#and not the people who actually have a big enough impact

[wedriftlikelonelyplanets]

how feral are max & charles, give me your most feral opinion please and thank you

OKAY I have 20 minutes to answer asks before I force myself offline because i have to be up in....5 hours.

DISCUSSIONS OF D/s relationships, bdsm, kink, etc under the cut

Max and Charles are wildly feral about each other. I could go into like insane detail but I think it would just be like PARAGRAPHS on PARAGRAPHS

It does depend on the verse. The current verse i'm actively writing (ncitw) is a little more tame, per se, than the Vampire!Max verse.

See in Vampire!Max verse i'm literally writing an entire CNC fic that is Max chasing Charles through a forest, to capture him and take him absolutely APART, but also absolutely meanly, and he kinda has the (PRE-NEGOTIATED!!!!) free reign to do what he wants to Charles. It's great. I love it. Arguably it is the most feral I'll probably write Charles and Max.

As for NCITW verse

Free use (goes both ways, Charles or Max wants it, they can take it. This is including but not limited to semi-public settings such as drivers rooms, anywhere they can catch a quiet enough moment away from the press etc)

Mild voyeurism (but like the risk of other people hearing them/accidentally seeing them)

Edging/Orgasm play (but unless Charles is really bratty, denial's not really a thing either of them are into)

Mild feminization (Max to Charles, and it depends on the mood tbh)

Praise kinks (both of them, but Max has a thing for praising Charles and making him acknowledge all the nice things Max says about him and seeing where it goes from there)

Degradation (Max to Charles, but it can't be anything actually mean, just telling him how needy etc he is)

Cockwarming.....(Charles' favourite way to unwind)

And then like idk I guess the general par for the course stuff which isn't totally feral, but bondage, impact play, Charles likes Max to have to fight for control a little, sometimes.

Spit kink, come marking kink, just general marking and possessiveness

Wrong him and you die (okay not DIE but you get it)

There's like a SMIDGEN of a breeding kink somewhere in there

INCREDIBLY light pet play (less of pretending to be an animal, instead more about the intimacy of being kept and safe and cozy, and not having to think about the big, stressful, important things in life...big thing for Charles)

A LIIIIIIITTLE bit of lifestyle control but like...subtle.

ANYHOW HERE HAVE A LIST OF THE FERAL BITS OF MAX AND CHARLES

they're also insufferable to like...anyone on the grid who knows they're together.

[thedevotionaltour]

karen is MY special white woman. my problematic fave. because i understand why she sucks. i think in order to be allowed to be a karen fan you have to actually understand why she sucks. if you don't understand why she sucks then you're a bad karen fan i think.

[in-tua-deep]

I drew up this merfolk character based on a pajama shark while i was at work! decided to digitally line and color it when i got home, though i did use colored pencils to do the original drawing lol

anyway i call them samira but,, don't get me started on the complex mer naming lore that has been tumbling around my brain all week

[yelloworangesoda]

maxwell and sammy are all mine and i love them like my children but its pretty hard to divorce them from fnaf enough to make them straight up ocs. sammy especially bc hes technically not my oc, even if i made up every aspect about him except his name and dead twin sister

[beeseverywhen]

I just think that if someone's paying their rent and they are using the land you rent to them for its intended purpose (growing food and flowers for my households use) what does it fucking matter how they do it. Like please. What is the point. Chill the fuck out

[artbyblastweave]

Playing through Fallout:New Vegas for the first time in years. And I'm developing a newfound appreciation for the damage done to the intended pacing of the narrative with the addition of the Courier's Stash. I wake up in Goodsprings, and as part of the extended tutorial you have Ghosttown Gunfight, the fairly self-contained faction war between Goodsprings and the Powder Gangers. And the design intent, I think, is that this is probably supposed to be a pain in the ass, with only one or two avenues of support available to you given the low level at which you'll pick this one up. Six Powder Gangers, some in body-armor, would be a serious threat, and committing to fighting against that with your dinky 9mm and a varmint rifle seems like a rough time! An actual uphill battle, doing the right thing instead of the easy thing. Fortunately, Benny inexplicably left my handy 40mm grenade launcher in the grave with me, so I cleaned up.

I'm working my way south, and, you know, in a version of the game where Benny didn't inexplicably leave my handy 40mm grenade launcher in the grave with me, this would have been the knock-on effect of my "good" Karmic choice in defending Goodsprings; the road south is littered with powder gangers who'd have been neutral had I not kicked the hornet's nest. As it stands? Free experience. I hit Primm, and fighting through the cramped hallways of the Bison Steve I encounter an enemy armed with what was clearly supposed to be the first heavy weapon I'd encounter in the world. Tight Corridors. Inexplicable Grenade Launcher. I clean up. South I go to the Mojave outpost, Nipton, that whole thing. And clearly, clearly you aren't meant to take a swing at Vulpes here, right? You're supposed to take it in, get a sense for the legion. In the version of the game that shipped you're supposed to get bodied if you try to kick the beef gate here. There are allowances in the game for if you pull it off, sure, but I did try with just the service rifle, without the glorious first-strike capabilities afforded to me by the 40mm grenade launcher that Benny inexplicably left in the grave with me. It didn't go very well!

So now I'm dogged by Legion hit squads on my way to Novac, which I get the distinct impression was not the point in the game at which this was supposed to start happening to me, because I am gathering up some pretty expensive equipment, all sold for space. I punch through to Vegas, and at this stage, the clear developer intent is that you need to spend some time milling around Freeside or Camp McCarran in order to gain access to the Strip- do odd jobs to scrape up the money, buy the forgery from Mick and Ralphs, gain monorail access, get your science skill high enough to hack the robot. Get the lay of the land, get a feel for the people, send some time stewing in the human cost of House's walled garden before you head in and hear the pitch from the big man himself.

Except I've got 5000 caps from selling off all the legion killteam equipment. In I go!

And the fun thing is, right, the Courier's stash can't be diegetic, but it is having a very direct impact on the world here. A top legion guy just went down to my inexplicable 40mm grenade launcher. Whatever else I'm roleplaying as, I am roleplaying as a guy who woke up in the possession of an inexplicable 40mm grenade launcher, and neither I nor my character can plausibly ignore that fact given its terrible bloodstained utility. I play a man, a man who would be a good man, a man nonetheless bewitched by the terrible resolutory power of the grenade launcher. My best friend, the inexplicable 40mm grenade launcher! My worst enemy, the inexplicable 40mm grenade launcher!

[ilydeku]

izuku loves to talk about you during interviews

- anything and every topic it will ALWAYS be about you

- the question won't even be remotely related to you and still izukus answer will revolve around "y/n, my wife!!" <3

- oh, the glint in his eyes, the peaking smile when he speaks about you, lover boyyy

- the media knows he LOVE LOVES you, they think it's funny for this big, confident, mighty hero to be reduced to sap when it comes to you

- it's like his whole is personality is HIS WIFE

- the journalists lowkey get so SICK of him for this, they don't want to invite him anymore 😭

- but they kinda have to, due to to his status as #1

"Good evening everyone and welcome Hero Talk! Tonight we'll be staring someone you all know and love, single handedly the greatest hero of all time, Deku! Alright, Deku how are you tonight?"

"Feeling pretty good! This is one of my wife's favorite shows, so I'm even more grateful to be here. And how are you?"

"Oh, same old. Really, just living. Now, we wanted to ask you some fun questions. Let's start with this one. Why did you want to become a hero?"

"Wow, haha! That really brings be back to my youth. When I was kid, my biggest influence was All Might, and he miraculously became my mentor. He was a good hero, and a good man. I wanted to be just like him: fearless, persevering, saving people with I smile. I would beg my mom everyday to watch this video on the computer of him saving a bunch a people. I was really swayed by All Might. I wanted to become a hero to make an impact in the world. I wanted to save people with a smile too."

"That sounds really endearing, Deku. I remember All Might's reign. He wasn't number one on the top charts all those years for nothing. So, did you ever think you'd be standing as Japan's top hero?"

"Well, it was never really my goal to become number one. That was Kacchan's- Dynamight's. My dream was, like I said, to become a hero and save others. But I have to say, it really is a blessing. I'd like to thank my Mom, All Might, my friends, and especially my wife for who I've become. My Mom has really done a lot for me growing up: protecting, encourage, and just always caring for me. All Might has kinda been that father figure for me when my Dad was away. My friends have shown me what it's like to work together and really be part of a heart. And my wife? Haha...I can't thank her enough for all the times she's been right by my side, even before we were together. Nothing I can say or do will ever be enough to express how much she means to me."

