#although really it was ~always~ ''we''

[robotsandramblings]

from "they" to "we" 🥲

[chawliekin]

and if I said that dennis’ insistence on being the breadwinner/provider despite literally being a pampered princess who dgaf about traditional roles of masculinity in every other regard (aside from ego) is because his mom only stayed with/chose frank for his wealth and dennis is highly aware that he’s difficult to love and unable to show his emotions openly so he has to be contributing something to the relationship materially in order to feel like he’s worth staying for… and mac grew up with parents who were extremely ambivalent to him and eachother so he has to overcompensate by proving his worth at every given moment and seeking praise/validation from people (and religious icons) who will never demonstrate the same amount of dedication to him but he has no idea how else to desperately keep himself close to those he loves other than by eroding himself into something they’ll approve of… dear god they’re both exactly what the other needs — someone who can’t and won’t leave them even if they try — and they don’t even see it…

[delcat177]

Okay can we just look at this for two seconds please, for July Disability Pride Month if nothing else

This is the image description box.

When you click on an image to describe it, do you know where the image description box goes?

That's right! ON TOP OF THE IMAGE, SO YOU CAN'T SEE IT.

I believe in modern science and the ability to make this window movable. Like, this is a known technological marvel, dragging windows to one side.

Could we please for the love of God have that? I can't speak for anyone else, but it would make actually using this accessibility feature a LOT easier, it's just good UI sense

Thanks to anyone receiving this voidscream

[sskk-manifesto]

Bungou Stray Dogs: Dead Apple and how “ability users” (opposite to “normal people”) learning to accept themselves through the acceptance of their own abilities is a queer metaphor of acceptance of own's sexual orientation and gender: an essay by me

[gummi-ships]

Kingdom Hearts 0.2 Birth by Sleep - A Fragmentary Passage

[front-facing-pokemon]

[oifaaa]

as the Tim fan™️ what are your thoughts on fandom tim. I just saw a tik tok about Bruce making Robin Tim do honey traps and sleep with rogues so that Red Robin Tim would he be willing to sell his body for the mission.

Tim has never been my favourite so maybe I just don’t understand but like what is the fandom desire to abuse Tim? or make it so Bruce abuses him or assaults him or that the Batfam hates him?? It seems like every other post I see about Tim is centred around him being severely abused by the Batfam.

I know canon and fandom are tots different but like what’s going on??

I honestly don’t mean to come across as mean or anything it is pure confusion?? Damian’s my fav and all I want is for him to live his best happy life. what is the desire to see Tim abused? Physically sexually and emotionally??

As a Tim fan do you understand this conundrum?

With Tim there's a couple different things happening; first is the general way a lot of fans will enjoy angst/hurt type stories and situations like I've seen it with multiple fandoms and multiple characters it's not unique to Tim we all like to hit our fav characters with sticks bc we want to feel something

Secondly Tim just has a big victim complex in popular fanon if he's not being abused by his parents, then he's being beaten up by Jason or Damian, or Dicks trying to send him to Arkham, or Bruce is actually just being Bruce he does do some messy stuff depending on who's writing him (I will also note you actually see a similar thing with Jason but I shan't get into that now)

Anyway to conclude people like angst and Tim is an angst magnet (also something something about tim being a lot of people's self insert character but im not getting into that right now)

[a-dragons-journal]

The OP of the post I originally wrote this as a reblog for seems to have blocked this sideblog (which stops me from reblogging from them on this blog but doesn't actually stop me from seeing it in the tag, so I didn't realize that until I tried to hit post on the reblog and it wouldn't let me), but it's a good post, so I'm posting it as its own original post even though my principle is to not vagueblog. Sorry. If I physically could respond directly I would be doing so.

Anyway the original post was saying that rejecting p-shifters from nonhuman and alterhuman spaces is "erasing your own history", and I just... this is just categorically not true. Self-proclaimed p-shifters, people who claim to physically shapeshift in capital-R shared Reality, have basically never been accepted in most nonhuman or alterhuman spaces, primarily because there's a long, long history of that label being used dominantly by people a) pulling young nonhumans, especially therians, into cults, cult-adjacent groups, and other abusive situations by dangling the impossible carrot of p-shifting in front of them and b) worsening psychosis symptoms of others by refusing to properly mark for unreality (because, of course, a p-shifter claims it's not unreality at all).

There is an argument to be had about both delusion-based nonhumanity and philosophical physical nonhumanity (ie "I am nonhuman, this is my body, therefore this is a nonhuman body") having a history in the otherkin and therian communities. P-shifters, however, are another matter entirely. I don't think I've ever seen a nonhuman space accept p-shifters that wasn't, well, run by p-shifters trying to pull people into cult scenarios.

