#You can't be mad at them

[loveisinthebat]

Full of Love

[salarymanwaka]

[kunikiiida-kuuun]

My heart wished to stay here, because it gave me a reason to live ♡

Fukuzawa + The Founding Trio

[gnomewithalaptop]

Rereading the Our Worlds at War tie-in again and God I miss their friendship every day

[marypsue]

Man, it's cool and all if you see a metaphor for marginalisation in the monstrous, and if you want the power fantasy of 'what if you could just eat anybody who threatened you/pissed you off'. Me too.

However, as soon as you start saying 'no, these monsters are a 1:1 on Specific Marginalised Group, and you have to treat them in the fiction like they are directly representative of real human members of the marginalised group', BUT you also, in the fiction, make them hurt/kill/eat humans? And then try to shame me, your audience, for noticing or engaging with the bit where they kill people, because you made them directly representative of a real-world marginalised group? You have lost me, and also, I think, the plot.

[trash-and-trash-accessories]

Constantly citing this article and the studies it uses.

Here's a quote:

"That study shows that transmasculine individuals were actually more likely to be victims of childhood sexual assault, adult sexual assault, dating violence, domestic violence, and stalking than were transfeminine individuals (as shown in the chart below).

The only category in which trans women were more likely to be victimized was by hate violence, and even there the difference was small: 30 percent of trans women reported having experienced hate violence, compared to 29 percent of trans men."

[edenprime]

One of the strongest points of Mass Effect, if not the strongest, is just how well written the characters are. From Shepard, to the squad, to the side characters like Anderson and Bakara, to barely-there NPCs like Ereba and Charr the lovers, Etarn Tiro the enthusiastic turian merchant, Kargesh the krogan who wanted a fish, Lia'Vael, the quarian who gets falsely accused of theft, and the Salarian who wants to buy a memento to his asari lover to remember him by once he's dead.

I feel like so many of them are memorable, and they all serve a purpose to the overall world building. The krogan show that they are not the violent thugs the galaxy has made them out to be. The salarian shows the struggle born out of building relationships with people of a species with a life expectancy so beyond your own. Lia'Vael illustrates what Tali says about the quarians being treated like second class citizens. Those small little side quests have a meaning and a purpose, it doesnt feel like they are Just There, and they add more to the lore of them game to those who care about that stuff.

[blazeball]

it is genuinely the most stupid thing that kids are taught from a young age to be scared of and devalue the lives of bugs like. i am 100% sure that if kids were taught instead that insects + other crawly little things are just smaller animals that are deserving of respect and admiration as much as, like, deer or birds or squirrels, the world would be so much better. none of them are out to get you. none of them will seek you out to hurt you. that's a precious waste of resources for such a tiny creature. they're concerned with finding food and a place to rest. BUG IS ANIMAL. JUST CHILLLLLLLLLLLL

[makenna-made-this]

Feel like shit just want them back

[gingermintpepper]

In my Zeus bag today so I'm just gonna put it out there that exactly none of the great Ancient Greek warrior-heroes stayed loyal and faithful and completely monogamous and yet none of them have their greatness questioned nor do we question why they had the cultural prominence that they did and still do.

Jason, the brilliant leader of the Argo, got cold feet when it came to Medea - already put off by some of her magic and then exiled from his birthland because of her political ploys, he took Creusa to bed and fully intended on marrying her despite not properly dissolving things with Medea.

Theseus was a fierce warrior and an incredibly talented king but he had a horrible temper and was almost fatally weak to women. This is the man who got imprisoned in the Underworld for trying to get a friend laid, the man who started the whole Attic War because he couldn't keep his legs closed.

And we cannot at all forget Heracles for whom a not inconsiderable amount of his joy in life was loving people then losing the people around him that he loved. Wives, children, serving boys, mentors, Heracles had a list of lovers - male and female - long enough to rival some gods and even after completing his labours and coming down to the end of his life, he did not have one wife but three.

And y'know what, just because he's a cultural darling, I'll put Achilles up here too because that man was a Theseus type where he was fantastic at the thing he was born to do (that is, fight whereas Theseus' was to rule) but that was not enough to eclipse his horrid temper and his weakness to young pretty things. This is the man that killed two of Apollo's sons because they wouldn't let him hit - Tenes because he refused to let Achilles have his sister and Troilus who refused Achilles so vehemently that he ran into Apollo's temple to avoid him and still couldn't escape.

