#It Must Be a Misunderstanding

[majestativa]

And this deep placidity, this silky tenderness, into what cross-section of the cosmos does it settle now, onto what edge and propitious nuance, into what relief?

— Coral Bracho, It Must Be a Misunderstanding, transl by Forrest Gander, (2022)

[cntarella]

"(Observations)" from It Must Be a Misunderstanding by Coral Bracho, trans. Forrest Gander

[konaizumi]

What I really like about this scene and what puts it over the top for me is that Joke knows Jack is talking about him. Like, there's surprise and shock that Jack is openly addressing it, but there's no confusion. There's no "who is this mystery person that Jack has feelings for?" This scene just felt a lot more exciting and tense because Joke understood what Jack was saying and exactly what he was choosing.

Just something about Joke visibly trying to lock it in a bit bc he can't afford to stop and fully process while in such a high stakes situation just has me obsessed, and it lead so well into the confession/kiss scene later on. The way that Jack and Joke both know what's going on, know how the other feels, but there's still that bit of uncertainty and hesitance--not necessarily about how the other feels, but simply bc circumstances are weird and uncertain.

[eulyin]

With all honesty, I do agree herrscher Seele is beautiful, magnificent, gorgeous n so on, but… at the same time, I cannot NOT SCREAM about her SKIN! I mean… SEELE PLs wear more cloth will youuuuuu 🗣️🗣️🗣️

(Also please blame richarano for this blanket wrapping)

[lizzibennet]

personally the appeal of friends to lovers to me is that i like the idea of a person realizing they’ve always been a little bit in love with that friend, but they needed something to make them aware of it, to point out that that nice, warm feeling that they love about that person isn’t just friendship and perhaps hasn’t been for a long time. i love the idea of “of course i love you, i always have, how stupid of me to not have seen it before.” in that sense, i don’t think it makes sense when people say colin just starts liking penelope in s3/episode 4. the whole point of building up a friendship into a romance is to portray that these characters have deep feelings for each other that may or may not be romantic but that end up melding into a romance in the end. he’s only just understood his feelings but he’s clearly felt them for a long time. the fact he doesn’t understand being a rake doesn’t emotionally fulfill him and processes that through part one is telling, to me, that he’s only now beginning to fully understand what he feels, not only towards pen but also towards himself, towards life in general. so again, i think it makes sense that things become clear to him now, that doesn’t mean they’re just starting to happen now. i think that read of him is really superficial tbh

[ghost-bxrd]

Tim can’t breathe. He can’t breathe.

He thought— the Tower was bad enough. He hates being kept out of the loop, especially for “his own protection”, but he never thought—

It is Robin who had been threatened. Robin that Batman had been taunted with. Enough times, and with grisly enough descriptions of what might happen to him, that Bruce sent Tim to the Titans as a last ditch effort to keep him well out of reach of Gotham and its newly minted crime lord.

But Hood took Bernard, and Tim can’t breathe. Can only stare at the grainy picture from an unknown number, showing his boyfriend tied up and gagged in someone’s— Hood’s, probably, oh god— bed.

Tim wants to throw up.

Please god, please no.

— sneak peek of “Modern Day Cain”

[brainrot-jikan]

im not the biggest alhaitham/kaveh shipper (because im a rare pair ho) but it seems to me that in alhaitham/kaveh getting-together fics tend to be... unequal.

the beautiful thing about alhaitham and kaveh is that they're both equally right and equally wrong and equally dicks about it. but the writers for alhaitham/kaveh much more frequently seem to give alhaitham the burden change (the burden of the character flaw) instead of kaveh.

in any good character arc, the main character has a fatal flaw or misconception, and by the end of that arc they have addressed that flaw in some definitive way. scrooge was a scrooge and learned that being that way was detrimental; merlin from finding nemo was overprotective to a fault and had to learn that he couldn't (and shouldn't) control everything and to let go; the wolf from little red riding hood learns that you should stop while you're ahead.