[eliotquillon]

after watching 4 whole seasons in less than 2 weeks i think house md is maybe the perfect example of why we need to bring back 20+ episode seasons. like yeah sure there's a very clear formula but: there's time to add sub-arcs! motifs! weird experimental episodes! the season finales actually feel like season finales because there's enough episodes in the rest of the season for the characters to have chances to breathe without sacrificing the momentum or wasting time. it actually feels like there's a passage of time happening without the need for explicit mid-season time skips or exposition dumps because, guess what, the season is long enough that time actually IS passing. when characters change their hair or visibly start to age it feels normal because again: time is actually passing in-universe. i yearn for the days when television actually felt like its own distinct thing!!!!!!! i also yearn for lisa cuddy but that's not the point here.

[outeremissary]

What is the worst thing your OC does in their story?

Is there a canon character that your OC needs to ask forgiveness towards?

Is there a canon character your OC needs to forgive?

for Carmen or Balthazar maybe??

This got really out of hand- originally I just intended to do one or the other, but I got a little lost in the sauce trying to decide and uh. Both, I guess? I've changed the order of questions in order to put aeon spoilers under a cut for anyone that matters to; I think the rest is reasonably spoiler free for both games.

[prompt list]

Is there a canon character that your OC needs to ask forgiveness towards?

Well, both of them are awful people who often treat others poorly, so in my eyes yes.

But narrowing in more on actual Plots and Arcs, two come to mind for Balthazar. First of all, there’s Tristian, who Balthazar treats dismissively at best and cruelly at worst early on in knowing each other. He’s been willing to drive in the knife on Tristian’s failures in ways that he couldn’t really appreciate the real impact of, and while it’s never really asked there’s definitely a degree to which forgiveness and regret are a necessary part of them becoming closer. He tries to make it up, in his own way. There’s also [redacted] later with Tristian but we’re not getting into All That here. The other character(s) who leap to mind are Regongar and Octavia in a much more mundane way. Balthazar did have a relationship with Regongar early on where he strung Reg along and took advantage of Regongar’s Actual Feelings to manipulate Regongar into imposing his whims onto other people without having to get his hands dirty or be the bad guy in a situation. He also tried to drive a wedge between Regongar and Octavia so that he could be the one with the real influence over Regongar. But ultimately, he throws this all away and breaks Regongar’s heart abandoning him because after suffering his own personal low he finds Regongar far too high maintenance to put up with and he’s at his end with all the gross feelings. Regongar doesn’t take it well. Octavia also doesn’t take it well, because unlike Balthazar, she cares about Regongar. And ultimately it is something that he eventually tries to bridge with them and to ask forgiveness for- first from Octavia, who he hasn’t been able to escape in the interim, and then from Regongar. Character growth: local asshole has discovered the value of friendship and feels something resembling remorse. It’s not really forgiveness that’s easily or immediately given, but it’s a start.

Carmen… this is a thing where I think that she would need to ask forgiveness from certain people if her character arc was going a certain way. Like, Legend and Gold Dragon had both been endgame considerations for her at one point and would have realized a redemption arc that I once intended for her in the tabletop campaign she came from. A big part of taking that path would be recognizing that she has caused other people enormous and often undeserved suffering and that she needs to reevaluate some of her values. She’s an LE character (Wrath may disagree but I’m firm on this), but she’s not evil out of a sense of personal sadism or cruelty. She’s evil because she has let her desire to protect others be filtered through a worldview of such violence and black and white extremes that there’s no room in her eyes for anything except for villains and victims. There’s no nuance and no confusion allowed. Allowing herself to sit with the very, very clear evidence that the need for moral purity is a barrier to actually helping others the way she really, truly wants would push her down a different path, as resistant as she would be to it at first. And I think that a part of committing to that would be that she would want to seek forgiveness from Ember and would need to seek it from Arueshalae. With Ember it’s the matter of always having doubted her, rejecting the message of Exactly This that the girl has tried to impart to her and trying to force her own harsh ideals in turn. And Arueshalae is perhaps one of the greatest victims in Wrath of Carmen’s behavior- and certainly the one who has survived the longest. She would have to find some way to accept that she had been wrong and do something about it- I don’t think her conscience could rest otherwise. And aside from these big names there are all of the many, many other people who she imprisoned, conscripted, or otherwise brutalized in her time commanding the crusade on her quest to fix it. I think she’d spend the rest of her life trying to atone. Kind of an Infinity Train vibe now that I think about it.

