#SHE'S SUCH A BITCH AND I LOVE THAT FOR HER TBH

[theofficialpresidentofmars]

zuko and katara have genuinely SUCH an interesting dynamic and relationship to explore when you don’t have a bitch in your ear trying to tell you they should kiss.

like there’s nothing objectively wrong with shipping zut4ra but i CANNOT find any proper duo content of them that isn’t romantic or romantically implied and it annoys me. no i don’t think they would work. no i don’t think Katara would give up her man for that guy of all people. no I don’t think Zuko would be romantically interested in Katara. yes i do think that reducing all of their feelings towards each other into ‘romance’ oversimplifies and undermines the depth of the platonic relationship that they actually do have in established canon. yes whatever I’m sure there’s something sweet about a boy trying to get a girl to forgive him by helping her get revenge on the guy that killed her mom but don’t you think that it’s actually much more profound if there are no romantic ulterior motives whatsoever and it’s actually just a demonstration of the lengths Zuko will go to because he cares deeply about his friends and their feelings and what they think about him and he wants Katara to like him and he’s genuinely sorry that he broke her trust by warming up to her slightly before betraying them and to make sure she knows that he was being sincere and he actually was touched by what she said he tries to find a way for her to heal a wound that he knows tears her apart and it’s a wound he wishes he could heal in himself. and he does it because he’s trying to earn her forgiveness, not her love. he’s trying to earn himself the right to look her in the eye, not to hold her hand. he’s trying to amend for the mistakes of his people for nothing but the better of others.

and when Katara offers to heal him in the cave, it’s not because she’s fallen head over heels at all, or even in the slightest. she’s the first to see the light in him, and she sees a boy who’s been hurt by the fire nation in a similar way to her. she recognises that if she can convince him to come with her now, the gaang is up by a firebending teacher and a friend at best, and down an enemy at least at worst. for a moment she sees him for who he is and what he’s been through and it’s not because she likes him. the thought doesn’t even cross her mind, it’s just in her nature as a person to be caring and understanding and she has the help she can tell he needs, so she extends a hand.

and when they face Azula together? Katara was the first to reach out when it was almost the right time, and she’s the one who’ll be there to help him see it through. When he takes a bolt for her, isn’t it more profound that he jumps in front of the bolt not out of romantic love, but because Zuko is the kind of person who would put himself in mortal danger for anyone he cared about? Because his heart’s too big and because he’s seen those he love get hurt too many times to stand there and let them take it?

anyway I’ve spent too much of this post refuting romance but not actually expressing what it is i do like about their platonic dynamic but it’s late and i don’t have the words. so i’ll just say it’s such in that it would be really funny if Zuko instead dated Katara’s brother. and they yap together and she gives him a list of interests and he tells her embarrassing date stories. they also yap a lot about Aang because like. Zuko’s bff and Katara’s bf he’d probably come up a lot. also Maiko’s platonic shit-talking exes/close friends dynamic solos their romantic dynamic but that’s a discussion for another day ^-^

ship name censored because I don’t intend for any negativity to actually intrude upon certain shipping spaces lmao. i’m rarely opinionated but i don’t really care tbh i just wish there was more platonic stuff out there or i saw less romantic stuff el oh el

[viisiond]

@paradiisaea​ // Starter [Innamorati for Serpent!]

      Rather condescending applause coming from the other harbinger as she stood up from her seat, walking up to her colleague and giving her a smile- “A marvelous show, Sandrone~! Truly right up your alley~” Compliments who? she didn’t know them, this was just observation.

         “It’s so nice to see a familiar face within the confines of Fontaine...~”

   A wave of her hand and she sent her men away so they could properly talk, her smile disappearing once they were gone.

      “Alright let’s not cut corners- What’s the status on the gnosis, Serpent?”

[motherjanerainy]

booktok cannot handle unfriendly or emotionally complex female characters. show them a woman who’s a little problematic and they start shaking and shitting themselves. women can be either be martyrs or victims, anything else and ppl short circuit. men can be fucked up emotionally manipulative mass murders but if women have one unpalatable emotion they’re drawn & quartered.

if booktok bitches saw the female characters i liked they would piss blood for a week !!!!

