#Maybe this is obvious for everybody

[thefriendoforatioisdead]

There is one thing that I love the most about Wan's character, and I love the way they tied everything together

I'm going to try to explain this but that might be confusing so bear with me.

(Warning : This is a very long rant)

So what I'm talking about is the way her character evolved between present time and the flashbacks, because I think there's something great about the consistency of it, which I'm going to explain chronologicaly (sort of)

So from the beginning we know that Wan doesn't really have a temper. She's friendly, as she immediately tries to befriend Kim and doesn't mind that she is being rejected : it doesn't stop her from being nice. The only times she is different from that smily happy girl is to display righteous anger, when the teacher is being mean to Kim, and when she's worried for her and runs to find her in the lockeroom.

These earlier flashbacks (which I assume take place when they were around 15/16 in tenth to eleventh grade) show us that Wan was friendly, extroverted (which is also why she was so popular in high school I think), determined and courageous, and also very protective of Kim already, even without them being really friends yet. She was headstrong, self-confident but only in a positive way.

THEN their dads left. And we enter a second phase of her character : Based on their conversation in the bathroom from ep 9, I assume Kim was a very sensitive kid, withdrawn, lonely, and it probably got worse after her dad left. Wan, on the other hand, seems to have reacted with more anger, as we can see when she attacks Mali for spreading the rumors. We see that she's a bit authoritative, leaving no choice to her friends but to accept Kim in the group, and her ego seems to have grown a bit as we see her bragging about being a good actress at their sleepover (which I assume takes place at the very end of high school, 12th grade, when they're around 17/18 although I don't know much about the thai school system so I might be wrong), but also saying that she's too pretty for any guy to date her. But we can see that her anger is still one that makes sense, and her protectiveness towards Kim is hightened, probably because she's starting to fall in love with her.

So what I assumed from the end of her teenagehood, after her dad left, is that Wan reacted with anger,became less patient, started having less kindness for the world, however, she got closer to Kim, and more protective of Kim, who, on the other hand, reacted by keeping even more to herself, and the friendship she built with Wan, Mon and Mali is what helped her becoming more self-assured, and more open. (My personal headcanon is that once they became really friends, Wan decided to keep her sadness inside so she could be strong for Kim. WHICH IS WHY SHE LATER ON EXPRESSES ANGER INSTEAD OF SADNESS WHEN SHE FEELS THAT WAY, but i'm getting ahead of myself)

Lastly, there is a big big big time lapse of ten years that we never see, where they went to college, Wan built her carriere as an actress and Kim became her stylist, they became roommates and stayed roommates until they were (I assume) 28, and the events of the series began. During this time, Wan got depression, we are told from the pressure of her job and what is happening to her mother. When we meet Wan, she's very different from what we see later in the flashbacks, but after putting this chronologically, I think we can see that the way she acts is an excessive version of all the traits we've established before : She's jealous and possessive of Kim, an excess of her protectiveness that we have seen previously. She's prone to anger, outbursts, she snaps at anyone, which we saw was a trait that already existed in a positive form at first, then started to become a bit negative after her dad left. She has, outwardly, even if it's not real, a big ego and a diva attitude which leads her to act like everything is due to her and into petty fights with Jessie and Pam (even if the fact her rivalry with the later exists since apparently forever can let us assume that she always had a tendency to compare herself to others). She's the worst version of things that used to be her best qualities, and that made Kim fall in love with her.

And I love this consistency, I love the way we see how she evolves as a character and I used to be so annoyed with her and the way she acted, but after eleven episodes, I realized that it actually is very tied together. They don't communicate because they never learned how to do it, because they just did it in their dreams, Wan snaps because she always thought they could just keep being in love without ever saying it and living their life, until Jessie makes her realize that she might lose Kim at any point, Kim is forced to face the fact that the Wan she fell in love is not the one she's living with right now, and that she deserves better than that, and Wan is also forced to face the fact that she isn't who she used to be, and that if she doesn't do anything about it and makes up to Kim, she's going to be miserable forever and lose the love of her life ! AND THEIR PERSONALITIES IN PRESENT TIME MAKE ABSOLUTE SENSE REGARDING WHAT WE SEE IN THE FLASHBACKS ! AND THIS SHOW IS AMAZING AND I ALWAYS KNEW IT IN MY HEART ! TRUST THE PROCESS !