"Mm. Quite the supportive group. Your wife sounds like quite the lady!"

"She is. She's wonderful."

"Moving on to the next question, do you use social media often?"

"Occasionally, yes?? My wife uses it regularly, posting about us when we go out and stuff. It's mostly for her family to see how she's doing. She handles most of my official accounts. She says it's to be more appealing to the public, and I guess to show that there's more to heroes on the inside?? I'm not really sure, but I trust her process. Although, I'd rather be appealing to her alone."

"The public will always interested in a hero's private life! Now, Deku, what is your ideal setting of relaxation?"

"My wife doesn't like places that are too crowded or noisy, so maybe a cozy day at the beach?- but early in the morning or in the evening when the crowds calm down. Maybe a movie theatre, but days after the movie is released so it's just us together. Actually, a lazy day at home together is great too! Cooking meals and watching a movie on the couch? Really, any place is relaxing if my wife is with me."

(am i questioning Deku's wife or Deku!?) "How scenic! Those sound very fitting for you!! How about any restaurants?"

"Not really. My wife really knows how to cook, it's amazing! I love her home-cooked meals, so there's no way I'd go out of my way to a restaurant. But if my wife is feeling it, I'll be sure to make reservations."

"(sigh)"

"(smiling warmly)"

[milkloafy]

SILENT BUT RECKLESS — TODOROKI SHOUTO

⋆｡˚ ❀ summary: in which pro hero!shouto saves you from getting run over by a car and finds himself immediately enraptured by you.  ⋆｡˚ ❀ contents: pro hero!shouto, fluff, gn!reader ⋆｡˚ ❀ wc: 1.3k ⋆｡˚ ❀ a/n: aka…pro hero!shouto is a pr nightmare and no u cannot convince me otherwise ! ahdjskc but frl this is so unserious but i miss the og anime loml so here we are :>

Shouto wasn’t exactly known for his talkative nature. 

It was quite the opposite, in fact, with news agencies and magazines often referring to him as the quiet one of the Big Three. Though, he supposed that was better than being known as the one with the family trauma. 

But people often mistook his silence for thoughtfulness, he realized. Or an intense observation of sorts. And while at times that was the case, most times, it was simply because he didn’t have anything to say. 

Shouto blinked as he realized the situation he was in. 

He had just stopped a villain from robbing a luxury clothing store for the third time this month, nothing too exciting, yet the journalists showed up each time for an interview with him after. 

“Sir, we are live,” the reporter reminded with a nervous laugh. “We asked if you had a message for any…”

She kept talking, but Shouto was unable to concentrate. Not because he had heard it millions of times before, but because he noticed a strange movement from the corner of his eyes. 

This was one of the times he was both silent and observant. 

Shouto spotted you crossing the street on your phone, staring at your screen and completely oblivious that a car was headed your way with little to no sign of stopping. 

Without thinking of how it would look to the public for him to ditch an interview mid-sentence, he ran over to you before he even processed his legs moving. Throwing his right arm out in front of him, he sent a wall of ice up to block the vehicle’s predicted path, reaching you just in time to sweep you off your feet and carry you away from the road as the ice began to shatter from the impact. 

The ice wall was thick enough that the car slowed before fully breaking through, but that didn’t stop Shouto from instinctively shielding you with his body in the event that ice shards propelled towards you. 

Once he heard the sound of a crash and alarms, he figured the vehicle was fully stopped and the authorities arrived to assess the situation themselves. Would he get scolded by his agency for putting up an ice wall and potentially damaging someone’s vehicle? It was likely so. But that was better than someone actually getting hit by a car instead. 

The world wanted heroes, but only when they fit into their ideal mold. And while rules and regulations helped keep order in the world, in moments like these when someone’s life was in danger, Shouto couldn’t be bothered to care.

Slowly, his body relaxed and he was able to finally take a look at you. At the person who, for some reason, was so focused on their phone they didn’t notice a car coming at them. 

Any criticisms that threatened to come out of his lips stayed there once he got a good look at your features. He found himself taken aback by how beautiful you looked, though he quickly cleared his throat and recovered from his blatant staring. 

“Be careful when you’re crossing the street,” said Shouto, walking over to a section of grass and away from the commotion that was happening on the road, with you still in his arms. “What was keeping you so occupied?” 

You looked up at him guiltily, your phone clutched between your hands. “I was trying to order my food…” 

He blinked. As a pro hero, he shouldn’t be one the judge victims. But he couldn’t help but raise his brow just a bit. 

“I was really hungry,” you said sheepishly, hiding your face in embarrassment. “But I can’t believe I was so focused on my order I didn’t realize the car wasn’t stopping!” You sighed to yourself before meeting Shouto’s eyes once more. “Thank you for saving me, Shouto. I’m sure you had much more pressing matters to attend to instead of saving some random person off the street.”

He shook his head. “That’s the most important part of the job. Saving people.” 

You smiled gratefully at him and he almost had to look away from your dazzling grin. “Well, thank you for saving this idiotic person right here.” You gestured towards yourself. “Still, I hope my order went through…”

A mixture between a snort and a laugh escaped his lips. You had almost gotten run over and your biggest concern was whether or not your dinner was on its way? 

“It’s didn’t!” you cried in exasperation as you peeked at your phone. “Well, I might as well get a convenience store meal at this point.” Sighing, you leaned your head against his chest for a brief moment of comfort. “By the way, you can set me down now. I think people are taking pictures of us.” 

“Oh,” said Shouto, “right.”

Carefully, he loosened his hold on you and set your feet carefully onto the floor. Before fully letting go of you, he made sure you were stable and steady. For some, it took a while for the events to process and the panic to settle in, and he wanted to ensure you were truly okay. 

You had a worried look on your face as you noticed the video cameras still focused on the two of you. 

“Will you get in trouble for this?” you whispered, leaning close to his ear. 

“For rescuing someone from a getting hit by a car and talking to them after?” He considered things for a moment. “Most likely. But it’s okay. The most important thing is you are safe, both physically and mentally.”

Giggling, you nodded, reaching up to pat him on top of his head. Shouto was startled by the sudden touch, but he didn’t pull away.

“Who knew Shouto was such a worrywart,” you teased. “I’m safe and unharmed, all thanks to you. In fact, to show my gratitude… Why don’t I treat you to some convenience store dinner? On me, of course!” 

Shouto was silent for a bit. There were plenty of things he should be thinking about right now. The headlines that would be made about Pro Hero Shouto saving someone and then going on a “date” with them right after. The damage it could do to his reputation. The overtime hours the agency would make his public relations team work.

Instead, his silence was used to think of what he exactly he wanted to get at the convenience store. 

“Okay,” Shouto said once he made up his mind. “I’ll take a curry bun.” 

You laughed and gestured for him to follow you to the nearest convenience store. “I like that, too. You have good taste.” 

He followed along beside you, pleased with himself when he heard your captivating laugh. 

“I think I want an egg sandwich tonight,” you stated, a thoughtful look on your face. “Or maybe some fried chicken. Or an egg sandwich and fried chicken? And a smoothie for a drink and dessert all in one item! But maybe I want a crepe instead…”

As you rambled on, Shouto suddenly understood how you were too engrossed with trying to order food on your phone that you didn’t realize a vehicle was approaching you earlier. And while that was dangerous, he found it slightly endearing. Just as long as you were away from any cars. 

Shouto was so focused on listening to you that he hardly paid attention to the look of shock on the reporters’ faces and the influx of calls he was receiving from his agency. 

Right now, he simply wanted to hear you talk more and eat a curry bun. 

The rest, he could deal with later. 

[five-thousand-loaves-of-bread]

autism awareness & autism acceptance not either or. not mutually exclusive. can coexist. need coexist.