[creative-robot]

I know The Founders Cut, generally, is the edited scrubbed over version of genloss from Showfall in-universe (as well as a not-8-hour-long-three-stream-binge-night whenever we want to watch it again) but something that struck me as odd and I haven’t seen anyone mention yet, is this warning

It shows up right at the junction where the third act starts, where it appears the Hero is breaking free of Showfall thanks to Hetch. But here’s the thing, while a LOT less than the previous acts the audience still played a significant role in this act, even when really only given two audience interaction choices. Which makes me wonder, how real is this warning, and who is it for? Obviously the audience involved knows what happens past this point, but the audience is also implied to be an integral part of the Social Experiments, which is part of why things start to tweak out when the Founder removes them in the Founder Cut as the Generation Loss generation loses.

My first thought, was that obviously this is another bait and switch, a way to draw the audiences attention, seeing something that’s secret, something that’s not “meant for them”, which is a tactic I could see Showfall using in universe to keep people’s attention and add an air of mystery to their shows.

But

Showfall is doing all their experiments and these shows with a LOT of help from their censors to show it off, displaying a fun silly show that is definitely not uber fucked up and that is 100% just slime don’t worry about it, it’s kid friendly if it’s green! And I don’t think they’d want to bet all their cards on this one experiment doing well enough to their audience to not question the sudden shift in tone that follows this warning. Which makes me wonder.

They did their test, they did their experiment, and the evidence of this last act? I think it was a one time run, they don’t want anyone seeing this, it isn’t for the audience. Act three is specifically to both test and play with their Hero, Hetch’s new lines add a level to this, never once does he call the Hero by their name, just refers to Ranboo as their Role, and he’s not exactly. Nice? About literally any of Ranboos concerns, which wouldn’t really seem conductive to making an audience trust him, especially with his monologue at the end. Ranboo has escaped before, possibly right before act 1 started, they tightened the security on his mask to be unremovably part of them, Hetch doesn’t like the Hero but they’re a fan favorite so he can’t just get rid of them.

Act three is the cumulation of Ranboo being punished for things they don’t remember, for daring to break free from Showfalls control, this is Hetch taking the Hero and essentially majorly fucking and manipulating them to take his frustration out on a fan favorite they can’t otherwise get rid of or give a smaller role like Slimecicle. which is exemplified by the fact that we now know Charlie most likely was never able to actually able to fully snap out of the control, that even in act three in panic and confusion there was at least still a part of him being influenced by Showfall.

So the first two acts are the usual show, they have their posters, they have Squiggles to introduce them, they have goofs and silliness and only a couple slip ups that’re quickly dealt with, the usual rose tinted curtains. Act three?

Do not watch the following material

[tvckerwash]

you know, an interpretation of ct that I don't see that I personally really love is that she's a fuck up. like yes she's cool and she has some good fight scenes, but a huge part of her character is that she makes mistakes. the mistakes that she makes are ones that on their own aren't the end of the world, but she keeps making these little mistakes, and they eventually add up until she's out of room to make any more.

a really good example of this phenomenon in action is the actions she took leading up to her final confrontation with carolina and tex.

strike one, she thought she saw something in the water, but when asked by the leader what it was, she brushed it off as nothing when even if it had been nothing, it would've been smart to tell him what she thought she saw.

strike two, she didn't sense or notice florida's presence when the leader did, and she looks at the leader twice, once as she pulled out her magnums, and again after she did a scan of the room, almost like she was looking at him for guidance before he finds florida and takes him out with one good axe throw.

strike three, she couldn't convince the leader to leave when they had the chance to get away, and her cheap tricks were not enough to hold off either tex or carolina in a fight. they were only good for incapacitating her opponents enough for her to get away, which doesn't work when she has no escape.

ct is not tex, or carolina, or south. she is not a one woman army who can get herself out of trouble when she's stuck in tough situations. she needs people who can watch her back, she need a team who can cover her when she does mess up, and the leader and his team were not those people. she couldn't bring herself to trust them, and they couldn't bring themselves to trust her, and that cost all of them their lives.

