#and call it righteousness

[lotus-pear]

rewatched madoka magica again today bc i fucking hate myself and to absolutely no one’s surprise i went through all five stages of grief in a single evening

[mollysunder]

The biggest tragedy of Jayce's raid on the shimmer refinery wasn't just that he killed Renni's son, it's that that kid died slowly without any sort of comfort or aid. That boy was alive and wheezing by the time when Jayce and Vi slowly (kind of reluctantly) made it down to the ground floor and was still alive enough for Jayce to look directly at him as the light left his eyes.

What's worse is that he died surrounded by shimmer, a single drop could have saved his life! Anybody at the refinery that could have helped him, even in theory, was held at gunpoint by the Enforcers Jayce and Vi brought and could only watch him die. And then his body's just left there for his mom, Renni, to see. This boy was the kid that pulled the alarm on the Enforcers in the first place, he absolutely knew why shimmer was so important to their operation and once Piotover got involved he's deprived of it's aid.

[kinaaaard]

not to be petty or bemoan what should be a ostensibly ignored talking point but it is kind of ridiculous that so many of the anti-tommy people (mostly on twitter) harp on about how they don’t find lou to be attractive (to paraphrase some of the gentler sentiments passed around).

which, fine, YOU don’t have to find him attractive. that’s your prerogative! but your favorite tv character does find him attractive, which is what….matters. it feels indicative of a larger issue that….shipping folks need both sides of their ship to be CW-looking men. non-threatening with gentler features, model-tuned and effete. in the larger scheme of things, lou is VERY attractive. but when it comes to shipping fictional characters, they need to have softer, more affable features — almost like they need to appeal purely to a certain subsection of the female gaze! which is ridiculous.

lou is a man, LOOKS like a traditionally masculine man. which is part of the reason buck likes tommy so much. which is not to say that any other actor isn’t that (traditionally masculine, esp while playing a gay character) but once it breaches outside their accepted barriers of what a….shippable man should look like, it comes off as spiteful and childish, and ultimately, a deviation of what the “aesthetically pleasing” presentation of what a gay couple should look like. I don’t know lmfao i’m just really peeved at the people going after lou’s looks.

[write-nerdy-to-me]

tadius ~ "fuck this miserable life": a study, pt. 2 (pt. 1)

[syluses]

caleb gets off on you calling him gege lbr here. This is a hill i will die on

[polysyndetonaddictsupportgroup]

Everything about the battle at yokohama was Amazing, I love all of your thoughts and world building in pez dispenser. If you have time (and feel like it), could you explain ‘this entire sub-analysis on Idaten’s internal culture and how it intersects with broader heroics standards’. (i was ENRAPTURED by your hero economic analysis)

ps. when i saw in the tags about how the class just. broke down. and asked for their parents, it was like sucker punch to the face, i couldn’t imagine how the actual heroes felt when they saw them. if the public saw that side of class 2a, would they lay off? probably not, but damn. your world building and ideas are just. so good

So my decision about Idaten and its subculture actually hinges on one question about canon: Why did Stain go after Tensei?

Stain was all about attacking people who had committed some kind of perceived failing of heroics. But Tensei seems to be legitimately above the board. He didn’t seem to engage too heavily in the consumerist culture around heroics. He did good work. He was a good hero. So what about him made Stain decide to go after him?

I didn’t want it to be an “IDK he thinks all heroes but all might is fake” thing because 1) that cheapens the character and 2) it doesn’t match what canon shows. Don’t get me wrong, he was a lunatic who thought he needed to kill a fucking kid over his extremist ideals, but he let Izuku go the second Izuku established he conformed to his moral system.

Stain kills when he perceives a reason to. That doesn’t mean he’s always right. But he needs an excuse first.

I decided that there was one detail about Idaten that would be his most likely motive: the number of sidekicks he had.

Tensei is canonically taking up his parents’ mantle. This is a family business he’s heavily suited to and excels at. He has working beneath him a much higher than average number of sidekicks. And we know from canon that he’s not the type to take advantage of his team. Fuck, he seems to emphasize taking care of his team and working together above all else.

But we know that from canon. Stain doesn’t. What he sees, from the outside, is a young hero who took over his parents’ agency and is bolstering his own career on the backs of his sidekicks, which is what so many heroes were doing at that time.

Because stain is an extremist. He doesn’t once consider that maybe Tensei is the exception to the rule. He didn’t think to ask the sidekicks who he was, in a way, taking action on behalf of what they thought of Tensei.

Which is consistent with his character. It took him less than five minutes to decide “yeah I need to put down this grief stricken fifteen year old boy” do you????