“there enough awareness for autism already 🙄 we need acceptance”

ok. you aware of high support needs autism? aware what that even means? not “need reminder take meds need remind take shower” “high” support needs autism, but “need full physical help do bADLs lack danger awareness may accidentally hurt self or even kill self without support” high support needs autism? not just higher support needs people who can be independently online do advocacy, but those who need help from others even be online, or those who cannot be online at. all.?

aware of nonverbal nonspeaking people? not just nonverbal nonspeaking people who can write grammatically correct cannot tell apart base on writing. not just nonverbal nonspeaking people who can be online who can advocate online.

aware of nonverbal nonspeaking people who cannot communicate in way that easily understood, either for now, or ever? aware of nonverbal nonspeaking people without functional communication, aware of how without functional communication, how that drastically limit communication, even though behaviors are valid communication? aware of nonverbal nonspeaking people who may never use AAC fluently even with best support?

aware of technically verbal but very limited verbal autistics who may only able say wants & needs but not other things and certainly not online advocacy, “despite being verbal”?

aware of just how much our life depends on caregiver/carer/PCA/etc? aware how vulnerable that make us? aware of abuse from caregivers? aware of caregiver burnout from lack of support for caregivers, & how that impact our care we receive? have you even heard of term respite care? aware of those of us who cannot separate ourselves from caregiver? aware of those of us who cannot participate in autism community without caregiver?

aware of visibly autistic people? aware how we not automatically believed? aware how we often bear blunt of violence because we most easily identified target because we visible? aware visible =/= get support, aware that many those diagnosed severe who now adult so no longer qualify for services under 21 year old, languish in hospitals because nowhere to go? aware how long life saving necessary waitlists are? aware that even to this day parents have to fight school fight day service fight government fight insurance for them give their nonverbal nonspeaking child AAC & be properly taught how use it? actually, are you aware of how properly teach AAC to nonverbal nonspeaking, developmentally delayed child who may or may not have intellectual disability?

actually, aware of autistics with (correctly diagnosed) intellectual disability & how they make up big amount of autistic? aware of institutional systemic & legal impact of mental [r word] right & the human rights abuse justified using r word right? wait, you aware that r word come from old term for intellectual disability, that, actually, still in many laws because no one bothered updating, right? aware of what severe profound ID look like? and aware they real and they still human deserve education deserve life deserve care, yes?

aware of early diagnosis 20 30 or even 10 years ago, not same as now, even less resources & knowledge about autism now? aware that while gender race class 1000% impacted diagnoses, a lot of early diagnosed people early diagnosed because… they die without support unlocked by diagnosis, right? but also, aware that in old times, early diagnosis often did mean doom, not because autism bad or anything, but because severe lack of support & diagnosis can literally bar you from so many things including basic education?

aware that for many people in special education, which impact specific group of autistic people, they not get degree when graduate high school, they just get certificate, which limit their educational & employment opportunities & others?

aware of life saving importance and necessity of masking for autistic of color especially Black autistic people, despite stress inducing traumatic? aware that live in broken system be victim of hate crime & police brutality just as traumatic often even more traumatic than masking? aware that many Black & other parents of color forced to teach their child masking because of this?

are you aware of most marginalized autistic people? aware of leadership of most impacted?

aware you can and need to care about autistic experiences & form of autism you not experience? aware that you can and need to do that without try twist your experience into our experience into our words our community?

aware that advocacy goes beyond about you?

aware that you can’t speak for all autistic? aware that you shouldn’t speak for all autistic?

are you aware of when you need to stop talking & listen & amplify others? aware of when and how to decenter self?

aware that even this long post, barely scratch surface? still so much to say?

[better worded version of original post]

[oatmilk-vampire]

Steve Harrington needed hearing aids.

He wasn't born needing them. In fact, he was just about as healthy as a young man in his social class could be. But numerous head injuries eventually led to gradually worsening hearing loss, leading him to needing mostly useless hearing aids.

His damage was so severe he actually needed cochlear implants but his parents kicked him out of their house and off of their insurance plan when he got caught kissing his teammate back in high school. With his minimum wage job and splitting rent with his roommate Robin, he currently did not make enough money for such a luxury.

So he did the next best thing: he learned ASL.

It was free, other than his time invested, and Robin was the one to suggest it. After all, she was already fluent in five languages and had been in band for twelve years. If anyone could teach herself and a hard of hearing person to sign, it was Robin Buckley.

The only bad part was, they were the only two who seemed to know the damn language, leaving Steve to strain to hear or read lips lest he get (mostly) silently yelled at by some deranged customer.

So when he spotted a guy around his age with long, dark curly hair and perfectly round black glasses with side shields, he knew he had to act.

He knew what it was like to have people gloss over the fact that you exist, or even berate you for it; so he took a page out of Robin's book.

He learned braille.

Sure, technically Steve could still speak to the boy, but wouldn't it be more special if he could read what Steve wanted to say?

So he practiced and practiced until he was happy, bringing the card to work where his crush appeared to be a regular.

As Steve sees him walk in, he knows today's the day.

⠓⠊ ⠊ ⠁⠍ ⠎⠞⠑⠧⠑ ⠎⠕⠗⠗⠽ ⠊⠋ ⠞⠓⠊⠎ ⠊⠎ ⠺⠑⠊⠗⠙ ⠃⠥⠞ ⠊ ⠚⠥⠎⠞ ⠺⠁⠝⠞⠑⠙ ⠞⠕ ⠎⠁⠽ ⠽⠕⠥ ⠁⠗⠑ ⠗⠑⠁⠇⠇⠽ ⠉⠥⠞⠑ ⠁⠝⠙ ⠊ ⠺⠕⠥⠇⠙ ⠇⠊⠅⠑ ⠞⠕ ⠁⠎⠅ ⠽⠕⠥ ⠕⠥⠞ ⠕⠝ ⠁ ⠙⠁⠞⠑

Hi I am Steve sorry if this is weird but I just wanted to say you are really cute and I would like to ask you out on a date

Steve is giddy when he wanders over to the boy in dark clothes. He had on black jeans that are ripped at the knees, a Metallica band tee, a leather jacket, and a denim battle vest. He's perfect. He's hot.

Steve's footsteps must be louder than he expects because the object of his affection immediately turns in his direction.

"Hi," Steve greets as he presses the thick stock paper into his hands.

The boy angles his head down with a frown as he traces an index finger over the raised dots, before looking right at Steve behind those dark frames.

He takes them off, and Steve learns after so long that his eyes are brown.

"I'm sorry," his crush says, Steve recognizing those syllables easy enough, "But I can't read this. What is it you're trying to say?"

But now that response is too much, Steve can't keep up. All he knows is the card he worked so carefully punching little holes in with a special tool he had to buy was now being pushed back into his hands.

Steve doesn't try to answer, he just wants to get the hell away before his tears spill over, but a hand on his shoulder stops him in his tracks.

He tenses, squeezes his eyes shut and braces for impact, but when a familiar hit doesn't land on his face, he cautiously opens his teary eyes to find him staring right at Steve.

"Are you okay?" He asks, but Steve can't be quite sure if he's checking on him or asking if he's gay.

Steve's own frown appears on his face as he points to his ears.

"Can't hear too good."

His mouth drops open, rushing to spiel something Steve doesn't catch. He must realize this because he's taking Steve's card back from him now as he mimics writing something with raised eyebrows.

Steve nods his head, more confused that the guy he thought was blind seemed to be understanding him perfectly.

He fishes out the little pad of paper and pen he keeps with him for moments not quite like this, passing the two items over.

He scribbles for a moment before letting Steve read what he's written in big loopy letters.

Hi, I'm Eddie. Sorry, I can't read braille. What did you say?

Steve furrows his brows.

I thought you might know it. Aren't you blind?

Eddie shakes his head with a little smile.

The glasses? I have killer migraines. Never go anywhere without them.

Steve smacks himself in the face. He's been such a fool!

Eddie taps him to gain his attention once more before handing him the notepad and pen.

What did you say? I'd like to know :)

Steve worries his bottom lip.

Hi I'm Steve. Sorry if this is weird but I just wanted to say you're really cute and I would like to ask you out on a date

He's nervous as he hands it back, but Eddie's wide grin and eager nod does wonders to knock back those worries.

I thought you'd never ask, Steve.

[gemsalive]

re: that HEFTY siffrin sweep on id5’s isat favourite blorbos poll — this might sound silly but i do actually think it’s kinda fascinating that isat, as a game so inseparably steeped in (for lack of a better way to describe it) queer fandom culture, managed to so completely sidestep the common Fandom Phenomenon that i suspect was behind the poll in the first place by creating a main character that is also overwhelmingly the fan favourite character for once.

obviously there are any number of factors we could point at to explain the extent to which siffrin nomiddlenames nolastnames manages to grab people and absolutely not let go, but personally i think one of the most interesting ones to consider is the one specific to the medium — that is, how siffrin subverts the “silent blank slate video game protagonist” archetype in such a way that happens to be primo brainrot breeding grounds.

like, when a video game dev makes a silent protagonist it’s usually a bid to maximize immersion by closing the aesthetic distance between player and character as much as possible, right? which is especially true of rpg video games — players find connection in the generic, as that is what gives you the freedom of motion to insert yourself into the story in whatever unique shape suits you best. you are your character and your character is you.

