#abjection productions

[alectoperdita]

yeah fuck this. today was not okay at all.

[orcelito]

ok actually i went on to read chapter 3 of multiple bullets

i fucking HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAATE the way the women are drawn. this has made me sorely aware of how LITTLE fanservice there is in trigun, bc whoever this guest artist is, they drew... way too fucking much. too many Pert Tits and weird ass shots and this entire thing about a child????? hello??????

the discussion of the metaphysics to plant production is interesting though.

because it really is an important note that plants generating matter goes against the fundamental laws of physics. i'm not sure how much i ascribe to the idea of "negative matter", ESPECIALLY in the form of some weird plant baby...

but then there's the assertion that This is how independent plants are born. "A plant child like Knives and I."

i don't know enough about physics to comment on how theoretically possible that "oscillation in empty space" thing is. "planckian microspace" seems to be a reference to an established study of the "cosmic microwave background". so not entirely baseless, though almost certainly not applicable to this here.

it's interesting. the theories this raises has definitely given me something to think about.

i just wish it wasn't delivered with such blatant fanservice lmao

[hazeltongzhi]

Anti-commies (fascists) love to tout the successes of capitalism but they have perhaps the most bizarre case of survivorship bias. How successful has capitalism been for the Congo? For Somalia? For Chile? For Guatemala? For Haiti? For the Philippines? Of the approximately 6.5 billion people who live under capitalism and under DOTBs how many live in abject poverty? Fact of the matter is, for there to be rich imperial core countries there MUST be poor global south countries. The global reserve army of labor in a sense. For there to be cheap chocolate and bananas there MUST be genocide and slavery.

Such wonderful "success" this mode of production is, isn't it?

[gutsby]

Wingman

Pairing: Himbo!Joel x Reader

Summary: Your bestie braves the tampon aisle for you.

Warnings: 18+. Period crackfic starring Himbo!Joel—don’t take it too seriously. R has a uterus that hates her. Mentions of blood, cramps, & hangover-induced puking. Dirty talk, f!masturbation. One (1) Mean Girls reference.

Word count: 1.7k

You were fucked ten ways to Wednesday if you didn’t get your hands on some soap, a steamer, and a supersized box of maxi-pads in the span of the next eleven minutes.

Joel Miller moved like molasses on a flat slab of granite.

“WILL YOU HURRY— THE FUCK— UP?”

Your cheeks were hot. The night air was cold.

Every other word that managed to claw out of your throat was punctuated by a breath—your stomach clenched, and the sex organ below it was in hysterics.

Joel continued to lace up his loafer, clumsy as ever.

“O-kay, okay,” he hummed, “Steamer, soap, and, uh…”

“Pads!”

“Uh-huh. Right. So what kinda…blood stuff is it, again?”

The words were like an aspersion on his tongue. At the ripe old age of forty-seven, Joel still hadn’t quite learned to jibe with the menstrual product lingo, and it showed.

“Heavy flow. Any brand. With wings,” you hissed.

“Boneless or traditional?”

And if he hadn’t been standing outside the truck, foot propped up against the driver’s seat while he tied his shoe, you likely would’ve smacked him upside the head. The glare you gave him was sufficiently vicious to extinguish the smirk, though. Your hand made a fist in the front of your dress, and you groaned, leaning inward.

Joel got the picture and finished his bunny ears quick.

“Sorry.”

Then, a little more sheepish as he straightened up,

“I’m goin’. Be just a minute.”

And he was off.

Your body curled into a ball as soon as he left. It cried in pain, to nothing and no one around but that fugly slut, the nastiest skank bitch you’d ever met, your uterus.

There was no way you and Joel were making it to this rehearsal dinner. You needed to be at the venue by 7:00, the clock on the dash read 6:11, and you were, currently, twenty miles shy of Fredericksburg with a rag between your legs and your best friend scouring the local H-E-B.

That afternoon you’d been running late, so of course you’d thrown on your thin, satin, pre-wedding-ready dress before you left—and forgotten a change of clothes. Joel had been hungover from all the batshit bachelor party antics, so of course you’d had to stop three times along the way just so he could throw up on the side of the road. And, though your friend was many, many things, discreet was not one of them, so of course he’d told you, point-blank, when he saw you reaching for something in the backseat with your butt sticking up:

“You been pissin’ tomato juice or somethin’?”

And you’d looked back in abject horror.

Of course your period had come a week early and made you bleed straight through your bright yellow dress.

Maria was your best friend. You were her maid of honor. Tommy’s groomsmen happened to be the most fuckable bunch you’d ever seen—save for Joel—so there was no way you’d be caught dead at that dinner with the flag of Japan on your ass. And Maria had bought the dress just for you, so you felt like you had to get this bloodstain out.

You lifted your head to peer out the window. Even with the help of a fistful of ibuprofen, you could barely move.

6:29

“Dude, where are you?!”

It was like your phone and the FaceTime call to Joel had just materialized on their own. The man on the screen was blinking slow. Ogling something in front of him.

“So ‘L’ stands for…long?” he said after a beat.

“No, that’s light, Joel, I need a heavy one.”

“This one’s got cardboard in it, I think.”

“That’s a tampon applicator, dipshit.”

In a blink, Joel’s eyes flitted to his phone. His nostrils flared, and he met your gaze with a scowl of his own.

“Well how the hell am I supposed to know that? Only stuck two— three things in a pussy before and it sure as fuck wasn’t cotton,” he griped, and if he were any less mature he likely would’ve rolled his eyes. Drama king.

You winced as another cramp rolled through you. You shook your head and tried to regain your composure.

“Just find a heavy-flow. pad. with wings. for me. Please.”

Joel sighed and turned back to the shelf, eyes searching.

It shouldn’t have been this hard, but it was. You had no doubt Joel had never willingly touched a pussy product before in his life, so the road ahead was treacherous. Silently, you felt the urge to tell him he had no business being in pussy at all if he didn’t bother to learn what came out of one every month, but you let him cook.

His dark, greyish brows drew together in concentration. He leaned forward and reached for a box. Then stopped.

Went low to grab another, before pausing to show you.

“Very close, Joel. That’s a pantyliner.”

You felt somewhat like a mother showing a headstrong four-year-old how to copy shapes onto paper. No, darling, that’s a diva cup—and be careful with that crayon. Joel stood and he stewed and, by the look in his eyes, you’d already resigned yourself to another ten minutes of this back-and-forth rummaging at least.