stories centering around romance tend to lean heavily on character arcs, which makes sense. and since romance generally requires two individuals to be vulnerable and open and emotional with each other, it makes double sense that alhaitham/kaveh authors zoom straight into alhaitham's lack of emotional vulnerability.

this bothers me.

in society, individuals are expected to experience and present emotions in a specific way. if someone dies, you cry. if someone smiles at you, you smile back. if you're at a party, you're supposed to be having fun. if you don't do these things, you're seen as impolite at best and a inhuman freak at worst. when these behaviors are frequent it's often viewed as emotional immaturity, or a lack of ability to feel at all. the inability or lack of willingness to conform to societies emotional expectations of you is seen as a flaw and a reason for exclusion.

alhaitham is canonically disliked and avoided for being the way he is. he prefers it this way, but that doesn't mean the people perpetuating this avoidance are in the right. they are the societal pressure to conform that alhaitham blows off. alhaitham could be the way he is for a lot of reasons: avoidant attachment style, trauma, following someone else's example (eg. his grandmother), or just his base personality. it doesn't MATTER. he is the way he is. kaveh having to accept that should be part of the story.

putting the burden of the fatal flaw on alhaitham, making the way alhaitham treats kaveh and the people around him the problem, feels invalidating. it implies heavily that alhaitham's way of interfacing with the world, alhaitham's very SELF, is incorrect. my suggestion is to flip a larger portion of that burden onto kaveh. kaveh 👏 character 👏 arcs 👏

some examples/recommendations:

- make kaveh project his insecurities onto other people but especially onto alhaitham; he's overly reliant on other people for his own self worth, and he perceives alhaitham's lack of positive feedback as a direct reflection of how alhaitham feels about him. but learns along the way that alhaitham doesn't hate him, kaveh's actual struggle is with hating himself and being unable to his own self as worthy of love. maybe throw in how you are responsible for your own recovery, other people can help but you can't rely on them to carry you through self actualization.

- or, kaveh tries to make alhaitham behave more like a "normal" person, to be more pleasant and emotive and forthcoming, and then realizes he's in the wrong for trying to make alhaitham into something he's not, possibly for all the wrong reasons (not because he likes alhaitham better like that, but bc society says that's healthier and a better/more conforming way to be)

- or you could go ahead make alhaitham's issues the main problem but they're too complicated to overcome in a short period of time, so kaveh has to accept alhaitham is doing his best in his own way and not push for unrealistic and unhealthy changes. he could alter his own behavior to give alhaitham space and time and a safe place to land.

that got sappy so it's past time for me to dip out. go forth and ship things; but maybe consider letting alhaitham be a rude stone-faced bastard if he wants to be.

[qiu-yan]

sensitive topic incoming

not a haterpost i promise.

sect leader yao is not a reliable source

further explanation/hypothesizing:

it happened exactly as sect leader yao said: self-explanatory. the version of events preferred by jiggy antis

he mercy-killed rusong: maybe rusong was already showing signs of a life-altering disorder as a result of the incest. or maybe jiggy just felt that, if the incest information ever came out, rusong would be doomed to a life of suffering in a heavily prejudiced society. jiggy himself had spent his entire life suffering and getting kicked around due to his own proximity to society's pariahs/taboos, so perhaps he felt that he could not subject his son to the same miserable existence. thus, jiggy gave rusong a more peaceful end, before (in jiggy's mind) society could force rusong to suffer.

he allowed rusong to die through inaction: this is really only a "kill" under a utilitarian moral framework. by this explanation, maybe jiggy found out in advance that someone was planning to kill rusong; however, for any of the other reasons listed here, jiggy decided to do nothing and allow the assassination to happen. thus jiggy would consider himself guilty of allowing rusong's death to happen through inaction.

he did it to justify eliminating an opponent of the watchtowers: maybe the advancement of the watchtower project, which jiggy knew would make society a safer place, had hit a deadlock because of a particularly stubborn opponent. so jiggy killed rusong and framed the opponent in order to engineer a situation in which his annihilation of the opponent would be entirely socially sanctioned.