(as ever, post ran long. yall know the drill. tossin in a quick header pic before thoughts on blank slates & blorboification continue under the cut)

and then you’ve got siffrin, who is expressly pointed out to be the taciturn type; who when initially giving the player exposition about their journey so far doesn’t seem to hint at a life or history or even really any motivations outside the journey; whose every thought and action is narrated in second person so as to keep tracing and re-tracing the connection between him and you.

even their design — all darkless and shapeless, bundled up in that big cloak, as if an invitation for you to fill it in with whatever lets you relate to them most! at this point they are their own character for sure, but they also have enough very clear parallels going on with the silent protagonist archetype to feel more than accidental.

of course, as you keep playing you start to recognize that his blankness is much, much more than just a grab at immersion; his apparent lack of backstory, itself a fundamental piece of backstory. this is where he flips dramatically in the player’s perception from “generic vessel for story delivery” to “thoroughly multidimensional character trapped within endless torment nexus custom-built to target and exacerbate all his very specific worst traits rooted in very specific traumas”.

yknow, the good stuff !

but by then you have also been playing enough to be feeling the effects of the thing isat’s design does best of all. i’m talkin bout that ludonarrative lockstep baby. every piece of isat’s gameplay is designed to make you feel what siffrin is feeling — you understand by now that he is not a stand-in for you, but all the same you share in his frustration, his grief, his rare moments of joy and the subsequent heart-in-your-shoes devastation when that joy is inevitably poisoned — and through it all, the desperate grasping for anything new — all as if they were every bit your own.

so in this way the connection is maintained, even if you were someone for whom siffrin’s particular traits & struggles might not otherwise cause you relate to them at all if you had encountered them elsewhere, in a setting where you weren’t actively controlling them as a player. siffrin still gets to carry all the “just like me fr” impact of the blank slate protagonist in the tropes he embodies and in the game mechanics’ design, while totally free to evolve completely into his own character and keep you relating to closely them all the same. now toss back in the fact that said traits & struggles very much ARE of a flavour that a great many people Would Tend To Relate To and just like that you’ve got a perfect storm cookin.

too individual and compellingly written to be an empty vessel for plot delivery. too closely connected with the player’s emotional state to be a story observed impassively from the outside. he has 92 mental illnesses and for the low low price of free u can give him yours to carry too. nobody is doin it like him. congratulations on your well-deserved nose sniffrin nomiddlenames nolastnames <3

[not-terezi-pyrope]

Often when I post an AI-neutral or AI-positive take on an anti-AI post I get blocked, so I wanted to make my own post to share my thoughts on "Nightshade", the new adversarial data poisoning attack that the Glaze people have come out with.

I've read the paper and here are my takeaways:

Firstly, this is not necessarily or primarily a tool for artists to "coat" their images like Glaze; in fact, Nightshade works best when applied to sort of carefully selected "archetypal" images, ideally ones that were already generated using generative AI using a prompt for the generic concept to be attacked (which is what the authors did in their paper). Also, the image has to be explicitly paired with a specific text caption optimized to have the most impact, which would make it pretty annoying for individual artists to deploy.

While the intent of Nightshade is to have maximum impact with minimal data poisoning, in order to attack a large model there would have to be many thousands of samples in the training data. Obviously if you have a webpage that you created specifically to host a massive gallery poisoned images, that can be fairly easily blacklisted, so you'd have to have a lot of patience and resources in order to hide these enough so they proliferate into the training datasets of major models.

The main use case for this as suggested by the authors is to protect specific copyrights. The example they use is that of Disney specifically releasing a lot of poisoned images of Mickey Mouse to prevent people generating art of him. As a large company like Disney would be more likely to have the resources to seed Nightshade images at scale, this sounds like the most plausible large scale use case for me, even if web artists could crowdsource some sort of similar generic campaign.

Either way, the optimal use case of "large organization repeatedly using generative AI models to create images, then running through another resource heavy AI model to corrupt them, then hiding them on the open web, to protect specific concepts and copyrights" doesn't sound like the big win for freedom of expression that people are going to pretend it is. This is the case for a lot of discussion around AI and I wish people would stop flagwaving for corporate copyright protections, but whatever.

The panic about AI resource use in terms of power/water is mostly bunk (AI training is done once per large model, and in terms of industrial production processes, using a single airliner flight's worth of carbon output for an industrial model that can then be used indefinitely to do useful work seems like a small fry in comparison to all the other nonsense that humanity wastes power on). However, given that deploying this at scale would be a huge compute sink, it's ironic to see anti-AI activists for that is a talking point hyping this up so much.

In terms of actual attack effectiveness; like Glaze, this once again relies on analysis of the feature space of current public models such as Stable Diffusion. This means that effectiveness is reduced on other models with differing architectures and training sets. However, also like Glaze, it looks like the overall "world feature space" that generative models fit to is generalisable enough that this attack will work across models.

That means that if this does get deployed at scale, it could definitely fuck with a lot of current systems. That said, once again, it'd likely have a bigger effect on indie and open source generation projects than the massive corporate monoliths who are probably working to secure proprietary data sets, like I believe Adobe Firefly did. I don't like how these attacks concentrate the power up.

The generalisation of the attack doesn't mean that this can't be defended against, but it does mean that you'd likely need to invest in bespoke measures; e.g. specifically training a detector on a large dataset of Nightshade poison in order to filter them out, spending more time and labour curating your input dataset, or designing radically different architectures that don't produce a comparably similar virtual feature space. I.e. the effect of this being used at scale wouldn't eliminate "AI art", but it could potentially cause a headache for people all around and limit accessibility for hobbyists (although presumably curated datasets would trickle down eventually).

All in all a bit of a dick move that will make things harder for people in general, but I suppose that's the point, and what people who want to deploy this at scale are aiming for. I suppose with public data scraping that sort of thing is fair game I guess.

Additionally, since making my first reply I've had a look at their website:

Used responsibly, Nightshade can help deter model trainers who disregard copyrights, opt-out lists, and do-not-scrape/robots.txt directives. It does not rely on the kindness of model trainers, but instead associates a small incremental price on each piece of data scraped and trained without authorization. Nightshade's goal is not to break models, but to increase the cost of training on unlicensed data, such that licensing images from their creators becomes a viable alternative.

Once again we see that the intended impact of Nightshade is not to eliminate generative AI but to make it infeasible for models to be created and trained by without a corporate money-bag to pay licensing fees for guaranteed clean data. I generally feel that this focuses power upwards and is overall a bad move. If anything, this sort of model, where only large corporations can create and control AI tools, will do nothing to help counter the economic displacement without worker protection that is the real issue with AI systems deployment, but will exacerbate the problem of the benefits of those systems being more constrained to said large corporations.

Kinda sucks how that gets pushed through by lying to small artists about the importance of copyright law for their own small-scale works (ignoring the fact that processing derived metadata from web images is pretty damn clearly a fair use application).

[yumeka-sxf]

According to this tweet from Endo, today's new chapter will be the final installment of the "Henry x Martha backstory" arc...and it definitely went out on a high note! The part where Martha meets Henry's wife was absolutely heartbreaking...in particular the below page, starting with an upside down view of the scene, showing how the world is literally warping for Martha, followed by shards and shreds of her various memories with Henry, all the while the "throb, throb" of her heart is overlaying all the panels. Definitely one of Endo's best portrayals of a truly shocking moment.

It's also interesting that we never see Lucia's face, despite her having a big panel when she first appears.

Endo has done this before with other characters, Loid's parents being the other big example. We also never see their faces, despite them appearing several times during his flashback arc.

With the few examples we've had, to me it seems like Endo hides the faces of characters who 1) appear as flashbacks only and 2) who have had a significant emotional impact on the character whose memories they appear in, but at the same time, that character has since done their best to get over the painful memories associated with them. So they basically represent some past trauma for the character (even if they don't necessarily dislike them) but in the current time, they've more or less left that part of their past behind. Hence why their faces are obscured in the character's memories. This is also why I think we'll never see Loid's parents or Lucia's faces outside of flashbacks. This is just my interpretation of course, and I'm curious if there will be more examples in other characters' flashback arcs.

But back to Henry and Martha, I also liked the fact that, despite her broken heart, Martha still saw Lucia as a good person and became friends with her. Henry seems to love her as well. This actually ties back very well to what Martha tells Becky at the end of her story about how dangerous it is to latch onto preconceptions and prejudices without knowing the truth.

