#and to your left

[homunculus-argument]

This counts as vent art.

[mewvore]

Sometimes you need to read something twice to get it. You might need to watch a movie three times to understand it. You might have to have that album on repeat for a week until the lyrics make any sense. You're allowed to engage with it and can keep engaging with it until it means something to you. People will see a painting at a museum and laugh about not getting what the big deal is but like you can come back, you can see it at another time, and maybe that next time it'll be different for you. I'm of the belief the "media literacy crisis" would solve itself if more people just sat down and did it again. Watched, read, played, listened, etc like I don't think people are getting more ignorant necessarily I just think we're not glorifying personally replaying things nearly as much as we should be.

[mediocre-megs]

honestly more media should portray the anti aging industry as horrific and decidedly unhuman. it IS body horror it IS grotesque it DOES go against nature*. it WILL kill you. yes.

*this is NOT anti-hrt or anti-vax or anything of the sort. i love criticisms of the anti aging industry + sci-fi/horror. i also love trans people and vaccines and medicine and science. i also don’t care if you personally have botox. this was a shitpost i made while high and 2/3 of the way through the substance (2024). terfs dni. cheers.

[riacte]

not romantic not platonic but a secret third thing [what would happen between earth and the moon if the earth stopped spinning as illustrated by xkcd randall munroe]

[valtsv]

enough paintings of saints where they're looking heavenward in ecstatic agony or down with love and mercy on their onlookers as they ascend. we need more paintings where the martyr is looking accusatorily directly at the viewer.

[northern-passage]

we go through this every hurricane season but the way people will find any excuse to point the finger at the victims of natural disasters and say cruel shit like "fuck around and find out" like it's not horrifying having to leave behind your home and all your belongings and potentially your pets with the full knowledge that there might not be anything to come back to after... ignoring that there are people that don't have a car or the money to evacuate, ignoring disabled people who have no way to get out, ignoring people that can't find places for their pets to shelter, ignoring people that have medical equipment that can't be moved or replaced, etc... and even if someone stays behind solely because they want to, they still don't deserve to suffer.

as someone who worked extensively in disaster response previously, it is not easy to "just" evacuate, and the relief that comes afterwards is intentionally difficult to obtain. and already the forces that be are trying to spin this narrative that the victims are at fault, to put the blame on them so that if (probably when) people are forced to resort to looting (because the aid never comes) everyone will nod and agree that they're all bad people and deserved it... rather than acknowledging the fact that there was no attempt to make the evacuation accessible and safe for everyone, no guarantee that aid will be waiting for them when they return to a home that has been swept away... no empathy for the fact that these people's entire lives are potentially destroyed with no safety net to catch them.

[bakedbeanchan]

random fire nation diplomat #492 will never understand the complex and fucked up relationship between the water siblings like I do 🙄

[victusinveritas]

[sleepless-in-starbucks]

guy who's stuck in a timeloop for so long he stops wanting to leave it. guy who started out trying to escape but slowly grew used to and became comforted by the familiarity of the repeating day. guy who is no longer who he was before the timeloop. guy who is offered a way out and violently refuses it because he can't leave, doesn't want to leave. guy who escapes the timeloop by chance or force or accident and doesn't know how to live anymore. guy who keeps going through motions that don't match the situation and keeps having conversations that aren't actually occurring. guy who panics every time he realizes he can't predict the next instant. guy who left the timeloop but still lives with it.

[thelesbianthespianposts]

imagine: you get your memories back after years of amnesia to find out your whole species is dead and earth doesn’t exist anymore. that the only thing left of your culture is your weird ex and his busted honda civic that barely even works that he stole from the government when he was 13. And he’s been taking members of an alien species for trips in his honda civic and they’re all like “woah it’s so cool” and you get upset because it’s NOT COOL it’s a honda civic, the turn signals don’t even work “wow it can go up hills” yeah OF COURSE IT CAN GO UP HILLS EVERY CAR COULD DO THAT. but they’ve never seen a car before so everything it does is the coolest thing ever. And your ex’s only tool is a fucking screwdriver which is somehow also cool to this dumbass alien species even though it’s a fucking screwdriver so you just look like an idiot screaming about how none of this is even cool it’s actually really shitty but your whole planet is gone so you can’t even prove it but also you’ve had a constant drumming sounding in your head since you were 10 slowly driving you insane. I would become evil too.

[muffinlance]

Consider: Post-canon Zuko wakes up in the body of his childhood self, the morning of That War Meeting. Would he still speak against the plans, knowing his fate? What do you think he would do differently the second time around?

"Turned away at the doors, Zuzu?"

"Shut up, Azula," her brother sulked. But sulked weirdly, after staring at her too long and too wide-eyed, not like she'd surprised him but--

But like he hadn't expected her to be there. At all.

