#and like with friendships... ugh

[sentientsky]

i don’t know how to describe the soul-rendingly deep ache of meeting your best friend in adulthood and knowing you’ll never get to know them when you were both little kids

[batman-gif]

"Frank and Gerard early 2000's stage kisses" this "Frank and Gerard early 2000's stage kisses" that. LISTEN! 2022 Ray and Frank forehead kisses. In conclusion . Frank iero.

[fallandfigs]

So I’ve been thinking a lot about how Hawkeye and Trapper might reconnect after the war, assuming they didn’t write to each other after Trapper left.

This is still rough, but I’m picturing Trapper, attending a medical conference in Indiana, going to pick up his morning paper in the hotel lobby. He starts flipping through the pages, skimming over the various articles, when he finds, on page 3, a picture of Frank Burns staring back at him.

Yes, that Frank Burns.

It’s the most unflattering picture he’s ever seen. Frank is squinting and sweating, the image is slightly fuzzy, and to top it all off the headline is equally embarrassing: “Major Mess at the VA.” Turns out Frank had gotten caught in a compromising position (with a female employee) by a VA police patrol. A patrol Frank himself was responsible for initiating (he’d called near-daily to chew out the shift-leads for dereliction of duty). Well, they finally took his complaints to heart. Quintessentially Frank all over.

And Trapper bursts out laughing right in the hotel lobby. He clips the page and stuffs it into a first class envelope so fast it’s on its way to Maine before the conference is even over.

It’s probably the last thing Hawkeye expects to receive but damn if it doesn’t get him cackling.

[czache78]

thinking about cherry who starts coming over to the curtis house to work on homework with ponyboy and doesn’t seem to mind the creaky steps. the chocolate cake for dinner. the small bedroom or the lack of a dishwasher or the blankets laid across the couch for anyone who needs them.

cherry who’s the first one that hasn’t minded. not since paul, at least. the first soc who it hasn’t occurred to to not make fun of them or leave or spit at their feet. and she’s ‘round their house a lot. no, this soc ain’t like all the other ones.

cherry who starts coming ‘round a lot more often. even when they don’t have to study. an’ she’ll help darry with the dishes or dinner or whatever needs to be done. the only way darry’s gotten this level of approval before is when he *was* a soc. when he was really one of them. but now, he’s *not* one of them. but this girl don’t seem to mind.

cherry who makes her way to the curtis house one night, tears streaming down her face and dress clenched in her fist. she sits down on their couch trying to stifle her sobs, and a mug and damp towel are placed in front of her within a minute. no words of condolence, no trying to pity her, just silent help.

and she knows she’s accepted. darry knows it, too. maybe things didn’t turn out so well with paul, but he’s got hope for this one.

[many-gay-magpies]

i love crystal and charles having an emotionally inadvisable hookup charles can't even FEEL in one room while niko and edwin sit cross-legged on niko's bed watching scooby doo in the other

[jerreeeeeee]

thought about “are you my friend” again i need to lay down. or explode

[wynandcore]

We need to talk about the band. And you.

[merehawke]

i love my freaking elf 😭 #myelf

[lightbluesleeper]

oakworthy brainworms,, i just think they're neat also hermie is so fucking fun to draw it's ridiculous

[screenshotsonpinterest]

The way I feel about Glinda and Elphaba is actually very similar to how I feel about the biblical story of David and Jonathan because I do think it’s really valuable to show intimate, meaningful platonic relationships between the same gender and it’s important that we recognize how these friendships often become our most important in lieu of decent familial ones, it’s representation we need more of

But also they’re gay like they’re so so gay just so gay 

[cankersoregirl]

I was afraid I’d lose him. So I got there late. And… as I entered, I saw him about to take pictures by himself. The first thing that I felt was… I wanted to hug him. No matter how bad I was to him, he’s still there for me. Every time that I’ve fallen or torn apart, he always runs up to me. He’ll come running and hug me. The same goes for this time, where he shows up. Am I happy? I’m really delighted. I really am. I’d like to thank Save for always being by my side till this very day.