In Becky's simple world, she would see Lucia as the "evil seductress who stole Henry away" and Martha has to get him back. But as Martha said, things aren't always that simple and don't always adhere to our preconceived notions. Sometimes things can't end up exactly how you want or expect, so you have to be grateful for what you have and see things as they truly are, despite living with lingering regrets. In fact, this whole speech from Martha at the conclusion of her flashback was extremely deep and profound. Not many people can write both comedy and drama so well, but Endo is certainly one of them.

Also, is this Wiesel's first appearance? Still waiting for the doggy play date chapter with Wiesel, Bond, Max, and Aaron! 🐶

Since it's been so long since I read the first chapter of this arc, I couldn't remember if Martha had actually revealed the identity of her lover in her story, but makes sense that she didn't. I can imagine Becky storming into school yelling at Henderson and causing total embarrassment for all 😅 Funny that she almost guessed correctly though.

I'm surprised we never found out how Martha started working for the Blackbells, but that's an easy enough mystery to solve - she needed work after the wars were over, and being a bodyguard suited an ex-soldier. Also seems like she never told Henry her true feelings either...maybe by the time Lucia died, it was too late and they had both grown somewhat apart by then, and/or they had some additional falling outs about Martha joining the other wars, etc. It just wasn't meant to be and the message of the story was Martha coming to terms with that and being wiser for it.

In conclusion, this was a great arc that really shows Endo's range as a writer who can do both comedy and drama very well. Despite Henry and Martha being side characters, I have a feeling that the struggles they experienced will have relevance later in the series. But for now, I look forward to seeing the Forgers and other characters again (and getting back to the last major uproar of Anya telling Damian about her powers...seems like ages ago, lol). Endo will be taking a well deserved break, so the next new chapter will be on August 19th!

I also have some new posts planned in the coming weeks, so stay tuned for those as well 😀

[art]

Creator Spotlight: GDBee Art (@prinnay)

Geneva Bowers is inspired by the wonders of the natural world around us, and enjoys manipulating colors to create art full of mood and feelings.

Check out our interview with Geneva below!

How did you get started with art? Did you originally have a background in art?

I’m going to say yes because that’s all I’ve known how to do. It started because I wanted to draw better horses than my sister, and it just spiraled from there. People started asking me to draw things because they saw me drawing horses. I was like, well, I can draw things that aren’t horses, and then it was just kind of all I did. 

Have you ever had an art block? If so, how did you overcome it?

I have one right now! Honestly, with time, and I also collect art books; I think I have a couple hundred. If I really want to draw something, then I just flip through those and try to steal some ideas.

Which three famous artists (dead or alive) would you invite to your dinner party?

I mean, of course Van Gogh…I’m really inspired by Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, so I would invite Van Gogh, Monet, and Julie Dillon to a dinner party.

Have you ever wanted to dive into another medium before?

Yeah, actually, I currently am! I’m trying to do more traditional painting. I used to do a lot of acrylics, but I haven’t done it in years, and now I’m kind of bad at it. I’m trying to get into actual impressionistic art with oils and oil pastels. I’m like failing, but you know, you get there. Just fail until it looks presentable. 

If there is one thing you want your audience to remember about your work, what would it be?

I guess it’s more of a feeling. I create art because I’m inspired by things around me, like certain video games. For example, I have been inspired by a Japanese RPG called Chrono Cross on PlayStation 1. They make me feel a certain type of inspiration to create something, so that’s kind of like what I’m hoping to leave behind. 

Have any of your projects surprised you with their outcome?

Yeah! I did this Weapon Faerie series where I took three prompts: a weapon, a winged insect, and an herb, which I combined to make different characters. So, a faerie with a spiked club or a butterfly faerie with a katana. I made 13 of those, and they kind of took off! I wasn’t expecting that at all.

What is the hardest part of your process?

My whole art style is coloring, like the way it’s colored… but I hate the coloring process, haha. I like doing the color combos, but I don’t like the blending and shading. That takes like one-trillion years. It’s the part where I’m most likely to give up. You know how art kind of looks ugly before it looks good? I’m trying to trust that process. 

What do you wish you knew when you started creating art that you know now?

I guess one big thing would be knowing how to use lights and darks. When I do color, it is definitely colorful, but when you switch it to black and white, you see that everything’s the same tone of gray. I’ve learned that if you just use some brighter colors and some darker shades, you create a bigger impact in the end. So, now, when I paint something digital, I make it black and white for a moment to see where all the hues are, and if something is weirdly dark or not dark enough, I can change it.

Who on Tumblr inspires you and why?

Oh, @feefal definitely inspires me. She does a lot of spooky art.

[cy-cyborg]

Toph Beifong doesn’t hold up as disability representation - Disability in the Media

[ID: A screenshot of Toph, a twelve-year-old girl with black hair in a loose, green and tan short-sleeve shirt and shorts, cheering in an arena. Next to text written in a rough, blocky font: "Disability in Media - Toph Beifong Doesn't hold up as disability representation" /End ID]

Avatar the Last Airbender is one of my all-time favourite TV-shows, and Toph is still easily one of my favourite members of Team Avatar. I was a few years younger than Toph when the show first started airing, and being a disabled kid who was into martial arts, constantly being dismissed by my able-bodied opponents and teachers, meant that I connected very strongly with her right from the get-go.

But upon my last couple of rewatches of the series, I began to come to the realisation that my opinions on Toph as a shining example of good disability representation were... well, pretty heavily influenced by my nostalgia for the show and that many aspects of Toph's character just don't hold up today. Which, honestly is fair, the show is nearly 19 years old (if it were a person in my country, it would be old enough to drink) and I think it's pretty ridiculous to expect every part of every character from an 19 year old show to age well. So today I wanted to talk about the things I think Avatar the original Last Airbender did right with Toph, where I think they missed the mark, and what changes I think would need to be made to Toph to make her work for a modern audience.

So let's start with why I think Toph doesn't really hold up as "good disability representation" today, and the elements of her character that just haven't aged as well.

For me, one of the biggest issues I noticed upon rewatching the show, is how often we are told (often by Toph herself) that she is blind, but how infrequently we are actually shown it's impact on her life beyond her bending or outside of jokey contexts. Outside of her bending, we only ever see her blindness impacting her ability to do things like read or write, otherwise, she functionally has full vision -so far as the audience is informed - with the only exceptions being when she's in the air or water (e.g. on Appa or in the submarines) or in loose soil (e.g. the desert). Having places and circumstances where she doesn't have access to her power that allows her to "see" was a step in the right direction, but I do think it would have been better if her seismic sense wasn't quite as accurate, even in the most ideal of circumstances.

But why? Well, I think Suki explains it really well, long before Toph is even introduced. when Sokka says "I should have seen you as a warrior instead of a girl" Suki stops him and says "I am a warrior, but I'm also a girl". Being a warrior and a woman are both important parts of Suki's character, and only recognising her as one or the other means ignoring a big part of who she is, and the same is true for Toph. Being blind is a big part of toph's character that has informed a lot of her life, but so is being a warrior and bending master. Many people see Toph as a warrior or fighter, but ignore her disability, but both are important. She's disabled, and a warrior, and those things don't cancel each other out, the same way being a warrior doesn't diminish Suki's status as a woman.

When the show was still airing though (and even still today) it was very common to see non-disabled fans of the show exclaiming that they honestly forget that Toph is even blind sometimes, with many people going so far as to say that she's not even disabled (and that this was a good thing). While I do think some of that comes from the fact they weren't used to seeing a disabled character as both disabled and an active participant in these kinds of stories, I do think this mostly happened because of the show's lack of, well, showing the impact of her blindness on her daily life and allowing her earthbending and seismic sense to erase the effects of her disability to some extent. It's much harder to forget a character is blind when it impacts their daily life in ways that are shown to the audience. This doesn't have to be in big, showy ways mind you, showing things subtly but consistently works way better than one "very special episode" type setup.

In the show as it is though, the seismic sense functionally gives Toph a perfect image of her surroundings until it's just not available anymore for *plot reasons*.

