#and society made it that way

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Happy Homestuck day!

(Timeskip version)

[yellenasbelova]

2.08 | 3.04

[deadpoetsandlivinglegends]

Something something every time Charlie isn’t fighting to be the center of attention, he is always looking around to others to gauge their reactions and silently observing them all something something he is searching for connection, to fit in and be loved but he doesn’t know how to ask for love so instead he gains their attention by acting out in ways he knows they’ll notice and tries to pretend their attention and love are the same thing

[scary-grace]

sometimes I wonder what goes on in the heads of people who honestly think BNHA had a good ending. I don’t care how happy they are about b/akudeku being friends (or more????) or whatever, the fact that the characters are actively bitching about the lack of villains to beat up (which impairs their ability to gain money + power + fame) represents a colossal failure. the horrific death of an actual child (Toga) is seen as acceptable, the murders of people whose abandonment and rejection by society led directly to their development into villains (Twice, Shigaraki) are treated as heroic, and the conditions that led to a war that devastated Japan are still in place. so while whoo hoo Deku is on the Billboard chart with Bakugou 😃😃😃 and all that jazz, their victory is ultimately hollow. what happened before will happen again, because nothing has changed in any meaningful sense.

also, the central conceit of the story is that it’s about how Midoriya becomes the greatest hero in the world. spoiler alert: by any measure of the concept “greatest hero” as set down by BNHA, he, uh — didn’t. from a storytelling standpoint, pretending he did is just weak.

[whimzycle]

First meetings, awkward greetings.

[solargeist]

i think the Watchers are talented beautiful artists, they adore creating, but, i think that since a lot of them have access to a sorta ~creative mode, able to spawn in things, and are so, so, old, they lose their way a bit and take cheaper routes, just to get through their schedules.

why cook ? they can spawn in food. theres no use for grinding, they can build walls in seconds, theres no need to travel for supplies, no need to go beyond what they know, no need to be extra.

its much like a/i "art", its easy, but so soullessness, lazy, and cheap.

another layer of disappointment for Grian. at first, everything seems so beautiful, so overwhelming, but the food is bland, and he notices the asymmetry, he counts the stone tiles across the hall and down.

Hes looked at in confusion or even annoyance when he suggests doing things the longer way.

[metanarrates]

worth bringing up as sort of a corollary to my severance thoughts is that severance does an excellent job of showing that different forms of power & control (cult/corporation/family/government) tend to bleed and overlap and propagate in similar forms. in that particular vein, speaking as a cult survivor, it's worth saying specifically that it doesn't do much good to exceptionalize cults as a rare oddity of how societal power can sometimes take shape. lumon, though fictional, is a really good example of how those mechanisms of control exist in many forms throughout society and should be broken down and scrutinized when they do appear.

[the-gnoblin]

Y'know. Middle grade fantasy is great. Middle grade fantasy knows what the people want. I want to read more middle grade fantasy. Just like when I was a kid

[juney-blues]

when a cis person gets medical surgery and treatment to allign closer with their coercively assigned gender at birth, that is in fact, different, to when a transgender person does it.

yes, even if they're the same surgeries! and yes, even if the cis person is intersex!

that does not make a cisgender person meaningfully "trans" in any way what are you people talking about?

being transgender is kinda, fundamentally about being a different gender than you were assigned at birth! and the societal pressures that come with being that are always going to be different than someone who has the same gender that society assigns them!

like this line of thought implies that, being transgender is just a process of surgeries and hormones and medicalization? which, i shouldn't have to tell you that's transphobic but it kinda fuckin is !

i'm sorry but this is just a nonsensical concept and following it to any of its logical conclusions implies really weird things about transgender people and intersex people.

[starry-bi-sky]

more clone^2 memes because i think they're funny

[myokk]

✨🌚MY HEADCANONS ABOUT THE BLACK FAMILY🌝✨

Being this close to her mother, Eloise was struck by their physical similarities. As a young girl, it had been impossible to see, but now that she was a young woman they were striking. She felt as if she were looking in a mirror, but a twisted mirror: everything that was warm about her appearance was turned cold in her mother: hazel eyes to a frigid silver, unruly brown hair to straight black; her mother's skin was somehow even more pale than Eloise's, as if she were cut from marble. Everything soft about Eloise was made sharp in her mother, and Eloise wondered what had made her this way. She was terrified that in twenty years' time, the two of them would be indistinguishable. Had Elladora Black always been like this? Eloise couldn't imagine any time when her mother might have smiled, or even huffed in quiet laughter. No moments where she had been caught staring at her husband with love and warmth in her eyes. Eloise had only ever known her as an ambitious woman who was always striving towards some goal, even if it was known only to her. Someone couldn't spend their whole life like that, could they?

or: how I imagine Elladora Black's life and how she became the evil, complicated woman that I love so much​🥺​ ft Phineas Nigellus Black, Sirius, Apollonia, pureblood society headcanons I just make up, tragic romance, complicated female characters and SO MUCH MORE🫶

this post is dedicated to the sweet amazing @elliecutte my favorite Elladora lover/sweetest person EVER & the only person I dedicate posts to🤭

This might be kind of disjointed, because I don't have names or anything for the people in her life really. It's just what is kind of in the back of my mind as I write Elladora, but very much going off of vibes more than anything.

