#and this is obviously wayyyyyy way way way less of a consequence than that but it did fuck with me to see ppl act like you were a freak

[vaugarde]

people pearl clutching about preteens knowing what sex is is so wild as someone who was given the talk at age 6 because i asked my mom if she bought me from target’s secret baby compartment. and literally just took it like “oh okay. gross. :(“ being more sad that it affected my fantasy of being bought from target

[connoroaks]

Hot take #2: Femcels don't really exist

A few days ago I received an angry anonymous message from someone, referring to me as a "racist cvnt" and telling me to kms. I obviously didn't respond to this, as doing so would just be feeding the troll's ego (rule 14 of the internet), and anyone with common sense knows this, but it did get me thinking about another thing, with that being what type of person would've gone out of their way just to call some random guy online a racist and hopefully get the attention they desperately wanted out of it. As a straight cis male who decided to make a Tumblr account to join the tcc and now post long paragraphs like this one, I'm obviously part of the minority here, as most people who use this site are either women or trans men who are in reality also biologically female, and this site is home to some of the most radical of feminists, as I stated in my previous post. Most of these women (and trans men) identify as femcels since they struggle with dating, sex, and finding a partner just like incels do, but I think the latter one is definitely less voluntary than the other, as women are way more respected in society and could find a bf or gf almost instantly if they really wanted too, whereas it takes most average looking straight men years to find a partner, and even longer to lose their virg1nity and sh1t. Now obviously I'm not saying that femcels can't exist, as there are some women who suffer from things like severe facial deformities or are just unfortunate enough to be in the bottom 1% of women, what I'm saying is that they're a lot lot rarer than people make them out to be, and male incels are wayyyyyy more common because for example, if you're like a 3/10 woman who's not very attractive at all and you want to find a bf, there's still gonna be plenty of 5 even 6/10 men who would be willing to date you, whereas 5-6/10 women mostly refuse to date men on their level, and instead sleep around with Chad and Tyrone for their entire late teens and 20s until their 30s when they finally realize that their actions have consequences, and from here they will either settle down with the 5/10, who probably now doesn't want her knowing that she has a body count in the hundreds, or they can just become a cat lady and die alone and childless, wishing they could go back in time and do it all over again. There's even 7/10 men who are struggling with dating in today's world because the 7/10 women are all in the 10/10's harem of b1tches that he talks to. Most women here on Tumblr however are average looking (4-6/10s), and they could easily pull a man on their level (like me) who shares similar common interests and wants to build a family and grow old and die together, and for almost all of history, that's how it was. However, starting in the 1960s and 70s second-wave Feminism led women to become more career focused and less family oriented. This in itself is not a bad thing, as women of the time still maintained a healthy balance between their work and their family, and were not just fvcking around with a bunch of different guys, but third-wave Feminism in the 90s and early 00s told young women that starting a family and having kids was bad for their mental health and that they didn't need a man and should just fvck, party, post borderline n@ked pics online, and completely focus on work and their careers. This effectively made it extremely difficult for average looking men to find a loving wife who's actually loyal and not a degenerate and made it impossible for below average men to ever even feel the touch of a woman other than their own mother without doing something like hiring an esc0rt or some sh1t. The top 20% of men get 80% of all women, and it leaves the bottom 80% to have to either find a non-feminist woman, which is not very common in today's day and age, or to compete for the bottom 20% and probably still fail anyways. There is really no such thing as a femcel, as even "ugly" women have it way easier in the dating market than 6-7/10 men do. And also, I don't really consider myself to be an incel either.

I may be average height, and I'm definitely not as attractive as Chad is, but I'm not below average either, and I have a bigger pen1s than most men at my level do. I'm more of a cutecel than I am an incel, I'm like Elliot Rodger but taller and with a much bigger d1ck, fluffier curly hair, and blue eyes. Take that information as you will, but girls never even look at me, not even gay guys either. I've been told by my parents a few times in my life that girls were checking me out, but I don't really think that's true. For example, last spring break we went to some Japanese garden while on holiday in Florida, and both my parents said that this one girl in front of us was really checking me out, but when I started being more aware of this random girl in front of us as opposed to only looking at the flowers and sh1t, not even once did she turn around and look at me, and she couldn't have heard them either, as they whispered it to me, and we were pretty far away. I don't think they're lying to me, but I do think they tend to overexaggerate things like that. Another time we were at some restaurant and my dad mentioned that these girls were looking at me, but again there was no sign of anything, and if they really liked me they probably would've just gone up to me and asked me for my number or something. However, to be honest even if they did I wouldn't have given it to them. I don't trust normie women, as I've been wronged by them many times in the past, but that's a story for another time. I'd rather find a girl that actually loves me and shares common interests, even if she's average looking or crazy. I'd rather take the crazy yandere who texts me to see if I'm ok every 5 minutes and starts imagining bad scenarios if I don't respond right away than a "normal" girl who I share nothing in common with and who'll leave me the second she finds a more attractive guy.