[ID: A black and white shot of Toph and how she sees the oponent she's fighting, with shockwaves radiating from him towards her to indicate how she's interpreting the scene. Her foe has jumped into the air and now has his hand dug into the ground of an arena, about to launch rocks towards her. /End ID]

In many ways, her picture of the world is better and clearer than what the non-disabled characters can see, leading to this feeling of her disability being erased. It may have been better though if the seismic sense could give her a general idea of big things in her immediate vicinity but she still missed the finer details, functioning at least a little bit more like a tactile/earthy-vibration version of the limited sight some legally-blind people have in real life. Things like a person's position, movement and overall pose would still be "visible" to her in a general sense, as well as big things in the environment (including things underground, since there are a few plot-points that require that), but smaller things like details about objects and creatures, people's facial expressions or what they're doing with parts of their body that have no direct contact with the ground (like their hands) is less clear. On top of this, she may struggle to detect smaller, lighter objects or creatures that realistically wouldn't cause much of a vibration at all. creatures as small and as light as Momo and Hawky for example might be detectable, but "fuzzy" to her, and anything smaller might make enough of a vibration to tell her it's there when it moves, but not enough for her to be able to tell what specifically it is without some other cue (such as sound). There are a few moments in the show that seem to imply this is what they were initially going for, but it's not really consistent, and is directly contradicted in her debut episode, "the blind bandit" when she explains that she can even "see" something as small as the ants off in the distance.

[ID: A shot of Aang, a twelve-year-old bald boy with an arrow tattoo on his head, dressed in a yellow and orange outfit, standing with Toph at night. In the foreground is an anthill will a trail of ants, which Aang is looking for. /End ID]

With an adjustment like what I'm suggesting though, she still serves her narrative purpose of teaching Aang the importance of being able to wait and listen - possibly even more so, as her needing to wait and collect more information in order to get a clearer image before striking, would back-up what Bumi tells Aang that he needs in an earth bending master. It would also still help to illustrate the connectedness of the world, a theme Toph continues to embody heavily in The Legend of Korra, while still showing the ways her disability impacts her more frequently.

When I talked about the "super-crip" trope a while back, I mentioned that one way to avoid the more harmful elements of the trope (where the character's disability is erased by their powers) is to use the ability in question more like a mobility or disability aid than a straight-up cure. The power should help them, but shouldn't make their disability redundant. People are creative and we would find ways to use a superpower or magic to help with our disabilities if it were available in real life, but what's the point of including a disabled character if you're just going to functionally erase their disability? For a character like Toph, I think this is the kind of approach that should be taken with her. Her seismic sense still helps her, but it's not a perfect replacement. (Ironically, I did use Toph as a "good" example of that trope, but I do think after this last rewatch, for the reasons I'm discussing here, I might have to backtrack that a bit).

I considered giving an alternative approach here, to keep the sensitivity of toph's seismic sense as it is in the show as is, but giving it draw-backs such as making her susceptible to sensory overload similar to what autistic people experience. However, while replacing one disability with another can work for some characters and stories, I don't think it's the best adjustment to make for Toph or any blind character, largely thanks to this also being a trope. The "blind (or d/Deaf) person who's other senses become super-human to make up for it" trope is very common in fantasy, sci-fi as well as older martial arts films, and while I'm not really the best person to cover it, I do know that members of both the blind and deaf communities have expressed a lot of frustration with it. Toph already falls into this trope quite a bit, and any suggestions I could make would have just dialled that element up to 11, and fixing one problem with another is never a good idea.

Another thing that actually did bug me for a while, even before my most recent rewatch of the show, is how Toph is treated on the rare occasions she does point out something won't working for her. There are a number of times where Toph advocates for herself and points out that something The Gaang is doing isn't accessible to her or sets a boundary to do with her disability, and she's either left behind, her concerns are brushed off or she's ignored entirely. The three most noticeable examples of this are in the Episodes "The Ember Island Players," "The Library," and Toph and Katara's segment of "Tales of Ba Sing Se."

In the Ember Island Players, Toph complains that the seats they have for the play are too high up and too far away, and she's unable to "see" what's happening on stage. Her friends don't really take any notice of her though except for Katara who tells her not to worry, "I'll tell your feet what's happening."

[ID: A shot of Katara, a fourteen-year-old girl with long brown hair and blue eyes, sitting with Toph, who is sitting with her arms crossed, annoying in a theatre seat. Both Toph and Katara are wearing red and gold, fire-themed outfits. Katara is looking at something off-screen. /End ID]

My problem here is that this particular kind of situation is something that is familiar to a lot of disabled people. Even the least independent disabled people I know get annoyed when their access needs or requests for accommodations, even among friends, are ignored and their pushback is brushed off with "don't worry, I'll just help you!" It's one of the first things that many disabled people tell non-disabled folks wishing to be better allies to us: you offering help instead of actually accommodating us isn't a good thing. We don't want to rely on others if we can avoid it, because honestly, non-disabled people often aren't very good at actually helping or in this case, relaying information to us without training and more often than not, it just results in us being left out. I find it very hard to believe a character as independent as Toph would accept that without any protest, especially considering that is pretty much exactly what ends up happening (even if the show didn't really acknowledge it). Katara never actually conveys anything about the play to Toph, except when she's attempting to throw Toph's words back in her face when she asks for clarification about the actor playing her - which ends up backfiring on her.

[ID: A shot from the same location as before, this time Toph has a huge smile on her face and is leaning on the balcony excitedly while Katara is leaning towards her, annoyed by her reaction. /End ID]

While it would have been better if Toph was actually listened to, it would have been…fine? if a justification was given for why they had to sit there (e.g. to avoid being recognised), if Katara had actually described the play for her. This wouldn't have been ideal, but it would have been better at least. In real life, many movies, TV shows (including this show's sequel series, The Legend of Korra) and other forms of visual media have an Audio Description track that does exactly that. If they weren't going to move for Toph to be able to see better, having Katara describe the play could have introduced kids to the fact this is an option. but instead it's brushed off, and I'll admit, it left a bit of a bad taste in my mouth, even back in 2006.

The Library is a bit more forgivable in my opinion, since Toph is still new to the group, but in this episode, she states that she doesn't want to go inside the spirit library because she isn't able to read and therefor there wouldn't be anything for her to do. However, it still would have been nice to see her friends consider this at all before they actually arrived. They could have (and should have) still gone, but some acknowledgement that they at least thought about the inclusion of their disabled friend would have been nice.

[ID: A shot of Aang, Katara, Sokka and another man are talking while looking down at a map on the table. Meanwhile, Toph is sitting on the other side of the table, completely disinterested as she sips from a large ice cup with her feet up on another chair. /End ID]

Alternatively, I do feel like Wan Shi Tong, a self-proclaimed all-knowing-spirit or his assistants would have been able to point her in the direction of something to interest her, since he does imply books aren't the only form of knowledge he collects.

The reason I mention this though is two-fold. In real life, disabled people are very often left out of "fun" group activities, whether that be in formal settings or in casual ones, like hanging out with friends. If the episode had been framed as "the Gaang learns about the library and decides to track it down," I might have been less critical, but it's specifically framed as something that at least starts out as a kind of break for the team where they all take turns picking out fun things to do so they can rest, and Toph's access needs not being considered at all until they're already there hits a bit close to home, especially since they just end up leaving her outside. Secondly, there's also a stereotype that disabled people (and especially blind people) don't belong in academia and places of learning, such as in this case, libraries. This stereotype is about as old as the concept of organised institutions of learning, and definitely isn't unique to AtLA, but the assumption is often that disabled people wouldn't be interested in more formal methods of learning, so it's not worth accommodating us. With blind people in particular, when I've seen this in media, the premise is often "well I can't read anyway so why bother?" which Toph definitely falls into here with no push-back against the trope.

[ID: A close up of Toph and the rest of the group, Katara, Sokka and Aang standing in a desert. Toph shrugs, looking bored, while the others looks confused and surprised with the exception of Katara, who looks mildly annoyed, standing with her hands on her hips. /End ID]

It does make sense that she would have been resistant to going in, and I'm not saying this episode should have turned Toph into a bookwork akin to Wings of Fire's Starflight (another blind character) or anything. But there was a chance in this episode to push back against some of these assumptions, and I think it's a shame they missed it. How cool would it have been if Toph had mentioned not feeling welcomed in more formal learning spaces because of her disability, which was just reinforced by the way her old earthbending instructor and her parents treated her. She decides to go inside the library anyway as "backup" in case something goes wrong, grumbling about it the whole way down. Wan She Tong starts his introduction mostly the same way, saying humans aren't welcome and Toph makes a snarky comment about it. Wan She Tong, equally offended that this human thinks he, the all-knowing-spirit, wouldn't have considered something, shoots back with an annoyed comment about humans being so self-centred. He explains that spirits come in all shapes and sizes, and not all of them have eyes, but they can still access his library. She's not the first sightless being in his study, and he-who-knows-ten-thousand-things knows this too. Once everyone is permitted entry, one of the knowledge seekers shows her to a series of slates about a lost earthbending form that she can actually read (or at least, "see" the pictures on) because it's carved. Or instead of a slate, it's a series of statues outlining the form, similar to what Aang and Zuko find in the episode "The Firebending Masters". Perhaps this form is something that helps her develop metal bending later on, and lays the groundwork for Toph becoming interested in teaching in the comics.