Then you shifted in your seat, pushing your legs down a bit. They rubbed, of course. In spite of the pain that had seized your whole lower half, you felt a sweet, dull pulse.

You stared hard at Joel’s face on-screen to make sure he hadn’t seen it in yours, but damn that friction felt nice.

Sensitivity elevated with the influx of hormones, no doubt, you sat tight and tried to enjoy the feeling on purpose for a moment. You slowly sucked in a breath.

“Aw, hell, there’s just too many’a these damn boxes.”

You flexed your thigh muscles and let out a sigh.

“I don’t know how y’all do it,” Joel grumbled.

Keep looking, Miller. Just keep looking.

Slowly, your hips began to stir, and one small grain of pleasure gave way to a jolt—a twist in the pit of your belly that made the pain less grating. You leaned into it more.

Holding your phone, you could feel when Joel let out a frustrated groan. The sound low and almost enticing.

Wait.

Wait.

“Gross,” you said out loud, half-whispered.

You couldn’t help it. Joel was one of your closest friends; a man who loved beer die, Pall Malls, and Keith Whitley like nobody’s business and gave suffocating bear hugs whenever he was sweaty just to gross you out. You weren’t supposed to find men like that attractive.

But when the grit of his voice was just so nice…

“What?” Joel stopped to look down again.

“What?” you shot back, instantly.

A frown tugged at his lips.

“What’s ‘gross’? Me?”

Not…exactly, no.

More disgusted with yourself than anyone else, you clamped your legs together and shook your head. You tried to swallow, as if the action might suck the pleasure down with it, but the hot, throbbing sensation only grew.

You were practically grinding into the towel that had been stuffed between your thighs when you heard:

“Wings!”

An exceptionally proud Joel displayed a box of extra heavy-duty maxi-pads, with wings. He was grinning.

You weren’t sure if you thanked him next, congratulated the man, or what. You probably strung some words together and tried to return the smile as best you could, but who knew? The next thing you saw was that the line had gone dead, the truck was silent, and all that could be heard above the hum of the engine were your moans.

You braced yourself against the seat and rolled your hips even harder. Out of habit, you caught your lip between your teeth to prevent a louder sound from escaping, but then you remembered there was no one to hear you but you—for now. Your palm pressed flat on the dashboard, your knees squeezed even closer, and your vision flooded with soft, minuscule pinpricks of an all-too-familiar hue.

The only thing new to you here was Joel—the thought of him had never crossed your mind in moments like these.

But now you were closing your eyes, humping the seat with nothing between your body and the old, weathered upholstery but a scrap of fabric. And you were moaning his name. Imagining a face that was littered with coarse, grey stubble—you might’ve teased him for that once or twice before—and lips that were soft. So soft against your own that you wouldn’t think twice if he tried to slip his tongue inside and hold the sides of your face as he filled your cunt to the brim. In fact, Joel’s mouth would be a welcome distraction. Knowing how foul he was in even friendly confab, he’d undoubtedly be whispering the most vile things in your ear while he fucked you.

Reminding you, quietly, that you made such a pretty cocksleeve for him—why didn’t we try this sooner?— and how you’d be the sweetest thing if you just gave his cock another squeeze and made yourself cum all over it.

The mental image of that alone was inducement enough.

You felt a hot, euphoric band of something start to give way inside you. It tightened up, twisted—then snapped. Your mouth fell open and your thighs clenched tighter, grinding desperately in tandem with a pace you’d hoped Joel might’ve set if he were laying there underneath you. You clung to one last thought of him gripping your hips and bruising your walls with the force of his cock driving in and out, over and over again until, eventually, his cum was leaking out through each fluid thrusting movement. It was all your body could take, conjuring thoughts of his load spilling into you and onto him in warm, wet, sticky—

Whistling.

Someone was whistling outside. Walking up to the truck.

You were still coming down from the staggering heights of your climax when the driver’s side door swung open. You blinked furiously, as though to drive all the filth and depravity and need from your eyes before he could see.

It didn’t matter.

Joel was too amped up off a white plastic baggy to be concerned with much else as he plopped down beside you and smiled—beamed, really. Completely oblivious.

Your extremities were still twitching with the residuum of bliss when he reached for your hand. His eyes somehow warmer than they’d been all that day, they sparkled and shone and crinkled at the corners in a way that seemed to say the words before his mouth had uttered a sound.

“I got three boxes to be safe…”

Joel was really too sweet.

“…and some chocolate for your cramps…”

Always so considerate.

“…and you look real pretty when you cum, by the way.”

This motherfucker.

[headspace-hotel]

like, yknow, I get it, climate doomerism feels cleansing and just and right and important, but making yourself suffer with stress and fear over the future...does nothing. It's punishment, not work.

And capitalism puts us in this place of abject paralysis when the only options presented to us for things we, personally, can do are Buy Different Product and Buy Product Differently.

Isn't it a torture to try to fix the Earth by buying a different combination of products from the very industries that are killing it, and being told you're killing the planet because of Buying Product—by the entities that sold you the Product in the first place?

Do something outside capitalism. Join or start a community garden. Organize with gardeners in your neighborhood and start an initiative to grow native species. Yoink some seed heads from the side of the road. Write about the importance of insects. Make infographics about moths. Grow your own food and give it to others. Pull invasive species from an empty lot. Print out posters with lists of important native host plants for pollinating insects and leave them mysteriously all over your neighborhood. Grow milkweed, collect the seeds, and go door to door giving people milkweed seeds randomly. Plants are anarchists, the possibilities really are endless.

[absolutebl]

This Week in BL - I'm DELIGHTED by so much goodness, also I lust after a boy's robot's pants

Organized, in each category, with ones I'm enjoying most at the top.

Feb 2024 Wk 1

Ongoing Series - Thai

The Sign (Sat YT) ep 11 of 12 - I support the fact that the producers seem to have decided that even in uniform Yai never needs to wear sleeves. Hear hear.

No sleeves for Yai ever again!

On the other hand, why doesn’t anyone ever wear gloves? Going around touching evidence all willy nilly like that.

No to sleeves. Yes to gloves.

People. Sheesh. Get with the program.