and here is where the utilitarian arguments come in. perhaps jiggy knew that the watchtower project would improve the lives of millions of people and would make society as a whole safer. and he saw that one political opponent as the final major barrier. and jiggy could think of no other way to get rid of this guy. so jiggy weighed the lives of those millions of people against his one son, and concluded those millions of strangers were weightier; his son became his iphigenia.

of course, this is still a rather unhinged plan to just come up with on your own, so perhaps a better explanation of events is this reasoning paired with the "he allowed rusong to die through inaction" series of events.

rusong was killed by political opponents and jiggy blamed himself: now we reach the "he didn't do it" section of the potential explanations. jiggy has a habit of claiming kills he didn't strictly perform himself; so long as the chain of cause and effect can somehow be traced to somewhere near him eventually, jiggy will claim credit for someone's death. this is how jiggy takes credit for the death of jin zixuan: even though [novel canon] no one forced wei wuxian to lose control of wen ning and no one forced wen ning to attack jin zixuan, jiggy still acts as if he can call himself jin zixuan's killer, simply because he sent jin zixuan to wei wuxian's location.

jiggy, in pursuing the watchtower project, aroused a lot of public anger. jiggy made himself, and by extension his wife and his child, the political enemies of many, and thus political targets as well. thus, if an enemy targets the life of jin rusong because they are jiggy's enemy, jiggy is entirely justified in feeling as if rusong's death is his fault. after all, if he hadn't pursued the watchtower project, then maybe rusong would still be alive.

jiggy said "he had to die" as a Cope: losing your son sucks. perhaps jiggy, in the despair following his son's death, tried to cope with the new reality by telling himself that rusong would have had to die anyways, because he was an incest baby. if rusong was always slated to die, then the fact that rusong is now dead can now be survived. thus, "rusong had to die" becomes an emotional coping mechanism for jiggy.

no, jiggy himself is uncertain if he allowed rusong to die through inaction: this one is a a bit fanciful but bear with me here. on one hand, jiggy loves his wife and son. on the other hand, jiggy is horrified by his marriage with his wife and by the existence of his son, because his wife is also his sister and his son is the product of incest. jiggy lives with not only this horror but also the constant fear of exposure, because if this information ever got out, the lives of himself, his wife, and his son would all be over.

rusong's growth thus becomes a source of dread, not hope: every day lived brings the possibility of rusong developing some disorder or condition that eventually proves the incest. is it not possible that jiggy, living every day under such fear, might come to believe that things would be better if rusong stopped growing older? if rusong died--then gone too would be the evidence of the incest, would it not?

now along comes the political opponent who assassinates rusong. jiggy does not see it coming and jiggy is thus unable to stop it. but afterwards, upon beholding the corpse of his son, what does jiggy feel? rage? despair? no--relief! he feels relief! though he also grieves, the constant fear shrouding his entire life has, for once, lifted!

but if jiggy is relieved by the death of his son, what does this imply? can jiggy truly say, with full confidence, that he did not see the assassination coming? can he really say, with heaven and earth as his witnesses, that his failure to stop the assassination was not to some degree a choice? is there truly no small part of him that did in fact see the assassination coming--yet, knowing it would be so relieving for him, simply chose to do nothing?

but if jiggy did not see the assassination coming at all--if rusong's death truly cannot be pinned on jiggy at all--then what does that say about jiggy's power? about jiggy's safety? jiggy being innocent of killing through inaction means that jinlintai really is somewhere assassins can penetrate into. then jiggy's son really was killed by a force jiggy had no way of stopping. then, in this situation, jiggy really was powerless.

you can remove the ambiguity and argue the case either way: jiggy knew about the assassination and let it happen, jiggy legitimately knew nothing and could not have stopped the assassination. but the ambiguity makes this scenario more interesting to me. jiggy lives for the rest of his days uncertain if he chose to allow his son to die through inaction, or if he really was just weak enough to fail to protect his son. maybe jiggy's memories of the incident even manage to start distorting after a while, implying either one or the other depending on jiggy's own mental situation.

thus, when jiggy says "rusong had to die," he's uncertain if he's justifying his actions or delusionally coping with a reality he had no hand in making. when jiggy says "i killed my son," he's uncertain if he's even telling the truth or not.

ah well. this is basically original fiction at this point. it's just a potential scenario.

anyways, these are just a few scenarios based on various meta and fanfics of this subject ive read over the past few months. you can probably come up with all sorts of explanations. whatever you come up with, though, should be better than just blindly taking sect leader yao at his word.

