#and defined personality

[laf-outloud]

This is so true! I think any personality that we see is what's left over from playing Dean for so long. Otherwise, Jensen (without Dean) is very much a blank slate.

He also changes based on the role he just did, right down to his wardrobe. When he was Dean for years we saw him in more flannel and "Dean-style" outfits. When he was SB suddenly he's showing up at cons in Playboy t-shirts. With Beau he started wearing more sweaters and that style clothes.

And his behavior also changes based on who he's with at that moment. He's much more palatable with Jared. With MC he becomes a drunken jerk. With JDM he seems more cocky/arrogant (they wouldn't go to a tattoo shop unless they were recognized and got to jump the line? I wouldn't brag about that one boys..).

Hell, he doesn't even use his real voice most of the time! He adopted the Dean voice for SPN and just... never dropped it. People have even made comments about him in M&G's and being surprised about how high his real voice actually is.

I literally have no idea who Jensen is. I think "Dean-lite" is the closest we get to Jensen's actual personality (and he's even said as much at cons) but it's still a mystery. And no, I'm not saying we ever "know" celebs or that they owe us that, but branding-wise it makes it more difficult.

Oh, I hadn't even considered the clothing styles, but you're so right! It seems he's trying to portray himself as a character actor who can change with each role, and yet his off-screen persona and his onscreen acting still come through as a personality actor (i.e., Dean-lite - except in TW, strangely enough). Therefore, if Jensen can't even figure out his own brand, how are casting directors and producers supposed to figure it out?

[platoapproved]

armand + identity

[thedreadvampy]

people seriously pretending EEAAO is overrated suddenly bc it swept awards? it swept awards largely because it is very very very good. I cried like someone who's just had a religious revelation BOTH times I watched it bc it touched something raw and real and beautiful but it was also just very, very funny. everyone's performance kills and the concept is creative and interesting and doesn't distract from the emotional core. you guys are just contrarian.

[hinamie]

itakugi sillies fr the soul

[morgenlich]

the thing about saying “violence against [fascists/pedophiles/etc] is always justified” is that people immediately begin to expand their definition of who counts as a [fascist/pedophile/etc] to include people they personally don’t like, in order to justify violence against them, whether or not they are actually a [fascist/pedophile/etc] or whether they are actually doing harm (or are very likely to do harm) to others. the solution to dealing with the fact that [fascists/pedophiles/etc] exist in society should never be to go looking for a reason to do violence, or to train yourself to treat violence as a reflexive action.

[i-eat-deodorant]

does this annoy anyone else or is it just me

[wheresurboytonighthelookslikeenj]

its always funny when i remember hamilton was a big deal because i know about it rationally like i was into it as well. but so many people in the doctor who tag knowing jonathan groff primarily as king george still amuses me because he is in so many other things

[katabay]

ONCE UPON A TIME, THERE WAS A KNIGHT...

the visual inspiration for this was a combination of Frederic William Burton's Meeting on the Turret Stairs and also Bernardo Cavallino's The vision of St. Dominic receiving the Rosary from the Virgin

this was supposed to be just a one off illustration to get the thoughts out of my system, but then I started thinking about medieval politics and warfare and plagues and a castle and home as both a place of refuge, a prison, and a tomb, so perhaps they will end up as ex voto characters as well.

you may say, hey! that rosary looks like it has too many beads! it's a fifteen decade rosary, probably. dominicans are really into marian devotions. it works out.

also. spiral style stair cases. oh boy. it was that unexpectedly more difficult than I originally thought it would be to draw. the more I think about it, the less I understand them, even though I had a million photos of the stairs in front of me while I was drawing it.

⭐ I have a tip jar (ko-fi)!

⭐ and other places I’m at! bsky / pixiv / pillowfort /cohost / cara.app

[watermelinoe]

you cannot convince me that these people don't just hate women

[clovelie]

i don't know who i am as a person. i rely on everyone around me to give me a personality instead of forming one on my own.

[mesetacadre]

yeah im actually an evil abolitionist. my political position is that bad things should not exist. so I guess you could say I'm a bit of a far-leftist 😎

[anghraine]

It's interesting (if often frustrating) to see the renewed Orc Discourse after the last few episodes of ROP. I've seen arguments that orcs have to be personifications of evil rather than people as such or else the ethics of our heroes' approach to them becomes much more fraught. Tolkien's work, as written, seems an odd choice to me for not wrangling with difficult questions, and of course, more diehard fans are going to immediately bring up Shagrat and Gorbag.

If you haven't read LOTR recently, Shagrat and Gorbag are two orcs who briefly have a conversation about how they're being screwed over by Sauron but have no other real options, about their opinions of mistakes that have been made, that they think Sauron himself has made one, but it's not safe to discuss because Sauron has spies in their own ranks. They reminisce about better times when they had more freedom and fantasize about a future when they can go elsewhere and set up a small-scale banditry operation rather than being involved in this huge-scale war. Eventually, however, they end up turning on each other.

