#and learn some empathy

[red1culous]

Take Care of Maya

I watched this last night and cried my eyes out. It's a documentary about the Kowalski's and their struggles not so much with Maya's CRPS affliction but more so with Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital for allegedly abusing Maya Kowalski, then 10, and accusing her mother of Munchausen by proxy.

[astearisms]

catalysts, protectors

[bubblingsteam]

[soracities]

if we should protect children because they are vunerable, this means you would protect cruel children who bullies people who different than them then. the children who responsible to trauma for someone else's entire years

You're assuming that "protecting" children is the same as absolving them of responsibility and that's not what I said. All children are vulnerable, because all children are children; they don't come out of the womb with a perfectly working moral compass anymore than they come out of it waiting to hurt people--they're vulnerable because their understanding of the world is entirely at the mercy of what we, as adults, consistently tell them and show them. Children behaving cruelly aren't exempt from that--they learn that cruelty from somewhere, or someone. Your job, as the adult, is to make sure they understand that it's unacceptable so it will not happen again--but your job is also to ask why someone that young is behaving this way to begin with, so you can ensure they become better.

"Protecting" kids is not ignoring when they hurt or torment others, it's not refusing to teach them consequences or right from wrong, it's not "zero tolerance" policies in schools that treat a child being bullied and the child bullying them as equal instigators, and it's certainly not protecting them from recognizing, and atoning for, the pain they have caused someone else. You don't have to make peace with the now-adults who hurt you when you both were kids, but you cannot let the horrors of your own childhood impact how you treat or respond to the children living theirs around you right now, either.

You don't protect kids so they can get a free pass for bullying or tormenting another child. You protect them because kids are impulsive, emotionally reactive, and profoundly social (which means deeply impressionable) human beings who are still learning & processing insane amounts of information every day about what it means to be alive, to be alive as yourself, to be alive as yourself with other people. Protecting them is realising that you can't isolate the responsibility of a 10 year old from the bigger responsibility of the literal grown adults around them, adults who are in charge of teaching them about the world and how to behave in it. Whether you have children of your own in the future or not is completely irrelevant to this; we all become those adults eventually--no matter what happened to us as kids.

[conartisthaiji]

i think my favorite part of the lion's head fights was that everyone was like "i am here to shame you into being a better person" EXCEPT for hiragi vs sako. that fight was just sako going "i am going to beat your ass for telling me to stop following you >:(" and hiragi going "i'm sorry i left you behind and also i'm going to beat YOUR ass :(". that was some real gay shit right there.

[princessdarth-vader]

i can't stop thinkng about kristen this episode. her kindness. her honesty. she sees a grieving man; a man she hates, a man who has wronged her and hurt her, a man who she would be well within her right to vow to destroy, to laugh at his pain. and she says "it's too sad not to tell him". she tells him the truth about what she knows. a hard truth, but a necessary truth. he doesn't believe her, but she tells him anyway, because she cares. because this is a world barely a step from hers.

she talks to her brother, and she doesn't try to make a grand gesture. she doesn't try to heroically convince him to turn away. she empathises, she's been there. she tells him she understands. and she meets his doubt with courage, with a hand to hold, with a lantern to light up the overwhelming darkness. she offers him the hand he needs when he's too afraid to ask for it.

she talk to jawbone. she sees how hard a time he's having, and she reaches out. she helps, and she tells him that her plan was to take advantage of him, but she couldn't go through with it. she's honest and kind and giving at every fucking turn, and she tries again and again and again.

it's in the way she would still reach out and try to reconnect with her parents, who let her down and betrayed her trust and innocence. The way she insisted that buddy be revived, and was hopeless when she could do nothing to help. for all her chaos and bits, kristen is one of the most heartfelt and genuine characters in dimension 20 and i fully fully believe that.

[forgetme-eternally-blissfully]

Do you ever think that when Cale was KRS, he subconsciously knew about the curse? All of those terrible things kept happening to people he cared about- so much so that it would become a recognizable pattern (that he would realize later on was an actual curse) so he unintentionally twisted his mind into the piece of origami it is now, attributing people to their worth and convenience and refusing to express care for anyone, inside of his heart or to the outside world.

… He fails at hiding it. He fails because he doesn’t even know what counts as caring about someone’s well being, he doesn’t know what it looks like! He’s only ever had his own concern towards himself (and Lee Soo Hyuk and Choi Jung Soo), and everyone who cares for him like he cares for them— dies.

He knows how to be a team leader and how to manage and take responsibility for his members, but he doesn’t want to outwardly or inwardly care. Even after finding out about the curse, he doesn’t see how he refuses to care about things.

Well- he does care about things. Arguably more than anyone else, because his internal longing for human connection is so bone-deep that he can only create reasons why he’s helping people, instead of saying that he wants to.

‘Want’ got Cale nowhere. ‘Family’ got him nowhere. ‘Friends’ left him to sweep up his broken remains. ‘Home’ didn’t last, ‘safety’ is an illusion, and ‘emotions’ have only ever gotten in his way. Time and time again, these facts got drummed and burned into his mind.

It’s all he knows. It’s all Kim Rok Soo knew for his aching, dragging 36 years of existence.

Now he’s Cale Henituse.

Those facts are still there. They’ve become deep, welded scars in his mind. They’ll never go away.

But he’s learning. Very, very slowly. Those scars will never disappear, but maybe through this story, he can learn to traverse his trauma.

I hope so.

I really, really hope so.