[backpackingspace]

Okay so I've been thinking about @nonbinarylocalcryptid Astyanax lived/daddy odysseus au. Which is some good shit in general. Yall should check it out. But specifically I'm think about what it would be like for this child to grow up on calypso's island. He would have been what ? 3-10 there??

[impostorsshow]

I'm actually so obsessed with him it's not even funny if i'm not listening to a TikTok or music directly related to him I can't focus free me free me

This is @/cherubpuppet's OC for a object show [au? pitch? wip show? How do I categorize this] and I've been destroyed by the fact that ruler art is infinitely superior [and 10x longer] and i don't have a good enough grasp on lip gloss's personality to make fanfiction so I am frozen in "want make fanart but fanart takes effort :["

[xcziel]

has anybody else thought about how jk could easily manage sofia's parts of slow dance or is it just me?

[happyk44]

Vampire Nico, werewolf Jason and selkie Percy.

[batsplat]

oxley bom pod was talking about the friendly atmosphere in the paddock today and they brought up vale as someone who would make himself hate his opponents in order to beat them. they mentioned biaggi before saying vale didn’t need to make up a reason there lol, and the gibernau, stoner, lorenzo, marquez. thought it was interesting to hear them say that especially since oxley specifically had a particularly close working relationship with vale!

got around to listening to the podcast rather belatedly + had a chat about this general topic that helped me organise my thoughts on this a bit. I transcribed the most relevant comments - probably some small errors because of cross-talk and like... I'm a fast transcriptionist but can't be bothered to properly do it, here:

O: One is because racing is so fucking complicated now. [...] They've got so much to do, so much pressure - to have the negative energy of anger and hatred is actually - B: It's a waste. O: It's a bad thing, you're just wasting your energy. I mean it depends on the character, okay - B: So maybe Vale was the last who really needed to hate somebody to give him - and now even Vale invites Casey to his ranch to ride with him. But he really needed to - It was not difficult for him to hate, but he - Some riders he really looked for a reason to hate them even more, because then he could dig deeper in himself - because he was just a happy chap - in order to beat them. O: Max Biaggi. B: But it was easy to hate Max! That was not very difficult. Sete Gibernau, basically he needed to try - O: Casey Stoner. Sete Gibernau. Marc Marquez. B: He hated Vale probably before Vale hated Casey! But that's another podcast. O: Yeah, I think so. No, definitely, definitely, definitely. [...] Some people - they get fired up by hating other people, and that's fair enough.

so yeah. I mean, qualified agreement, I guess? they're definitely right about casey hating valentino before valentino hated casey lol. if valentino ever really hated casey at all. which is not necessarily a mainstream take, so it's nice to hear it!

I also agree with this general take about... y'know, the creeping professionalisation of the sport and how that affects how likely you're going to get fun drama. goes beyond just hours spent looking at data and also about... having a bit of a life, having time to actually form a personality. and as I've said before, it's the fans! clickbait news + social media featuring partisan fans, who aren't just going to read every statement but also react to every statement like it's life or death shit. pecco and jorge have gotten push back for some incredibly, deeply, ridiculously mild comments these last couple years. they HAVE to phrase everything they say as inoffensively as possible while still getting their points across, and even then they'll generally be jumped. like, forget valentino, how do you think casey would have fared in this current media environment? up against a fanbase as partisan as valentino's - or marc's nowadays? not well is the answer! I think to some extent you can get away with this stuff more depending on people's perceptions of you, so marc and increasingly pedro will generally be fine... but on the flip side, the pecco's, the casey's, the jorge x2's of this world... everything they say gets read in the worst possible light, but now everyone's just so much louder about it

