#Idk man it's the little things sometimes

[cripplecryptid]

I love having autistic friends. When you don't have to explain why you wanna go outside bc it's too noisy..... So good.

[moongothic]

Madoka is the promise you won't turn from a child, full of hopes and dreams and the wish to save the world, into a bitter adult who just wants to hurt others and ruin people's lives

Madoka promised to be there for you to remind you of the person you wanted to be and to stop you from becoming what you sought to destroy

Madoka made that promise and became the very embodiment of it

[zeb-z]

I just think Tallulah gets to be upset about this. “It’s not Wilbur’s fault” “He’s not a bad dad” “He loves his daughter so much” yes! These are all true! And it’s not his fault! But he’s still not there. And Tallulah has gone through so much and still hasn’t seen him, the one time he was around was the one time she wasn’t, and all she has are letters and “I’m thinking of you always” and things that used to be theirs together, but he’s still not there. She’s waited and she’s been patient and she’s loved him all the same, and he’s still not there. Like yesterday, and the day before, and the day before, from the happy milestones to the traumatic events, he’s still not there.

She knows that it’s not his fault, but it doesn’t change the fact that he’s absent. That in and of itself just adds to the sorrow, because she knows why he’s gone, and she’s been told time and time again it doesn’t mean he doesn’t care, she knows this - it doesn’t mean it doesn’t sting, that it doesn’t hurt, that she doesn’t yearn for her father to be there more than anything in the world, and he’s just not there.

So yes, she gets to be upset, and be caustic, and stomp her feet and write bitter messages, and be angry and vitriolic, because she’s a little girl missing her father, who feels things with her whole heart and soul - and that means she gets to feel the ugly parts of it, too.

[skitskatdacat63]

2023 Las Vegas Grand Prix - Qualifiying - Fernando Alonso

[good-to-drive]

Abuse, Silence, And Why Kevin Can Fuck Himself

I recently finished watching Kevin Can Fuck Himself on Netflix, and, aside from being the most brutally honest portrayal of domestic abuse I have ever seen, I discovered a beautifully written examination of narrative as power and silence as abuse and how this manifests in our larger culture. 

Without going into too much detail, the show is filmed in two distinct styles that are interleaved throughout each episode to tell a cohesive story. Allison and Kevin’s relationship as seen by the rest of the world is told through a multi-cam, laugh-track sitcom that depicts a very typical “goofy husband, shrewish wife” mainstream comedy. Allison’s life through her own eyes is told through a single-cam drama/thriller about Allison planning to murder Kevin to escape his abuse. 

It’s an absolute masterclass in screenwriting, but more than that, every episode explores the difference between truth, fact, and reality, and how none of these things are quite as much or as little as story. But while the process of transforming the chaotic and plotless reality of life into a story is as involuntary and essential as breathing, misogyny and the degradation of women is just as ubiquitous in our society, and a story that exists at the expense of another person’s lived reality is a refutation of their humanity. 

It's also just a great show for anyone who likes to engage with history (or reality TV or true crime or “real life stories” in general), because while we have to tell ourselves stories about her own lives, we have to tell ourselves stories about other people as well. Eternal silence is narrative death, and the perpetual silence of an unspoken narrative is often the last death we can visit on someone whose story we’d rather ignore. 

I also pulled up some books – Lolita and Disgrace – that dealt with similar themes, but from the perspective of the abuser. And what strikes me the most is that, across three beautifully written stories about narrative and silence within a culture that normalizes abuse, Allison, who began her story within a state of narrative death, was the only point-of-view character who had any chance of surviving. 

One of the main themes of Kevin is that a compelling story is often a story that reinforces what we already believe or like to believe, and while the story may be factual and true it often also exists at the expense of someone's lived reality. The exact same series of events can be a silly joke or a harrowing tale of abuse depending on the lens through which we view it, but historically we've only been willing to see the multicam, laugh track, sitcom perspective on unbalanced relationships.

The alchemical process of turning a series of disjoint facts and experiences into a narrative creates something new and compelling, and erases much of what previously existed. In this way, it’s entirely irreversible. We spin our experiences into a very thin thread, a story we can tell ourselves that elicits something within us, something we need in order to live with the complex, uncertain, and unsatisfying reality of life. In think in many ways the thing we elicit in ourselves is truth. But truth is both more and less than fact, often more a reflection of our own beliefs and desires than the events of our lives. And in telling that truth we may never stray from the facts, but we almost by definition cannot give voice to another person’s reality.