Anygay, this is such a fun show. I could watch 50 episodes of this abject nonsense. I’m sad it’s gonna be ending. And I don’t say that often about Thai BL. 

Pit Babe (Fri iQIYI) ep 12 of 14 - Oh has Jeff been kidnapped again? Here, let's throw fruit at Babe and think about it for a bit. Tra la la. Trash watch happening here.

Cooking Crush (Sun YT) ep 9 of 12 - They are such very good boyfriends. Also, this is a ton of kissing for OffGun. I’m at a loss as to how they are going to turn this into a decent 12 ep show. Unfortunately, I’ve foresee it going off the rails - pacing seems off. 

For Him (Thurs iQIYI) ep 10 of 12 - We have our little No Comebacks twist. The sides are growing on me, but now the mains are boring me. The sudden gun-toting new characters are just weird. It’s like they took the script and just threw it down a staircase, gathered it back up again, then filmed that. 

City of Stars (Fri iQIYI) ep 1 of 12 - Fueang is an actor in the midst of crisis and scandal. Normally I don’t like Thai BL when it’s tackles celebrity and this is... yep, the same. Our actor is pitted against an older worried nerdy app developer, Krom. And I feel that dynamic - hyung romance, jock/nerd? Very nice. But it’s also very Star Hunter. Never met a trope they didn’t wanna do a million times over - in the very first episode. Also I think I’m not a fan of the actor playing the lead. 

My Universe (Sun iQIYI) ep 24fin - The blond who comes to get his hair shaved looks just like Fluke T (SOTUS et al). And even more like him after the shaving (My Bromance et al). Is that him? MDL doesn't say.

Anygay... something something: Orphan. Cancer. Kisses. Dream. Death. 'Bout what I expected. 2/10 even with a decent kiss I don’t do dream sequences and I don’t like death in my BL 

All in all, I’m relieved that that’s over. The series is a slog. And in general I don’t recommend it. I plan to promptly forget its entire existence. 

Ongoing Series - Not Thai

Love For Love's Sake (Korea Weds iQIYI) eps 3-4 of 8 - There is so much to adore about this show. The two younger guys who are suddenly in competition for the one older one. You know hyung romances are my favs. A hyung love triangle? COME ON. Also, I got to say this one’s giving me second lead syndrome. I do love me a brat. Add in all this on honorific play and linguistic flirting (as their should be in age gap). This is just THE BEST show. 

Look I gotta say this: the "Who did this to you?" trope (AKA who hurt you?) is the single most popular romance trope right now, remarkable to see it turn up in a BL. And pleasing. Trust Korea to be ON TREND. It's their national agenda. *respect*

Perfect Propose (Japan Fri Gaga) eps 1-2 of 6 - From Fuji TV (who brought us the Pornographer series) adapted from Mayo Tsurakame’s manga, production team includes Tadaaki Horai (My Love Mix-Up!) and Takeshi Miyamoto (scriptwriter for Old Fashion Cupcake). Hiro’s so stressed at work he barely has time to eat so he passes out on the sidewalk. An unfamiliar face saves him and insists that they once promised to marry each other.

Ready?

Oh I fucking love it. Sullen, out gay, younger seme with serious grumpy overprotective tendencies and beautiful possessive cat eyes? Well, it’s not dimples, but it’s still my catnip. Also they are moving very quickly. Hand jobs already? + dub con seasoning? Say it with me everyone:

Oh Japan, must you? 

Apparently, you must. And I must enjoy it. Carry on.

Please reread those producer creds and understand what we are in for. Okay? I would urge you to avoid this one if you get squeamish when JBL does what... JBL does.

AntiReset (Taiwan Fri Viki/Gaga) eps 1-2 of 10 - I really enjoy the character of an OCD intellectual automaton professor, contrasted to a warm and sunshine actual robot. Out the gate, this is oozing Taiwanese domesticity, we can only hope they juice it with their usual standard of heat too. 

All puns aside: It’s charming and I’m charmed. Does Taiwan finally have another winner on its hands?

I do adore Taiwan's aesthetics: The house designs, the suit designs, the human designs. I wouldn't say no to the robot’s pants either. Very cool. Can I order them in black?

Although I Love You and You AKA Sukiyanen Kedo Do Yaro ka (Japan Thurs Gaga) ep 4 of 10 - The birthday confession was a bit much. But I love how mature the reactions were. It reminded me a little bit of I Cannot Reach You. Always a good thing. 

Girl: I like you. 

Sakae: sorry, not intersted 

Girl: what am I lacking? 

Sakae: a dick 

What you mean it didn’t go that way?

Happy Ending (Korea Tues YT) 2 of 3 - Oh it’s lovely, exactly as I expect from Strongberry.

I gotta say all of the above are pretty neck & neck for top spots for entirely different reasons. BL is seriously giving right now!

Sahara-sensei to Toki-kun (Japan Fri Gaga) ep 8fin - In the end this is mostly a piece about courage, and the rewards and disappointments that being courageous entails. Sadly, I personally didn’t have the courage to enjoy it. Featuring a chaos nugget bad boy student who falls madly in love with his teacher, this should’ve been My Thing. But Japan failed me. It happens sometimes. The leads had no chemistry, and the age gap rather than being a narrative driver and source of conflict, was just ignored. 7/10 

It's Done

What Did You Eat Yesterday Season 2 AKA Kinou Nani Tabeta? Season 2 (Japan Gaga) 10 eps - will binge when I have any spare time. 2024 is crazy busy for me so far.

The Servant and the Young Master - from Vietnam so I assume it's on YouTube. I never even noticed. Anyone got a link?

Began Beginning (Myanmar YouTube) - Is TRUST Entertainment bringing us the first ever Burmese BL? I don't know if it's really the first, but @heretherebedork vouched for it, so I will give it a watch through.

The Whisperer (Thai Horror) - @all-you-had-to-do-was-neigh commented with the following: "MASSIVE content warning for extreme ableism, homophobia, and rape plots done for shock value. I don't recommend it, and if any of your followers decide to watch it proceed with caution."

So... yeah, I won't be watching it.

It's Airing But...

[NO INTERNATIONAL] Cherry Magic (Sat YouTube) ep 3 of 12 - yeah Japan put the smack down on our boys. Sadness. You can use a VPN if you like. Read all about it here.

