#She's just so selfish

[amostimprobabledream]

You know, I've been rewatching Peaky lately and it's reignited my burning hatred for Grace, and yet another thing to detest about her occurred to me:

I never see people talk about this, but has anyone else noticed that she was always trying to separate Tommy from his family? Like, when she pulls the whole "please spare him my liege" shit with Campbell, she specifically asks that he spare Tommy, but never says a thing about Arthur or John or anyone else - she only wants Tommy spared because of her personal feelings (and if you're going to argue that she knew Campbell would never agree to sparing all of them - then she should have known from go that Campbell wanted to get Tommy the most. It's ridiculous she'd think he'd agree to sparing the one guy who has been routinely outwitting him but not his brothers, who are a lesser threat). Then at the end of the season, Polly outright says that Grace took the job because she thought the Shelby's were just "scum" that would be easy to get rid of, but when she "fell for Tommy for real", suddenly it wasn't about the job anymore and Grace doesn't deny she had this attitude or that she still does - Tommy is only the exception in her eyes because she fell in love with him, but the rest of his family aren't important.

AND THEN, when Tommy confronts her at the end of Season One, Grace doesn't even apologise and says he should run away with her - like she genuinely thought he'd agree to abandon his family, friends, city, business, etc, for the woman who stabbed him in the back and indirectly got Danny killed - you have to wonder if Tommy would have been so lenient with her if, say, Arthur or John was the one who had died. Or what about Ada? She was right there inbetween the Peaky Blinders and Billy Kimber's gang with baby Karl - would Tommy have been able to forgive Grace if his little sister died because of her intel? (Also she didn't even confess until Tommy and Polly worked it out anyway, then she cried about how "I've done a terrible thing", but it really came off more like a bratty child crying because they know they're going to be punished, not out of genuine remorse.) In Season Two she outright blames Tommy for the relationship not working out because he didn't run away with her, instead of...you know, her selling him out to his worst enemy?

And she doesn't think she did anything wrong or regrets her actions because she still got what she wanted - she even brags to Polly about how "I used to do this for a living" without a smidge of guilt, and Queen Polly puts her right in her fucking place when she tells Grace point blank that only Tommy has chosen to forgive Grace for what she did, the rest of the family haven't forgotten and if Grace pulled that shit again, Polly would kill her.

It's almost like Grace eventually realised Tommy won't and cannot be parted from his family so she had to get pregnant so he'd pick her over May and become the mother of his kid, thereby making herself family as well. (I know she claims it's thought she was infertile at first, but honestly, taking her at her word is a big ask when she's a known liar).

Honestly, I truly, 100% believe that if the screenwriters hadn't killed Grace off (and I think they did that because honestly once she became Tommy's Wife, there was nowhere else to take her character. She'd gotten Tommy as a prize after not being punished whatsoever for her actions and that kind of concluded her arc, especially since her character is so intrinsically connected to Campbell), I think the marriage would have eventually crumbled - the entire wedding just showed the huge divide between the Shelby's and Grace's family, especially since Tommy was still doing gangster business right under her nose the entire time (almost like he didn't trust her enough to tell her about it) and everyone in Tommy's family except for Arthur didn't seem to like Grace and were only pretending to tolerate her because they love Tommy. Once the mystique of being "the one who got away" wore off, I think eventually the realisation that they have nothing in common and the undercurrent of "can she really be trusted?" would have gotten to him eventually.

Say what you will about Lizzie but at least it's shown the family were fond of her even before she and Tommy got involved in Season 4, and May had a lot of potential from that scene with her and Esme or how Charlie outright shipped them - like when he made this point of telling Tommy to take May to The Garrison for a drink. If having Charlie's seal of approval isn't a big deal, idk what is.

[stil-lindigo]

HELP PALESTINIAN ARCHITECT EVACUATE HER FAMILY FROM GAZA

This is a verified fundraiser for a family of four to evacuate to Cairo. The fund's creator, Amal Abu Shammala, reached out to me personally to share this since she's failed to get her fund on Operation Olive Branch and Let's Talk Palestine's fundraising linktree.

