#Really the only way it could be better

[chronurgy]

i gotta say playing as durge and finding the Prayer for Forgiveness in the mind flayer colony has genuinely made me unwell. Durge and gortash..... I'm rotating them. gnawing on them. absolutely freak4freak. help.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

In the world of heavy metals, love is denser than hate!

[vaguely-concerned]

thinking about not only the specific people lucanis pulls in to represent the 'locks' in his psyche, but the storytelling that happens in the structure/order of them. the underlying ideas are presented something like:

the lucanis who went into the ossuary never came back out again; he died down there (the boy caterina raised is gone forever) -> you're putting yourself in danger doing this (by being close to me), you should leave because I can't bear it if you get hurt because of me -> it doesn't matter even if we do try this, it won't work anyway (again because of me) ('you know what he's like, you can open the door but he won't walk through it' :'( oofie doofie) -> what if the real secret is that there was never anything but the monster in here from the beginning. you should leave, there was never anything here worth saving in the first place. (implicitly: what if I deserved what happened, all along.)

it runs pretty cleanly from outward-oriented attachment anxiety ('caterina won't even want me back like this, she won't recognize me (the same way I no longer recognize myself)) and gradually deeper inwards until we reach self-image and self worth. or you know, the harrowing basic lack of it lol.

"careful -- they'll know we're not right," spite says in one of their first scenes... but clearly, some very deep part of lucanis has feared or suspected for much longer than that that there's something inherently not right at the core of him, way before any demon entered the picture. and the voice he gives those lines to is the person who should know him better than anyone in the world, who he has loved more than anyone in the world -- and who deliberately chose to hurt him so horrifically anyway. 'It's better if I'm just a monster and deserved what happened than it is to allow for the idea that the brother I love doesn't really exist and maybe never did'. it's better if he's fundamentally flawed in some way that needed fixing to help him survive, and that's why caterina chose to hurt him again and again -- out of love. (this one I think he might have a very sad wakeup call on one day if he ever ends up with the responsibility and care of a child of his own in some way and realizes just how alien the idea of ever intentionally hurting them for any reason is to him. oh buddy. also interesting that he keeps caterina as the outermost lock -- there IS a distance he keeps there that he hasn't with illario. he doesn't resent her 'anymore' he says, but he also keeps her carefully further away from his deepest self.)

as far as I could tell the only note in the mind prison that's fully hidden and needs to be uncovered is the sad painful helpless stupid little truth that even after all this, even knowing what happened... he still loves his brother. is there anything illario could ever do that would make lucanis completely stop loving him, do you think? sometimes the trouble with unconditional love is that it is, well. unconditional, even when some terms and conditions probably would have been in order haha.

that's the pattern you see there again and again; he would rather destroy and abandon and imprison himself at every turn than let go of love, even when it's just scraps, even when there's only ever enough of it to hurt him. it's only when rook shows up and as it were takes his hand and walks along with him that he can entertain the idea of changing the story of what walking out the door might mean in the end.

[afurtivecake]

if andrew was a bit swayed by kevin, i cannot blame him in THE SLIGHTEST. kevin is like, specifically engineered to appeal to all of andrew's protective instincts:

fleeing horrific abuse from a grade-A asshole

thinks about going back to the abusive situation sometimes

needs him all the time

hot.

and on top of that, kevin tells him he's worth something and that he'll give him something to live for.

like idk what else andrew could have done. the man is not made of stone.

[sualne]

found back this thing from 2021

putting the addition directly onto the og post since nobody reblogs the full version:

'about this i feel a few people have misunderstood what i drew it for, my tags didnt help at all for sure and it is just one doodle, but i didnt made it as 'i'm questioning my sexuality and need to know what specific labels i am'. i've been well aware of what my whole deal is for years.

this was a silly doodle i drew as a recreation of all the thoughts and questions i had that went 'what is attraction? what is romance and sexual and platonic and friendship and something else entirely? how and why do we need to define feelings and relationships so much? why do people act the way they do, date the way they do, marry the way they do, live the way they do? how much does your own culture and time influence the way you do those things, the way you think you should act and feel? how much does amatonormativity influence and impact all of us? and why are some people so resistant against the idea of questioning and living out of these norms?' among many others things.

again, i drew years ago. i didnt want to post it because it felt unnecessarily personal and because people are insufferable about queerness.