What's canon about her is that she's the third child in her family (Sirius and Phineas are her older brothers), and has a younger sister, Iola. (Idk who exactly Apollonia is in relation to their family…maybe a great aunt?) (Iola was burned off the family tree for running away with a muggle, which was always a source of deep shame for the family)

Sirius dies when Elladora is three (he was eight years old). He was the oldest son, and in these types of families, the oldest son inherits EVERYTHING - the land, the house, the heirlooms…basically the whole estate. Subsequent sons would go into some sort of profession (church, army, law etc - my wizarding headcanon is a high position in the Ministry or the Wizengamot or something) and might inherit a smaller estate that's in the family if they're lucky. My guess is that Sirius was prepared from a young age to be the heir, and his death was a freak accident. Maybe he drowned when the family was vacationing by the sea, maybe he caught Dragonpox…

BUT his death was the factor that really drove their mother over the edge and started her own personal journey into the Black Family Madness (because, as we know, there's ALWAYS an inciting incident for the poor cursed women of this family and they will ALWAYS get it) (yes it's a curse, which will be explained LATER​​🤭​). She had been SO proud of giving birth to four healthy, beautiful children, and Sirius was her favorite so it was devastating to lose him. After his death, she grew quite distant from her other children, believing that they were also all going to die and abandon her and she couldn't bear the thought of getting close to and losing another.

Phineas grew insolent and hated the fact that he was going to be the heir - I think his temperament is better suited towards not having the pressure of carrying on the family legacy, anyways. Sirius’s death really affected him as they were quite close (similar to Eloise and Leo’s relationship BEFORE she was banished). His grief manifested in general apathy.

Elladora, on the other hand, CRAVED her mother’s attention and tried doing everything she could to get it. Her magic manifested quite young, and it was apparent to everyone that she had the potential to be quite powerful. No matter how much she tried, however, her mother would just wake up and sit in a fugue state, ignoring everything until the day was over and she would rise and go to bed.

Elladora was raised in the typical fashion of that time: private tutors in magical theory, dancing, how to navigate pureblood society, and learning how to manage a household of her own in the future. She disdained muggle culture and muggleborns, not realizing in her ignorance how much her own society was influenced by muggle customs, and thought of herself as above others in the wizarding world as well due to her family’s status. She always knew it that when she came of age, she would be married to Oberon Babbit and that was that.

The Babbits were an extremely prominent wizarding family; one of the oldest British wizarding families (most had some connections with France, Germany etc but not the Babbits), and known for being quite reclusive and wealthy. Oberon’s mother died in childbirth, and he was quite sought-after due to the fact he would inherit EVERYTHING. The Blacks considered themselves fortunate for being able to secure that connection through Elladora.

When Elladora got to Hogwarts, she was STILL determined to do everything right. She excelled in all of her classes and thought of herself as unstoppable. In the back of her mind, she knew that her duty would be getting married and starting a family after graduation, but she couldn't help but hope for more - probably due to how well she took to her studies; Transfiguration in particular was a favorite subject. She was hot-headed and fiery and opinionated, never letting anyone tell her what to do, and never had a problem telling people when they were wrong. I want to think she was pretty popular amongst the students - not only because she was always impeccably put-together and wearing the highest-quality robes that money could buy, but because there was just something irresistible about her. She drew people to her; she knew how to navigate all of the subtle interactions between the various students and she always came out on top.

Oberon was a few years older than Elladora, but she didn't interact with him much. Maybe it was a bit of self-denial: he didn't seem so interested in her, and she wanted to live a few more years freely before beginning the rest of her dutiful life. She was very carefree - maybe a bit too carefree - and before she knew it, she found herself head-over-heels in love with a Gryffindor (he has no name bc it's not important). Or - and this is what she tells herself in the future - she thought it was love, but it wasn't😤​

He was everything Oberon wasn't, and that's what attracted her in the first place. He wasn't scared to disagree with her, to rile her up, was loud and outgoing and present to his life like nobody else she knew, and he saw her - not just the façade that she put on for everyone else. Even though Elladora knew it was doomed from the start, that it could never last, she couldn't help her feelings and her seventh year at Hogwarts was a whirlwind of emotions. She lived in the moment as only a young girl can do, enjoying those halcyon days...and yet at moments was paralyzed by panic, knowing that it would all be over soon. She soon found herself not even enjoying any time spent with him in secret, living in her present moments as if they were already memories to jealously guard close to her heart for the rest of her life. She had no one to confide in but him - all of the girls she surrounded herself with were just waiting to pounce at the first sign of weakness she showed - and yet to tell him everything was too painful.