There's a scene in season 2 of Kevin when Allison is hit by a door – a la the classic excuse – because of Kevin’s carelessness. And while he absolutely did not hit her, the way it's written is such an incredible allegory for how Kevin has curated their story and curated their friends' and family’s perceptions of their story such that even if she tells everyone the exact, unvarnished truth of what's happening to her and begs for help, they will only be capable of seeing the laugh-track, sitcom, “Kevin is a harmless goofball and his wife is a total shrew” perspective on the events of their lives. 

As so often happens with abuse, their friends and family saw Allison being hurt because of Kevin. But the alchemy of creating a narrative around Kevin and Allison is irreversible, and the series of events they witness can only be spun together to a joke, an accident, a silly, childish mistake. Allison’s reality, Allison’s pain and fear, is completely elided. Like a lost sound in the middle of a sentence, her experience goes silent, and their larger understanding of her relationship never has to change. And you feel so acutely how Allison lives her entire life in that silence. 

Storytelling is human, it’s essential, there’s no other way to engage with our own lives. And it’s not lying. It’s never lying to tell the truth. But it doesn’t reflect every reality, either, because another person’s reality can’t be reflected within our own narrative, because that’s what it means to be another person. To spin two different threads.

And because narrative is the essential process by which we understand our reality, denying someone their own narrative, or denying that this narrative be heard, is inherently abusive. To allow someone a voice is to give them humanity, and to suppress it is to strip that humanity away. 

Disgrace, by J.M. Coetzee, follows the story of a professor, David, who rapes a student and then fails to protect his daughter, Lucy, from being raped by intruders in their home. He destroys his daughter’s life  – not through failing to protect her, but through twisting her rape into a story about why the rape of his student wasn’t wrong. The main theme of the book is generally considered to be exploitation, but Coetzee doesn’t deal with the exploitation of the rape. That’s too direct, too immediate, too easy for the reader to understand as misogynistic and wrong. Rather, Coetzee delves into “the innocuous-seeming use of another person to fill one's gentler emotional needs” (Ruden).

The rape is how we understand David as a fundamentally exploitative person, a person who denies others their humanity by converting them into a vessel for his own desires, who erases their voice in order to speak through them and give himself the things he needs. And that’s how we recognize that the way he absorbs and claims the stories of his daughter and his student is another kind of violation of their humanity. Another way of turning women into vessels for men’s pain and fear and need. 

What’s fascinating is that David's student finds her voice – files a complaint against him – and is eventually able to continue with her life. The woman he raped is less damaged by him than his own daughter, because she was the woman he couldn’t permanently silence. 

In Lolita, another brilliant novel about abuse, dehumanization, and storytelling, Humbert turns to the reader at the end and says, “Imagine us, reader, for we don’t really exist if you don’t.” 

It’s not that Humbert knew he was fictional, but that he knew everyone was fictional. Believed the entire world only truly existed in his own mind, because anything beyond that was irrelevant to his needs. He coped with the collapse of his ability to dehumanize Dolores (who he called Lolita) by demanding that his voice be resurrected. Demanding immortality. Demanding his narrative exist in another person’s world, and thereby be given the existence and humanity that Allison and Dolores and Lucy and David’s student were denied. 

Pushing his needs, finally, onto the reader, because we are the only person he has left, and a person like him can only exist through the use of another. In that way, Humbert was powerless. In that way, Kevin and David were powerless, too.

In Disgrace, David’s dream is to write an opera, and at the end of the book he realizes he’ll never finish his magnum opus. He’ll never be able to terminate the process of converting himself, his world, into a story. But he does learn to decenter himself in that narrative. And it’s when he loses all fear of death, and any conception of the self, that he gains the ability to give dogs – who he generally equates to women – a voice within his opera, his life’s work. 

It’s in death that we discover our true unimportance as human beings, that we learn to let go of vanity and our conception of the self entirely. And David had degraded women so thoroughly in order to justify how he used them to meet his own emotional needs that it was only in losing all value for his own life that he could gain the ability to see them as equal voices. To actually put those voices into his own life story. It's at the cost of himself that he allows other people to truly exist, in the death of the self that he finally allows the world to exist outside of himself. It’s almost a positive character arc. Almost.

When Kevin finally loses the ability to abuse Allison, he, like many abusers, loses all desire to live. His world was built on a structure of superiority and inferiority, on beings and vessels, on the inherent value of men and the inherent meaninglessness of women’s lives. The system on which he based his entire reality has been destroyed by Allison’s declaration of the self. And, if he was a being because she was a vessel, then in losing the ability to treat her as a vessel, to fully and completely dehumanize her, he has lost his own humanity. 

It may be perfectly summed up here: “Become major. Live like a hero. That's what the classics teach us. Be a main character. Otherwise, what is life for?” (Coetzee).

If you’re not to be a main character, if there indeed is no split between major and minor characters, between people and the paper dolls that populate their story, between living beings and the vessels into which they pour their need – what is life for?