Ossans Love Season 2 (Japan Gaga) - 5 years later, will anything have changed? This is Japan so… probubly not. I won't be watching this. I disliked Season one and actively hated the follow ups. No thank you.

Playboyy (Thurs Gaga) 14 eps - Dear Playboyy, it's not you, it’s me… I hate you. You’re about as deep (and as palatable) as a shot glass of cum. While I'm sure you’re someone’s kink, you're my weakest link. Goodbye. I DNFed this at ep 5. Frankly I'm impressed with myself for getting that far.

7 Days Before Valentine (Weds WeTV) 12 eps - Giving me Luminous Solution vibes. I'm waiting to binge if safe.

Dead Friend Forever (Thai Sat iQIYI) 12 eps - horror, meh, tell me if it's worth my time?

Time the series (Tue Gaga/YT) 10 eps - dropped it at ep 4.

Next Week Looks Like This:

Still Coming in Feb

2/17 A Secretly Love (Thai WeTV) - Khonprot, a third-year head hazer of the engineering faculty, has a secret crush on Pluem, a tsundere fourth-year head hazer. Over the years, he's seen Pluem cycle through many girlfriends. Recently, after a public breakup, however, Khonprot thinks maybe a boy has a chance.

2/24 Unknown (Taiwan Youku) 12 eps - Older brother tough guy criminal breadwinner looks after his sister and defacto adopted little brother. Little bother falls in love with him and is sent away after a stolen kiss. But when he comes back…

Upcoming BLs for 2024 are listed here. This list is not kept updated, so please leave a comment if you know something new or RP with additions.

THIS WEEK’S BEST MOMENTS

GMMTV is officially stalking me.

I do love OffGun's particular brand of domesticity. It's fun that they and TayNew are both getting to be so soft on our screens. It's very comforting, like a family favorite warm toddy. (Cooking Crush)

Korea, what's gotten into you? Are you feeling okay? Such bold weaponized gayness isn't like you at all. (Love for Love's Sake)

The Sign, forcing me to ask the eternal question.

I LOVES THEM YOUR HONOR. (Pit Babe)

(Last week)

[asurrogateblog]

what makes me lose my mind about the wall is that I could write up so many pretentious essays like "ah yes the concert is clearly a representation of antonin artaud's concept of the theatre of cruelty in its fostering of an atmosphere of unreality that forces the audience into an abject sense of collusion with violence". but the problem is I highly doubt that roger or anyone else involved in its production were thinking about it that hard. I'm obviously not denying that that they were conscious of their storytelling and staging choices but like, when they had the idea for the surrogate band they were not thinking about its deeply fucked ontological implications. they were thinking "haha remember that time you said you wished a fake band could play all the songs so you could go play golf instead let's do that" and all those ideas just organically snowballed into what is genuinely one of the most narratively complex musical performances ever conceived. how did that happen

[leftistfeminista]

Feminist activists carried out a protest starting from Providencia: Un Sitio de Memoria para Antofagasta, the former detention site for political prisoners under Pinochet. The object was to raise awareness about the abuses women endured as well as their heroic resistance and defiance. It is necessary to put a human face on what women endured. To overcome the silence. The Junta claimed it was "terrorizing Marxist terrorists". Leftist women were dehumanized as a dangerous threat to society who deserved their rough treatment.

The protest performance memorializes and reenacts what women political prisoners endured. Communist Party women leaders were considered the trophy prizes of the Junta regime. After being worn down by daily beatings and torture, she was stripped. Her bra and panties hung on display to show off the intimate symbols of her conquest. But she herself was the even bigger spoil of political warfare. She was paraded around the prison yard in front of all her comrades. Torn from the embrace of her sister-comrades, she was bound, chained, and presented like a trussed-up human gift, a macabre reward for a high-ranking Junta officer. She was delivered like a wrapped up Valentine's day gift to be enjoyed. Forcing defiant militants to become intimately submissive was the tool to make them politically compliant. The Left was to be broken by breaking its women leaders.

"No abortes" is written over the protester's belly as a grim reminder of the final goal of the repeated abuse. Political prisoners who became pregnant from their violations were denied abortions under Pinochet's draconian laws. The Junta answer to Marxist women's attempt to seize the means of production was to seize their means of reproduction. Misogynists saw the bodies of women political enemies as just a battleground to wage war on. In the neoliberal calculus, leftist women enemies were now a net benefit to the Junta, their bodies providing pleasure and babies for Junta officers.

The Junta Fascists sought the complete destruction of the dignity of political women who threatened it. Making a mockery and spectacle of Communist women leaders who had once been dangerous. Intense relentless humiliation was used to mentally break her so she would no longer think of herself as a political agent. To transform her from a threat to a source of pleasure and amusement to the powerful men of the regime. In the political war against radical egalitarianism, the women of the cause were to be reduced to complete subjugation and slavery, the polar opposite of the equality they fought for. It is precisely because of the immense strength of Marxist women that the total power of the capitalist military state was needed to drag her down into abject weakness.

We must never forget how women have had to pay for their political convictions in such an intimate, personal, violating way. The ways in which misogynist fascists attack the ideas of women through our bodies.

[duckiemimi]

rather than gojo being the other side of the coin to toji, i think geto is the perfect opposite to toji, a one to one inversion. where geto is a sorcerer born from a non-sorcerer family, toji is a non-sorcerer born from a (big three) sorcerer family. while geto is relatively new to the inner-workings of jujutsu society (being young and enrolling in high school), toji was conceived in the caverns of its maw. while pre-defection geto was embraced with open arms and praised as half of the "strongest duo," toji was practically "a failure" since birth. which is why their battle in the HI arc is poetic, in a sense that two polar opposites are made to collide. in the end, while geto was sorely out-powered, they were both abject products of the society that bred them, casted out as "broken goods," not quite either or. and in the end, they both haunt the narrative every step of the way as painful reminders of the fault in the system.

[cerastes]

Whats your opinion on wuthering waves so far?

Kurogames is the Yang to Mihoyo-Hoyoverse’s Yin in that, mostly, they get right what the latter gets wrong, but they get wrong what Hoyo gets right as well.

This comparison is always relevant because Kuro wishes soooo bad they were Hoyo, it’s always blatant. PGR is Honkai 3rd as made by someone that wishes they could’ve modded Honkai 3rd, and indeed, they blast 3rd out of the water in QoL and gameplay VERY hard, but Honky 3rd always has it beat in presentation, writing, production values, and optimization.