And finally, Toph and Katara's segment of Tales of Ba Sing Se. Katara convinces Toph to go get a makeover with her as part of a girl's day. Overall, this segment of the episode is pretty nice, and I liked that they showed that a person's gender expression (in this case, being a tom-boy) doesn't mean they can't like things outside of what we usually associate with that. Tom-boys can like girly things on occasion, and vice-versa, and I think this is an example of an episode that would seem a bit ham-fisted today, but honestly, was needed in 2006. However, there's a throw away joke where Toph says "as long as they don't touch my feet," and it immediately cuts to show spa workers filing down the calluses on her feet in a way so painful several staff are required to hold her down.

[ID: An image of Toph in a bath robe being held down in a chair by two spa workers while a third scrubs at her feet so hard that she is sweating. Meanwhile Toph is fighting against the two holding her down and has a facial expression like she is in a great deal of pain. /End ID]

this might be a minor thing in the grand scheme of the show, but it's still another example of Toph's boundaries about her disability and her access needs being disrespected by her friends, which the show just doesn't acknowledge it at all. People ignoring Toph's wishes about a part of her body she depends on in a much more direct way that others do is played off like a joke in a montage of otherwise enjoyable and goofy activities and this is a very, very common experience in disability circles.

There are a number of other, much more minor issues that show up with Toph as well, such as the fact she's the only one of the main cast who never has an on-screen (or on-page) relationship. not in the original show, not in any of the comics and not in The Legend of Korra. Again, it's not a big issue on it's own, especially because in AtLA, she's young enough where it's possible that she was just not interested yet, and she does have kids in The Legend of Korra where she mentions a relationship with a man named Kanto (Lin's father). So it is implied she does have some form of relationship eventually, but the issue is that it's never shown on screen or on the page. This feeds into a wider pattern in media of disabled characters being the only ones in their respective cast not given on-screen romantic relationships in stories, and so I still think it's worth pointing out, especially since the creators have had a lot of opportunities to correct that by now.

Toph is also portrayed, pretty much undeniably, as the best earthbener in a way that, at times, comes across almost like the creators felt like they need to compensate for her being on the team "despite" her being blind. This trope is one that I think Toph, at least partially, helped to popularise with the current generation of story tellers: The Disabled Savant. In this trope, disabled characters aren't really given the same room for growth as other characters; they aren't permitted to be average or still learning, they start good and get better. If they do progress, they often become the best, which is the case for Toph. To be fair, everyone in the The Gaang is the best at their respective skill by the end of the first series, which is why I say this is a minor point. She dose, however, have the least amount of on-screen growth in skill out of the whole team. Katara starts out barely able to lift any water at all, let alone actually bend it. Sokka is skilled with weapons from the start but does get his butt handed to him a number of times by others with more experience than him whom he learns from throughout his story arc. Zuko spends most of the early-to-middle of the show having things "blow up in his face" (to use his own words) and being belittled by his family of prodigies. While Aang is an airbending and, to a lesser extent, waterbending prodigy, he fails at pretty much everything else for a while before he starts to find his confidence - especially earth and firebending, not to mention the entire situation with locking himself out of the Avatar state. Toph is the only one who doesn't seem to fail or struggle all that much from a combat perspective. She does grow and improve in her bending (she invents metal bending after all) but she never has any moments where she really messes up or even struggles in combat all that much compared to the others.

All of these points and criticisms I've mentioned are not necessarily big in and of themselves, but when looked at together, they build up to create some issues with how Toph is depicted and how the people around her treat her disability

So that's it then? Toph is bad disability rep and Avatar should be "cancelled"?

God no. Like I said at the start, I still adore Toph and Avatar as a whole, but the show is a year away from being two decades old, it's bound to have some elements that don't hold up and I think it's worthwhile discussing them, specifically because I love the show and it's characters. Despite all the negativity I've brought up, I do think there are a lot of things AtLA did well with Toph too.

I've mentioned a few times that we rarely see how Toph's blindness impacts her life outside of her bending and combat abilities, and there's a reason I made that specification. Unsurprisingly, if you know much about the show's development, the ways in which Toph’s blindness and seismic sense impacts her bending and fighting style is one area where the show really does shine, and I still think that is worth a mention. The various types of bending are based on different styles of martial arts, specifically, different types of Kung Fu. Most earthbending in the show takes heavy inspiration specifically from Hung Ga, but Toph is different. Her bending heavily references Southern Praying Mantis Kung Fu, something unique to her within this world.

The reason for this (outside of simply wanting her to be visually distinct) was because the show’s creators made sure to consider what limitations Toph might have and what parts of the more common earthbending styles wouldn't work for her. Since her connection to the earth was critical in order for her seismic sense to work, they decided on a style that would keep her feet on the ground more, prioritised strong stances with minimal jumping and put more focus on attacking with her upper body. While not an intentional choice, the style they went with for Toph, according to the show's head martial arts consultant, Sifu Kisu, was supposedly developed by a blind woman in real life, at least according to legend. The creators also made further adjustments to the style with the help of martial arts consultants and just watching Toph fight is evident that a lot of love and care was put into the decisions made on that front.

I also appreciate that Toph's disability wasn't off-limits to joke about.

[ID: A picture of Toph waving her hand in front of her face with an exaggerated smile to remind the others she's blind. /End ID]

As I already mentioned, they didn't land 100% of the time, but lot of shows are afraid to use disability as a source of jokes, which would have felt weird and out of place in a show like Avatar. I see this hesitance in real-life too; people get extremely uncomfortable when I joke about my own disabilities and I've heard several people and even disabled comedians talk about the same observation. My last video on Tik Tok that got outside my usual audience was a joke about my prosthetic leg, and every single stictch and duet I received was people saying some variation of "I'm such a bad person for laughing!" "I'm going to hell!" or just straight up asking if they're aloud to laugh. If I didn't want you to laugh, I wouldn't have posted the joke! But joking about disability does make it more approachable. Despite how often Toph and the others made blind jokes though, outside of the one instance I mentioned earlier, they never felt mean-spirited or like they were punching down. Even when a very sleep-deprived Katara was intentionally trying to be.

I think it's also worth keeping in mind the context of the media landscape when Avatar The Last Airbender was airing. Today, characters like Toph are very common, so much so there's a whole trope about them (super-crips) but at the time, having a character with a major disability be a main character in an action-orientated kids show like Avatar was really rare. She wasn't the first of course, but a lot of the time, if they were included, they were almost certainly sad and depressed, wishing for a cure or they were designated to the roles of "Guy in the chair" (which is a character, usually a tech person, who helps from the background), inspiration, scary villain fake-out (or other variations of "creepy" character) or the actual villain. Having a character that was not only comfortable in her skin as a disabled person, who didn't want or need to be "fixed" or "cured" to be directly involved in the story, and who's main obstacle (at least in season 2) were how the people around her treated her, was pretty ground-breaking at the time (pun not intended) and went against the most prevalent stereotypes of it's day.

And I really want to emphasise that. For many Millennials and older Gen Zers, myself included, Toph was the first character that didn't tell us we were broken and needed to be fixed in order to be part of the group (even if they slipped up with that messaging occasionally). Prior to seeing Avatar, I honestly thought there was something deeply wrong with me for being happy with my life (a reminder, I was 10 years old when this show first started airing), because every other disabled person in the media only ever talked about how much worse their life was because of their disability, how much they hated it and how much they hated themselves. Many outright said that they wished they had died rather than become like me. Toph wasn't the first to go against those tropes, but she was the first example of a disabled character who wasn't like that many people my age saw. Did she do it perfectly? Hell no, but personally, back then, I was happy to have a character who maybe over-corrected and took things a bit too far than another sad character talking about how lives like mine weren't worth living.