[cottonwoolsocks]

if you don't know what's happened in UK politics today, it's terrifying news for climate change —

the UK government have just announced plans for over 100 new oil and gas drilling licenses. these new licences will directly contribute.

alongside this, the government announced funding for carbon capture and storage projects — this is great! carbon emissions are stored deep underground, and thus removed from the atmosphere. this solution has been being worked on by climate scientists for 40 years.

but the UK government are using carbon capture as a get out of jail free for drilling more oil.

this is dangerous.

carbon capture and storage works at reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but it does not negate further emissions. it only works if we stop burning fossil fuels.

carbon capture and storage is not the problem — continuing to burn fossil fuels is.

we should be angry.

[rin-solo]

[geraskierfanficprompts]

Prompt 18

Jaskier wants Geralt to notice him already, and when Geralt makes yet another dig at Jaskier's clothing, Jaskier comes to the only reasonable explanation that this must be the only thing holding Geralt back. Jaskier decides to start dressing less and less extravagant, and it seems to be working! Geralt stares at him all the time, now! He even watches his performances! But he still doesn't react to Jaskier's innuendos or flirts*, nor does he walk across the camp and kiss him silly. *(It has been YEARS of this, so it's not exactly new behavior, he supposes.) Jaskier decides the final push is to start dressing more like Geralt, since that's surely what Geralt likes. He'll dress in black! ... Black. Maybe he'll just start with a dark grey. Geralt meanwhile is horrified at Jaskier's sudden wardrobe change. It gets blander and blander, more bleak and cheap, until he's starting to wear exclusively black. Geralt is worried. Is Jaskier... going through something? Geralt keeps waiting for Jaskier to bring it up, but he won't. Jaskier is a man of opulence and colors so bright they practically glow. To see him in such monochrome apparel is disconcerting, to say the least. The day Jaskier wears all-black and doesn't sing, Geralt has had enough and has to confront his friend about what appears to be a depressive episode or mourning period.

[nataliescatorccio]

i swear to god if y'all bully chappell roan into abandoning her music because you love to over scrutinize lgbtq+ women i am gonna flip

[cntarella]

The puzzle pieces/ get lost but not the look/ she knows to be hers./ The forms, the objects, they merge,/ they crumble; but a feeling/ for the ensemble remains: between moments,/ between fictions,/ despite constant fractures. Like a threshold,/ a hand hold.

"(Observations)" from It Must Be a Misunderstanding by Coral Bracho, trans. Forrest Gander

[ourflagmeansgayrights]

canon edizzy dynamic btw

[a-most-beloved-fool]

something very compelling about accidental bonding spirk fics.

it's like, oops! i love him so much that i've unintentionally tied our souls permanently together! surely this was caused entirely by my own affection, and he could never feel the same way! <- they're both thinking that, btw. sharing both a head and a brain cell and still never getting a clue.

[blazefirefox]

I've been seeing posts about the collective oc doaiblr has created who was somehow rizzed up by Alex named Claire, and though the consensus is that she's part of the lankmann foundation, what if she was a veldigun?

The concept of a veldigun based on one of those butcher-themed serial killers has been rotating around in my head for a while, and I had the design in mind for a while, I just didn't have a name and decided to dub thee Claire. this was just a silly idea but I kinda got attached to it lol, hope you like her

the original master of bad pickup lines Alex post was by @corrupteddoodles and most of Claire's details were inspired by @luxury-nightmare's art

UPDATE: HER NAME IS PAMELA NOW >:)

EDIT FORGOT TO ADD THE SILLY SONG