#again idk how unpopular these are

[spilledmilkfkdies]

Do you have any unpopular wizard opinions?

Uuhhhhhhh hhmmm??? I used to think not really, but these days I have no idea how unpopular certain takes are, both in general and under wizard enjoyers specifically. Lemme just uhhh carefully throw some things out there that I've been thinking about-

So I know there are several, very valid reasons to dislike the Wizards of the Black Circle, like the Black Circle in question is made of actual spray painted soggy cardboard, go off- But a thing I still see floating around sometimes is that they suck because they killed Nabu? Which, when you think about it? Not really? Yes, he died closing their portal thing, but that's technically not a direct kill. Ogron kept him from being resurrected, he definitely did do that, but did he kill Nabu? No?? Nabu kinda. Killed himself. And like I said, Ogron absolutely had a hand in him not um. Getting back up from it. But if you're gonna shit on him or even the whole group, at least do it for what they actually did y'know?

Okay lightning round!!

The canon interactions between Flora and Anagan do very little for me. Gantlos has the best fit it slaps so hard. It's fair that people consider the wizards weak due to how canon portrayed them, but it still makes me a little sad sometimes.

[godsfavoritescientist]

well hold on, if we define a character flaw as any limitation a character deals with, regardless of whether it's something Morally Wrong With Them or not, then Ford's paranoia counts as a character flaw since it does in fact negatively impact him and the people around him. Let me use better wording here: I will die on the hill that Ford's paranoia is not a moral failing.

[slooshee]

Oh… that’s Sunday’s ENG VA doubling down on his support for Chris Niosi

[screechingfromthevoid]

the thing about Cyrus is that he's supposed to be likeable. Cyrus Wyvernwind is supposed to be that himbo npc that is funny and charming and gets you attached. I don't know what it is about him but I don't buy it. Not that I think he's faking it. I know he's profoundly stupid.

I just don't think he's charming enough. I don't think hes sweet enough. I don't think he's fun enough to justify everything he put people through.

He shows up, scaring the shit out of Dorian. He's trailing Bells Hells (badly) to the point that everyone was on high alert. THEN he asks for Dorian to separate from the group. While they're on a stake out. While they know someone's trailing them. And Dorian goes, putting everyone even more on edge, and himself in danger. Then he has the audacity to be bitchy about it.

And I don't know if I'm remembering wrong? But he's not even happy to see Dorian? Like he doesn't give him a hug. Hes not stoked to see his brother after so long. Hes defensive and guarded. And Dorian is forced to know that his brother followed in his footsteps, badly, and now has a bounty over his head bigger than anyone's ever seen.

He then proceeds to be the fall guy AGAIN because he was so desperate to prove himself. So desperate to fix his mess himself.

But Cyrus does not seem grateful for everything his brother and his brothers friends have done for him. These are people who could have turned everything around for him. For the bounty, for the connections they had to Hexum. Cyrus could have been a part of Bell's Hells. He could have become another important member to the team. They could have all been family.

He makes a bigger mess of his life and then drags Dorian down with him. He drags Dorian down with him and he doesn't even seem grateful. He seems embarrassed, ashamed, sure.

Instead he was too proud to let his brother help. He was too proud to let his birth family help. He fumbled and failed and he never learned.

Abria said at the top of the Crown Keepers interlude that he was still level six because he never learned a lesson.

And I think that's what gets me about that mother fucker. He allegedly wanted to do this all on his own. He wanted to fix it himself, right? BUT HE NEVER LEARNED. HE NEVER GOT STRONGER.

Dorian and the crown keepers went up seven levels. They kept up with Bell's Hells. That means they were doing dangerous shit to survive because they were on the lamb because of cyrus and he didn't do a damn thing to help. This man didn't even do anything during the heist. He didnt join in at all. Even when they were all 6th level. He was just as capable as the rest in that moment and he didn't do shit.

Then he didn't improve. He didn't get stronger. He didn't do anything remotely helpful for months. When most of this strife started with him.

So now he's dead. After everything Dorian went through to save his life. After everything everyone did for him.

Dorian is adorned in gold and has a weight on his shoulders that should have never been his. He is left with a feeling of failure because he could not save his brother. His brother who did not try to save himself. He could have been such a prize. A prince who came back so much stronger and worldly. To rule as a king well and true and fair because he had seen the world beyond.

So Dorian will return that heir. Because his brother was not fit.

[haunt-the-house]

hey. hey, I love damien so much. but he's kinda an awful person/friend, to be honest?

Like canonically has done some shady stuff with money (considering he's mayor, it's not wild to guess that he was using tax money for something he shouldn't have).

he also was shown to be both manipulative and very easily betrayed us/the da despite being long-time friends. (No matter what fanfic writers may want, damien was not being forced by celine, wkm Fandom celine is not the root of all evil in the lore).

he also tried to cover for william literally murdering someone (there is the nuance of grief muddling people's emotions and having both victim and perpetrator be his childhood bestfriends don't get me wrong...but at the same time dude your best friend just died after having a very rough couple of years before but you're fully sided with the guy who had an affair with your sister????)

my point can be easily shortened to this; Damien is not a morally perfect person. This does not make him a bad character. stop making characters worse for him to be better in fan stuff, and if i see another uwu version of him, I'll die.