Wuthering Waves? Pretty much the same, just replace Honkai 3rd with Genshin. It’s got it beat in QoL, gameplay is vastly superior, moving around the open world isn’t a torture, and just, every QoL upgrade you wish Genshin had, Wuwa has it. Conversely, the writing is abject ass, the characters are frankly largely not memorable, and while sound design is good, the music in itself is pretty forgettable. Wuwa has Yangyang, Genshin has Paimon, so both lose here with no chance of parole.

Again, it’s be irresponsible of me not to compare it with Genshin because Wuwa very expressly wants to be Better Genshin. Does it succeed? Well, the gameplay is fun enough that when a new boss drops, I have a lot of fun going in, learning the parry timings, and beating it. If you want a compelling narrative… Well, I personally don’t think Genshin has one, either, but at least it keeps people around (that, or sunk cost fallacy? They have Hu Tao, that’s a win), I think, whereas Kuro can write kino but only once in a blue moon and the rest of the time it’s clumsy and a powerful anesthetic. If you want legitimately fun gameplay against fun and inspired bosses, Wuwa absolutely has your back.

Ideally you play Bloodborne though.

[ladiemars]

I love Nor and her giant sad puppy eyes, I would love to know more about her

thank you!! have a hastily drawn nor ft. her giant sad sopping wet puppy eyes:

+ a giant nor lore dump below the cut જ⁀➴

➸ her whole character was inspired by that one textpost that’s like, “characters with both the abject terror and desperation of an animal that knows it is cornered and destined to be eaten. you just can't get that kind of angst out a successful hunter” and this quote by james harriet: “if having a soul means being able to feel love and loyalty and gratitude, then animals are better off than a lot of humans.”

➸ she’s is the product of a union between a drow woman and a deep imaskari man. for those who don’t know, the deep imaskari are a human subrace (from 3e) that have stone-like skin and hair that’s white or black. because that’s nor’s human half, most people assume she’s completely drow upon meeting her, since did not inherit any features from her father that would make her look less like her drow mother.

➸ the deep imaskari live longer than other humans—up to 550 years—so nor ages at a rate more akin to drow and elves than half-elves or humans. nor believes she’s currently around seventy years old, though she could be off by a decade or two. she’s not sure when she was born and has long periods without human contact. she really isn’t sure how much time has passed.

➸ she has no given name, but eventually ended up going by the name ratcatcher, which is what the locals in baldur’s gate called her. halsin is the one who names her nor shortly after they meet, which is the elven word for “passion” and also “run.”

➸ this excerpt from one of my fics sums up her urchin/orphan to urban ranger/beastmaster pipeline pretty well:

➸ around the age of twenty, nor grew to resent humanity so much that she decided to leave baldur’s gate and live in the forest with only animals for company for half a century. (this is when she lost track of time completely.) in the forest, she became an expert in survival, attuning her ears to the slightest twitch in the air, to every noise and smell. she lived in a cave and slept curled up beside velvet on a bed of willow leaves. the events of baldur’s gate 3 is the first time in decades that she’s had social interaction.. and it shows.

➸ she has a little wolfdog companion named velvet. (i’ve drawn him and her and halsin and scratch here). he was another half-breed who didn’t quite being anywhere, so they bonded very deeply. (fun fact: velvet killed the elder brain in my first playthrough as nor. he’s a legend in faerun now.)

➸ laezel is her bestie. they are ride or die. neither of them understand a damn thing about faerun or its inhabitants. but that also means they don’t judge each other for anything, cause they both just kind of assume what the other is doing is normal

➸ a big part of her character is her dynamic with the emperor. she gets manipulated by him so bad because he tells her everything a forgotten, unloved creature wants to hear: i need you, i’ll protect you, you’re not like other people, we’re a team, you can trust me, i want you to join me, you aren’t alone. it’s not until he begins to pressure and compel her to become illithid against her will she starts to fear him and his power over her, and after certain revelations she realizes he was using her and turns on him altogether.

➸ obviously she romances halsin. i love the dynamic of beastmaster/druid. they’re extremely well suited because they’re both such inherently good people and they bond a lot over their love for nature. they are also the only two people who can really understand each other’s animalistic quirks.

i’ve written some fics with her that you can read here if you’re interested. >:3c

[ofthehands]

Been thinking about the childhoods of the Sawyers again, this time in particular Drayton, and wondering about how the time period he grew up in might have shaped who he became. Generally I base his age on his actor, Jim Siedow, which just makes sense, we’ve never been given any reason to doubt he’s the same age as his actor. Which would mean Drayton was born in 1920 sometime, and would’ve grown up in part during the Great Depression and Dust Bowl. 

Now, of course the Sawyers would’ve been too poor to have a stake in the stock market, and whether or not the Dust Bowl would’ve hit them exactly depends on where Newt, Texas actually is, but for this little piece of analysis I’m going to make the leap and assume Newt would’ve been impacted by the Dust Bowl, and that the Sawyers were impacted by the job loss and industry cutbacks (via the slaughterhouse, most likely) of  the Great Depression, both because it’s interesting and because I think it makes sense. 

We know Drayton was born in 1920, and the twins were likely next, or at least the next surviving Sawyer children, born in 1945 (if you base their age on Edwin Neal’s age). Which is a big age gap, and we’ve discussed lots of reasons for this age gap, but one that isn’t talked about much that I think makes sense is the economic impacts of the times leading the Sawyers to be too afraid to have more children. They had Drayton when things were looking up- the Great War just ended and while many farmers were burdened with debt, the roaring twenties were beginning, and along with that came a boom in industrial production- it could be possible this is when the slaughterhouse came to Newt.  Only for all that to be yanked away when their son is about nine years old. The Great Depression comes first- wages are cut, many people lose their jobs, folks are going hungry. But the Sawyers seem to have at some point lived off the land somewhat, maybe they could raise livestock or grow food. For about a year, until the Dust Bowl starts, nearly a full decade of dust storms so intense they choked the life out of the land and left the Sawyers and many people like them not only in abject poverty, but absolutely starving. Of course they wouldn’t want another child- they probably only barely managed to clothe and feed Drayton. But, eventually the Dust Bowl does end, and the economy of the United States is boosted by the second World War, leading many Americans to feel secure enough to start having lots of kids, causing the Baby Boom. Which started around 1945, birth year of the twins. The birth order and timeline of the Sawyer family makes a lot of sense with these historical events taken into account, and the Texas Chainsaw universe is never shown to be different to ours historically beyond the existence of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, so I believe it’s entirely reasonable to assume these events did happen and did impact the Sawyer family in this way. 