[maxdurden]

look,,,, i think the bad kids are understandable for being as pissed as they are at kipperlilly copperkettle. but i'm on my 'it's all love now' bullshit so hear me out:

what the bad kids read about klck were files from therapy. Before she was coopted by literal deific rage, she was only talking about perceived unfairness and her jealousy of riz in therapy/counseling. that's literally where someone is supposed to work through their darkest, worst parts of themself. and she was only a kid.

i can relate to her, even. as a teen who had real bad mental health, i absolutely had moments where i coveted other people's trauma because i didn't feel that my life situation was bad enough to justify my mental illness being as unmanageable as it was. so i get it. i feel where klck is coming from. and again she wasn't preaching this on the street. she was sharing it, in confidence, with a counselor. she might have been bitching about it to her friends. but honestly? do i think that justifies hating her? nah not really.

and then, if theories so far are correct, jace stardiamond dug into her counseling files, invaded and violated her most personal, least flattering thoughts, and took advantage of them. fed her like a sacrificial lamb to a dead god of rage, used her and the god to twist each other into the worst versions of each other.

all i'm saying is: ankarna has been corrupted. through compassion and reuniting her with cassandra, maybe the bad kids can save her. kipperlilly has been corrupted. maybe through compassion and reuniting her with lucy, with her best friend and voice of reason, the bad kids can save her too.

[imthursdaysyme]

little arwen doodle

[greghatecrimes]

Amber looking cunty as always. and Thirteen in the middle there... hello autism

[heikeee]

no but i need to scream into the void or i'll go mad. listen. kikyo wasn't a bitch. i don't think the way she was written did her any justice; it just makes her easy to hate. and don't get me wrong, this isn't about her relationship with inuyasha or kagome at all, i just want to talk about her as a character because she is one of the most complex of them and she needs to be looked at with more empathy.

i've said it before and i'll say it again: her whole thing is that she is tragedy personified. think about it. everything, and i mean every single thing that could have gone wrong in her life, HAS gone wrong. she had a difficult upbringing, having to raise her little sister and having to shoulder the burden of being the sole purifier of the shikon jewel (which constantly put her and her village under threat). she was never dealt an easy hand to begin with. then, she finds solace in love, tries her best to think of a way of unraveling herself from her duties to live a free life, while still caring for others selflessly: she took in onigumo, and he betrayed her. by pretending to be inuyasha, he had her think that her lover had betrayed her as well, and succumbed to wounds inflicted by him (or so she thought), while sealing him to the goshinboku.

the last wish she spoke of was to take the shikon jewel to the beyond with herself. later, kagome finds a way to actually destroy the jewel, which was what kikyo had intended to do but couldn't. in her heart, her last wish was to see inuyasha again. the jewel corrupts this wish and grants it in the most fucked up way possible.

her remains are robbed from her grave and she is brought back to life with NO agency on the matter, by someone who wanted only to exploit her powers. now, untethered from from her past duties, she is finally free to experience emotion. and that includes bad emotions. so anger, resentment, jealousy, contempt, loneliness, selfishness (and that's part of being human). every unfulfilled wish, the unfairness of it all. she spends the rest of the series navigating this undead existence, the duality of not belonging anywhere, constantly torn between doing what is right and what needs to be done to reach her goal, having no choice but to consume souls of recently departed girls to have the energy to fight her only fight (destroying naraku), all the while helping villagers and kids, and even the inugang, despite not wanting to align with their agenda at first. she contemplates sacrificing kohaku, yes, but ultimately her redemption is that she chose to save him instead of purifying the jewel in the end. she showed that she trusted the inugang to finish what she couldn't, and chose to spare another life, if possible (she says so herself in ch441)

it is very difficult to relate to someone that doesn't give access to her vulnerable side very often. her and sango are the two characters who had it the hardest and were forced to make the most difficult decisions out of everyone. but we love sango, even when she chose to sacrifice rin, even when she contemplated killing kohaku then herself, because we know where sango's heart lies and how torn she is about all of it. kikyo, on the other hand, is stoic and hardened by her life (and also post-life), but ultimately her biggest trait was kindness. we don't get to see her cry and be like woe is me about it, something that could've made us more empathetic towards her like we are with sango.

my point is kikyo deserves to be looked at through kinder eyes. she is a complex character, and she requires a bit more analysis and compassion to actually see who she really is. my tragic girl

[mrsoharaa]

Felicia: I can send you the address, Miguel...