He turned away. ...He turned back. "Hey, Lala? Do you think you could help me practice that one set?"

He didn't meet her eyes.

She narrowed hers. "Which set?"

"The one I'm bad at."

She scoffed. Pushed away from the wall she'd been leaning against. "That's all of them, Dum-Dum."

He didn't shout or stomp or yell about the nickname. His lips twitched.

"It's okay," he said. "If you're afraid you won't be a better teacher that my instructor..."

It was the most obvious manipulation ever.

Perhaps if he proved an adequate firebending student, she'd work on his courtly survival skills next. Honestly, it was good that not even Uncle Gets-Cousins-Killed had been fool enough to take Zuko into that war meeting. She could only imagine how terribly that could have gone.

"Keep up," she said, and turned her steps towards the training grounds.

He did. There, and during the katas she ran him through.

Azula kept her eyes narrowed.

"Hey," he asked, "do you know how to bend lightning yet?"

As if he could have missed it, if she'd been able to get more than sparks. "I will soon," she said.

"You will," he agreed, and flowed through his next set. The one she'd only just mastered.

Father didn't notice how weird Zuzu was being. Uncle never noticed anything. Zuko ate dinner and asked a servant for seconds and didn't stutter or flinch or lose his appetite when father asked, coolly, what he'd done with his day. Azula's shoulders tensed, because one mention of how she'd squandered her own training time teaching him--

"Azula hogged the training grounds. For hours," Zuzu scowled, exactly like a petulant thirteen year old.

Exactly like he hadn't been acting all day.

By the time Father was looking her way, Azula had her usual smirk in place. "I'm sure there would be room for both of us," she said, "you're not afraid of a little friendly fire, are you, brother?"

Zuko sulked. And ate his seconds, like he was enjoying each bite. There was something in his eyes, like a joke no one else was getting.

---

Father died that night. A heart attack. There were the faintest of burns to either side of the treacherous organ; the royal physician hypothesized that he'd grabbed at his chest, fingers burning hot in his final moments; so hot they'd only exacerbated the problem.

The royal physician would never have been brought any victims of lighting strikes. Those that occurred in the capital did not generally require a doctor in the aftermath.

Zuzu ate a hearty breakfast.

He didn't order seconds. Azula gave him points, at least, for not being tacky.

---

The sages named Iroh as regent.

They named Zuko as Fire Lord.

"No," the tiny Fire Lord in his perfectly miniaturized Fire Lord robes said, sitting at the head of his war council. "We're not doing that. And I'll be reviewing all recent battle plans, as well. What's this I hear about a division of new recruits being deployed to the front?"

He did not mention how he'd heard of the 41st Division. No one asked.

"Prince Iroh, surely--" one of the generals tried to appeal.

The young Fire Lord's regent was looking as startled as the rest of them, for a moment. Then he sipped his tea, and smiled.

"Your Fire Lord is correct, of course. A change in our leadership--a change the other nations may mistakenly view as weakness--will necessitate a change in our strategy."

"Now," said their lord, "what, exactly, is our overall objective in this war?"

War, the new Fire Lord decreed, was not an end unto itself.

---

The new Fire Lord continued to have time, to pretend to be trained by her. Azula watched him. Adjusted her footwork. Did not tolerate, and was not offered, any commentary on who was teaching who.

"What did you do with my brother?" she asked, as they flowed from one set to the next. As her hands, poised to throw fire, just so happened to be pointed his way.

He missed a step. It didn't look like an act.

"I'm, uh. Right here?"

She didn't bother to dignify that.

He didn't bother to look worried about her hands, one movement off from a true attack.

He looked around, then grabbed her sleeve, and tugged her further from any walls that may hide ears. The royal family's private training grounds were wonderfully large, and wonderfully open.

"It's me," he said. "It's still me. Just. More of me? Longer of me?"

She narrowed her eyes. A familiar expression, by this point. "Explain."

"...I found the Avatar," he said. "And this is definitely his fault, but--but I guess it started at a war meeting, when I was thirteen."

Azula listened. It was a very Dum-Dum story.

[bl00dalchemist]

*chews Hidan and spits him out*

[marciaillust]

your design of me

[gingerswagfreckles]

It's weird how in the past 5 or so years the left's understanding of decolonization devolved into some kind of weird Nazi era eugenicist thing about how people's "true places" are something encoded in their DNA and no one in the history of the world should have moved anywhere and anyone decendent from people who moved at some point should be shot.

[polysyndetonaddictsupportgroup]

Outie Dylan, swallowing his pride and deciding to tell his innie that he’s actually pretty cool despite the wife smooching debacle: I’m proud of you and while I’ll respect your decision if you want to resign I think you should make it work there because I don’t want you to die

Dylan G: *immediately hits his boss with a vending machine*