Nothing. At least, not for people whose narrative must exist at the expense of another. 

And that’s why I say that only a narrator like Allison could survive this kind of story. Despite beginning her story trapped in eternal silence, her reality fully elided no matter how immediate and obvious it became, Allison was the only point-of-view character of any of these three stories who didn’t establish her power through the degradation of another. Who didn’t conceptualize the world via being and vessels. Whose narrative didn’t exist, by necessity, at the expense of another person’s humanity. Whose thread could exist in a larger tapestry without destroying her sense of self.

Don’t get me wrong, she’s not generally a likable character. She’s misogynistic, cruel, selfish, jealous, desperate, afraid, and in pain. Like anyone in an abusive relationship, she’s not at her best, and she’s often pushed to do things that are ugly and disturbing because she’s simply been pushed too far. 

But, for me, the power in her character is in how her last scene never felt like a final scene. Her story didn’t have to be killed, her conception of the self didn’t have to be killed, in order to reveal the brutal reality of stories twisting and intertwining without any inherently superior truth or narrative among them. Allison’s story was one of declaring herself. And that’s why it didn’t feel like it ended at the end. Instead, this felt like a beginning.

[astralleywright]

Marisha's comment about how Relvin is one of those parents who ended up with a child they didn't know what to do with really gets to the heart of it, i think, and is such a good way to tie the fantasy element of Imogen's powers into things more tangible. because there are really a lot of parents like Relvin in real life, who have a child with the person they're happily married to and never expect to be left alone with the kid. or who expect a ""normal"" (read: cisgender and heterosexual, able-bodied, relatively neurotypical and obedient, etc.) child and end up with one who's ""difficult"", who demands more or different of them than what they believe they signed up for. and that's not entirely entitlement on a parent's part- many cultures' common frameworks of parenthood and child-rearing do not include space for these children. it makes sense that Relvin was unprepared. raising any child is difficult, and raising a child whose needs you were never taught how to accommodate, who the world is so cruel to, is even more challenging.

and yet. and yet, the person who bears the brunt of the harm in these situations will always be the child. they're the ones who have to live every moment of how the world treats them, without the support that their parent is supposed to provide them. and when asked to care for his child even when she turned out to be ""difficult"", Relvin couldn't. for entirely sympathetic reasons, of course. he tried, in his own way. i don't think he's a bad guy. but he's let his own broken heart bleed onto his daughter. he hasn't been able to give her much else.

[waterfallofspace]

don't know how to format this post so welcome to waterfall is craving things and she doesn't know if it's more h-rny or lonely so enjoy a little snippet of what is playing on loop in my mind~

Person A: tshhieew!

Person B: Bless you, poor little thing~

Person A: I'm- eshh'iew! tschh- kngt'shhew! I'm not little!

Person B: Even if you aren't, your sneezes sure are~

Person A, blushing: No they're- eh'tnshiew! aeshh'iee!

Person B, with a smirk: What a poor, sneezy little thing~

[mokeonn]

Before I go to sleep I leave you all with this piece of advice: sometimes you don't actually have to answer big political questions, sometimes you can just say "I am not smart enough to know that, I just know the small things I do to help." Like you can often times completely avoid making a fool of yourself if you just say you don't know.

[manichewitz]

me explaining why i ship sam and frodo: *hours of rambling about the intricacies of their relationship, ten in-text citations of all the times sam’s devotion to frodo saved them both from disaster, quoting “i can’t carry it for you but i can carry you” and “dont go where i cant follow,” sobbing about how they canonically love each other so deeply, bringing up academic articles about wartime homoeroticism and deconstructing toxic masculinity, etc*

me explaining why i ship aragorn and legolas: im gay and i want to see the pretty men fuck

[widowshill]

— But it's almost midnight. — Oh, that's the point! At the stroke of twelve, he turns into Dracula. C'mon, Vicki – he won't bite.

pose ref.

[zebratimw]

Spirit animal SQH

[skrunksthatwunk]

not gonna elaborate for now but why did none of y'all tell me the no.6 light novels were Like That (/pos in like a mildly baffled and mostly enthralled kinda way)

[surreal-duck]

wanted to redraw their 7th anniversary homescreen before the next anni comes along o7

[thetardisisnotourdivision]

Hey did I ever tell y'all about the time I dreamed that I had a baby daughter called Ellie that began with my finding out I was pregnant and ended on like her third birthday?

I legitimately woke up thinking "I should go check on Ellie" and then realised she was never real and when I tell you I SOBBED. I've been haunted by an implacable sense of loss ever since. Did I travel to another dimension? Wtf happened because that was insane.

