#another level but it also causes such emotional pain that i wish i could disengage from it. just my thoughts tho

[waterdeepthroat]

bg3 is one of the only games where i’ve had to take some space away with it due to content. and honestly? i think that’s a good thing

[just-dreaming-marvel]

ONE HUNDRED THREE - THE BATTLE BEGINS

LEGACY: A Tony Stark Daughter Story

MASTERLIST

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Word Count: 1,475ish

Summary: The fight of their lives begins.

~~~

Everyone started gearing up and preparing for battle. I turned back towards the window, wondering how we were all going to get through this and where Tony and Peter could possibly be. I felt arms wrap around my waist. I put my arms over Steve’s and leaned back into his chest as he set his chin on my head.

“We’re not all getting out of this…” I whispered.

“I know…” He whispered in reply. 

“I just got you back… All of you. I don’t think I can lose anymore than I already have… I don’t think that I could come back from that…” 

“You can and you will. You’re the strongest woman I know.” Steve kissed my head before turning me around and holding onto my waist. “I need you to promise me something.”

“Anything.” I looked up into his eyes. 

“Promise me that if I tell you to go, to leave, that you’ll will… I can’t see you get hurt.” 

“Steve, I ca—“

“I know, I know you can handle your own, but I need you safe.” Steve pushed my hair out of my face and left his hand on my cheek, his thumbing gently rubbing it. “If I tell you to run, run… I can’t lose you.” I grabbed the hand that was resting on my face and nodded. “Not again."

“I will. For you.” I closed my eyes as the tears started to come. “We are not going to lose each other again. Okay?” 

“Okay… I love you.”

“I love you too.” 

We breathlessly kissed before I got dressed in my suit that’s similar to Nat’s and gathered my nano tech gear. I was determined to use my iron suit as a last resort. I helped Bruce into the Hulk buster armor as Steve received shields that attached to his arms, courtesy of Shuri. We loaded onto the carriers and headed out to the battlefield. I held Steve’s hand as I watched Sam and Rhodey fly overhead. I could hear Bruce following along in the Hulk buster armor. 

“How we looking, Bruce?” Nat asked.

“Yeah, I think I’m getting the hang of it,” Bruce excitedly answered. “Wow! It’s like being the Hulk without actually—“ I turn around when I hear Bruce stumble and our carrier continues on. “I’m okay. I’m okay.” 

“Maybe it was a bad idea to let him try the suit,” I whispered to myself.

“I got two heat signatures breaking through the tree line,” Rhodey informed us.

The carriers came to a halt and we all unloaded. The Dora Milaje shouted a command and the Wakandans formed their ranks. I heard chanting in the distance as more warriors joined our sides. After T’Challa greeted their leader, him, Nat, Steve, and I walked to the edge of the barrier, where two aliens were waiting for us. One of them was from the attack on Vision and Wanda, and the other one, I fought in New York. The familiar creature growled and glared my way as I walked up, causing Steve to tense up and force me to be a step behind him.

“Where’s your other friend?” Nat taunted.

“You will pay for his life with yours,” The female alien threatened. “Thanos will have that stone.”

“That’s not gonna happen,” Steve stated.

“You are in Wakanda now,” T’Challa added. “Thanos will have nothing but dust and blood.” 

“We… have blood to spare,” the alien snarled. 

She brandished her sword with a snarl, and the ships behind her opened their doors and more alien creatures began coming out. We quickly walked back to our massed forces.

“Did they surrender?” Bucky asked.

“Not exactly,” Steve replied. 

T’Challa then led the Wakandan warriors in a war cry as we all mentally prepared for the fight ahead. Steve turned and gave me one last quick kiss before we would find out our fate. We looked back over to the barrier to see the creatures trying to break through. They were willingly dying, trying to break through the barrier.

“What the hell?” Bucky exclaimed.

“Looks like we pissed her off,” Nat stated.

“You think?” I chuckled dryly.

“They’re killing themselves," Okoye said, horrified.

