#I think we need to address some things

[little-laurance]

Tbh I think this fandom needs to settle tf down. There is a not a single (mainish) character I can think of in mcd who doesn't act a little bit fucked up. You can like or dislike whomever you wish, but we are all pretending our fav didn't do some messed up shit. Jesson cannot write consistent characters and they most definitely cannot write characters without questionable morals or behaviors.

Too many people seem to get on a high horse about their favs in comparison to other peoples, and it leads to arguments cherry-picking actions on both sides. Let's be real for a second, none of us are writing these characters the way Jesson intended. We're taking their characters and restructuring them to better suit our personal preferences, morals, or story structures. Everyone's rewrite is about two steps away from original fiction. No one is justifying every bad action from a character by enjoying them. Some may justify some morally reprehensible things, but I'm under the impression most of us are simply ignoring the parts of characters that don't align with our view of the character (or reconstructing some morally dubious actions to properly be addressed within the plot).

In short, stop fighting over the block men being sexist. All of Jesson's block men are sexist. Every single one. If they aren't in mcd, they'll basterdize them to be in mystreet (sorry Dante). They all kinda suck at one point or another for one plot point or another. Let's try to stop acting like we're 10 year olds in the aar/laur/garmau wars PLEASE

[aroaceleovaldez]

i have suddenly become obsessed with a theme that HoO established but never proceeded to extrapolate on, which is:

You are Percy Jackson, and you have been swapped with a boy who was allegedly everyone's favorite person, but they have decided to replace him with you. They just met you. You stand next to his best friend and the people he's known his entire life. In his home. In his cloak. In his place. They stopped looking for him.

You are Jason Grace, and you have just found out you have a long lost sister who completely replaced you in her life with this girl you just met. Your lives and personalities are mirrors. She is you, living the life you were robbed of.

You are Annabeth Chase, and you have just become starkly aware that you have been inhabiting the void left behind by your best friend's long lost brother. You and Luke were just replacements for him. Now you have to look him in the eyes when he has nothing and know you took that life from him.

You are Piper McLean, and you have just found out your relationship is fake and built entirely on the memories of Annabeth Chase. You have been given a boyfriend when hers has been taken away. You have no idea how much of it is real or not but regardless you feel like if your relationship isn't exactly in their image that you have failed.

You are Leo Valdez, and you have just learned that you are the echo of your great-grandfather. You are not your own person. You just exist to be a mirror of him. A doppelganger. An actor and stunt double facing all the danger he never had to but wearing his face. To be there for his best friend decades later simply because he couldn't. You are playing a role. A seventh wheel and a pawn for a goddess who carefully sculpted your entire life for her own purposes.

You are Hazel Levesque, and the only reason you are alive is because your brother couldn't save your his sister. You are a consolation prize. An apology. Your existence here is misplaced in every way but you inhabit it anyways.

You are Frank Zhang, and you are a shapeshifter. Inhabiting your own body feels strange and clumsy when you could be literally anything at any time. You are anything and everything and live your life with the simple certainty of knowing exactly how you will die.

[winteriron-trash]

rdj the (whitewashed) electric boogaloo

This is a reminder to everyone who's excited about RDJ's casting as Doctor Doom that this casting is whitewashing. Victor Von Doom is a Romani character and has been a Romani character since his introduction in the 1960s. (Fantastic Four Annual #2 [1964]) Not only that, but his Roma identity and the persecution he and his family faced due to it is integral to his character, it is what forms his identity. (Books of Doom by Ed Brubaker) Even if on the off chance this casting is meant to not be Victor but instead be some variant of Tony or whomever else becoming Doctor Doom, it is damaging to the character to rob him of that important cultural background. Doctor Doom does not exist without that history. Fans have been pushing hard to cast Doom as a Romani actor for years, especially since the MCU has whitewashed other Romani characters. (Wanda, Pietro, etc) This casting is not a celebration moment, it's fucking heartbreaking that the MCU repeatedly ignores the important and nuanced cultural backstories of characters.

I know I can't change anybody's mind on whether or not you want to be excited about RDJ's return to the MCU. But I do think at the very least you should be mad that the MCU is baiting us all and destroying nuanced and interesting characters for the sake of self-referential easter eggs and nostalgia bait. Because that's what it is. Feel how you'd like to feel about RDJ's return, but personally, this is soul-sucking. I had such a deep love for the MCU as a teenager, it was obviously something incredibly formative to me, especially Tony Stark. This isn't recreating what I fell in love with the MCU for. This is turning a well-planned and artistic storyline of adaptations into cheap cash grabs and fan service. Because, I think we're past the point of being able to call the MCU an adaptation of anything. They can use existing characters' names and powers, but to say they're being properly adapted is laughable.