As of right now, she has raised €2,397/ €42,000. You can see the breakdown of what the money will be used for in the fund description.

Please give generously!

[rameiixo]

izutzoomie.. sorry

[jtranageder1]

i don’t think any catgirl has ever embodied a cat like Izutsumi has. she just is a fucjing cat

[cubbihue]

I just found your Itty Bitty Au and I have to say, I love how you've written Perry and the other fairies to be... just a bit selfish? How Perry won't consider turning Dev into a Fairy- not because he doesn't really care about him or thinks there's a moral issue with it, but because if he turns Dev into a fairy it'll negatively effect HIM. Also, super excited to see more of Timmy (both)!

Fairies are not like humans in that they have “Good or Bad” morals. Fairies, by nature, are extremely selfish. They don’t care for human conflicts, human goodness, or human morale.

A fairy’s first priority is doing their job right for their court, and their second priority is doing what they want most. Selfishness is innate for Fairies as Compassion is innate for Humans.

Cosmo and Wanda are outliers in that they care about their godchildren to an emotional degree. It’s what made them the best fairies to be godparents!! Peri… doesn’t understand that quite yet.

Bitties Series: [Start] > [Previous] > [Next]

[bixels]

vague-posting about this here cuz i don't feel comfortable yapping about my su takes on twitter, but after everything that's happened the most interesting thing about the su fandom to me is that so many are 100% there for applying the "everyone can change and deserves a second chance" message to everyone, even the diamonds. except for one ☝️ she doesn't count. cuz she's dead.

[star--nymph]

Vivienne's fear being 'becoming irrelevant' isn't something that's linked explicitly to her pride, no matter what Solas says about her (and the irony of Mr.Pride himself saying that should not be lost on you), it reveals what and who Vivienne truly is.

She's a survivalist.

Because we don't spend as much time in the Free Marches or Orlesian circles, we don't get to experience what being a mage is in these cultures. In Ferelden and Kirkwall, a mage is a lesser being without freedom no matter what they do--but in the Free Marches and Orlais specifically, mages are commodities that are given freedom so long as they play an entertaining enough role. They can explore the world if they have a noble patron, if they catch the right person's eye. They are, in a way, two sides of the same coin--refusing mages agency and forcing them to relay on higher powers. Vivienne lucked out, as sad as it is, when Bastion fell in love with her; she found someone who was contrarian enough to recognize her as a full person and also someone with power that could help her rise through the ranks. This is not to say that Vivienne on her own wasn't an exceedingly talented and intelligent individual--by nineteen she was already the youngest full fledged mage in Circle history and she was skilled enough to make herself an enchanter. But, I can not emphasize this enough, none of that matters if she didn't also play the Game and impress enough people.

Vivienne could have been the most brilliant mage in the history of Thedas and it means nothing if she was overlooked by nobility.

So when Bastion made her his mistress, she gained not just a lover but also a means to an end. Now she can use her magic to protect herself. Now she can roam where she wants and not be question for it because she's Madame Vivienne. Now, she can walk into the Orlasian court and belong there.

And what happens? Celene notices her and makes her the Court Enchanter, a position that has always been the equivalent of a jester. Vivienne took that title, ignored that it was essentially a glorified insult to who she is, and made it a position of power. She made the Court Enchanter into an advisor, a political rank. She had done the impossible and made mages an actual political entity in the Orlasian Court, something that wasn't seen outside of Tervinter (not counting what players can do under very specific conditions if they made mages in DAO and DA2).

All that, however, only continues as long as the court recognizes her as something worth their attention. Vivienne needs to maintain her act as Madame De Fer, The Lady of Iron, the Court Enchanter, The Jewel of the High Court, because the second she just becomes Vivienne, it's over for her. The assassins coming raining in, her name gets devoured by rumors and gossip, and she'll be found dead at bottom of the stair case with a dagger in her back if she's lucky.