(Drafted: January 23, 2023)

(I found this gathering dust in my drafts and decided to post it)

[froginabogg]

rewatching nowhere boys (yeah sue me i know i know) and i'm lowkey obsessed with how sam isn't even like,,, mean, he starts talking to andy and felix right from the start and isn't insulting or rude to them, he calls them nicknames he uses for the rest of the show, he has a few rude moments and insults but definitely not as much as jake does, who's an actual bully

it's very fascinating to me how sam's ENTIRE arc is really just him getting a reality check and being like "dude you gotta be less selfish", dare i say incredibly adhd coded (hi hello it is me i relate to this so fucking much), and he's right at the age for it too, which fifteen year old hasn't gotten bonked in the head by destiny and told "yo cut it off and think of others", it's genuinely so nice

[eats-a-berry]

i swear this panel drives me INSANE. this as a visual while the text says "it feels like we're pretty close", them being the same age but hien already having developed her tough personality while he's still a sensitive boy. this being one of the FEW things we know about their relationship. what tje hell man what the hell

[caligvlasaqvarivm]

wanna ask how you feel about the eridan bpd headcanon/theory(?? not sure what to call it!) you're so good at your character analysis and i'd love to see your outlook on it

Since I don't have a degree or any formal training in psychology, I feel deeply uncomfortable diagnosing characters. I've made an autism joke before but only because I'm on the spectrum. He's definitely traumatized and anxious, but I mean those as descriptors of his behavior rather than capital-D Diagnoses. I try to focus on those when I can - the cause and effect of cognition, self-image, and behavior - and those factors may very well match up with DSM criteria, but I try not to touch an actual diagnosis with a ten foot pole unless the author has explicitly stated that X character has Y condition.

[isa-ah]

one of the best things about getting older is hitting the point where you look around and realize you arent legally bound to be nice to anyone. it doesnt matter if youve known someone all your life or if you met them last week, if you decide someone is too immature, unevolved, annoying or just plain uninteresting to you, you can simply tell them you dont want to talk anymore. you can just break it off and walk away. you dont have to stay in meaningless or frustrating friendships or relationships. you can decide you dont like someone and it doesnt have to be moral it can be any reason you could ever think of and you can simply say hey. i dont think were compatible and id like to go our own ways. and then you can clean your hands of it and never have to stress about it again. its fantastic.

[ratingboomercomics]

Real, picture of what happens when you attend Tumblr University

Small nitpick but why did the artist turn some of the spines of the books away from us, why couldn’t he think of more bad gay things that college teaches you. Like he thought five books wasn’t a big enough pile but couldn’t think of two more titles?

“America is Evil” “Trans Socialism” “Gay Math” “Socialism For You(and Everyone)” “Books are Sexist” there’s a few right there

2/10 unfortunately I must admit this is a well-drawn picture of a smart rational man getting his head flattened by evil gay books.

[third-doctor]

I feel like I'm going insane. That episode read to me as a lot more tragic than other people are reading it. Yeah they were racist and rich and spoiled and awful but they were just kids. They were all just kids. Lindy was absolutely terrified throughout the whole thing and clinging desperately to what she knew, which was terrible. They could've had the chance to learn and become better but they chose to go die and it's infuriating and tragic because nobody deserves that. Nobody deserves to be eaten by slugs or die of exposure in the woods. Nobody deserves to suffer like that. But they chose it rather than let the Doctor help them because they'd rather stay in their rich white supremacist bubble and he just wants to help and there's nothing he can do.

Maybe it's because one of my core beliefs is that nobody deserves death and suffering. Nobody. Even the worst person on earth can learn from their mistakes and come back and change and everyone deserves that chance. There's no such thing as too late. But they're never going to get that chance because they actively rejected it and to me that's still very, very sad.

[deityofhearts]

I genuinely hate half of the people on this website. y’all are so incapable of not making bad faith assumptions about everything or taking shit that isn’t even about you so fucking personally or getting mad because a post didn’t specify everything eloquently and in depth and in excruciating detail. Like explain to me how exactly leaving unnecessarily rude replies or sending nasty, hateful asks over stupid shit like this is something that a normal person does, it’s not! Being online so much has rotted y’all’s brain and empathy beyond repair I fear.

[swemtpotamtam]

from time to time, when I post anything relating to ruzzian attacks on Ukraine, I get these dumb ass comments about "OHH BUT WW3 WILL START IF NATO/ANY OTHER THING/YOU NAME IT DOES ANYTHING!!" and it's just so??? huh?? so you would rather let a nation, a whole country get invaded and decimated?? its people killed by some fucking imperialist pigs? really? cool logic🤡🤡🤡 like, ah yes, let's make sure to let this terrorist state wreak havoc 'cause otherwise there will be ww3🤡 I fucking bet y'all 20 bucks that if those people's country was under attack, they would be super angry, yelling at the world to do something

but of course, if it doesn't concern them or their relatives, they won't feel empathy

[domesticmail]

so what are people who have been through rape and are now saying that neil gaiman cant be guilty (despite him admitting himself that he slept with his kid's nanny on her first day on the job) bc he wrote their fav show doing?

i don't know, presumably acting out in denial because they don't want to believe someone they looked up to could commit the same act of violence that they themselves have experienced? do you have 0 ability to put yourself in the perspective of others?

i don't agree with them at all and think it's gross to cover for a wealthy white man who has essentially admitted to everything (with the caveat that "they consented to everything", showing a clear lack of understanding of consent as a whole and presumably lying) he's been accused of. simultaneously, i can see why they're doing it. do i like or agree with it? no, i find rape apologia disgusting and dehumanizing. however, shockingly, i am not the arbiter of all rape victims! we react to things differently because we're all different human beings! very simple concept.