[emcapi-gaming]

Aha, fun fact, the DRK quests were more of a consequence of the breakdown, rather than the breakdown being a consequence of the DRK quests. Like I mentioned, she's been more or less repressing a lot of stuff from the entire MSQ that she just hasn't had time to fully process. (Ardwin lore dump incoming.)

Especially through the second half of Endwalker, because. The Zodiark situation was. Bad. And definitely tipped the scale from "concerning but still (barely) manageable amount of repression" to "oh this is real dire."

For context: She still has Ardbert hanging around in her head. She initially thought he was completely gone after they fused - he sort of went dormant and fully intended to just fade away - except then he spoke up during the Seat of Sacrifice trial and she sort of yelled at him afterwards. However, during that dormant period, they blended together a bit, and had to put in a lot of work afterwards trying to figure out whose memories and feelings were whose.

So with that said, Ardbert - and Ardwin by extension - have, uh, some pre-existing trauma regarding the whole situation of "there's an Ascian causing problems! QUICK! HIT THEM WITH AN AXE!... oh fuck I accidentally the apocalypse." (See: Mitron and the Flood of Light.)

As such, their immediate reaction to the Zodiark kill and the immediately following Meteion vision of the star being consumed was "...did. did we fuck up again."

They were seconds from turning into a blasphemy when the Watcher showed up and managed to distract them long enough to shove that wayyyyyy into the Pit of Emotional Repression.

And then Ardwin had to go through THE ENTIRE REST OF ENDWALKER while very intentionally NOT dealing with The Zodiark Situation or ANY of the things that followed because it literally was not safe to do so. And this is on top of the preexisting issues. She is now basically the emotional equivalent of an unexploded nuclear warhead.

At some point after coming back from Ultima Thule, she went to Ishgard, and found a body, and touched the dark knight soul crystal. And to be honest, this is probably the single best thing that could have happened to her at that time. The soul crystal acted as a catalyst; it latched on to the Pit of Emotional Repression, the residual memories from it's previous holder, and a sliver of Ardwin's soul that was hanging on to the rest by a thread after the Lightwarden incident and didn't get sufficiently reconnected by the Ardbert-superglue. And the combination of those resulted in her Fray/Myste/Esteem.

This did not magically fix the Pit of Emotional Repression, obviously - but it did force her to confront all those issues, in a way that was, relatively speaking, manageable. Her personal dark knight questline definitely diverged from the canon version at some points, but a lot of it did follow the canon quests that address a lot of things from ARR/Heavensward/Stormblood, and forced her to also come to terms with the fact that she hasn't been OK for a long time. (It also got her to deal with part of Mental Breakdown 2, which is probably the most minor of the three and is the slight identity crisis resulting from Ardwin plus Ardbert plus Azem.)

Basically she sort of got therapy (and also probably got to make out with Esteem at least a little bit because she is a freak (affectionate)).

(And this is not even getting into Mental Breakdown 3, aka The Entire Zenos Situation, which is a whole other can of worms - I may expand on this later.)

Spent the evening fiddling with my mods for Ardwin to try and get her to a body type that actually comes across as, like, healthy, instead of running on nothing but stress. I partly wanted to do this because I wasn't happy with my current mod setup, but also as a character development thing for her.

Her personal timeline for MSQ, from ARR through the end of 6.0, was something along the lines of 2 years. She has not had a chance to actually, properly rest. Post-Endwalker, heading into Dawntrail, is really the first time she gets to relax for more than 5 minutes. And also deal with the unholy amount of emotional baggage she has been repressing in order to function this entire time, especially through ShB/EW, which resulted in at least 3 distinct mental breakdowns between the end of 6.0 through 6.1 (one of which was The Entire Dark Knight Questline). 6.2 onwards has very much been about recovery for her, which I think is gonna be a process that continues forward into summer vacation in Tural.

Without further ado, I give you:

Before...

...and after.

(mod list for "after" pic under cut)

Base textures: Bibo+ ("buff & smooth" texture)

Body: rue+ (buff small chest, small skullcrusher legs)

Scaling tweaks: DIY set of Customize+ scalers - if anyone's interested in a copy, let me know and I'll figure out how to export them

Smallclothes: Yet Another Sporty+

Skin details: All-Gen Body Freckles, Rough Travels (scars)

Compatibility: Atramentum Luminis

Face details: Proper Freckles (medium), Hair Defined, Everyone Bites, Eyeworks (looking forward to the graphics update when hopefully I won't need as many of these lol)