So of course when the Circles fall apart during the Rebellion, she clings to that Loyalist Mages to maintain that structure--of course she moves her pieces to the Inquisition, knowing that if the Circle DOES fall, she at least as another place for herself and mages latch onto--of course when she hears that Celene replaced her with a new Court Enchanter that appeared out of no where, she grows to resent Morrigan.

Like, Morrigan literally pops up out of thin air, makes herself invaluable to Celene, and then plants herself in the place Vivienne had to claw her way up to and create so she could survive. Would you not be resentful when your life's work is usurped by some random witch of the wilds because she happened to charm the Empress? Everything Vivienne strived for all whisked away because the court find a gem who glimmers ever so slightly more than Vivienne.

So yes, Vivienne fears becoming irrelevant because the world has made it so that irrelevance for an Orlesian mage means death.

[spiderzlover]

"All I wished for was another Splatfest win..."

- Frye the Skullsquid💀

[mylastmoleculeofserotonin]

I’m convinced that people who hate Mabel have a) never watched the show and/or b) don’t have siblings. Because until they encountered Bill Cipher for the first time, there was nothing to suggest Dipper’s obsession with the journals was more important or valid than Mabel just wanted to have a normal summer with a whirlwind romance. And even after incident with the portal Dipper and Ford actively keep everything secret from Mabel and Stan so she has no idea of the stakes or what Bill is capable of. Add to that that her dreams of the future were all suddenly crumbling around her all at once, and it is perfectly reasonable if not expected that she would fall for an immortal chaos demon’s tricks.

Also, most of the stuff involving the journal that goes wrong is Dipper’s fault but he still pretends like he and Mabel are in it together. And those of you who are siblings know that Mabel takes it extremely well. Like if I had accidentally sold my body as a puppet to a demon and the only way I could ask my sibling for help was through a sock puppet, I would expect them to help, but only after they spent a good half hour laughing and making fun of me with the additional consequence would be that any time I ask them for a small favor in the future, they would remind me that they were the one to save me from my stupid mistake, so no, they won’t pass me the salt.

(Also, can we just take a moment to see the giant double standards when it comes to the romances that Dipper and Mabel’s have. When Mabel pursues a romantic people treat it as irrelevant and getting in the way of the plot even when it doesn’t. But when Dipper tries to win Wendy’s affection, people expect Mabel to drop everything, sacrifice her pet, mess with time travel to help set up a scenario which Dipper can win a carnival game as a flex.)

[whetstonefires]

The reason I keep banging the Jiang Fengmian drum so hard is not that he did nothing wrong--he's definitely in contention for best parenting in this book but that bar is in the ground--but because most of the takes I see about him are so extremely bad.

If you want to slag him off for trying to make choices that would hurt no one, and winding up properly protecting no one as a result, that's valid! That's an interesting and text-based critique, which opens into his parallels with Lan Xichen!

If you want to blame him for being weirdly over-invested in Wei Wuxian and Jiang Cheng being bffs, that's fair, that definitely contributed to the weirdness between them. If you want to say he was a poor communicator, that he fundamentally misunderstood his son, that he failed to be emotionally available in a way his kids could get much use out of, even that he should have figured out a way to stop Yu Ziyuan from creating such a hostile environment, all of that is fair game!

If you want to tackle how the worst thing he did to his kids was die I am so interested in how Wei Wuxian went on to abandon A-Yuan by going to his death, and how that might be tied to how his primary adult role model tied him to a boat and went off to a fight he knew he was going to lose.

After his parents had already left him like that once before, presumably less intentionally.

But no, instead I keep seeing that Jiang Fengmian didn't care. That he never expressed affection. That he actively participated in Yu Ziyuan's fucky game of forcing proxy conflict onto the boys instead of constantly trying (and failing) to shut it down, or that he ignored her bad behavior because it didn't affect him, or that he fought with her constantly, or that he was too much of an unmanly coward to stand up to her when she wanted something.