Iida becomes the kind of hero that meets his ideals. Stain would have killed him the first time Iida gave him a reason. He’s shown to not always be right or do due diligence to determine if someone is even consistent with his crazy fucking moral system. He was just wrong when he went after Tensei.

And a big reason why he was wrong is because Idaten, as a culture, is far from the typical agency experience. It’s just that no one knows this, because Idaten is shown to be all about maintain a strong and confident facade. It’s not releasing its fucking employment contracts. The public only gets the calm, in control demeanor of the team. It doesn’t see how the sausage is made.

Do you know that millionaire ceo who realized his employees lives sucked and voluntarily took a huge pay cut so that way he could raise all of their salaries to a huge degree and the company as a whole got much, much better because the workers cared about it now and they made more profits and his salary eventually increased too as the company improved and all of his employees loved him? And he published the results thinking maybe other ceos would follow them after it was proven to make their companies more successful? And literally not one single one of them did?

Yeah that’s Idaten.

We talked in the earlier post about how heroics culture, for the most part, is abusive and built on the backs of sidekicks who are being widely taken advantage of. Idaten just… isn’t. Their compensation is incredibly fair and above board. People get credited for busts based on who was in charge of that particular bust or went above and beyond. They genuinely take care of their team, which is consistent with how Tensei seems to treat his team in canon.

For the most part, the sidekicks don’t want to even leave Idaten and become big name heroes themselves. They are all so genuinely happy and fulfilled that most of them happily spend their whole career as a sidekick.

But that’s the exception, and not the rule. And from the outside, Stain saw another sidekick farm propping up a pretend hero.

Which is one of the reasons why all of the Idaten sidekicks got together to hunt him down like a sick dog when he escaped. Tensei was babygirl to them and Stain hurt babygirl. He besmirched babygirl’s name over something he didn’t even do. Tensei didn’t even coordinate that mission the sidekicks made a group chat without him and went out to kick that fucking guy’s ass.

Idaten is a model of what heroics could be if it wasn’t focused on self profit and promotion. It made sacrifices to be this way. But it resulted in a team of excellent heroes who are all able to focus on protecting society without going home and feeling like they got fucked.

Stain has this mental image of heroes who should be helpful and good and save everyone without any personal incentive. But when you’re breaking your fucking back and going home to a shit apartment while your boss does 3 hours of work per day and has five houses, you start to ask yourself why you have to fucked for society to be safe. The sidekicks’ “greed” took the blame for the meltdown with Tartarus, but really, people should have been pointing fingers at every single agency head who refused to treat them fairly.

Idaten is this sparkling model of a business that is incredibly successful because the company heads are actually fair and good. They are the exception. And they are operating within a system where many of the other agencies are treating their talent like disposable cogs in a machine. The system needs to be regulated to force everyone else to act like Idaten—Idaten’s independent success is not a sign that the system works on its own.

As to your second question—no. The world saw little snapshots of Class 2A melting down in the aftermath and it got traded around like every other moment. Someone took a picture of the moment I talked about with Iida just sitting on the curb and crying when his brother’s men came to relieve him of command, and it was just another famous picture of many on the internet do that incident.

It was just—a horrifically public event. All of the kids had to be hospitalized in the aftermath. The world knew that. Izuku took a hit during his big fight with Mirio against the major villain team. He got stabbed, and it was poisoned. He knew from the villain’s history that the poison they produced was slow acting, though, so he quietly took Todoroki aside, had him cauterize the wound, and kept fighting until more heroes came. There’s a fuck ton of photos of him lying down on the sidewalk with his head in Todoroki’s lap in terrible shape waiting for the ambulance to come get him. And the world took that as a “Look At How Strong He Is, All Might Reborn, He Fought All Night With That Terrible Wound And He Still Prevailed” not “wow, that actual child had to fight for hours through the night not knowing if he’d live long enough to make it to a hospital.” Which is like. What happened. Izuku didn’t tell anyone but Todoroki that he took the hit. They both knew that if he didn’t get the antidote in time, he was dead. And they also both knew that there was no way he was going to be able to have even a shot at a hospital until morning, so they just had to keep going.

The world also took that as fuel for the ongoing ship war around Izuku and Todoroki, that they are only marginally aware of. Which like. Would not be comforting, that that’s what they took from a picture where both of them were legitimately afraid that Izuku was going to die.

The world knew they were young. They knew they were a bunch of amazing kids who had done something spectacular. To a lesser extent, they knew that those kids struggled in the aftermath. But that was never going to save them from the media machine. The fact that this fell to kids who visibly struggled in the aftermath was picked apart and used as a bat to hit opponents with in the debates that followed.

The picture of Iida crying on the curb with his brother’s sidekicks around him is considered one of the seminal photos documenting modern Japan’s heroics. It is the kind of thing that is probably going to end up in a textbook down the line.