EDIT: pls for the love of my sanity reblog the full post instead.'

[gunstellations]

In the world I love

_

In a different world

[ecoterrorist-katara]

“Katara deserves a quiet life after the war, so becoming a healer (who made no contributions to the field) is actually a good arc!”

It is already bizarre to me that in ATLA, Katara is this confident & combative & ambitious girl who LOVED to fight and wanted nothing more than to help as many people as possible…then comics!Katara and TLOK!Katara showed neither her previous personality traits nor a career commensurate with those traits…

but it’s even more bizarre to me that ATLA fans would defend her trajectory as if it were some kind of progressive story of recovering from war trauma.

I’ve seen multiple takes like this. “Katara is not a YA heroine, she’s not a bloodthirsty girlboss who loves fighting so it’s actually a good thing that she doesn’t have to fight anymore” “after everything she’s been through she deserves a quiet life and a loving family”

For Katara, fighting in the war was actually empowering. It didn’t burn her out. It didn’t disillusion her. It didn’t take more out of her than she can give. Katara is not Katniss Everdeen, who needed to step back and discover her own agency and a sense of peace after fighting in a war she never chose to start. Katara’s war trauma largely happened before she took an active part in it. After she chose to be a part of the war, she became a waterbending master, made close friends, found her father again, got closure for her mother’s murder, defeated the Fire Lord, and met the love of her life. If Katara were a real person, maybe she’d be traumatized, but nowhere in the text of ATLA does she exhibit the sign that she’s tired of fighting on behalf of the world. If anything, she just got started.

If you take her post-ATLA arc at face value (vs as bad writing), it’s a tragedy of a woman who has learned to minimize her own relevance and her own power. In The Promise, she begins deferring serious decisions to Aang. She doesn’t even express a strong opinion about the fate of the entire colony of Yu Dao, or the fate of her friend Zuko. In North and South, she accepts Northern encroachment of the South in the name of progress. In TLOK we see her not as a politician or a chief, but rather as “the best healer” — albeit one who apparently never established a hospital, or trained acolytes of her own, or done anything to help people at scale, which she has always wanted to do. It’s even more egregious when you remember that in Jang Hui, she was not satisfied to simply heal the sick as the Painted Lady. She wanted to solve the root of the problem, so she cleaned the river and committed full-on ecoterrorism. Just because the war is over doesn’t mean she wants to stop helping people. In fact, the problem she addressed in Jang Hui is exactly the type of problem that would become more prevalent after the war ends, judging by the rapid industrialization between ATLA and LOK.

In the original ATLA, I think Katara is about as close to a power fantasy as you can get for a teenage girl, because she gets to be messy and goofy and powerful, even though she also had to perform a whole lot of emotional and domestic labour. But post-ATLA, she doesn’t get power and she doesn’t get to make a change. She gets love and a family. That’s it. And her grandkids don’t even remember her. Her friends and peers, on the other hand, were shown doing all sorts of super cool things like, you know, running the world they saved.

It’s not feminist to say that a female character deserves “rest” when she’s shown zero inclination that she wants a quiet life. Women who want a quiet life deserve to get it — I think Katniss’ arc is perfect — but women who want power deserve to get it too, especially when they’re motivated by compassion and a keen sense of justice. There’s nothing feminist about defending the early 2010s writing decisions of two men. Like just admit that they fucked up! It’s fine! Maybe they’ll do better in the future!

[imminent-danger-came]

“I felt the red-winged man gaze, I heard him speaking. I know who you are, he said, there are two ways this can go, no, three ways. I don’t want to count the ways, I said, I just want to finish it. I need to get to the end. His wings lifted and sanked. Oh my darling, he said, you’re a long way from the end.”

— Anne Carson, H of H Playbook

[turtleblogatlast]

Something I love about Leo is that, canonically, he IS capable of cooking, he’s just completely incapable of using a toaster. He’s banned from the kitchen not out of an inability to make edible food, but because being within six feet of a toaster causes the poor appliance to spontaneously combust.

