#and suck at commitment

[annyankers]

for all the amicability in the whirlwind later on i think it's really important to never lose sight of why dru was turned and then why she in turn sired spike. she was tortured and turned for angelus' enjoyment, her continued suffering brings him pleasure. he owns her, she is a Thing to him and she has no way to escape this. she makes spike to be "her brave knight" a position that, especially in fairytales, means a very romantic man physically protects and serves a woman who is usually gonna end up being some kind of damsel in distress.

while yes dru is evil and a vampire she's still obviously very upset about what happened to her and those moments seem to be her times of lucidity, not delusion. not to mention that she's already been beaten out of the notion that she can escape angelus, she tried to as a human and it didn't work, it likely won't work now either, especially if darla sides with him. but with spike around there's someone who basically always takes her side and fights to keep angelus away from her. who is, at least, a buffer between her and her tormentor. he also takes care of her and validates her, something neither darla or angelus seem to be interested in doing at all.

i feel like people tend to intellectually remember what happened to her but forget that it you know, has long lasting consequences when say, they evaluate her behavior in late s2 when angelus comes back. like... yeah ofc she goes back to appeasing him and shit. spike's a wheelchair and she was beaten into shape to be "daddy's little girl" (gag) YEARS before she even MET spike. her abuser is back and her defender is out of commission not to mention her whole view of reality has been actively warped by the most narcissistic sleezoid around.

and all the reasons why people love spike or point to as why he's better with buffy or whatever.... dru was the one who saw those first and picked him because of those. like... it's wild to see people act like they spent a loveless century together and spike was just used the whole time when we SEE them literally in love, he states MULTIPLE times she means so much to him and we get an OUTSIDE SOURCE CONFIRM THEY HAVE "AFFECTION AND JEALOUSY FOR EACH OTHER". we have the spike we know of today because drusilla saw the hero in him and wanted him to rescue her. and ya know, he kinda did. multiple times. over a century of deep, mutual horrifying love. you only even GET spike and buffy in the same ROOM because he loved dru so much he saved her from a mob, traveled with her across a continent (maybe 2 depending on direction) and over an ocean for even a SHOT at a cure. like... cMON.

this got a little off topic into some of my pet peeves but also kinda not because just-- i don't think people always remember that dru is still a victim and a victim who was intentionally frozen the moment of maximum despair and internal destruction. then spent about 20 years being groomed by her tormentor before she ever had anyone care about her as a priority. i think people tend to forget that it was angelus who wanted to turn spike into a monster and drusilla who wanted him to be a hero. it's dru who gives him his swagger, his confidence, his love for life, who encouraged his romanticism and adored his poetics. it's not that she groomed or built him, but just that she saw all that potential already in there and facilitated it and nurtured it. sure in a fucked up vampire way but still.

[deadpoets]

RORY GILMORE 1.06 | Rory's Birthday Parties

[lustlovehart]

Oh my goodness??? This is horrifying 😭😭

I would literally pee my pants if I was Idia and Malleus just ominously said that. The way they don’t even show him either is so scary (╥_╥).

The end is coming for Diasmonia, and they’re really building it with this horrifying exchange 😭

Over blot Malleus fic... (a few spelling errors in the tags be warned >.<)

[moth-flowers]

moth-flowers #21

[captainjonnitkessler]

"Fight back against fascism by not buying anything for a day! Cripple capitalism by skipping work and calling it a general strike! Protest the government by not voting!"

Hey so this is probably nothing, just a totally weird coincidence, hardly worth bringing up, but it seems like all of those things all boil down to sitting on your ass at home and not doing anything that would involve actual effort or make you talk to another human being.

I don't want to sound crazy here but what if instead of trying to make inaction sound revolutionary, we tried - and again, this is going to sound insane - what if we tried actually organizing the people in our direct communities by running for school boards, attending and speaking out at city council meetings, and identifying and campaigning for progressive politicians?

[hadesknockedupintheunderworld]

The fans: Ugh Sonic was just so preachy. I mean obviously he's supposed to be the good guy, so any uncomfortableness I feel here and any way I feel like Sonic's choices are framed as being why some other people have shitty lives is just bad writing because he is obviously supposed to be right always, but this characterization makes no sense. Isn't he right for the things he did?

Ian Flynn, using Kitsunami to say the (barely even at this point) quiet part even louder: Hey it's almost like ever since the Mr. Tinker event we've been purposely running with the critique of Sonic as being more selfish than he appears. Sonic is upholding a system of Eggman v Sonic that currently benefits him and shuts down talk of how to improve the current system because he likes his own personal enjoyment and he's attached enough to Eggman that he'd rather Eggman pretend to be a good person than be stuck in prison for life. He doesn't even quite practice what he preaches. We are trying to show that the current hero v villain system and Sonic's recklessness currently affects some people poorly and that Sonic isn't a perfect hero.

