#also feeling very validated recently

[solavelyan]

Veilguard promo time is really highlighting how many people are actually fans of the fandom and not the games themselves

[bonefall]

the worst parent poll made me realize just how many ppl in the fandom are willing to jump straight into abuse apologia. bc on one hand you have ppl dumbing down crow's abuse to "him just being mean" and on the other end you have ppl saying that curlfeather didnt abuse frostpaw because she sacrificed herself and frost + her siblings love her so she couldnt possibly be an abuser. truly mindboggling stuff take these serious topics away from the fandom asap.

Part of me feels like it's because many in this fandom have a feeling that if a character's actions are abusive, it means you're "not allowed" to like them. Like there's an impulse where if you liked a character, it MUST mean they weren't THAT bad, because you'd personally never like "an abuser."

As if it reflects poorly on your own morality, as a person, that you connected with An Abuser. Understood them, even. Even if it was just a character.

If it's immoral to Like Abusive Characters, of course your reaction is going to end up being abuse apologia. To enjoy something isn't logical, it's emotional, so you will get defensive about it when questioned. When you do, it's not going to be based on logic because you didn't reason yourself into that position in the first place. It's an attack on you as a person.

I feel like that's often the root of abuse apologia in this fandom, and sometimes the world at large; "If I admit that this character/person IS abusive, it means I was doing something bad by liking them, so I have to prove to everyone else that they weren't or it means I'm bad too."

And to that I say... That's a BAD impulse! Grow up and admit you resonated with a character that did a bad thing! If that's an uncomfortable thought, sit with it!

Sometimes abusers are likeable! They usually DO think they're justified in their actions, or doing it for "a good reason," or were just too preoccupied to care. MOST of the time, people who commit abusive actions are also hurt or traumatized in some way. You might even empathize with them. None of this means their actions have to be excused or downplayed.

"Abusers" aren't a type of goddamn yokai, they're people just like you and me. You don't help victims of abuse by putting the people who hurt us in an "untouchable" category.

In fact, all it does is make you less likely to recognize your own controlling behavior. You're capable of abuse. People you love are capable of it, too. People who love YOU can still hurt you.

In spite of how often people regurgitate "It's Ok To Like A Character As Long As You're Critical Of Their Actions," every day it is proven to me further and further that no one who says it actually understands what that means.

All that said; I think it's no contest which one's a worse parent, imo.

They both mistreated their children, but Curlfeather did it through manipulation without verbal or physical abuse. She politically groomed her into a position of power so that she could use her as a pawn. It can be argued if this counts as child abuse-- but it's firmly still under the broad category childhood maltreatment, which is damaging.

(though anon I'm with you 100% at seeing RED when "but she sacrificed herself" is used as an excuse. Curlfeather's death does NOT CHANGE what she did to Frostpaw in life. I think it's a valid point to bring up when comparing her to another terrible parent for judgement purposes, such as in the context of this poll, but I really hate the implication that redemption deaths "make up" for maltreatment.)

Crowfeather, meanwhile, is textually responsible for putting Breezepaw through verbal AND physical abuse, as well as child neglect. His motivations include embarrassment from a hurt ego, revenge on his ex, and being sad because of a dead girlfriend. This abuse drives Breezepelt towards radicalization in the Dark Forest.

You could argue Curlfeather is a worse person for Reedwhisker's murder, but as a parent? It's not even a question to me. Crowfeather's one of the worst dads in WC.

[persisting]

nah, kirk and spock have always had a father and son relationship. a sexual relationship between them would be super inappropriate because kirk is spock’s superior officer, which is like being his father. and spock canonically has a fiancée! if you’ve actually watched the show you’d see how kirk is always smiling at spock in this really loving paternal way, and spock always looks to him as the example of the man he wants to be. it’s just obvious. i didn’t know anyone ever saw it a different way. some people just really want to force gross ships on the world, huh?

[emry-stars-art]

Hi i love your fat Andrew art insanely much. It's so cool. It helps me feel valid.

[soft-puppy-boyfriend]

At the anger stage of realising I have childhood trauma

[sepias-scribbles]

The resident angy lil guy in our head!! Goes by Ren currently, but we use the 🪴 emoji usually when referring to 'em ^^ We're not practiced in drawing a lot of stuff, so unfortunately we can't accurately depict them with a leather jacket XD

And as the resident yap yap yapper, it is my job to tell you they also have their own blog!! Interact with caution, however!! They are typically pretty irritable, and might come off a bit more abrasive than is intended ^^; And that's just a general warning, it goes for if they're in front, too! Ofc, online we might mask, or someone else will take the wheel, it all depends!