So she ended things abruptly, no explanations. Cutting him out completely was the only option she could bear.

(Elladora never did find out that he had saved up a summer's wages, plus his inheritance money, to buy a delicate engagement ring and two tickets to America)

Her first years after graduation were spent in a flurry of balls and courting Oberon and gossip and weekly appearances in the society section of the Daily Prophet. To all outward appearances, she was having a wonderful time, but she felt hollow inside. Before she knew it, that time was over and she was getting married and then she was pregnant with her first child at only twenty-one and she was alone and then she was giving birth alone and then she was holding her tiny son in her arms and crying for some inexplicable reason.

Oberon hadn't come to even see their new son, Leonard - Elladora chose the name and it had meaning only to herself (and one other person, who saw the news a year later, in New York).

Her life was a series of disappointments.

She never could get any indication from her mother that she existed, she never made any true friends, and the only happy moments in her life were relegated to memories she could never bear to take out and examine ever again. Oberon was [redacted] and if she wasn't so strict with anything she would lose everything she had.

It's quite obvious that she and Eloise were doomed to always be at odds - just another disappointment to add to the list. Of course she would give birth to a useless squib daughter and this - along with everything else - spurred on the beginnings of her own version of the madness. Deep, simmering, volatile anger, a desire for everything to be absolutely perfect and to keep up appearances at any cost. Losing control of herself whenever she's lost control of anything, and deeply regretting the outbursts if she ever were to reflect on them, which she doesn't.

Elladora sees too much of herself in her daughter, especially after Eloise is brought back into the family, and that makes her hate Eloise more. (is it really hate though?) Seeing the same mistakes she made so long ago repeated is unbearable, and in her own way, she believes that she's helping Eloise with every decision she makes, such as Eloise’s rushed engagement to Augustus Malfoy.

But, Eloise will never be able to make herself as hardened as Elladora no matter how much she wishes for it and tries.

I love love love Elladora, she's one of my favorite characters to write, and her scenes with Eloise, and with the Headmaster (her brother), have been some of my favorites to write. There are just SO many layers that go into who she is & all of these little things behind-the-scenes that I think make for very interesting interactions.

I know that this is the Sebastian Sallow fandom & I could do a whole entire post just like this for him and how he grew up, for Solomon, even for Ominis (and I wrote a whole oneshot just for Imelda's history🤭​), but Eloise and her mother have become my favorite women to think about and they are who occupy my mind the most🥺​ I am endlessly grateful that people even like my girl so much & that there is one girl who is as crazy about Elladora as I am🥹​🫶​

And, if any of this is interesting to you, my fic is full of these things. SUPER canon-divergent, it’s been described as a mix of Hereditary and Midsommar and just spooky gothic angst vibes, exploring complicated family dynamics (I’ve ALSO been told I wrote the most realistic description of Sebastian’s relationship with Solomon), Arthurian mythology, LOTS of blood rituals and dark magic and sacrifice and who-even-knows-what and romance🫶🫶🫶

Before It Felt Like A Sin (115775 words) by myok

[wormpool]

The Substance (2024) vs Stuff It Reminded Me Of

featuring:

Videodrome (1983)

Re-Animator (1985)

The Shining (1980)

Carrie (1976)

Coraline (2009)

[stromblessed]

pretty much all analysis naming Mel any kind of "flawed" character, villain, or as problematic in any way, is terrible analysis. which is a phenomenon that goes against all my instincts but it is so real all the energy and interest I possess leaves my body every time

the thing is, Mel is a hero, Mel's intentions in season 1 are not as pure as the driven snow, Mel benefited from class divide pre-canon and during canon, yet Mel would have benefited from war and colonialism pre-canon only for her to reject it, she is both noticeably "nice" to all the protagonists in season 2 and removed from most of the plot, she is so many things because of her story and because of her writers and (unfortunately) because of the fandom -

and these "nuanced" analyses of her flaws and negative impact on the narrative are worthless

i can't even explain it. i get one sentence in and it immediately sucks. doesn't matter how true or technically correct the words are. i would rather read my linear algebra textbook and make a fandom for eigenvectors than engage with any level of Mel "criticism" no matter how mild. it could be one sentence in an otherwise long and carefully thought-out essay and i will quit that thing faster than my anxiety medication makes me fall asleep