but this ask was more about valentino than the current landscape, so I'll get back to him. I do think it is a bit of an issue if you frame it as a completely either-or issue - at the end of the day, most competitors will probably motivate themselves through their enemies at least a little. pecco definitely uses negative emotions to fire him up, people criticising him and the like. casey absolutely used them, often directed at valentino. all the comments from the haters to fire them up right, to show everyone how wrong they are. on a psychological level, there is not something *fundamentally* different between using your rivals or the fans or the press to motivate yourself - it's still the same underlying motivational process (and indeed the podcast references lawson's distaste for the press). casey signs off his first every grand prix win by saying how nice it was to beat a spanish rider sponsored by the circuit, like are we calling that pure love for the game? he and mostly martin and to a somewhat lesser degree pecco do share a tendency to... believe the world is out to get them, and use that to fire themselves up. idk if casey strictly needed to do that or if it was just ingrained at a young age and became a stable self-perpetuating way in which he viewed the world but also, it doesn't really matter, right. maybe in both valentino and casey there is a pure unpolluted soul who could have enjoyed winning just for the sake of winning, but in practise it's clearly more complicated than that. as has been recently discussed in quite some depth in this parish, late 2007!casey was getting sympathetic interview write-ups that described his mentality as informed by 'bitterness and rejection'. including bitterness at valentino, who at that point in time was not meaningfully reciprocating any of that stuff!

so I do have a bit of a bone to pick with this idea of 'the last guy'. valentino didn't 100% motivate himself by hating his enemies, the blokes after him didn't do so 0%. I think of the aliens casey is probably the most similar to him by this metric... some are definitely less inclined to do so. lorenzo's a bit of an odd case where at times it felt like he was better at making other guys hate him than necessarily hating them himself... complicated guy but I think he actually really did want to mostly fuel himself in a positive manner, except then for various reasons both external and internal he needed to also draw a bit more from. the darkness. marc is more likely than either valentino or casey to just fight to win for the sake of winning... then again you do have cute little incidents like misano 2019 where marc - off the back of two back-to-back last lap defeats - miraculously happened to find an extra bit of motivation through a spat in qualifying after duly harrying the yamaha's all weekend. again, it's a question of degree, right. marc is just inherently less restless than valentino and less inclined to think the world is out to get him than casey, which are all contributing factors

with valentino, I think I disagree a teensy bit in terms of framing more than I do in substance. first off, not to be a broken record on this, but obviously all of these feuds were very different, involving very different emotional landscapes. I don't think it's correct to say valentino needed an enemy to fire himself up, but he did always need something. some mission to dig his teeth into, some way of making the whole thing exciting. of making it fun! I'm not all that convinced of this happy-go-lucky characterisation of valentino - a lot of the time he had to go to an awful lot of effort to keep himself entertained, and when that didn't work he could get pretty miserable. he needed to keep himself stimulated, he needed to stop himself from feeling lonely, he needed to give himself a purpose to work towards. hatred did help him in a motivational sense, and he's talked in his autobiography about how anger has made him ride faster. it's useful... up to a point. it's just not a uniform thing across rivalries

my sense is that it comes down to two things. 1) he needs something to motivate himself and get excited, be it a rival or whatever. and 2) he needs some distance from his rivals. motivating yourself through a rival is not quite the same thing as motivating yourself through an enemy. for instance!! casey was only really his enemy once they were no longer on-track rivals - it was unrelated to actual competitive calculus, and was in some ways more about casey than it was about valentino. when valentino did that shit to casey at laguna 2008, he's not like... mad at casey. he doesn't hate him. he's gleeful at least in part because of how obviously pissed casey is, but he doesn't hate him. because he doesn't need to hate casey to want to beat him! casey is already so considerable a challenge that beating him is reward enough in itself - he's this super tricky puzzle for valentino to work away at... and when he comes up with the answer at laguna 2008, he's delighted. he doesn't really hate jorge in 2009 either - dislike, yes, hate, no. he's already plenty stimulated by the challenge of beating his feisty young teammate... he doesn't need anything else. he gets through 95% of the 2015 season with barely any animosity with his title rival - there, he would have seen it as distracting from his primary mission of winning his tenth in a way that was entirely disconnected from any particular rival. he also runs into the problem that it feels like any psychological warfare feels like it's getting aimed more at marc than jorge - but that's entirely accidental, he isn't TRYING to fuck with marc in the middle of the season. why would he!! and jorge refuses to be fucked with on the track because he's just never in the same postcode as valentino, and valentino isn't attempting to fuck with him off the track. he's barely even doing like,, mild mind games, like they're quite actively friendly the entire year