I won't be giving away the blog, though, that's no fun!! If he wants you to see it, then he'll share it herself! Or maybe you'll find em by sheer luck or chance, who knows ^^

Note: please do not actually go looking for them ^^;

[pyrosomatic-metamorphosis]

people can use this site however they want but there's something almost- idk, sad? about how few people are actually using their blogs. you can turn themes on and have skeletons dancing in the background. you can make everything hot pink. your blog is your scrapbook and you can put whatever you want in there. tags are okay at organizing things so you can have just a whole archive of cool shit to look at later. i know people complain a lot about people liking stuff about reblogging for engagement, and on one hand i get that- it is WILD to see a drawing i spent hours on get only 12 reblogs and 60 likes. Absolute culture shock compared to my previous fandoms. but i don't think you should reblog anything to make artists happy. i think you should reblog things so you can find them again. i think you should queue things to appear on the dash at specific times on certain days. i think you should reblog things so when you're talking to your friends about xyz post you saw you can look in your blog's archive and find it again. i think you should reblog things so that your dash is filled with one really sleepy cat. with the loss of reblogs there's the loss of engagement, which Does hurt the community-focus that makes tumblr so appealing, but idk i just wish people were more excited about the incredible amount of customization that tumblr allows and took advantage of that more

[mar64ds]

the wild robot was a good movie but i think i watched it at a bad time 😔

[fruitsofhell]

       An idea I’d been working on for a second was that Morpho Knight isn’t the only grim reaper of the Kirby universe, and more just fills the specific niche of taking the souls of warriors. It came from reading the novel where Meta Knight falls into hell, which explained that he came just for the purpose of taking the souls of strong warriors, (something that was then canonized in KatFL). Which is fun cause it opens up the idea of like a little pantheon of reaper butterfly characters for specific niches.

Which I will talk about a lot now.

       So building off that I thought about Morpho’s actions and how it seems he specifically shows up when a character has long overstayed their mortal welcome and needs to be taken away, or needs to have a “final battle”. Given the nature of how Soul Bosses work and how Forgo himself was in that state before Morpho came and got him, I figured the idea was that in the Kirby universe character’s souls can linger on and get lost when they’re still filled with too much emotion and a will to fight on. Thus needing to be tracked down and forcefully taken away by a reaper. It’s easy to imagine this happening with warriors, who are likely to die in fights still full of energy and vengeance, but also power seeking maniacs drunk off power are commonly turned into soul bosses within the games.        Another part of it I thought of though is how much “judgement” is emphasized in Morpho’s descriptions, so obviously that’s an important part of why reapers would exist beyond souls just wandering off. Warriors are probably very tricky to judge because their job includes spreading death and destruction, and you have to weigh that against the good they brought as well as intended to bring with it. And back to the theme of those power hungry maniacs, while some of them were clearly vain like Sectonia, you have Haltmann who started just with the wish to bring back his daughter before he went down a path of corruption.        And Morpho’s origins had always been hard to think about for me, the most obvious idea at first was that it was the same species as Galacta, Kirby, and Meta, but his appearance couldv’e just been because of absorbing Galacta. But then KatFL comes around and he’s still an orb with wings which is in line with our description of their species. As well as the fact that Forgo manages to get “Chaos” powers it previously never showed off only after escaping Morpho... I think it made a strong case for Morpho being soul matter, the way Kirby is heart matter and Zero is dark matter. It’s power’s seemed in line with the idea of how Kirby and Zero represented their specific elements.        (Also as an aside, I wondered if Elfilis would be dream matter, but if Kirby, Zero, and Morpho are our bases for this species... it would not make sense. Plus like I said, it only got the “Chaos” powers related to Astral Void after interacting with Morpho. So no in my opinion.)

Headcanon Starts Here:

       ANYWAYS, thankss to KatFL I’m very sure Morpho, and subsequently his reaper pals, are all a form of Astral Void. But unlike Kirby (Heart Matter) or Zero (Dark Matter), they’re weird trans-dimensional shadow orbs. Which is how they can teleport, turn into butterflies, and break the rules of space-time in order to judge souls across the universe. A butterfly of a certain type comes to everybody who dies, but these bad boys only really make true appearances when things are special. The butterflies work kinda as just pieces of them spread across time and space, and they can appear from them at will as long as they have enough power.        There’s probably far more I could hypothetically make (it would be fun to make a whole rainbow of them), but these are the ideas I have now based on the qualifications of being needed to wrangle troublesome souls and/or those souls needing careful consideration. They also have roles in the actual underworld, which is probably where they consciously spend most of their time as their butterflies go about bringing souls to them.