All four of these men are still celebrated as great heroes and men. All four of these men are given the dignity of nuance, of having their flaws treated as just that, flaws which enrich their character and can be used to discuss the wider cultural point of what truly makes a hero heroic. All four of these men still have their legacies respected.

Why can that same mindset not be applied to Zeus? Zeus, who was a warrior-king raised in seclusion apart from his family. Zeus who must have learned to embrace the violence of thunder for every time he cried as a babe, the Corybantes would bang their shields to hide the sound. Zeus learned to be great because being good would not see the universe's affairs in its order.

The wonderful thing about sympathy is that we never run out of it. There's no rule stopping us from being sympathetic to multiple plights at once, there's no law that necessitate things always exist on the good-evil binary. Yes, Zeus sentenced Prometheus to sufferation in Tartarus for what (to us) seems like a cruel reason. Prometheus only wanted to help humans! But when you think about Prometheus' actions from a king's perspective, the narrative is completely different: Prometheus stole divine knowledge and gifted it to humans after Zeus explicitly told him not to. And this was after Prometheus cheated all the gods out of a huge portion of wealth by having humans keep the best part of a sacrifice's meat while the gods must delight themselves with bones, fat and skin. Yes, Zeus gave Persephone away to Hades without consulting Demeter but what king consults a woman who is not his wife about the arrangement of his daughter's marriage to another king? Yes, Zeus breaks the marriage vows he set with Hera despite his love of her but what is the Master of Fate if not its staunchest slave?

The nuance is there. Even in his most bizarre actions, the nuance and logic and reason is there. The Ancient Greeks weren't a daft people, they worshipped Zeus as their primary god for a reason and they did not associate him with half the vices modern audiences take issue with. Zeus was a father, a visitor, a protector, a fair judge of character, a guide for the lost, the arbiter of revenge for those that had been wronged, a pillar of strength for those who needed it and a shield to protect those who made their home among the biting snakes. His children were reflections of him, extensions of his will who acted both as his mercy and as his retribution, his brothers and sisters deferred to him because he was wise as well as powerful. Zeus didn't become king by accident and it is a damn shame he does not get more respect.

[tart-miano]

angry that your parody has a degree and you don't, victor

[mellohiizz]

draw eggzam and my life is yours 🙏

using this to drop a redraw of a sketch i drew like... some weeks ago, idk. i only showed it to oomf because he introduced me to them. (hi ykn who u are ^_^)

[marvey-sideblog]

"And it just happened to be empty?" "Something like that."

Suits 4x8 "Exposure" Mike returns to Pearson Specter and gets Harvey's old office.

[megamindsupremacy]

So. ive been going through your billy batson tag bc im very normal and super hinged about this kid and you ARE right about Billy growing up the normal way and how that would effect him, but I need us all to consider the opposite: The Magic went "Ah, he's pure of heart bc he is but a lad", and not *letting* him grow up. Billy being immortal but stuck as a kid forever. The realization everyone is going to grow up w/o him. That he is *always* going to be a kid. That could be a very bad time too.

OH MY HEART. you're so right and i'm kissing you on the mouth. okay i need to marinate in this now stand by

so I think it's fairly accepted now that the Wizard chose Billy to be Shazam when he was so young because all of the previous Champions were adults, and that went Badly (see: Black Adam). So obviously, if the adults can do the whole superhero thing, then we should give the role to a kid. But then, to take it a step further: if the adults can't do the superhero thing, then we should make the next Champion stay a kid.

And like, it takes a hot minute for Billy to notice. Say he became CM at 8 - he doesn't know the average rate of growth for a boy. He just thinks he's not getting as tall as quickly as his peers. It's not like there's adult supervision around to go "hello small small child, why are you still small and a child?" I could see him going at least a few years before realizing there might be something wrong. Then it takes him a little bit to figure out what exactly is wrong, and then a little longer to be in denial, before he finally has to come to terms with, yeah, he really is 8 years old for the rest of forever.

I wonder how it affects him, mentally? Because you could go one of two ways: either he stays mentally an 8 year old forever and doesn't mature, although he gains knowledge and experience with time, or he does mentally mature and becomes an adult, just stuck in the body of a child.

For angst reasons, I like the second one, but realistically, the whole reason he's in this mess is because the Wizard wanted someone who was pure of heart to stay pure of heart. Why go through all the trouble to not let him physically age but allow his mind to change? So now we have an eternally "both mentally and physically a child" situation.