Unfortunately for everyone, Carmen is nothing if not a master of digging her heels in and not letting herself linger on anything that could make her a Bad Person, and the Aeon Experience has been allowing her to sink deeper and deeper into a spiral of self validating extremism. So I guess she’ll never need to because she’ll never care enough to think she’s done anything wrong. Sad!

Is there a canon character your OC needs to forgive?

At various points for various spoiler reasons I will thus not answer for, Balthazar needs to forgive Tristian, and does forgive unconditionally. I’m struggling to come up with a Balthazar answer for this that isn’t spoilery past where I am given to understand you’ve gotten to, sorry. ^^;; I guess what I would say is that to me a big part of his growth across time isn’t tied to “needing” to forgive anyone, but reaching a place where he forgives certain people genuinely despite that. I think the “need” to forgive is something that’s been tied up in falling in line with what others want to survive in the past: you let things go (at least for a time) and make up because that gets you through when you’re too vulnerable to stand up for what actually want or feel. And for him the result is being extremely spiteful- given the ability to not forgive or to take revenge, he will always choose that because it affirms to him that he has the freedom to do so (also he really wants t0). Reaching a place where what he really wants is to let go of a wrong done to him accept someone back is not a small thing. While certainly not the only catalyst, a lot of this is reflected in extremely visible ways in his relationship with Tristian and the ways that he works to understand and support Tristian.

Carmen also has a lot of overlap with the above, I guess? If she was going to grow as a person she’d need to come to terms with other people making decisions she doesn��t like but they had valid reasons for and forgive them. Struggling to find a very good specific example here though. At the moment aeon puts her in a weird position where she always seems to sidestep any situation that might ask that kind of Big Difficult Feeling from her- she gets to force her will on others a lot and get them to decide it’s better, and the ability to bend reality so far in some instances it completely wipes away a person’s complex and difficult history for something she finds more palatable is. Well, it’s not conducive to changing one’s ways. At any rate, I think it’s kind of… difficult to imagine a lot of points where she was genuinely wronged in a way that would “need” to be forgiven. Maybe that’s just coming out of my personal feelings on what qualifies a thing as requiring forgiveness though. I guess one interesting place where she does extend a kind of forgiveness is with Nurah- last moment of empathy before aeon brain truly sets in. She doesn’t really blame Nurah for what she does and she sees her actions as reflecting an evil within the crusade rather than a demonic evil. And critically, she lets Nurah go. Flash forward one act and the next time she’s in a position to judge a person she considers innocent and reacting to evil within the crusade, she doesn’t stay her blade.

(In case the cut doesn't work: the aeon spoilers start below.)

What is the worst thing your OC does in their story?

Originally I was going to stick to Balthazar because I’ve actually never completed Carmen’s Wrath run (partly a tech issue in act 4 that persisted a long while, partly just losing a lot of interest in the game in 21-22), but I wound up answering for Balthazar here. So! Carmen it is.

And in terms of what got the most visceral reaction from me, that’s easy!!! That would be the Wintersun mass mindbreak incident!!!! I think it was not particularly Good, the Wintersun mass mindbreak incident. But it’s really representative of who she is and why she’s such a chilling aeon. She’s very, very willing to cut the Gordian knot, consequences be damned, and the powers of the aeon give her the ability to cleave through all those messy issues in reality to impose what she thinks is the correct state of the world. So given this problem (nonlethal but isolating demonic enchantment on people of Wintersun) and offered a non-ideal solution that would mitigate suffering to release them (compromise with a demon) she doesn’t even give Jerribeth the chance to finish making her offer before mass dispelling the enchantment herself. She hears “imagine if this enchantment ended now, wouldn’t it fuck everyone up” and the immediate reaction is "I don't have to imagine." It’s not a threat to her. She has absolutely no remorse about what she does either. Did the air fill with a symphony of screams when she did it? Yeah, but they’ll get over it- so what if they were plunged from peaceful lives into a waking nightmare? This is the truth. They’ll thank her later. Everyone will always thank her later- she knows what they need better than they ever could.

Although the vibes are also pretty rancid on her repeated attempts to murder poor Arueshalae (thwarted only by Ember) and habit of keeping companions she dislikes close so that she’ll be present to kill them at their first slip-up. I suspect that next time I open the game I’m going to have to kill Woljif. Ladies, gentlemen, esteemed colleagues: she's the worst!

[remcocoa]

*thinks about matteo jorgenson*

*sighs dreamily*

[lordendsavior]

Vestvågøya, Lofoten, Norway

[treasure-goblin]

.

[pinkeoni]

i dont think that byler needs to have had been planned since the beginning for it to still be happening

[kyouka-supremacy]

Well.

[front-facing-pokemon]