(I do sometimes think you can do a bit of displacement here where you don't necessarily need to hate the person you're actively fighting to get the job done - cf marc at misano 2019, also... tbh casey 2011-12 kinda had that vibe where he was getting all that energy out of his system in valentino's direction and could then keep things civil with his actual title rival. there's a LITTLE bit of that 2015 even pre phillip island but mostly valentino does have a more early 2008 'we move in silence' vibe or whatever that pecco tweet read. this is the restlessness thing, right - he kinda needs to fill his brain with SOMETHING)

which brings us to the second element: needing some distance. zero problem with biaggi, which is kinda the training wheels feud in that it takes a bit of a life of its own before valentino REALLY was intending it to. he's a kid (literal eighteen year old) who's kinda snarky about biaggi in the press and biaggi takes it EXTREMELY poorly and confronts him about it and it kind of spirals from there. with casey + jorge, valentino ensures that they never GET too close. I do think there is an element of... y'know, not wanting to be close friends with the guys who are your title rivals, because it's harder to beat people you care about and deprive them of the thing they want most in the world. which I actually think is pretty normal!! valentino's problem is that on a few occasions he has ended up in rivalries with blokes he was at some stage close in - and either he preemptively withdraws as with marc and... ? probably...? melandri...? - or the relationship deteriorates and then blows up as with sete and also marc. the 'preemptive withdrawing' bit does suggest a degree of self-awareness with regards to his own competitive process - and as has been previously argued in this parish, valentino's relationship with marc developing as it did was in large part due to his competitive situation 2010-14. the two of them falling out was probably always going to happen if they were competing, the two of them falling out that badly required valentino's stint in the competitive wilderness to let him lower his guard to such an extent

so that's the argument in broad strokes. yes, valentino can use enemies to motivate himself - he certainly enjoys having rivals, he enjoys fucking with them, he enjoys figuring them out and measuring himself against them and also a little bit of competitive edge. that doesn't mean he needs enemies per se, or certainly he wouldn't have seen some of his rivals in quite such extreme terms (casey in particular of course felt differently). he did need SOMETHING to motivate him... rivals, definitely - enemies, perhaps. and he also needed a bit of distance from those he was competing against. which post-sete he tended to preemptively enforce, except that one time when he didn't, and when it wasn't preemptively enforced it did have a tendency to blow up rather spectacularly. so in essence, you still end up at the same conclusion, right - valentino did get a lot out of having enemies, did motivate himself with them, did need to beat someone. but the working process is a bit different as I see it. sometimes making enemies is about emotional regulation, y'know. feuding as a healthy outlet for competitive tension. as it should be

[strawberry-pretzels]

how the fuck do straight people have 3-4 exes every year. god it's been eight fucking months and i feel like there's no end in sight for me

[probablysomethingtm]

It just hit me that the reason the worst men you know love massive trucks with blinding LED headlights is because those things are so ludicrously unsafe that they require everybody else on the road to modify their behavior and this feels like respect and power to them. The dodge ram is a symbol of how well male fragility, grievance, and violence have captured our politics

[princessefemmelesbian]

Op is a terf.

[indiegame]

depression cancelled i cleaned up a small part of my room and also my bag

[july-19th-club]

me age seven being sat down in front of the school’s district child psych lady and being given strange, simple spatial puzzles to solve and then long, complicated worksheets and hammering my way through them at the speed of light while having zero comprehension what their purpose was or why i was here: this is urgent! i have to get a good grade in Weird Puzzles, Or Else, something that is both normal to want and possible to achieve,

[pyrriax]

ANYWHO goodnight tumblr i'll be back on the art grind tomorrow i think 🙏

[robocops-a-christ-allegory]

I made. A Peacemaker iceberg

thanks.

[letmeliedown]

watched an episode of tigtone the other day and boy am i glad that kind of thing isn't trendy anymore. it's like xavier renegade angel but videogames (bad)

[relnicht]

lol sorry to the person saying i can't be a dick about not liking the eurovision results and that different people like different things and i'm being really horrible for disagreeing that loreen deserved to win. on this blog only my opinion is right and if i want to disagree with the eurovision results i can do that

[arielmagicesi]

hey, do you want to lose money AND your will to live all for the opportunity to make very little money doing a job that everyone warns you will sap you of your will to live? try applying for teacher certification oh my GOD