DMD Friendship the Reality: It Takes Two EP. 5

[mamawasatesttube]

i understand that ... the whole. everything. that fanon t*mkon does is super annoying, but the way some people push back against it by insisting that tim and kon weren't close before tt03/the geoff retcon is so funny (read: annoying) to me. this is simply not true ♥ so here, have a brief, nonexhaustive list of examples of tim and kon's friendship from kon's side:

tim is kon's second choice for "who to learn nonpowered fighting from" when he loses his powers (sb94 #76).

when he has a power spike and freaks himself out with his own strength (dismantling every single gun in los angeles), tim is the person he turns to to seek comfort and advice (sb94 #85). (and also to bother him because "bothering tim" seems to be one of his hobbies.)

he refers to tim as his "ex-best friend" after their fight on apokolips (sb94 #92).

like... you don't have to ship them. you can be very annoyed with the way fanon has warped their relationship. but to suggest that they didn't actually have any sort of close bond before tt03 is... rather egregiously not true? and just feels like a spite response to me. idk man. they have very clearly been good friends for a long time, before geoff had anything to do with them.

[heffrondriving]

❝ And KENDALL needs to stop talking back to me after everything I say! ❞

[inkedinserendipity]

oh my god, y'all. oh my god. moana 2 spoilers under the cut.

i am just?? i am speechless. i am literally still collecting my thoughts. right now i am just a mess of glee and relief and joy at watching that movie. the first movie meant so much to me!! and the most important part of it to me was the friendship between maui and moana, and i am so proud of the sequel for how they did that relationship right. i was stunned honestly by how faithful they were to what drove the first movie - maui coming to respect and care about this mortal, and moana caring about him and turn.

the first thing he does when he hears the gods are threatening moana is go no, this is between me and him! this isn't about her! don't even talk to me about the way he dove into the ocean after her!! without hesitation, even after he just lost his hook and his powers! (especially after the way he reacted to that exact same thing in the first movie, but in this one, instead of lashing out, instead of even pausing to think about it, he just goes in after her.) the panic in his voice when he finds heihei and demands, oh hell, where's moana. the way he mourned - god, that broke my heart. that was palpable. that was tangible. the song, aue, aue....

fuck me. FUCK me. if me from six years ago could've seen this, i would've been overjoyed. i'm tearing up now, even thinking about it. this story that i cared about so deeply has been continued with so much respect to what spoke the most to me.

the callbacks made me so freaking happy too! the mini-maui being just as much of a little shit, keeping score, the oar and the hook, oh and MOANA'S OAR becoming the symbol of her divinity? i lost my freaking mind! that was so good! and her ancestors - her grandmother, tala - being the one who ushered her into divinity - was so fucking good. we tell the stories of our elders in a never-ending chain. you could see it happen! in the symbol of te fiti, the swirl of people who gathered around her to bring her back to life!

the tie between community killed me too. how in the beginning of the movie, the meeting in motunui featured just moana and her father - and then toward the end, the structure was full of people.

i have so many more thoughts, about the musical callbacks, the refrains from the first movie (and, candidly, a number of critiques about the new characters and the strange pacing and lackluster and plot and weird music choices - basically everything but the friendship between our leading duo, tbh), but this was just...my heart is so full. i am so glad i got to see this movie. younger seren, you would've fucking loved this.

[kaurwreck]

Rereading the early Guild Arc is incredible because it's Fukuzawa and Mori engaging in viciously nasty and personal threats to one another's closest loved ones and allies that wildly escalates beyond their implicitly agreed upon tension, which comes to a head because Dazai petulantly mischaracterizes Mori as pathologically mathematical (because he isn't over that Mori could do what he did to Dazai) and intentionally triggers the paranoia and obsessive compulsive betrayal sensitivity that he'd clocked in Mori at fifteen, causing Mori to irrationally lash out and release Q (and then self flagellate because the consequences of this were wildly amplified by the Guild's seizure of Q), by which point Dazai realizes he'd gone too far and now has to get Ango hit by a car about it.

And Francis is just like. There.

(He's also going through it, but because Louisa isn't in underground son protection jail like Ranpo or hashing out unresolved grief like Dazai and Mori, she's keeping Francis rational with decision trees and focused tasks within the realm of his control.)

This is why there's a chapter called "The Conflict of Strategies." The Strategy of Conflicts by Thomas Schelling is about coordination between mutually dependent parties in conflicts. Unlike zero-sum games (in which one person's gain is equivalent to another's loss), mutually dependent parties rely on each other and so can't draw blood without harming themselves in the process.

The Agency and the Port Mafia are both pillars maintaining Yokohama's tenuous stability; if one falls, the whole city could devolve into a warzone. Thus, their mutual dependence is part of the logical structure of any strategy and demands some kind of collaboration or mutual accommodation, even if only in the avoidance of mutual disaster.