All of which are directly in contradiction to every scene he's in, and several of which manage to invert or erase the actual conflicts between him and his wife that were the source of all that tension.

And which are really interesting, because some of the most intractable elements are ideological--Yu Ziyuan is fundamentally a conservative and Jiang Fengmian seems to want to be an egalitarian, which ofc matched poorly with his hereditary authority as patriarch of a large sect.

The fact that the bit where we get to actually see him failing to parent Jiang Cheng consists of him gently and firmly trying to correct Jiang Cheng's ethics when what was actually needed in that moment was reassurance for the well-founded insecurities that were causing him to be a little bitch, only for Yu Ziyuan to charge in and make everything fifty times worse, is so much more interesting than literally any version of this family dynamic I have seen in fic. It's to the point I'm relieved when writers kill Jiang Fengmian off, because it means they probably won't feel the need to character-assassinate him too badly.

The number of people I've seen come right out and say some variation of 'men can't be abused' is killing me here. No, Yu Ziyuan wanting to hurt her husband does not constitute sufficient proof that he abused her first and deserved it! That's not how anything works!

[kanjichris]

"why don't you want him to know how much you love him?" "that's a little personal. he knows." "uh-huh."

[urjustaguyonahorse]

you KNOW cathy was so glad when kate came back home after all that time no matter how broken she was but she also must have been so so so unbelievably relieved as a mother to see that kate was opening up to others again and she had people taking care of her. like obviously part of her making tyler stay for dinner and giving him the guest room was typical mom scheming because why would you let a guy like that slip through your daughters fingers? but also, she watched her daughter lose three of her best friends and push everybody else away as a coping mechanism and there's no way she wasn't so comforted by the sight of somebody coming her her aid when she obviously didn't ask for it and staying for her even when it was an awkward situation to say the least. i just know she would love the rest of the wranglers and let them set up base there whenever. she would love having javi back and cooking them all bbq while they play poker in her living room after a long day. she'd let them redo the barn and put bedrooms in the loft and not bat an eye if any of them moved in more permanently in the off season. she would love boone's help with the animals and dani's help with the machinery. she would let dexter move a whole library into the loft "as light reading when we stay" and let lilly spread new t-shirt design ideas across her whole kitchen and give her feedback while she's deciding. she'd love tyler like a son (in law cause she's still a schemer after all) and tease him when she wears his t-shirt and he'd unclog the sink drain like a man. she'd love javi like a (more favorite) son and the guest bedroom in the house would be permanently his and they'd watch house md together. i just feel like a safe place to come back to that's filled with laughter and home cooked food would be exactly what kate and all of them would need to heal and carry on. and knowing kate's in good hands with good people who love her and let her be in their lives would be exactly what cathy needs as a mother who lost her daughter once.

[tea-cat-arts]

Since we're getting closer to the release of the next Madoka Magica movie, I'd like to gently remind you guys that Rebellion doesn't have a single reliable narrator, and you really can't take anything the girls say as fact.

Madoka, Mami, and Kyoko have all had their memories tampered with by Homura and don't have the full story

Sayaka and Nagisa are both mentally fully there, but they're biased as they benefit from Madoka's system

Homura is being prodded by Kyubey, is in the middle of a mental breakdown, is missing key information, and is locked inside her own head where she is subconsciously filtering out and ejecting things that don't alight with the reality she wants there

This isn't to say that any of these girls are bad people or being intentionally manipulative. Just please keep in mind that all these characters' perspectives are skewed, and you really can't take everything they say at face value.

[critter-wizard]

ep 43 had me tearing up in a fucking shopping centre ‼️‼️

b+w alt version that I truly couldn't decide if I liked it more . Also I included a lot of thoughts in the tags but they're somewhat incoherent<3

[happyk44]

percy needs to be haunted by bianca's ghost more

[nats-uvi]

Angst time :D👍

You can read my rambling about her in the tags