So, with that out of the way, how did these events impact Drayton? As an adult Drayton seems to be a very anxious and money-conscious man. Which in the first film makes a lot of sense- he and his family are very poor, and he’s their only source of real income that we see. However, at the same time, the family is shown to have a collection of victims’ previous cars. Which is a bit odd. There could be a good bit of money there, which you would think would cross Drayton’s mind.  Of course, it would be important to make sure these cars aren’t traced back to them, so selling them outright would be risky, but selling parts of them as scrap or the whole cars to be scrapped could be a fairly easy way to make some more money. It would’ve been easier to get away with then, without cameras everywhere especially in the middle of nowhere Texas, and with the law caring/ believing as little about the Sawyers as TCM2 showed us they did.  But, the cars are collected anyway. Since Drayton is the head of the household and these cars wouldn’t be easy to hide, it’s reasonable to assume that Drayton allowed these cars to be kept. It could be argued that the Sawyers just aren’t smart enough to figure out how to safely dispose of their victim’s cars, and so they keep them in order to avoid suspicion. However, I would like to posit that these cars are an early sign of Drayton’s tendency to hoard. 

Hoarding is a fairly common behavior in people who lived through the Great Depression, and it can be handed down generationally as well- the children of (or in our case, children raised by) those who lived through the Great Depression often struggle with hoarding too. Hoarding behaviors are commonly associated with anxiety- the fear of not having enough, the fear of needing something and not having it- there is an anxiety around need. Which, of course, is an anxiety that was greatly exacerbated by the Great Depression and Dust Bowl- people in mass didn’t have what they needed, and like many traumas, these events left people with the unending fear of it happening again. Additionally, and notably,  hoarding can also be related to a number of mental health conditions, like severe depression, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, and psychotic disorders. So how exactly does this relate back to Drayton Sawyer? 

To assume Drayton is a hoarder, or takes part in hoarding behaviors, based only on the car graveyard would be quite the stretch. However, this is far from the only time we see hoarding-type behaviors  in the Sawyers that must either be done by him or allowed by him. In the first film the Sawyers don’t seem to have too much of a hoarding problem. They use absolutely everything they get their hands on, which could again be a Great Depression/Dust Bowl influence, but their home seems rather sparsely furnished, and while they have a lot of animal bones laying about, its still easy to move through their home- it’s not particularly cluttered, just filthy. In the second film, however, with greater access to money, the Sawyers have started to collect things. The massive cave system they live in is full of strange items, all throughout the walls, and bodies are kept throughout their ‘home’ even when they aren’t being used- the giblets being stuffed into the walls, where Lefty finds them. They could burn something like that, or find some use for it, or get rid of it in some other way, but Drayton, who is in charge of their cooking operations undoubtedly, does none of this- he keeps all of it. He additionally is still very worried about money- he refuses to take a break or miss out on money for even one night, in spite of his advanced age, the fact that they have enough food to be selling food in mass, and that his business is stable enough for the woman at the chili contest to call him “Dallas’ favorite caterer”. Dallas is a big area- if he’s one of the most popular caterers in Dallas, his family isn’t going to go hungry. But Drayton expresses constant money anxiety anyways, and he keeps or allows the keeping of tons of strange and borderline useless items in their home- Christmas lights, skeletons, giblets, a stop light for some reason. If they lived still in the old farmhouse and not the cave system, their house likely would be full wall to wall. And, with the blood and guts in the very walls of their house, which is a cave and thus a fantastic place to grow all kinds of deadly molds, this behavior is definitely putting the Sawyers at a significant health risk. The Sawyer family, and Drayton specifically, show hoarding behaviors to the extent that it’s putting their health at risk. It may also seem like an odd thing, to keep mentioning the collection of bodies on the Sawyer property as a form of hoarding, but I think for Drayton it very much is. Meat is life for the Sawyers- they were raised in meat- and having it is all they have, often. So a massive collection of bodies and body parts, even when they’re not really being used and are likely rotting their home, soothes Drayton’s fear of needing and not having. If hard times come again, like they did during the Depression, or when the Sawyers could no longer work at the slaughterhouse, they’ve still got something, even if that something is nothing more than viscera in the walls. 

Now, of course, other mental health conditions could be impacting Drayton and causing his hoarding behavior. While Drayton doesn’t display a lot of obvious symptoms, we know psychotic disorders run in the family- Nubbins is heavily coded as schizophrenic, Edwin Neal based his performance off his schizophrenic nephew. Additionally, Drayton could have some type of severe depression. Throughout the end of the second film, Drayton talks about ‘quitting’, and how he’s been thinking about ‘quitting’ lately. Reasonably, it could be assumed he means retirement- he’s 66 after all. However, at the very end of the film, he refers to killing himself and his family in the same terms- “Maybe it’s time to just shut down. Time to shut down the show, yeah.” It’s possible that he did mean retirement originally. And it’s also possible he was always thinking of suicide. Drayton Sawyer may not seem like someone who is depressed, especially with business booming as it is, but depression doesn’t yield to success, and Drayton displays and follows through on suicidal intensions. It’s not a sure thing, but certainly not impossible. Additionally, Drayton could have OCD. Compulsive hoarding was considered a type of OCD, and 1/4th of people with OCD also display compulsive hoarding, and 1/5th of hoarders also display other traits of OCD. 

However, I still think one could argue these hoarding behaviors present in Drayton and his money anxiety are inextricably linked to trauma related to the Great Depression/ Dust Bowl. Especially since in disorders like depression and OCD, trauma- while not necessarily causative of the disorder- is a risk factor for the development of these disorders. So I do believe it could be said that Drayton is a hoarder, or at least shows signs of hoarding behaviors, and that this behavior stems from the impacts of the Great Depression/ Dust Bowl on him. 