Y/n: He didn't bring his phone. So...

Felicia: Oh, I can give you the address! *she chirps*

Y/n: No need. *retorts flatly, immediately*

Felicia: Can't hurt. *starts to get impatient and prude, brows furrowing with a small careless shrug*

Y/n: Might hurt. *states with a firmer tone, arms folded across chest nails seeping into suit, ready to ruthlessly pounce*

Miguel: Oye, nena...behave *chuckles and grins down at y/n, gently holding the lower part of their tense back*

*heavily inspired by a certain tiktok audio lmaooo my money is on Y/n!*

[dustyfairywings]

So you know how Takayoshi gifted Akemi two songbirds in a cage together as a sincere apology for his mother?

I think those two birds are meant to symbolize both Akemi and Takayoshi. They are both marginalized in some way despite their privilege. Akemi as the daughter of a lord and Takayoshi as the disabled second son of the shogun are both denied agency in their roles despite their privilege. Takayoshi and Akemi both are song birds in a gilded cage. Two pawns to the political and social machinations of their parents. Akemi a victim to her father’s political aspirations and Takayoshi evidently a victim to his mother’s social manipulations.

(Aside: and possibly emotional abuse/neglect, with the way he was forbidden from speaking to women and who knows what actually happened to this first wife. I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that it seems to me like this is all in service of maintaining a “respectable” image of the family, and cannot risk having people know he has a stutter. just spitballing here)

If I were to make a prediction for season 2, or a wish, it’s that I would like to see Akemi and Takayoshi form a genuine bond and alliance as two privileged-yet-marginalized individuals having to navigate a politically fraught and rigidly hierarchical society, and I think there’s at least some textual evidence to support this being a real possibility.

They demonstrate in the show Takayoshi is no fool and that he’s clearly an educated and well-read man. Take how he engages with Akemi’s poetry during sex compared to Taigen as an example. He simply has a disability and is somewhat submissive and subdued (likely due to being shamed or ridiculed for his stutter and getting little to no support as a child). They are capable of being intellectual equals. Any sort of power or control Akemi would gain over Takayoshi is by virtue of the kindness and empathy she is showing him, not because she’s outsmarting him. I believe Takayoshi is willingly surrendering himself to his wife and cognizant of this fact.

I think we may see a dynamic where Akemi will both advocate for her own political ends but also at times advocate for and try to protect her husband where she can where familial and interpersonal relationships are involved. I really really hope their union will be one that grows in political power through the healing power of love, compassion, and solidarity between two marginalized individuals.

They can acknowledge the humanity in each other and see each other as equals in their shared pain and victimization, and find empowerment through each other. If they cannot be their own masters at least they can be each other’s sole masters.

Takayoshi and Akemi may be two songbirds stuck in a gilded cage, stripped of their freedom and humanity. But they at least have each other and together they can harmonize.

[dailykugisaki]

Day 223 | id in alt

Maki thinking some very unsorcererly things over a piece of damn cheesecake.

(Read from right to left💥)

[teoandaurelioaregayashell]

LUMBRE:your so useless-

AURELIO,shrinking into himself:

TEO,smugly: like mother like son I guess-

THE OTHER SUNBEARER TRIBUTES: OHHHHHHHHHHHH

[sumamitt]

gideon nav is an angry woman

[derelictheretic]

I redrew the cult family doodle finally ✨💕

[crownrots]

big al is literally that “i’m a bad bitch you can’t kill me” meme and i think that’s what every geriatric mercenary needs to aspire to