(note: this doesn't mean he can't be nice and tbh out of the main cast of wkm, he's definitely on the morally higher ground BUT LET HIM NOT BE PERFECT THATS LEGIT AN IMPORTANT ASPECT OF HIS CHARACTER)

[tavina-writes]

currently trying to think if I remember any situations in Jin Yong wuxia where a family preferred sons over daughters (especially as like, a socially mandated thing) and coming up short.

Like I think there are plenty of situations where powerful men/families/sects only have one child and that child is a daughter. And this is neither weird, highly remarked upon, or considered odd in any way. Nor is anyone feeling pressed to come up with a son in the future.

Ren Yingying from XAJH, Yue Lingshan from XAJH, Huang Rong from LOCH, Guo Fu (from ROCH) for a good portion of her life (16 years of it, also Guo Fu wasn't displaced bc one of the twins was a boy, NOR were her parents trying to have more children on purpose), Yang Guo and XLN's daughter from ROCH/HSDS, Gongsun Lu'e from ROCH, etc.

Also their status range from like 'extremely important and visible family in the jianghu' to 'actually not all that well known' so it's not just a "well our family is powerful so who gives a fuck" kind of situation.

Like these are male dominated books, there are more men than there are women in Jin Yong's books (there are really cool women in his books though), but there's almost none 'oh no how will a girl inherit!' left beef. The girl will learn martial arts, like it's hard?

I think this is also relatively true of Gu Long books too, so at some points I'm left ??? at the discourse re: inheritance and gender in MDZS fandom bc I don't think it's actively stated anywhere that women aren't supposed to inherit? Or aren't allowed? or are less capable? or that there's a strong societal prejudice against it? Just. It's a danmei so most of these positions are occupied by men. Like, there are maybe five whole women and even less among the juniors. Who and how and why will they inherit if they don't exist.

[eshtaresht]

I think for all the transmasc trigun hcs there should be more non-op wolfwood art (both drawn and written). like I know top surgery scars are kind of a staple bc it's the dream, the ideal, but it doesn't need to be. for all the talk of man's tits I only see pecks (those are different things). get real

same with vash btw. those arts with a single tit get it and prolong your lifespan. or another interesting concept I haven't seen much of, if any: the scars he canonically has are the top surgery scars and he doesn't have nipples as a result. yeah I know the scars are diagonal and in the wrong place. there is some fucked up story behind them, just like behind his metal grate

like. what if we stopped being afraid of depicting trans bodies as complex and messy and unique instead of just slapping neat scars under pectorals? not that the later is wrong, of course, it's either a way to project your wishes or even see yourself if you're a lucky one! it just shouldn't be the only way to showcase that a character is transmasc

[smilesrobotlover]

Ok so before I go to bed cuz I wanna distract myself from the pain heres a ramble

I like to consider that Hyrule is pretty timid and shy around people he doesn’t know in LU. He just prefers to keep to himself and to have things quiet and private. However when he gets to know people more and he’s more comfortable with them, that’s when his true personality comes out. He’s sassy and witty and teases a lot, he’s like a completely different person when he’s around people he’s comfortable with. The true introvert experience

[thesorrowoflizards]

i really like ericka and wolf's interactions in the pilot. and honestly just generally wolf's interactions with the interns

[solar-halos]

🔥

hi thank u for the ask!

tbh i’m not really sure how unpopular this is, but i don’t think any of the other districts speak second languages like french/spanish/etc. at least not to the extent of being able to have full conversations. i think it’s such a sweet idea, especially when fics explore mags sharing that piece of her childhood with annie and finnick, but i think we really underestimate how quickly something like that goes

[kkeke99]

Enough time has passed now, so I can finally say with certainty that the only good MLs of the Jewelpet Series are Akira Nanase and Retsu Akagi 👍🏻

[nyxdimandis]

with the full disclaimer that i might be missing some context or significant piece of information & am fully welcoming anyone to inform me, i feel like. it really just doesn't seem like a huge deal that one of the "poison" storyboard artists is into "dark" kink. like this really feels like a non-issue to me

[arsillanola]

stop paying games with me tumblr

[linabirb]

me: god i feel so horrible i hope i'll be able to sit through classes today

our prof: hi anyway we have to watch this movie about this athlete who is disabled and you will hear stuff like "SEE?? YOU CAN DO ANYTHING IF YOU JUST FOCUS ON YOUR GOALS" and "YOU CAN DO IT EVEN IF YOU'RE LITERALLY GONNA DIE SOON YOU JUST GOTTA BE STRONG ENOUGH MENTALLY" throughout the whole movie :)

me:

[noritaro]

to be quite honest I dont see Arthur Fleck Joker being physically abusive like other Jokers

[charlesemersonwinchesteriii]

If you already got this from someone and you just haven't answered yet pls ignore, but if no one else asked i want to add klinger+charles for the relationship bingo ask meme

ok I’m getting to this late as FUCK but PLEASE nobody ever hesitate to send me something for an ask game if I get one ask on a topic I will go YIPPEE and if I get 20 asks on the same topic I will go YIIIIIPPPPPEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

Anyhow you're indeed the only one around here who shows outside interest in our rarepair insanity, a boon I will remember as long as I live btw. Mx. Smoking Marlene Dietrich I owe you the WORLD

TRIPLE BINGO because they are EVERYTHING. to me.

