#and only three were problems

[moeblob]

kitty kitty kitty

[miyagi-hokarate]

Alternative version of Robby's "Second Place" Mental Spiral I would have liked to see

[aroanthy]

kiryuu sibling stasis post-32 is so interesting to me. nanami tries to leave and is (temporarily but also, crucially, violently) prevented from doing so by touga and akio. after this experience she puts distance between herself and them: she leaves touga’s phone in the car, she resigns from the student council (though she dons her old uniform still), she repeatedly dismisses and undermines the authority of the rose code, of end of the world, of akio, of touga. but she’s still in ohtori, isn’t she? uncomfortable with the idea of leaving, uncertain if it’s really possible. she tried before, and it hurt her. deeply. it’s so interesting to me, nanami’s agency and how she limits her exertion of it after 32, when she realises it for what it is. contrast that with touga, who accepts this weird stalemate between them, who is, really, uninterested in having any relationship of any kind with nanami if he can’t gain something from her. he’s very passive with her after 32, compared to the passivity he’d always feigned towards her before in order to stoke reactions from her and then exploit them. i was thinking about how touga has always been able to sever his relationship with nanami, but chosen not to; first out of a sense of obligation (‘we should live to help each other’) then a realisation of how that could be exploited. i was thinking about how nanami has never realised her ability to leave, in part because it is limited by touga and the harm he does her. i was thinking about the desperation and confusion akio calls out to anthy with as she leaves. i was thinking about how different that is to the kiryuus’ strange semi-breakdown; touga doesn’t want or need nanami, and nanami might love her brother but she cannot trust him or feel safe around him, doesn’t want to see him anymore; she’s itching to leave, and just a little scared (you know, because last time she tried that her brother assaulted her), and he’s not doing anything because ignoring her means he doesn’t have to deal with the emotions of her leaving or staying. something something gendered power dynamics something something tragic siblings

[mikuyuuss]

Even though it's canon that Makomo never actually met Sabito and Giyuu while she was still alive, I love how many people (including me) still pretend that they are a trio regardless. The vibes are just too strong.

But it makes me think though, if Gotouge may have originally intended for them to be a trio, but maybe scrapped the idea when they realize there's no hint of Makomo in Giyuu's design, except just having a slightly similar hairstyle.

[cisthoughtcrime]

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[paldogangsaan]

source

the ending of the umbrella academy is frustrating on several levels but primarily bc it feels like the the showrunner was watching an entirely different show than the rest of us and this quote proves it. more under the cut bc the post is a bit long

the show wasn't about them being superheroes, it's literally a metaphor for childhood trauma and how it manifests in adulthood. reginald treated the umbrellas like weapons, never even gave them NAMES, and now they struggle to live as people with their own autonomy. the point was never that they were superheroes, that's quite literally the LEAST important part of the show! all their superheroes days are from when they were children!! the show focuses on the fallout of that!!! it's about how the umbrellas don't have coping mechanisms for what happened in their childhood and they keep ending the world because of their inability to work through their trauma. we've seen time and time again that they're borderline incapable of empathizing with each other, and they blame each other for coping 'wrong' and having different traumas despite having the same parent. and somehow the show ended with them being the problem bc they're inherently evil and their births are wrong rather than, you know, the person that abused them in the first place being the problem

like ?? reginald literally and metaphorically created the umbrellas. he released the marigold, he bought them from their birth parents, he raised them into his weapons. the way he treated them in their childhood/developmental years shaped them into who they are, and the world keeps ending because they blame each other rather than the real villain: the abuser. ending the show with them realizing this, thus breaking the cycle, and killing/erasing their abuser so he can't hurt them or anyone else makes much more sense thematically. if they erase him and he never releases the marigold, they still lose their powers and they technically never exist bc he doesn't create them. those versions of them we've seen for the past 3 seasons don't exist anymore bc they were never traumatized and raised to be soldiers by reginald. ending the show with the timeline restored and the umbrellas living different lives (bc they weren't only born from the marigold, they were also born from their mothers) would've still been the tragedy blackman wants. they're not siblings, they don't have powers, they're not superheroes, everything we saw them go through for 3 seasons technically doesn't matter bc it didn't happen to these versions of them, and they don't exist as famous public figures that'll be remembered for something grand. they're just regular people. this ending works because, again, they're not inherently evil. they don't need to atone for the crime of being born. the problem isn't that their very existence is wrong. the problem is that an egotistical fuckface decided to use them as accesories (he literally BOUGHT THEM from their parents) for his own gain and gave them the tools (powers and/or trauma) to cause harm. if reginald was, like, normal and not a piece of shit, he wouldn't have chosen to raise a bunch of children into weapons, traumatize them, and then release them into the world after years of denying them autonomy and barely even treating them as people and think hm this is fine. and by how the first season's flashbacks played out, it seemed like he never even planned to let them leave the academy, meaning he literally saw them as little soldiers that only existed for him. point is, if reginald hadn't intervened with their lives, if he had never existed, the world wouldn't have ended.