the fandom or the writers can call Mel a manipulator, a liar, a capitalist, a billionaire, a seductress, "benefiting from zaun just like all the privileged characters", "kind of mean that one time, she should've been more polite" - whatever anyone can dream up - as many times as they want, and it won't be anything the entire fandom hasn't seen approximately 1,000 times since 2021. and it won't be anything every person who consumes any kind of media hasn't seen approximately 10,000 times since we each took our first breath in this world - when that media has women in it

why push this same analysis over and over again. what do you get out of this. does it make everybody feel smart to point out the obvious without bothering to go even one level deeper. do you think it makes her character more interesting to equate well-recognized surface-level negative tropes with negative morality, even when all of those tropes are either actively subverted or massively outweighed by her true role in the story? (it doesn't.) no amount of pointing at and highlighting and underlining Mel's morality or lack thereof will make her any less of an interesting character worth loving and engaging with, and she is probably the most interesting character in the entire show even considering season 2. it won't make the other characters around her "better" by comparison either. nor will it make competing ships more compelling or more justified

[drratiosstudent]

On the Kremnoan language, its reflection of Kremnoan culture, and the way Mydei expresses himself with the language of action, not words

I know it’s a running gag that the Kremnoan language lacks a lot of words for some of the more emotional, ‘heartfelt’ or ‘vulnerable’ things such as ‘romance’ or ‘fear’ or ‘weakness’ or ‘chickening out’ (I forgot how many words they’ve mentioned, or if I actually quoted the right words) etc. + Taking into consideration all the jokes between Phainon and Mydei on the words that aren’t in the Kremoan language/dictionary.

But if you think about it, even in real life, language reflects a culture; it is deeply intertwined with society, impacted by its own culture and values, and in turn, influences society again, like a cyclical influence. Perhaps to the Kremoans, the most important language (a form of expression) is not through words but through actions.

Why do they need a word to express their love, their fear, their anger, their hatred, their pain, their sorrows - when they can show it through action or through battle? Of course, considering how their main values are strife, strength and dominion, it is inevitable that action/battle takes precedence before all else. But think about it: Fight for glory, for love of their nation, for protection, for pride, for honour, for fear; Sacrifice for something greater than themselves, for family, for friends, for the future.

Just like how Gorgo sacrificed herself for her son, how Mydei’s parents understood each other through battle, how Mydei himself shows his care and love for his people through his choices and actions -

Although Mydei is a man of few words, anybody can tell that he has one of the warmest, gentle and kindest nature. He doesn’t need words to show people that he cares for them, he doesn’t need words to express his fears, he doesn’t need words to convey his anger and values. Anybody can tell who he is just by looking at the choices and actions he has made. In my opinion, he is one of the most authentic and genuine person we’ve seen so far. Many characters we’ve seen so far have their own secrets, masks, agendas - but with Mydei? He may speak less than the others, he may not easily say words that are ‘emotional’ or ‘weak’, and he may seem harsh on the outside, but you can definitely feel his warmth, concern, and care without his words.

There may be no words for expressing certain emotions or vulnerabilities in the Kremoan language, but that’s likely because the Kremnoans are people who speak the language of action. That’s also what makes Mydei himself + his relationship with all the other Chrysos Heirs, his people and companions so compelling. You can read into his relationship and feelings for others well beyond his words, and you can read into his true values and principles. You can see what he fights for, what he’s scared of, when he’s willing to seek help and guidance, when he respects others - with Mydei, you don’t need words to know he trusts you.

For Mydei, he has shown his love for the people and Amphoreus by fighting the black tide, protecting the citizens, giving advice to others, supporting the children, cooking his food, supporting his companions, trusting his friends -

To Mydei, words aren’t required to express himself, and perhaps, words aren’t enough to express just how much he cares.

Yes, the Kremnoan culture has its distinct flaws, and its people have done some horrendous things in the past all for strife, honour and strength. But I think Mydei represents the virtues of his culture, when things aren’t taken too far - when you fight to protect instead of for ‘dominion’, ‘strife’, and so called ‘honour’, when you train hard to become strong so that you can support others, when you learn to face your fears, all so you can help others; when you learn to persevere, to be resilient, to fight for your life, because that will help you survive and live the life you wish to live with your companions.

[nadiajustbe]

I think the whole issue I have with Howl's character in HMC movie can be outlined in one brief sentence:

"You can't write Howl Pendragon without writing Howell Jenkins"

[lulu-the-bugaboo]

No offense but the hc that Whitebeard is in the habit of kidnapping rookies and adopting them is much less fun than the (basically canon) idea that he usually wipes the floor with those who go after him (Crocodile) but then he saw Ace and was like: I like this one, I'm not only gonna spare him but also give him the option to join my crew and cause extra chaos