It’s funny. This is the one duo where I almost do just want to post the bingo and leave it at that. Part of me wants to tell people about this ship SO bad, to give novel-length explanations and justifications and theses. But the other part of me is like you know what. You either Get It or you don’t.

Anyways there are 10000 things to say about Them but one is: I specifically did not fill in “gay af to have a sworn rival” even though it cost me another bingo because one of the most fascinating things about the interactions between these two is that they actually do not have a mutually adversarial relationship--even though that’s what writers usually do with two characters on diametrically opposite ends of the socioeconomic spectrum. 

I’ve been thinking about this a bit because I’ve seen people say things like, “It’s great what a funny duo they turned into when they started out hating each other, haha.” And I get why one would think like this but IMO it’s actually not the case! Charles acts more familiar with Max over time because he does that with everyone--

(Though he’s racist towards Max throughout, of course. Because Charles’ racism never goes away. You know that right. MASH fandom I am putting my hands on your shoulders and asking: You know that, right? I keep seeing people talk about Charles having a character arc and a redemption arc so I’m just. I’m just making sure.)

--but Max has actually been pretty nice to him right from the start, back when Charles’ relationship with basically every character was antagonistic. As soon as s6e13 he tells Charles how similar they are, how they should work together to try and get away from the war, how they’re “soulmates”. Even after Charles insults him, he straight up says, “I’m on your side, Major”, which I’m pretty sure remains one of the nicest things someone canonically says to Charles, ever. Just one scene, but emblematic of a greater whole, of quite a few future scenes where Max gamely engages with Charles even when it puts him in unpleasant situations.

And of course, the motivation the show usually gives, on those occasions when it thinks about Maxwell’s motivations at all, is a simple throwaway “Well Charles is paying him / giving him some other material benefit, so obviously Klinger will be his kicked dog! You all know how Middle Eastern people are! We are a groundbreakingly progressive show btw.”

But man. Fuck that shit. This is far afield of my original point but the thing is, Max’s interactions with Charles are often the most egregious exempla of every way the later seasons fucked over my girl here. It almost seems useless to try to analyze any of Max’s actions after a certain point from a Watsonian perspective, when the Doylist reading of the show being too racist and stupid to do anything coherent with him is the ultimate explanation, and sometimes the only explanation you can even come up with, because shit just makes NO fucking sense in-universe. 

But unfortunately I’m a stupid cringe ass fanfic writer/reader, and I love this character, and Max already gets so little screentime compared to the main protagonists, and I don’t want to just ignore him because of the decisions of writers who didn’t care about him.

(That’s the entire reason I started shipping this stupid thing in the first place, btw. I just wanted to read some fanfic where Max is the main character and idk if you’ve noticed but if it weren’t for AO3 user stateofintegrity and their ~problematic cringe ship~, the pickings would be pretty fucking slim.)

So I like to pretend there’s a better reason for Maxwell going from “Major Burns I hate you so fucking much I am going to kill us both with this fucking grenade” to the equivalent of a tumblr blog responding to pathetic anon hate with “are we about to have sex”. After all, if you’re going to write Maxwell yourself, get inside his head and all, then you also have to account for why he tolerates all the OTHER characters’ racism towards him in later seasons, too. 

And the messy problematic reasoning I come up with is that Max is at heart the kindest and also most emotionally intelligent character on the show, and even the liberalized version of the 1950s our story is set in is a systemically bigoted universe that is all he’s ever known and experienced, and he’s certain these are good people, really, when it matters. And being emotionally intelligent, and generally intelligent too for that fucking matter, and observant and insightful, he can tell there’s a big difference between Frank and Charles, and perhaps less of a difference, even, between Charles and Hawkeye. Maybe when you watch things from Hawkeye’s POV, the ideological and moral differences between him and Charles are huge, but maybe if you were in Max’s POV instead there wouldn’t be quite as much of a distinction between them. I don’t know! I don’t know. Just some ideas, I don’t know. 

Of course getting into fucking. internalized racism and such is pretty uncomfy and exhausting shit. And that’s not even touching all the gender stuff my girl has going on. You start to see why nobody wants to get into this character’s head much. But I do :3 And I do honestly think sometimes the most effective way to do that is to look at the Messiest Ship In All Of MASH (TM). As I’ve talked about before from the Charles angle, I love this ship precisely because of its Problems, because they’re problems that exist anyways for both characters, and having the two of them interact makes the problems impossible to ignore, so they maybe finally get to be dealt with. I mean, I just don’t think the optimal resolution to Charles and Max’s racism-laden interactions is that Charles goes back home to a big opulent house and Max struggles to save up to buy a used car in After M*A*S*H. That is not super satisfying. to me. 

This post got derailed to hell but I think what I was trying to say is that Max treats Charles SO much better than that bastard man deserves and I would at least like to see something come of it, for the love of--