the ending message of the show as of right now doesn't come off as 'are u a superhero if no one knows you exist ��☝️' it comes off as 'you were born wrong. your birth destroyed everything and the world would be a safer place if you (the abused child raised to be a weapon by your fucking asshole of a parent) had never existed'. and what kind of a message is that.

[songofsunset]

Never do I feel such a connection with my ancestors as when I'm wandering the house all 'where the FUCK is my thimble'

[mccleans]

i've gone to sleep angry and woken up angry every day since last saturday

[sunforgrace]

he sat there on the ground and cried. for cas. cas told him he loved him was taken away and he buried his head in his hands and wept

[weirfq1]

with all these gaston crackships/rarepairs that are coming out lately it would be so fucking funny if he had a flig with all the main characters (ambar, nina, simon... hell luna too if you want) and they all know it except matteo

[silly-lil-scribbles]

man i miss jiu jitsu. and aerials. i think i might just miss being able to do stuff actually

[quordleona03]

Friday the 13th

I was born on a Friday the 13th, and I credit my older brother with a superstition I invented:

We were playing cards. It wasn't a game where a number counter could win: it was a game of pure chance, and I was losing. He told me I was losing because I would always be unlucky because I was born on Friday the 13th.

And because that made me cross, I told him that people who are born on a Friday the 13th are in fact extra lucky on that day, because we get all of the luck that other people aren't getting. And then our younger sister wandered into the room and I said I was bored playing cards and my sister and brother played, and I took the opportunity when I offered to shuffle to stack the deck so that my sister got consistently good hands and my brother lost catastrophically, so that showed him.

[machinatings]

I love Eight saying “I’ve never thought of my self as suicidal” in The Last as if the entire reason the divergent universe arc was a thing in the first place wasn’t because he tried to kill himself. Twice

[livvyofthelake]

saw a tiktok that was like. Daily Affirmations: my work crush doesn’t like me. and now i’m like wow i wish i could send this directly to all of my new high schooler coworkers. who are all really annoyingly obsessed with our one male manager because he’s The Chill Manager. you may have seen me refer to this man before (it’s different when EYE love him because we are the same age. the high schoolers being obsessed with him is weird as hell and he DOES need to stop encouraging this) back in winterspring i was doing a lot of opening shifts with him and i was joking that we had the king and lionheart dynamic. which was real at the time but not so much the vibe now just because like. the vibe has shifted idk i work different shifts there’s different other managers i’m technically promoted there’s all these new people i don’t care about. the vibe is different. anyway. don’t care for these high schoolers and their obsession with him. especially because they’re like actual assholes sometimes to my friend managers… (they used to just work here and then two managers left and they got promoted) (i also technically got promoted at the same time but they rank above me and do more shit that i don’t want to do so like. obviously i’m not bitter or jealous about it. like if i had to manage a bunch of teenagers that didn’t respect me i might cry every single day) (which is happening to one of them fr. they’re literally such assholes to her sometimes it’s crazy like she’s not even as mean to you people as she should be…) not to side with like. The Man or whatever but unfortunately i’m not a teenager with a part time job i go to when i don’t have soccer practice so i cannot relate to the proletariat in this situation… like i knowww they’re seeing my girl as Bitch Manager and it’s making me hate them soooo bad. like you idiots can’t even fold jeans correctly!! i hate you!!!!