[bruciemilf]

One of my biggest pet peeves is the justice league being labelled as " The Avengers of DC" and its like. No? The avengers are law enforcement. The Justice League are volunteers

[caligvlasaqvarivm]

prince and prince friendship. this is my vision

[peachyutdr]

i finished it, was kicked out of the game, and then spent the next 10 minutes drawing this. i will now go take a shower, most likely cry, and then go through the emotional turmoil of convincing myself to reset so i can do a geno run. i hate it here :D

[saddest-girl-in-the-whole-world]

thinking about how harrows schizophrenia and general mental state is actually a lot less of a problem compared to the behaviour of everyone else around her that's using her schizophrenia and general mental state as a justification to treat her like shit during HtN.

I mean like yeah sure she's acting vaguely odd and has hallucinations of the body but like she's actually handling that well considering the situation she's in, the far bigger problem is that everyone around her is treating her like shit, hunting her for sport, treating her like she's less worthy of consideration and trying to manipulate her like sure she's not doing great but I'm sure it'd be a lot easier if!!! anyone!!! was treating her like a person!!!!

[commsroom]

this is a sensitive topic for me, so i really hate that i have to make this post, but unfortunately it keeps becoming relevant: stop infantilizing hera, and stop making excuses for it.

"well, she's literally four years old" she's been fully conscious with an adult mind for most of that, awake for most of that, and in multiple places at once for most of that. do you think that is comparable to a child's life experience, or is it maybe representative of something else?

i assume you understand why it would be wrong to call lovelace "literally two" because the fact that she is a clone is textually representative of the trauma she's been through. i also assume you understand why hera occasionally making flippant or frustrated comments about her own struggles living as an AI is different from the text telling you who she is or how you should regard her. it's science fiction, and it's a show that uses science fiction concepts in ways that resonate with real ones. the ultimate fact of the matter is that hera could've been in a lab for 30 years, or for 200 years, in a different setting, and be written the exact same way: as a sheltered, isolated adult woman without real life experiences.

hera is not a child or teenager in a natural stage of development. she is an adult who never went through the usual stages of development or life milestones, who has adult friendships and responsibilities, but who feels she is permanently ill-equipped to handle her life because no one ever taught her how, or gave her the space to make mistakes. if you don't understand why this distinction is important in discussing her trauma, that there are real, adult people who feel the same way, people who feel they've only been alive for four years, women who were never girls... then i really don't know what to say to you.

and i guess i have to say it: it's inherently infantilizing to say her peers see her the same way they see an actual child, or to say she needs them to be parental figures, especially eiffel of all people. "adult women have parents too" not ones that are 30 year old men! and parents have responsibilities to children, even adult children, that are different from the responsibilities two unrelated adults who care about each other have. it fundamentally reframes hera's most equal relationship in a way that diminishes her autonomy within it. (and if you're arguing it's all equal anyway, then what does it add? why don't you consider friendship as important?)

i know some people will dismiss that point because i view eiffel and hera romantically, but i've never argued you have to. if you want to go down that road, it says some pretty awful things about the couple of writers and actors who also view it romantically if you think she was meant to be viewed as a child, much less comparable to his child. you're inventing problems that don't canonically exist.

i just don't understand why you would make it about eiffel at all - and eiffel does not have the right to be a parent; the only thing that will heal his relationship with his real actual child is in relation to his real actual child - instead of discussing what a disabled, isolated, traumatized adult might be able to offer a disabled, traumatized kid. isn't the whole point of hera not being like pryce about breaking cycles? why make her a passive figure in her own story when her entire story arc is about taking control of her life?

there's no utility to this line of thought that doesn't further demean and alienate her, while implying she isn't ready to be a fully autonomous adult person. i don't think most people mean to be ableist, but hera is canonically a disabled woman, and i don't like where that line of thought leads. and yes, she's just a fictional character and can't be hurt by it, but everyone brings some real-world biases to how they engage with fiction. she's written as a marginalized adult person, and her womanhood is textually tied to defense of her personhood and autonomy (as well as a parallel to lovelace, also a marginalized woman.) to paraphrase minkowski - "you are going to show [that woman] some goddamned respect."

[userautumn]

"not all men" but not in a men's rights way, in a "it's important to remember that men aren't the only perpetrators of cruelty, abuse, and evil and that subconsciously or consciously training yourself to view men as inherently evil and everyone else as inherently safe inadvertently puts you in a position where you're both vulnerable to attack or harm from people you otherwise wouldn't suspect, AND causes you to limit the number of allies you might have in a time of need" kind of way.

[gayness-and-mayhem]

Father Mulcahy being a spin the bottle champion is something that's so important to me actually.