[mwagneto]

i have a lot of things to say but to keep it short moffat's writing so often completely lacks emotional weight, either because he fails to insert it or because he removes it without realising

as an example of the former, both the women in this episode have scenes where the sad music swells and everyone's crying and you're meant to be sad along with them, her mum died, the doctor's leaving, they're sad conceptually but i couldn't help sitting there and thinking... i just don't care about this. you've failed to write characters or scenes i can get emotionally invested in and instead reached for the cheapest tricks available (universally relatable sad concepts such as dying parent or ending friendship) and figured that would be enough to elicit a reaction. this is something he comes back to countless times, which i don't want to dwell on here but once you notice he's doing it, it's everywhere.

as for the latter, take the death of trev. he's a likable guy and watching him slowly dying would be quite sad but my immediate thought wasn't "aw oh no :( " it was that i have seen an unfortunate amount of moffat media and all his doctor who episodes so i am 100% certain that this isn't trev's actual end, that somehow his consciousness is gonna get uploaded to a database and live on, so there's no point being sad for him. and what do you know, like 20 minutes later they confirm i was right, which the doctor and the audience learns at the same time (except the doctor learns he's alive before he even learns he died, so he never even has to mourn). moffat's completely removed any kind of weight regarding the character's lives since he never actually just up and kills anyone so his stakes are impossible to take seriously.

[flora-tea]

It's so weird and messed up to me how society puts marriage on this pedestal as something we must aspire for as part of growing up, and how it's literally treated as something folks in committed long term relationships have to do in order to be "truly committed" or "truly serious" or "truly longterm".

Like why does a relationship have to have a legal contract involved that is sanctioned by and dissolvable only by the law to be considered valid and true?? Why do folks have to enter a legal commitment contract to be considered "actually truly for-reals serious" long term partners? Goverment's really gotta be in our business in order for us to be seen as fully adults or for partnerships to be seen as fully valid? Hell no!! You kidding me?? Society so weird for that fr 😭

No hate to anyone ofc, but the way marriage is largely considered an expectation for people and for partnered relationships is so weird and damaging.

[antianakin]

The ONLY TIME I could genuinely see Anakin becoming a Crechemaster by choice and actually enjoying it is in an AU where he's found by the Jedi as a baby and raised among them from the beginning and then remains a Jedi and it's a happy fix-it AU somehow and Palpatine dies and either there's no war or the Republic wins the war and Anakin's had like 2-3 Padawans or something already, he's been on the Council for like ten years, he's a little older now, like 50 or 60 years old perhaps, he's ready to move away from responsibilities like the Council or taking on an apprentice of his own, so he decides to settle down into being a Crechemaster, teaching up the newer generation of Jedi, occasionally wandering off on shorter missions if he feels like it or traveling places when he gets the urge since he knows there's plenty of other Crechemasters who are looking after the kids as part of the Jedi's communal system and his absence won't mean a bunch of younglings are suddenly left without supervision or caretaking. It's a nice retirement after several decades as a Knight where he was constantly away from the Temple doing other work or focusing a lot on raising one apprentice or being a part of the Council.

[dravencroft]

So I finally started playing Death Stranding

[sweasling]

practicifng drawing a bit more realistic … w oscar of course !

i rlly have not dabbled in realism as much as i have since being an f1 fan so this is all very Kind of New and weird to me ,… so my f1 art wil Vary quite a lot .. >_>

[liquidloz]

[emberglowfox]

closing time

[alittleemo]

ykw actually fuck everyone else fitzsimmons had the best dynamic of any characters ever. so inseparable they were originally written as one character. started off as best friends and nearly died for each other three times before the underwater confession. star crossed and cursed. they were so powerful the writers had to drag simmons to another planet to generate separation between them. that whole scene where even their evil alter egos are so into each other they start violently making out instead of killing them. fitz dies and simmons rescues him from fucking space. what the fuck. need that.

[altschmerzes]

i need to stop shadowboxing the concept of romance when i write. i need to make my brain go to a world where romance doesn’t exist when i write because feeling its constant presence and people’s expectations of its presence and reading in of its presence is making me a worse writer.

like. thinking a lot about that post that’s going around rn about Books That Are Clearly Afraid Of The Reader. been thinking about how fear of being interpreted or perceived or whatever permeates a Lot of what i do and always has, creatively, and frankly compromises it, especially in terms of fear of people reading romance into my stuff because of how much i write about interpersonal relationships and intimacy and reliance and vulnerability and intense emotional situations.

i need to stop trying to build a boat with my main priority being ‘i dont want people to insist to me that this is a car or make people feel tricked into seeing a car etc etc’ when there is actually no part of this boat that needs to be made with cars in mind at all i could just Build The Damn Boat. this metaphor got lost.

point is i need to stop letting romance take up space in my stories at all. even if it's just as something i'm doing backflips over and around. i need to just start writing about platonic relationships - friendships, queerplatonic relationships, familial relationships, etc - without feeling like i need to first disprove romance as an automated and inherent assumption. romance should have no quarter here, even in feeling forced to deny it.