Basically any time that someone brings up the "humanity" of this conversation, someone else will point out that they're still bad people. They're not at all guilty about what they're part of. They just resent the dangers to themselves, the pressure from above, failures of competence, the surveillance they're under, and their lack of realistic alternative options. The dream of another life mentioned in the conversation is still one of preying on innocent people, just on a much smaller and more immediate scale, etc.

I think this misses the reason it keeps getting brought up, though. The point is not that Shagrat and Gorbag are good people. The point is that they are people.

There's something very normal and recognizable about their resentment of their superiors, their fears of reprisal and betrayal that ultimately are realized, their dislike of this kind of industrial war machine that erases their individual work and contributions, the tinge of wistfulness in their hope of escape into a different kind of life. Their dialect is deliberately "common"—and there's a lot more to say about that and the fact that it's another commoner, Sam, who outwits them—but one of the main effects is to make them sound familiar and ordinary. And it's interesting that one of the points they specifically raise is that they're not going to get better treatment from "the good guys" so they can't defect, either.

This is self-interested, yes, but it's not the self-interest of some mystical being or spirit or whatnot, but of people.

Tolkien's later remarks tend to back this up. He said that female orcs do exist, but are rarely seen in the story because the characters only interact with the all-male warrior class of orcs. Whatever female orcs "do," it isn't going to war. Maybe they do a lot of the agricultural work that is apparently happening in distant parts of Mordor, maybe they are chiefly responsible for young orcs, maybe both and/or something else, we don't know. But we know they're out there and we know that they reproduce sexually and we know that they're not part of the orcish warrior class.

Regardless of all the problems with this, the idea that orcs have a gender-restricted warrior class at all and we're just not seeing any of their other classes because of where the story is set doesn't sound like automatons of evil. It sounds like an actual culture of people that we only see along the fringes.

And this whole matter of "but if they're people, we have to think about ethics, so they can't be people" is a weird circular argument that cannot account for what's in LOTR or for much of what Tolkien said afterwards. Yes, he struggled with The Problem of Orcs and how to reconcile it with his world building and his ethical system, but "maybe they're not people" is ultimately not a workable solution as far as LOTR goes and can't even account for much of the later evolution of his ideas, including explicit statements in his letters.

And in the end, the real response that comes to mind to that circular argument is "maybe you should think about ethics more."

[samuraijacksoff]

iv lately been converting minecraft screencaps into 32x32 pixels so i can cross stitch them :)

[morganbritton132]

Erica, like she does every year for pride, posts a collage of pictures of her queer friends and family. This includes a picture of her and Tina, picture of her and Steve (and Eddie half cut out of the shot), a picture of Nancy and Robin, a picture of Steve, Nancy, Max, Mike, and El repping bi colors at a pride parade, and a picture of her and Lucas.

Lucas, in the comments under this post: ??????

Lucas, still in the comments: I’m not gay????

Erica: Bisexual

Lucas: No?

Dustin: What about your crush on Steve?

Lucas: What about YOUR crush on Steve???

[whetstonefires]

Madam Yu is so much of a character in so little space, it's fantastic, and it's funny to me being also in the Scum Villain fandom because. She is very much set up on the same character framework as Shen Jiu. She's that same Kind Of A Guy.

But ofc her trauma foundation is in being a proud woman in a world that does not value womanhood, and without the social skills to get anyone to forgive her for it. So she's less violently fucked up than he is.

But like him, she's all twisted up around the sensation that her suffering is her own fault for being the wrong sort of person. Which is an unutterably fucking corrosive mindset.

And I really think that she doesn't in the least believe that her husband loved or had an affair with Cangse Sanren. She's humiliated that other people believe it, and furious that he's encouraged them to, but she doesn't think it's true.

What she thinks is that Jiang Fengmian liked Cangse Sanren. As a person.

And of course, he doesn't like her. Because who could? Yu Ziyuan is not the sort of person people like.

And then Jiang Cheng, her son who takes after her, is basically just an extension of herself. So obviously, his father doesn't like him, either.

And she says this. Out loud, in front of him. While having honestly a really embarrassing meltdown.

I'm sure one of the things driving it is worry, because as she'd just acknowledged even though she's now blaming her husband about it they have to send either Jiang Cheng or Jiang Yanli into the hands of the Wen or face reprisals, which she doesn't want to face either, and obviously Jiang Yanli would be toast.

But if your response to worrying about your kid is to make fun of him, yell at him, shame him, and shout that his father doesn't love him in a weird tantrum before storming out and going to your room where he isn't allowed, you are failing as a parent on such a fantastic variety of levels idk where to start.

[marzipanandminutiae]

I don't know if Lizzie Borden did or didn't Do It, but what matters more is what she did afterwards:

moved to a grand house with her sister and had intense, Ambiguously Gay friendships with actresses until her death at age 66

there's a terrible slasher film called Lizzie Borden's Revenge and I'm like. revenge for WHAT. what about the entire rest of her life could possibly leave her feeling in need of vengeance. barring local notoriety and the emotional toll thereof, the rest of her life was excellent