I feel like, when you're that young, you can't really... process how devastating that is? He's only a little kid - at that age, you can't even imagine turning 18 yet, much less living out the rest of your life as an adult. He doesn't know what he's lost. So instead of Billy angst, it's outsider POV angst. Everyone is growing old and watching Billy stay the same as always. I imagine he reveals his identity at some point, a while into being Captain Marvel, and they have a Twilight moment of "I'm 8" "....how long have you been 8?" ("no, but actually, we've known you for 12 years, you can't actually be 8. what do you mean 'a wizard did it'."). Everyone is just quietly mourning the person Billy could have become, had he not been chosen to be the Champion of Magic, meanwhile Billy is living out the eternal childhood dream of Superpowers + Adult Body w/o Adult Responsibilities. It's tragic in a way Billy can never comprehend because of what the wizard did to him.

Feel free to add onto this post!

[rmbunnie]

Something kinda tasteless about the way that alongside the concerns of "Batman needs someone to rein in his aggression/edginess" (mostly a meta concern,) "Robin is a symbol of undying hope right alongside Batman, Superman, and the police system," and "now that the thought's crossed my mind I think being Robin would be pretty sweet actually," one of Tim's points for why he should be Robin at the end of A Lonely Place of Dying is "we need to show the criminals of Gotham that they can't just kill Robin and expect to get away with it!" Because. They can. That's exactly what happened.

Using that line of reasoning, Tim makes the claim that the idea of Jaybin's life as disposable and inconsequential is heinous and bad, his killing something impermissible, but instead of disproving said idea they allow it to become true and devote their energy to making sure it doesn't become widely known as such. By covering his death up, they actually are permitting his murder to go unaddressed and deeming it acceptable, even taking away the opportunity for it to be consequential to anyone outside of Bruce's inner circle by not spreading the news. As much as we say "oh Bruce was a great dad because losing Jason crushed him" and "he almost considered trying to kill the Joker one time," he in all tangible areas did not do anything about Jason's death. Setting aside the question of killing the Joker or not, it's still shown in Batman Year 3 that Bruce's reaction to Jason's death in the time til Tim showed up was to hide away everything Jason owned and carry on with business as usual, a little angrier. Bruce didn't make any changes or actually evaluate anything in a significant way after the warehouse and Jason's death didn't warrant any tangible consequence, that's evident from reading the comic. I know some may disagree, and I acknowledge the room for interpretation, but in order to discuss Tim's reason we have to concede that it is explicitly written into this specific comic as something Bruce and Tim both recognize as fact, because it serves as the foundation that this reason is built on: there is good reason for the criminals to believe there would no punishment for killing Robin based on the actions Bruce did or didn't take in response. The concern about the public realizing there are no consequences for killing Robin wouldn't be reasonable if it wasn't true, if there actually were.

While they recognize that Jason's death came to pass largely without consequence, the fact itself is less of an issue to both Bruce and Tim than letting criminals actually find out that it doesn't have consequence. They know it's unjust, the notion that Jason can be killed without repercussion (and in making an effort to minimize his murder confirm it to be true,) but their concern isn't for what actually happened to Jason or the lack of proper response. At least on the vigilante side of things, the problem is public perception and continuing to uphold an image of Batman as just and diligent while permitting him to ignore injustice against those close to him. There's no efforts taken to actually disprove the idea that killing Robin would lack impact, what Tim proposes is just making it harder to prove right.

I think the best way to word what comes across tasteless for me here (aside from the side commentary on the unstoppable might of the institution of police and how it's an exemplar of heroism) is that beyond Tim's victim-blaming of Jason during his stint as Robin, (discussed in more depth by people who can word it better than me,) in the base text of a Lonely Place of Dying, it is foundational to the initial premise of Tim as Robin that part of his motive for being Robin hinges on accepting what happened to Jason as something that cannot be allowed in their pursuit of justice or go unaddressed for reasons completely unrelated to the actual harm, and then intentionally erasing the event and the way in which it was allowed and did go unaddressed. No matter how much it's claimed in later comics that Bruce was faultless and Jason doomed himself, Tim's Robin came to be at least in part (in-universe) as a cover-up for the lack of action taken about Jason's death, and by extension as an effort to overwrite his time as Robin and an individual entirely. And thought it wasn't the way his character viewed it, Tim wasn't passively complicit in it or going along with a poor grieving man, the intentional and deliberate erasure of Jason as a murder victim and the injustice of his posthumous treatment was part of his opening pitch.