[batsplat]

casey also talks about sepang 2015 what do you think of that

oh in that podcast? uh... lemme listen again...

yeah idk it's not really anything new I'd say? he's said basically all the same stuff in more interesting and extensive ways elsewhere. I think casey inevitably has a very 'well feuding is bad and helps nobody' point of view, has expressed that before in the past, does it here again, and he's also drawn a parallel between himself and marc on several occasions. which... well, of course there's similarities in terms of public discourse or whatever, but the parallel really falls apart whenever casey argues the feuds cost valentino. like, I do think it's sometimes important to just. keep in mind. it's interesting that casey draws this comparison in his mind but that doesn't necessarily means he's right about this. I'm not sure how you'd argue that starting a feud with casey cost valentino anything competitively? you can argue it didn't help him I guess, and then we can have a debate about the ins and outs of the 2008 season. we can also have an argument that in a hypothetical world where casey isn't ill in 2009, valentino doesn't break his leg and casey isn't on a piece of junk in 2010, and valentino isn't on a piece of junk in 2011-12, then actually maybe valentino sparking open animosity with casey COULD have cost him. but we don't know that! didn't happen! I wish we could have found out, but we never got the chance! as it stands, the tally on this is pretty straightforward: casey won the title when things were reasonably civil between them in 2007, and valentino took control of the following season at the exact moment he worsened the relationship between the pair of them in 2008. obviously, it's all more complicated than that and casey would of course argue laguna didn't negatively affect his subsequent performances... but it certainly didn't help them. like, at the very worst valentino escalating tensions in 2008 is a complete net neutral. after 2009, them being bitchy to each other every other tuesday was completely competitively irrelevant beyond maybe affecting how they approached occasionally fighting for a podium position. hey, maybe casey used that feud to fire himself up through sheer spite throughout the later stages of his career, but that doesn't actually support his anti-feud stance - it's basically the exact same thing as what valentino does. they're both quite similar in that regard! always so hungry to prove a point, to show how someone else is wrong. kinda half the point with this feuding business is to get yourself going, get yourself motivated, yeah. he straight up openly admits to using yamaha's repeat rejection of him as a way of giving himself motivation, and at the end of the day that's really not all that different?

anyway, what else does casey say... oh yeah, that him and the other aliens were already kinda prepared for this and had learned vale's tricks. that valentino had only been able to get into the minds of the previous generation. welllllll *wiggles hand* sure, I mean, he did clearly have to change his approach... he couldn't just use the exact same playbook to get to them, either on-track or off-track. but that's why he did change up the playbook... again, whether you want to believe valentino won his final two titles 'in the head' rather than just through pure pace kinda depends on how you assess the evidence, but it is at the very least a debate. and, y'know, it's always worth remembering that valentino's most important mind games with casey didn't happen in a press conference... it was on the track. and the on-track stuff really is just embedded in how valentino approaches winning. speaking of aliens, this is what dani and jorge have said:

like, valentino's entire approach to his riding, even to the way he's setting his bike up, is deliberately about directly fucking with you... he's not actually always trying to be faster than you as much as he's trying to give himself the tools to make your life miserable, to pressure you into mistakes, etc etc... and again, especially with casey (if anything because he was so mentally sturdy), the off-track stuff was really just window dressing. (I know they bicker a lot after 2009 but it's just so fundamentally irrelevant to actual on-track competition.) so you can be aware of those tricks, but it also doesn't necessarily help you when someone's being nasty to you on-track in a way you just fully do not enjoy. which is what it was like for casey! for casey, a lot of this comes back to the truly unpleasant context of how he was perceived by the public, how he was treated as mentally weak or 'broken' or whatever partly because he had the misfortune of coming up against a bloke who had the reputation for breaking rivals. I think it's quite natural to end up with a bit of a hardliner 'actually I've never been mentally affected by a result in my life' stance - and of course casey is a lot tougher than a lot of people give him credit for. that being said. sometimes your rivals affect you, shit happens, it's part of the game. it's fundamentally a nice idea to think that valentino's tactics weren't just morally wrong but also ineffective, which is kind of the appeal of this narrative, right? you want to believe you're above that, you want to believe you were adequately prepared and wise to valentino's tactic. it's unsurprising and understandable that casey does tend to tell the story that way, but again it's *wiggles hand* also hard to describe it as completely factual

uh. what else. oh I'm thrilled casey does canonically know valentino and marc were friends, he has said he wasn't following motogp too much during that time period so you couldn't be sure of that. does this mean anything? does it tell you anything? well, no, but it's just a pleasing thought to me. I like that. oh also 'provoking particularly aggressive riders isn't a good idea' is kinda a funny take from casey? like, he of all people would hate the idea of being cowed by someone's reputation like that... casey's right that provoking fast riders can potentially be dangerous, but y'know I do think that's probably not news to anyone almost nine years later. um. that's all I've got I think

[horsemage]

I think we should bring back basic etiquette lessons such as shutting the fuck up when you’re watching a movie in a group that is not exclusively your friend group 🙂