Iida hates that photo. He hates that he had one moment of vulnerability in the aftermath when he managed to keep it together the entire rest of the event, and people still pass it around like a trading card. He had worked so, so hard not to lose it, and right when he thought it was safe to, it got posted on the internet.

When Iida sat on the curb and started crying, he was barely standing. He was injured himself. Momo had a tremendous fight that left her in terrible shape, and everyone was afraid that she was not going to make it. Izuku had just revealed, by the way, guys, This Happened, and now everyone was afraid he wasn’t going to make it. Bakugou was like two days out of the medically induced coma Uraraka put him in when this happened and apparently the doctor’s warnings that he could only be on light work was a hard requirement because he was completely non responsive for the since the fighting stopped and now everyone was afraid he wasn’t going to make it. The entire class was concussed, exhausted, and wanted their parents.

And he just really, really wanted his brother. He wanted his big brother to come in as the hero he had always admired, sit down with him, and tell him it was over. That he did good, and he could rest now. His brother’s sidekicks were the closest second available to him.

That picture made Iida feel like he had failed. He hadn’t held it together, and he hadn’t had the same strong facade as his brother always did. His anguish became another thing for the world to chew on. And that was true for all of those kids at that fight.

[leclercskiesahead]

Some people have so little faith in Aston Martin. Thinking they wouldn’t do a tribute

[hazellvsq]

once you start seeing the madonna whore dichotomy perpetuated by certain parts of this fandom you can't unsee it

[mollysunder]

I don't see nearly enough discussion about the fact that the web of intrigue that leads Caitlyn to Jinx has shadowed her eye in the same way Silco's own has been scarred over. It's the same side too!

[yieldfruit]

The Lord will bring beauty from ashes.

[kisaraslover]

yeah Kisara was a self-banished wanderer, guilt ridden and afraid of her dragon but also like. who made the dragon. lol. theres always ALWAYS this quiet rage and grief, which claws at her skin trying to escape, just barely kept down at any given moment, and when her loyalty, therefore the dragons loyalty is bound to Seto there is not only no guilt, she surrendered completely, theres also relief and satisfaction. is he her enabler or is she his enabler trick question the answer is yes both

[handmedownpocketpussy]

Shabbat shalom, y'all -- my heart goes out to my Palestinian family who have been hit hard by the continued slaughter in Gaza, and have been pouring their hearts out doing advocacy on the local radio here, taking part in marches, and doing fundraising.

It's hard to see people framing anyone who shows sympathy for the Gazans being slaughtered as antisemites, especially as a Jew who wants the slaughter of my cousins to end.

I hope that the violence ends as soon as possible, please support your Palestinian friends and neighbors and support your Jewish friends who are against the illegal collective punishment being done to Palestinians in the name of retribution for the awful attack by Hamas

Pikuach nefesh, human life before all else. What we need more than anything right now is compassion and mutual aid for our Gazan friends in this time

I didn't want to drop 50 links so heres Vogue, of all publications, with a solid list if you want to help

[sylvanwoodring]

doing a new playthrough after a relentlessly pro-mage anders-friendmancing run is soo embarassing.

coming from a hawke that takes whatever anders says as gospel into a hawke that's only casual friends with him and hearing the same main character-esque lines... painful... buddy this is my story can you please speak normally.

[alatariel-galadriel]

The greatest kindnesses you will ever receive are from absolute strangers. it will mean nothing to them and everything to you

[twoplustwoequalsfuckyou]

[albertfinch]

Scripture Of The Day – August 16, 2021

Proverbs 18:21 - "Death and life are in the power of the tongue..." 

Job constantly feared that God would punish him and his family because he kept thinking that his sons and sinned against God. He would get up early in the morning to offer burnt sacrifices, saying, "It may be that my sons have sinned and cursed God in their hearts."

 So Job kept confessing the sins of his sons and  greatly fearing that something terrible would happen to him and his family (Job 3:25). Job's sin-consciousness opened the door to Satan.  His preoccupation with sins that his family may have committed gave Satan the opportunity to bring death and destruction into his life.

God had a hedge of protection around Job. But when he started being sin-conscious and having a fearful expectation of judgment, the hedge was removed and Satan could attack him (Job 1:9-12).

If you have sinned don't say, "I have failed again. I deserve to be punished by God."  Know that you already have forgiveness of sins because Jesus was punished and condemned in your place!  (Ephesians 1:7). So say, "I am the righteousness of God in Christ.  Jesus, you are my holiness and perfection" (1 Corinthians 1:30; 2 Corinthians 5:21).

Such believing and confessing not only pleases God, but also shuts the door on Satan so that he cannot make any inroad into your life.

ALBERT FINCH MINISTRY