       All the reapers regard eachother warmly, as being an eternity old makes it hard to keep grudges, and they see eachother sort of as friends or coworkers. Unlike Heart Matter and a lot of other creatures in the universe, they don’t have a burning need for deep attachment and they spend lots of time completely solitary from eachother. They sometimes have small rivalries and running gags though. A big one is how Morpho had been looking forward to claiming Galacta Knight’s soul for most of the warrior’s life in order to punish his hubris, but once he got sealed outside of space-time that became rather impossible - much to Morpho’s despair and the others’ amusement.        The reapers are also completely sexless, and regard themselves as genderless. They just pick up whatever mannerisms or characteristics they feel suits their niche, like Morpho adopting warrior-like traits that could be read as masculine, and Shepard adopting caring and nurturing traits that can be read as feminine. They mostly refer to eachother by name or maybe as “it”, but adopt the pronouns of any peoples or mythologies who regard them as well. To a patriarchal culture the King reaper would be thought of as a man inherently, but to cultures like the Ripple Star fairies who are matriarchal they’d refer to it as a ‘she’.        Most cultures across the Kirby universe pick up on the connection between the butterflies and death, but interpret them in different ways. Some base their versions of them on accounts of their true forms, and some make up characteristics from scratch. The ancient Halcandrans were very familiar with accounts of Morpho and the Artisan as a culture who valued both valor and ingenuity. The fairies of Ripple Star are most familiar with the Shepard as a species of children, and the King who comes to take their queen. Some cultures like the Jamba whom are very absorbed in their own beliefs actually attribute others, such as Astral Void, to ferrying the dead. Which surprisingly holds a tiny nugget of truth as the reapers are spawn of it.

       And speaking of Astral Void, the reapers do tend to pay extra close attention to their fellow voidspawn cousins. Morpho watched Galacta very carefully from a young age, knowing that he would be a truly great warrior but blinded by ego. He did try to scare the guy into not developing a god-complex, but Galacta was stubborn and only saw death’s warnings as challenges. Ever since then he’s watched Meta and Kirby very carefully, and is actually a big fan of Kirby due to him quickly becoming such a humble, merciful boy. Zero created a similar problem for King, and it waited very very patiently for his unimaginably long reign as the god-king of dark matter to be ended by everyone’s favorite pink ball of peace.        They’re not able to communicate directly with other beings, only with their souls, which isn’t very easy to reach in life. Even when appearing as Morpho did in KSA and KatFL, it wasn’t able to talk to others, but it could finally talk to Galacta’s soul in it’s head. The only way they can make appearances like Morpho did to the living and healthy is by using a dead or dying soul, and to those in that state already they can appear like that when casting judgement. They can also control souls of the dead as ghosts to do their bidding and send messages too. But that’s fun stuff for my HC writing. I’ve rambled on long enough.

TL;DR - Morpho is the Knight of Hades, and I thought up a King, Shepard, and Artisan of Hades who have their own niches of souls to guide and judge. They’re genderless, solitary, hyper-dimensional shadow people who are interpreted across the cosmos as different pantheons of death gods. They’re cool with eachother and even look out for their fleshling void-kin, but don’t interact with mortals outside of death matters. Morpho is an exception with it’s shenanigans cause Gala and Forgo cause hard times.

[bothfeetinthegrave]

| @handgiven :: from here |

----

He'd not really meant to raise his voice. Well, as much as something like him could raise their voice - it was still comparatively soft, disuse evident in the way it cracked and broke over the words in the middle. The idea of talking about something like this with anyone, let alone a stranger, was mortifying; the words had escaped before he could cage them because he was just so tired and sick and angry - so angry all the time and he didn't understand why. It was all overwhelming enough that it hadn't even really sunk in yet that this person could see him.

The question prompted a pang of guilt to settle between his collar bones. Was that really what he thought? A part of him had sort of been unconsciously hoping that, since he couldn't un-say words, he'd at least feel a little better after saying them, but he didn't. So instead of getting up from where he'd stumbled he remained seated with legs curled under him where he was, back turned to the other, and wrapped his arms a little tighter around himself to make himself smaller. Coordinated movement was still not his best thing yet.

" I... " he did his best to crush the wavering of voice that came with wanting to cry, " I want to go home. "

[bogkeep]

i'm only on chapter 2 of Unmasking Autism by Devon Price, phd, but it's SO good, makes me go !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[dbphantom]

you know if you guys voted for stretch armstrong i probably would have shut up a lot sooner tonight

[shleemies]

Jujutsu kaisen manga readers are really funny to me sometimes. Do you know how many people who are fully caught up I've heard say "they never explain how itadori broke through a concrete wall" like. Yes they really do I promise.

[minor spoiler talk] Also the amount of people that were like WAIT (x) IS HIS MOM? only AFTER the character explicitly referred to him as a son as if it hadn't been so fucking obvious and laid out for months with that first face reveal??? Like who else?????

[look-at-the-stars-tonight]

I ran this morning AND wrote some AND made art and I’m so proud of me

[callum-hunt-is-bisexual]

just posted the first fic on ao3 since giving my ao3 user to a friend im actually nauseous

[oidheadh-con-culainn]

i wish i could convince my brain that my workplace / being at work / doing my job is in fact safe

i know that there are some objective dangers involved (like covid and the fact that i'm the only person in the goddamn building wearing a mask) but emotionally i wish it felt safer so that i didn't feel like i was putting traumabrain through a blender every goddamn day so that it feels the need to spend every evening figuring out what "safe" is all over again (and not always succeeding at finding it at home)

like. i am okay at my job. my boss is fine. it is not an objectively challenging experience and i am theoretically staying vaguely on top of things. And Yet