I think, additionally, Drayton’s sadism and antisocial behaviors could stem partially from his experiences with the Great Depression/ Dust Bowl as well. I do believe there are other factors at play, ranging from potential generational abuse in the Sawyer family, to Drayton’s own desire for power and control leading him to exert that power as violence over anybody he can hurt and get away with hurting- namely his vulnerable and reliant younger brothers and the victims of his family. However, I think the Great Depression/ Dust Bowl could still have played a substantial part in shaping the way he’s sadistic, and forming within him a need for power and control. 

One of the more prominent ways I think that the Great Depression/ Dust Bowl shaped Drayton’s antisocial behaviors, is the way that it altered his view of people outside his family and the nature of human interaction. One of his snappier lines in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 was “It’s a dog eat dog world and from where I sit there just ain’t enough damn dogs!” which gives a pretty solid view into Drayton’s mindset. People can and will tear each other apart, and it’s important to him to be the one doing the hurting instead of being the one getting hurt. Of course, ignoring the cannibalistic implications of this sentence from the mouth of a cannibal would be silly, but taken literally the meaning is much the same. Drayton believes that the people he and his family kills and eats would at least harm and take advantage of him and his family if the shoe were on the other foot- maybe he even thinks its a matter of cannibalize or be cannibalized. And, of course, now that Drayton is on top- now that he’s scrapped out some deal of security by slaughtering others, he only wants more. Which makes sense if he grew up with barely any food on his plate, in a time period where others could pose a real danger, as they’re hungry too. Their neighbors realistically weren’t going to cannibalize the Sawyers in turn, but it was possible they might try to steal from them, or that desperate people might try to hurt them in order to take resources from them. It’s possible this could’ve happened to the Sawyers in Drayton’s lifetime, and it’s possible it never did but Drayton was raised with the idea in his head that it could happen- that the anxieties of older Sawyers before him imparted on him that he couldn’t trust people other than his family and that he should take what he can from other people before they take from him, regardless of whether the Sawyers were even cannibalistic during this time or not. I think that this anxiety around being hurt, baked into Drayton from a young age, manifested in his adulthood as an inward justification for his extreme and violent behavior, and in the way that he raised his younger brothers to continue this cycle- Drayton never breaks the cycle and imposes his beliefs and traumas onto his younger brothers, causing them to become even more isolationist and antisocial than him. 

Another way I think the Great Depression/ Dust Bowl would’ve impacted Drayton as an adult is by impacting how and why he expresses sadism. I believe that Drayton likely expresses sadism the way he does due to feeling helpless or out of control. This is an odd sentiment to apply to Drayton- he’s a very cruel and controlling man when he’s present in the films, and helplessness isn’t particularly befitting of him from the outside. However, despite what Drayton might admit or be willing to believe, he has control over almost nothing. He’s dirt poor, and likely disabled, trying to keep a gas station running in a tiny town when he can’t even always count on having gas. According to signs on the station, he sells barbeque and fishing worms as well, the barbeque sourced from their victims, and the worms likely just dug up out of the ground. He’s doing all he can to make ends meet, but whether or not he makes it really isn’t in his control. Additionally, he can’t keep his brothers under control. It’s not a particularly reasonable thing for him to want- the level of control he wants over his brothers, who are grown men, could certainly be argued to be unhealthy, he treats them quite like children. But it is still something Drayton clearly wants- he punishes them severely for disobeying him, and “I told you and I told you” is a pretty common sentence out of his mouth- he’s always vying for control of his brothers, even to the extent to not teach them about sex and to try and sway them away from ever having connections to people outside of the family, especially of a romantic variety, going so far as to try to make Bubba kill a woman Drayton assumed he had some kind of connection with. But, for all he does, he can’t keep Nubbins in the house, or Chop Top from getting into trouble and messing with Nubbins’ body, or Bubba from developing an interest in women. He wants control of them, desperately, but he can’t have that either. The only time Drayton Sawyer has complete control is when he’s tormenting a victim. It could be argued he torments them for the sake of tormenting them, not to have control, but to hurt someone for the simple enjoyment of causing pain. However, I don’t think this lines up with much of what we know about Drayton. While he is very cruel, he also shies away from violence at odd times. He enjoys poking Sally with the stick when she’s in his truck, but he also doesn’t like hearing her cry. He enjoys watching Grandpa bash her head in with a hammer, but also scolds his brothers for “torturing the poor girl”. Drayton clearly does enjoy violence to some degree, but I don’t think he enjoys violence for the sake of it. I think Drayton enjoys violence as a means to feel in control, and desires that feeling both because of his lack of control in his everyday life, and because of the way his life was suddenly upended by forces beyond his control or his family’s control at a young age.  

Ultimately, I’m not entirely certain that the creators of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre would’ve put much thought into the ways that the politics and economics of the time period the characters were born in would affect how the old scary guy who takes a chainsaw up the ass in the second movie thinks and behaves, so take this analysis with a grain of salt, lol, but it was a lot of fun to write, and I think that these factors are certainly something fans could take into account when thinking about and creating content of these characters. I greatly enjoy trying to unravel some of the mystery around the Sawyers with what little information we have, especially since these questions will never be answered in canon. Feel free to add on anything you think I might have missed with this topic, or any other thoughts that come to your mind! I love hearing other people’s theories and thoughts and such.

[hazeltongzhi]

Capitalism is a resilient mode of production because the bourgeoisie is not a passive class, but one who spends an incredible amount of energy, research, force, and violence in order to keep it going. They push back the material effects of the various contradictions which rise in intensity by the day.

The contradiction arising from the decline in the rate of profits have been resolved by various means in the past. Profits have been propped up through the profits attained via. superexploitation and imperialism, the financialization of the entire economy, creating a massively speculative stock market and the widespread application of personal credit, the widespread application of neoliberalism, and fascist control over various global south countries and sometimes in the imperial core itself. Today, the rising contradiction between the need for profit and rising poverty, joblessness, and homelessness will be resolved through the criminalization of poverty to turn the reserve army of labor into slave labor, and through various means of automation (e.g., AI) to reduce labor costs.

There is no future under the capitalist mode of production which does not end in abject barbarism. The question is: will you only fight back and organize when the cops are tearing your tent down, or now, where you have ground to stand on?