This is not an adaptation of Doctor Doom. This is RDJ the Electric Boogaloo because Marvel's fear of losing the interest of dedicated MCU fans overrides their willingness to tell stories that are genuine to the characters. I don't know what there is to be excited about that. The MCU has lost its authenticity and aside from a few projects, feels heartless. Every movie is a copy of a copy. This announcement isn't something celebratory, it feels like a death knell of a cinematic universe that's so desperate to cling to relevancy it's resorting to nostalgia for a character/actor who hasn't even been dead for a decade. We're not getting anything new, we're just rinsing and repeating the same song and dance.

I get it. I love Tony Stark, his death destroyed me and I to this day, rue the ending he got in Endgame. It misunderstood his arc and it robbed him of a satisfying conclusion. But the solution to that isn't dragging the corpse out of the grave five years later to whitewash an existing character with rich and interesting nuance, just to forcibly tie his existence in the MCU to Tony. Whether he is a variant or not. Why would you want someone else's fave's legacy to be destroyed simply so your fave's legacy can go on? Hell, if we were really all so hellbent on the return of RDJ and/or Tony to the MCU, we have the multiverse for a reason. There were other ways to do it that didn't whitewash and ruin someone else. This just. Isn't something to be happy about.

[sorcerers-quest]

it feels great to go on a multiple paragraph rant on trans discourse and then send it to drafts to die forever

[snekdood]

if ppl telling you "jewish ppl in israel were already kicked out of other countries and have no where else to go" makes you feel compelled to call whoever said that a "zionist", I really just dont think you give af about jewish ppl's lives quite frankly.

if your "free palestine" means "getting rid" of all jewish civilians in israel I think you're probably just a heartless asshole.

[taeyungie]

😺

[cattailtales]

seeing the reactions to this latest chapter I can’t help but to think back to the first post-war arc and remember how little was ever addressed then too.. like dgmw I enjoy all these characters and think horikoshi is insane for trying to juggle so many but in the end he kinda like. Cannot handle it all. maybe he could if he didn’t waste time on silly things.. like I get that he’s trying to uplift the story in the end but it kinda falls incredibly flat with so many anxious questions looming and a rapidly approaching finish line…

[is-this-really--life]

I pretty much *only* trust ecologists committed to responsible degrowth with socialism at this point. They tend to be committed to reality and humanitarian ideals more than any ideology. The rest just want to see the world burn.

[welcometogrouchland]

Getting back into comics is fun. Minus the Getting Back Into Comics part of it all

[candyriku]

finally getting a chance to work on chapter 15 today :-)

[idiosyncraticrednebula]

I feel like whenever people discuss "gender roles" on social media and just in society at large, they simplify it way too damn much.

[princesscedar]

Trying to tell mom "hey maybe don't call j ewish people rats even unintentionally" event leaves 10 dead thousands injured

[aroaessidhe]

2024 reads / storygraph

A Tale of Seashells & Shenanigans

YA fantasy

follows a grumpy 19yo who works in the fantasy thriftstore

when a girl tells them she accidentally donated her selkie sealskin on their watch, they have to go on a quest with her across the sea to the other store the donations were sent to against their will

but things quickly go wrong and they get stranded on a desert island, and they have to survive by busking, and hitchhike with some pirates to make their way there, and their frustration eventually grows into attachment

nonbinary ace disabled (cane user) MC, aroace ‘love interest’, QPR-ish

[the-hawks-rye]

i know it's been said a gazillion times and said more eloquently than me but god the amount of missed potential in the sequel trilogy. thinking about how anakin became a villain because he felt he had no other choice (and the tragedy being that he always had a choice, and his character arc concluding with him deciding to stand up for what's right by saving luke), meanwhile kylo grew up surrounded by a loving family full of positive role models and chose evil knowingly because he craved power for power's sake. kylo idolizing the tragic figure of darth vader all the while burning the world around him. there was so much you could do with that but instead they had to sacrifice rey's character to make the movies about her fixing the genocidal white boy who never wanted to be saved

[greencloakedfae]

object permanence issues but for emotions is so weird, ngl.

[2nfernal3ternal]

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