I also deeply appreciated that Toph did struggle with her independence, at least initially, and where to draw the line with accepting help. Because of how much she'd been coddled and overprotected as a little kid, she saw any attempt at people being helpful and working as a team as them trying to baby her. It was very on the nose, but I liked that the show gave her an episode just dedicated to realising that it's ok to accept help. Again, this is a bit of a story telling trope today, but having the disabled character realise that it's ok to accept help, and to do it without talking down to them or saying that them wanting independence was bad, was a refreshing change compared to what was around at the time.

[ID: a zoomed out image of Toph, standing before her parents with Aang, Katara and Sokka standing behind her. /End ID]

While I think the show's creators could have benefited from consulting with disabled people and specifically blind people the same way they brought in consultants for the martial arts featured in the show, it's very clear to me that the intention behind Toph's character was good, and that actual effort was put in to make sure they depicted her well, even if some of it was a bit misplaced. It's also worth noting that the groundwork for a lot of my suggestions is already in place, they just didn't follow it all the way through. Overall, I'd say Toph was good for her time, and she's what was needed in the 2000's, even if she doesn't hold up as well today. I also think it speaks to how far we've come in terms of disability representation. When I first started engaging with the online fandom directly, almost no one, even other disabled people, argued that Toph wasn't good representation, because honestly, the bar was on the floor and we were just happy to have something different. But now there are options, and the standards are higher, and that's so, so good. It means that people, even in the media, are starting to listen and be more thoughtful about their depictions of disability than we were in 2006.

And finally, I want to really quickly mention The Netflix adaptation of Avatar. A few people have asked me now what I think they should do with Toph when they get to her, and what my predictions about the show are. I'm not going to talk about my predictions here, because this post is already way too long and that's not what this is about, but I don't think the suggestions I made today would necessarily work in this particular remake, primarily because of the tonal differences. Some adjustments definitely could, such the other characters doing a better job at listening to Toph when she points out inaccessibility and them actually considering her in the first place, but others might be harder to balance. The original show could get quite dark and serious at times, but it was primarily a light-hearted adventure story for kids. From what I've seen of the live action remake though, they're more heavily leaning into those serious elements - for better or for worse, and as such, trying to tone Toph down in the specific ways I mentioned might not balance out as well as it would in the original show. At the very least, the specifics would need to be different. To be honest, I'm not entirely sure what approach they should take, that's not really the point of this post, but I did want to quickly address it to avoid confusion. My suggestions today were specifically on how to approach the cartoon version of Toph for a modern audience, and were not meant to be read as suggestions on how her live-action counterpart should be depicted.

[cindol]

hi!! idk if your reqs r open but can I req the jjk men’s fav kinks?

JJK MEN AND THEIR FAVORITE KINKSᯓ★ !

tw — smut,consent is given before hand in all scenarios, choso’s part is really rushed,

cw ꒱ ! — sub choso, choso is blindfolded, spanking, gojo is a little mean, gojo ties reader’s hands, pussy eating, sukuna is a clan leader, sukuna fucks reader in front of people, nanami’s hands and legs are tied,

synopsis — jujutsu kaisen men and their favorite kinks .

a / n : my inbox is very much open ! I guess I ain’t make it seem like it is but it’s very much open for request and any questions y’all ! but I hope u enjoy annonie

CHOSO KAMO + PRAISE KINK + MOMMY KINK AND SENSATION PLAY !

At first he’ll whine at the confinements on his hands and eyes till he hears your soft voice in his ear.“shh.. relax baby, I’m right here.” while rubbing his thigh.

“mommy’s right here baby.” Hearing that makes the tips of his ears slightly flushed with a pink tint. He can’t even respond, just focused on your hands touching him from his thigh to his neck, placing gentle kisses on his neck down back to his chest.

Only moans and whimpers come from choso, when he’s in this state that’s all he can do instead of words. The only words coming from his mouth are.“mmph! Mommy please!” for the entirety of this. With how your wet lips touched and teased the tip of his dick he couldn’t be blamed for barely making coherent noises and words.

GOJO SATORU + IMPACT PLAY AND FOODPLAY!

Gojo loves impact play with you. Unlike some men who just like to spank their girl for punishment he does it for the fun of it. Seeing your ass turn a different slight shade from his spanking paddle as you were laid out on his lap satisfied him.

Hearing every gasp and moan come from you from each spank on your ass gets his familiar cocky laugh out of him. To give you a fake sense of comfort he rubs your ass in a smooth circle till he catches you off guard with a sharp spank again.“cmon babe you know me, I think you can take some more spanks.”

Food play is also a liking of his also. If he isn’t causing terror on your poor ass he’s treating you like his own dessert. His cherries, whipped cream and chocolate syrup never goes to waste.

On his bed you laid pretty on your back with your hands tied behind your back while gojo stood in front of you all he did was admire you with a whistle.”you look Mm.. how do they say in Spanish? Delicioso!”

His corny joke makes your cringe even in your restraints but he was right. On your body all drizzled on you was chocolate syrup from top to bottom, your tits having whipped cream topped with two blood cherry’s, even your private area having whip cream sprayed on top of it.

“You’re so childish satoru.. you’re lucky I actually love you enough to get this sticky ass sweet stuff on my body.”

Your words aren’t even being put into consideration for him, his eyes just on your body while he licked his lips like he found you delicious.“mhm mhm.. just let me eat you yeah?”

Before you respond he’s parting your legs,“artist gotta eat his art doesn’t he? Or however the hell it goes.” You just roll your eyes in a playful way at his corny joke.

The snarky expression on your face disappears once gojo licks a stripe of whipped creamed off your cunt making you gasp and squeeze at the bed sheets for some leverage for the mean time.

In big licks he licked stripes of the whipped cream off your pussy until he started to eat you out, making small kisses in between almost sloppy kissing your pussy.

Through your soft moans you tried speaking coherently but he made that difficult like he wanted to on purpose.“s-satoru slow down! or I might cum too early!”

satoru lifts his head only once to laugh.“exactly what the plan is.”

SUKUNA RYOMEN + EXHIBITIONISM !

a exhibitionism kink is a dangerous combo but it makes complete sense for a man like sukuna ryomen.

Ever since he saw how two of his clans men had a flustered face at one of the meetings at a visible rip in your kimono showing your thigh while you sat. It made him look more into kinks and he eventually discovered those kinks

He used the excuse of showing dominance to his clans men on what’s his but really he gets off on fucking the beloved woman of the clan knowing no other man could ever have this privilege.

In a spacious room usually used for clan meetings it’s instead used for erotic display of you. On the large stage as he fucked you with you arched on a soft cushion and one of your legs draped over his hip as support for his deep fucking of your wet cunt.

When he turned his head to see his men with flushed faces sitting on their knees and staring at the sight of each part of his wife’s body and breathy moans. a grin stretches on his handsome face at it.

“Watch men as I fuck what’s mine, and don’t dare to take your eyes off.” He treats this as a lesson for them just to show them what’s really his and his alone.

NANAMI KENTO + BONDAGE PLAY !

On rare occasions, nanami gives you the wheel to try and dominate. Of course you always fail even with him in bonds but still being the sweet man he is, it’s never not worth a try.

Nanami isn’t big on bondage, he’s not a big bdsm daddy, his arms and legs are tied to his own bed so he’s on display for you and the third leg he had was there for you too.

In front of him you were standing over him biting your nail with a smile slowly moving towards his body.“Mm.. Better hope you can hold out baby, this time I ain’t folding for you.” purring your words out as you got towards his body.

nanami had a feeling that was never true and just chuckled along.“I can handle whatever you throw at me I promise dear.”

It turns out he’s really right when you can barely take his dick even with him tied down. Hiccups and moans are pouring from your mouth as you ride him. It was always intriguing for nanami to see how the smile you originally had on your face thinking you really were gonna get him this time turned into a moaning one with your pouty lips all wobbly and your eyes rolled back.

For nanami, only his hair was a bit damp with some sweat running down from his forehead. He didn’t have some shit eating grin but a ‘I told you so’ smile while he watched as you struggled to dominate.

“P-please can’t anymore!” you moaned out your plea with your legs soon giving up with slower movements.

Nanami was a slight tease like he always was in this.“oh? Can’t anymore? Even with my hands tied baby.” a false disappointed sigh came from his lips.“need me to take the lead again hm?”

Your movements stopped completely with you nodding.“mhm…” your head laid against his chest for a moment.“But how are you gonna take the lead if you’re all tied up?”

a soft chuckle came from nanami and a head shake.“I think you misunderstand just how much power I can have darling.” using his hips he thrusted up into you getting a yelp and whimper to erupt from your mouth.