[gothhabiba]

I think it might be difficult to get people to realise that their deeply-ingrained ideas about art just may be a titch ableist because of course they're actually not ideas about art... they're ideas about what 'value' is and what kinds of things confer 'value,' what 'intelligence' is, who is 'worthy' of occupying a 'subject' position and who is not, what it means to 'create' something, the relationship of 'worth' to 'labour' and the specific forms that 'labour' should take—

and these ideas are inextricable from capitalist modernity or from (depending on their context) a Protestant work-ethic or a settler-colonist mindset (tilling and hoeing fields makes the land ours because we have put in 'labour'—we will assume that whatever Indigenous peoples were doing did not transform the landscape, and that therefore the land has just been lying fallow in wait for us)

What I always try to stress with ableism is that it's not an animus of whatever kind that arises solely against 'disabled' people and exempts 'abled' people. Rather, it consists significantly of ideas about the nature of 'work' and the relationship of 'work' to moral 'value' or moral 'worth' that impact the 'able-bodied' as well insofar as these ideas keep their noses to the grindstone.

No one is innately 'able-bodied'—there are just people who can conform to standards of capitalist productivity and e.g. city design's concept of what is 'normal' to such a degree that they seldom come up across their own limitations, people who are routinely and violently made to come up across their own limitations by a world that is not designed for them, and many shades in between.

So it's very possible to have and express ideas that, taken to their logical conclusion, abject disabled people and cast us outside the pale of participation in history, without actually consciously thinking about disabled people even once. The same eugenic ideas that cast the disabled as unworthy of subjectivity, unworthy to be called 'creators' of anything, &c., are the ideas that people—even many "leftists" and "progessives" and communists—have been led to believe because of their (the ideas') centrality to capitalist accumulation and production.

[familyabolisher]

Hi, Ave! Loved your post about gendered socialization, though there was one part I didn't fully understand: "even in its most charitable form, it attempts to present a complete account of "womanhood" and account for transfemininity only after the fact via hamfisted exceptionalism, rather than beginning with transmisogyny as the lynchpin of gendering and developing itself from there."

Could you please explain how transmisogyny functions as the lynchpin of gendering? I've read a decent amount of trans feminism and Marxism but don't remember coming across this idea before.

so what i was describing in the first part of that sentence was a tendency to articulate a particular discourse of structural gendered violence & the oppression of women into which trans women/TMA people are then kind of axiomatically deposited; it is a kind of feminism which considers itself ‘inclusive’ of trans people on the surface but is still, in its essential apparatus, hung up on ‘men’ and ‘women’ as immutable categories, and thus finds itself kind of skirting around necessary questions of how transness problematises these essentialist understandings of patriarchy by, as i said, falling back on tautology and circular reasoning. the logic goes something like—women are oppressed; trans women are women; therefore trans women experience women’s oppression. but the first statement has under this discourse become a complete and comprehensive construct without accounting for transmisogyny in the first place. within that, there are (sometimes) some gestures made towards the specific subjective experience of being a trans woman, but it’s always, like … womanhood is a preconceived category into which trans women have then been discursively slotted, rather than figuring womanhood as a category within which trans women are an essential component. there’s this baseline reluctance to admit, i think, that cis women can be agentive within and beneficiaries of gendered violence, just as much as they can be subjugated by it.

anyway, what i meant in the second half is that i think this discourse has it the wrong way around. there is no womanhood without trans womanhood, is maybe the best way of putting it; the kind of abjection that transmisogyny enforces is an abjection necessary for cis womanhood and cis manhood to make sense of themselves. transfemininity comes to stand as like, the worst thing someone can possibly be and thus as a discursive space onto which the ultimate incoherence of gender and the violence of being a subject within it can be siloed off. for example, the sexual subjugation of cis women (cis women being raped, cis women coerced into marriage, coerced into having children, cis women being denied sexual autonomy) becomes coherent (bearable, arguably) to cis women through the sexual abjection of trans women (denied access to the socially elevated status of the childbearing wife in the nuclear family, afforded sexuality through peripheralised sexual relations like sex work, reifying heterosexuality by threatening it). similarly—and this one is pretty straightforward—cis masculinity is affirmed and bolstered through the abjection of femininity in those coercively regarded as ‘men.’ so basically, writing a script for gendered violence and then tautologically inserting trans women/TMA people into an already-finished product is a limited and incoherent understanding of how gendered violence actually works. others have explained this better than i could and if any of you can dig those posts out i will be v happy, but. i hope this goes some way towards explaining what i meant.

[chris-continues]

Howdy Howdy Chris!

My request for you is......

Any Trigun folks of your choosing reactions when they accidentally brush hands with their crush. They're all so baby about it.

VASH jumps, bringing the hand to the back of his neck and sadly (but also thankfully) out of your reach. You wouldn’t want to hold hands with him, after all. He finds himself attempting to recreate the touch, his other hand grazing the other but it’s not the same. It’s not your warmth, your grace, your- It’s not you. The way your touch tingles and he wishes for it to remain, to be firm, not fleeting touches he must settle for.

WOLFWOOD looks down, cheeky smile before taking your hand in his. He’s peeking at you from the corner of his eye, watching your reaction. “Don’t wanna get lost in the crowd, huh?” (He comes up w/ some bullshit excuse to stay holding your hand. Dork.) His hand is heavy and calloused in your own, comforting in its own right. It’s another feature about him you find likable, a simple comfort you find yourself seeking out more often.

MERYL looks up at you, saying nothing despite her more stiffened movements. Her face tinges pink, gaze turning away from you and quite literally anywhere else. She had things to focus on- yeah. Ahem. You guys had things to work on. Yeah. You should be more productive, ahem.

MILLY takes your hand in hers! She’s very sweet, and will let go if you ask, but you’ll have to straight up ask her.. her grip is strong and she’s kinda dense sometimes. If you do mind, no hard feelings, she’s happy to just walk alongside you! If you don’t, expect to hold hands with her more often. She’s really happy to be close with you :) what a sweetheart.

LIVIO’s eyes widen as he almost full body freezes mid step, swallowing thickly before attempting to continue walking beside you. His eyes dart around the area like crazy, continuing to loom beside you acting as a gentle giant bodyguard for you.

KNIVES curls away in disgust. Scoot over, he turns away and wipes his hand on his leg (dramatic much??)

Idk much about legato so @abject-indulgence I’ll toss the legato thoughts to you!