Mori often uses a strategy of irrationality, i.e. he acts volatile and whimsically sociopathic, where he's actually very controlled and rational, which Dazai knows. But, as Dazai reveals to Mori's horror in Fifteen, Dazai also knows where Mori is vulnerable to emotional provocation. This is because Mori, like everyone else, isn't completely rational or completely irrational; it's not a one-dimensional scale. But, "everyone else" includes Dazai.

Dazai characterizes Mori as a math equation because he's still reeling from the betrayal he feels over Mori sacrificing Oda despite knowing how much Dazai loved Oda, and despite Mori knowing it would drive Dazai away from him— because he and Mori also love each other. Even though Dazai probably understands logically that Mori made the decision despite his love for Dazai (and not in the absence of it) because Mimic was an existential threat on Yokohama, Dazai cannot shake the irrational and emotional thought, "If you could do that to me, of all people, you really are as coldly logical as a math equation."

This is irrational because Dazai knows that's not true; he demonstrated in Fifteen that he knows that Mori is terrified of, more than anything else, chaos, and that the threat of chaos is enough to trigger Mori into decisions he does not want to make and otherwise would not make. That's what he was trying to do in Mori's office in the first chapter of Fifteen— goad Mori into killing him by invoking a fear response.

But, Dazai is hurt and so he treats Mori as coldly rational and approaches him with vicious disregard for Mori's betrayal sensitivity, loneliness, and fear by taking Kouyou and leveraging Kyouka to keep Kouyou from returning to Mori. Mori, having lost Kyouka and thus Kouyou's incentive for staying in the Port Mafia, was already afraid he'd lost Kouyou's loyalty and support— and she's one of the four people he depends on. He also depends on Dazai, and although he's aware he drove Dazai away, that still hurts him. Further, Dazai demonstrating that he can and will use what he knows about Mori against him is terrifying to Mori because Dazai is one of the very few people capable of emotionally manipulating Mori. Dazai has Mori's nerves pinched between his fingers while telling Atsushi it's just an electrical wire.

Anyway, then Q is seized, hundreds of Port Mafia members and affiliates are killed, and Mori is wracked with shame and the fear that he behaved like the old boss. That's why Hirotsu and Chuuya are so gentle with him, and why, despite their agreement that Kouyou would stay with Dazai until Dazai saved Kyouka, Dazai asks her to return to Mori. It's also why the Agency and Port Mafia call a truce to collaborate against the Guild, without blaming Mori for what happened. They forgive because the cost of fighting is, as just demonstrated, too high, but also, they recognize that the escalation was mutually cultivated.

It's also why, at the very end, Mori asks Kouyou why she stays when she could leave. He knows he doesn't have Kyouka anymore, and he's still grappling with his guilt for those entrusted to his care that were killed because of his lapse in rationality. But, Kouyou assures him that this is a version of the Port Mafia she wants to protect. Because, even as Mori was spiraling and releasing Q, Kouyou was realizing that, unlike what happened to her, Kyouka could leave and decide for herself where and with whom she feels safe and has purpose. She could do that because Mori and the Agency have helped to create spaces and community and stability where there wasn't before. He's helped create a world where Kyouka can be a flower born in darkness and yet still make the choice to bloom in the light without being rejected or burned by it.

(And also because Kyouka left, and Mori didn't go after her to force Kouyou to stay. Because he would never do that.)

She wants to nurture that world with him, and she trusts him. The conflict may have escalated, but as soon as the cost was felt by the city and their own people, the Port Mafia and Agency were able to mutually deescalate and collaborate to contain the chaos and defuse it before it spread.

Mori isn't the old boss, and the humanity and love in him is reflected in his stewardship of their city. His humanity and love also mean he's capable of being hurt and will sometimes act emotionally and irrationally. But, it's okay for him to not always be rational; that's why Kouyou and Chuuya (and Hirotsu, who was goddamn MVP in the Guild Arc) are there to support him.

[falconewayne]

maybe I’m reading too much into this but I just realized something…I don’t think sofia ever calls oz “penguin” in the show (correct me if I’m wrong). I have a theory that it’s because she knows how the nickname is something that makes fun of his disability and how he’s impacted by it. Even though she despises him I think she still carries that sympathy with her from when he was her driver. I think her only referring to him as “oz” is something that can be seen as intentional.