[jankwritten]

I’ve been thinking a lot about what a Hazel and Jason friendship would look like.

Hazel tentatively reaching out after finally understanding that Jason isn’t everything she built him up to be in her head, influenced both by Nico and by what she actually observed of Jason herself

Jason assumes she just wants tips on leadership or maybe how to fight better, so he obliged by offering to train with her

Hazel expects Jason to go easy on her like Percy and Annabeth and Piper do, but instead she gets taken down within a few minutes and has Jason ruthlessly pointing out what things she could improve on.

(Cue: Hazel finally having an opponent who doesn’t underestimate her. Hazel who finally feels like she has somebody she can spar against who will help and not just let her win because she’s young and small. Hazel who finally gets why Nico spends so much time talking about how kind and helpful Jason is, even if what she’s seeing isn’t necessarily kind.)

Jason starts hanging out with Hazel outside of sparring but in other groups, like with Piper, or Nico. He learns that she loves dancing and horses and likes to test the hardness of a stone against her fingernails, likes to collect shiny non-precious things just like Nico does, likes to swear loudly whenever possible as if she’s doing it to purposely piss people off.

Hazel asks Jason if he wants to go hang out one day after the Argo quest is over, maybe go to some museum in NYC that she’s heard Percy talk about, or find metaphysical shops to walk through (I HC that Hazel really loves modern mortal interpretations of magic and that she’s fascinated by the ways mortals accidentally connect to the gods etc.) and Jason assumes she means with someone else and agrees, only to find out they’re going alone.

Jason panicking for a moment about potential misinterpretations, once he realizes, and stammering out some garbled thing about how he really likes her but not like that because ofc all he’s known so far is that being alone with a girl = someone will assume romantic intent. Hazel openly laughs in his face and rather boldly states that she KNOWS Jason is in love with her brother.

Hazel, eventually, being the first person Jason feels safe coming out to. Jason, in return, being the first person Hazel feels safe to talk about being asexual with. The two of them discussing their feelings more and more often while exploring new places together, like Hazel talking about how she did so much researching into queer history and labels when she first found out Nico is gay, Jason telling her that he still doesn’t feel like Thalia is his sister as if he might not be the same Jason Grace she remembers, the two of them coming to terms with being on the aromantic spectrum together.

Jason talking Hazel out of joining the Hunters when she’s having a very very bad day. Hazel stopping Jason from disappearing back out into the mortal world to finish school without first giving his other friends a chance to have input.

(Hazel and Jason inadvertently saving each other’s lives by tweaking fate, thus making their friendship literally woven into their lives forever indisputably. Hades/Pluto patting Jason on the back and telling him thank you with no context or clarification the next time they meet. Hera/Juno, tight lipped and silent, offering Hazel some kind of gift or blessing the next time she returns to New Rome. Hazel and Jason laughing it off when they tell each other because wow, their godly parents are weird as hell.)

[kinos-fortress-2]

ok another headcanon and is from my ultimate comfort favs:

When demo got first hired by pauling he was like very shy and introverted at some point where everyone wasn’t like… that conjoined and besties as how they are now. And i feel like he got a pretty rough time to even start to talk with his teammates or get a tiny friendship with them.

And he often times was very threatened by small lady in glasses that liked to be strict with them in their first day since… it was business only ofc

but by the time when pauling got a bit more soft with them, and got also a bit friendly with demo i feel like at some point he started to develop a tiny crush with her since she was the one who often talks more with, and i have this other hc that also he would fell easily with people that befriends him (not like anyone of course it really does depends the person for him)

so you know pauling it’s nerdy and a bit sensitive (she cries very easily) and she is very friendly or a bit more extrovert if she gets to, but like in a sense where she is more ambivert too. uhhh idk she is just talkative with people if you get her chance where she’s not busy and will tell you to go to hell. rough lady

and he liked that! i think he thought they both shared some stuffs along and can infodump their love for guns and for the work they are in and then if they can go a bit personal with some drinks and he liked that he could share this stuffs with her all chill and cool

but i feel like he just had this side secret crush with her and stopped those want to be romantic feelings because he really saw she is not like, up to those stuffs, she is so focused on work and also stressed and depressed like him and he could just understand that she just only want someone to listen to her but she will not like, pay that much attention about romantic relationships and he could completely understand that once he get to know her more deeply. and he just couldn’t do that to the one who also considered a friend and he probably guessed she will not feel the same for him but that didn’t like hurt him and is not like he ever confessed to her. he just had those secret feelings for her for a time and then realized she was not really like the one for him to be in a relationship

and that’s where i thought of him now having a more soft spot for her and caring her like a sister (not like literally but in a familiar soft spot sense, but that’s ofc his friend)

so yeah idk 👍