A few of the creatures managed to squeeze through intact, causing some of the soldiers to raise up their shields and kneel. Behind them, more soldiers leveled their spears over their comrades’ shoulders, and on T’Challa’s command, fired at the approaching creatures. Bucky and Bruce started firing as well.

“You seen the teeth on those things?” I heard Sam ask over the comms.

“Alright, back up, Sam,” Rhodey instructed. “You’re gonna get your wings singed.”

As I listened, I watched Rhodey drop a barrage of mines, all exploding on a group of the creatures. 

Steve’s head quickly turned when we all noticed a pack of the creatures beginning to run around the forcefield. 

“Cap, if these things circle the perimeter and get in behind us… There’s nothing between them and Vision,” Bruce warned through the comms.

“Then we better keep ‘em in front of us,” Steve stated.

“How do we do that?” Okoye turned to ask T’Challa.

“We open the barrier,” T’Challa commanded as his pressed his comms device. “On my signal, open North-West Section Seventeen.”

I mentally closed myself off from the other’s emotions as Steve readied one of his hand guards. I couldn’t let myself get too distracted durning the fight. T’Challa commanded his warriors to disengage their shields and stand as he stepped in front of the rest of us. 

“Wakanda forever!” T’Challa shouted, crossing his arms over his chest as his helmet closed. 

 We began to charge for the barrier. Halfway there, T’Challa shouted through the comms, “Now!”

The one section of the barrier opened up and the creatures began pouring through. Steve and T’Challa pulled ahead from everyone, Steve glancing one last time my way, as they literally leaped into battle. As I began to fight, I used my mind control to control as many creatures as I could and formed an iron suit gauntlet over my hand. I shot an energy beam at the group I had control over, killing all of them swiftly. I continued on, controlling and shooting my way through the creatures.

“How much longer, Shuri?” T’Challa asked over the comms. We hadn’t been fighting that long, but I could already tell that it wasn’t going to be an easy win.

“We’ve barely begun, brother,” she answered. 

“You might want to pick up the pace.”

Steve and T’Challa continued fighting side by side as Bucky joined my side to fight. He knew that I was more than capable enough to fight on my own, but he also felt the need to protect me. He felt bad for the pain he had caused me all those years ago and because of Steve and I being together, he wasn’t going to allow Steve to lose another person that he cared for. We fought together like it was something we had always done. Our time training together all those years ago definitely shined through. 

“I can see what Steve sees in you,” Bucky said as he shot an alien down.

“Ha!” I laughed as I formed a nano tech spear from my bracelet and stabbed a creature. “I wish it was cause of the fighting!” I killed another creature. “He’s seen me in action like twice.”

“What?”

“Tony never lets me out. And—” I stopped talking while I took out a creature. “And, well, you know Steve.”

“Unfortunately I do.”

“You shouldn’t be that surprised though.” I took out another creature. “You did have a hand in training me.”

“I guess you’re right.” Bucky finished off a few creatures. “So I should be hearing a thanks then?”

“In your dreams.” I rolled my eyes as Bucky let out a small laugh. 

Our fighting together was almost perfect, but then Bucky got pinned down. I was quickly there to try to rescue him, but then I got pinned down myself. The creature was nawing at me. I was trying my best to hold him off but for a moment, I didn’t hold up strong enough and the creature’s teeth scraped the right side of my face. I cried out in pain as I pushed the creature back again. 

“There’s too many of them! Ahhh!” Bruce yelled over the comms.

Suddenly, a large beam of rainbow-hued light landed in the middle of our battle. An axe flew out of it, tearing through the creatures, freeing all of us. It flew back into the light and the beam cut out, revealing Thor, a tree, and a raccoon. I paused in astonishment and relief. 

“Ah-hahaha! You guys are so screwed now!” Bruce yelled. 

“Bring me Thanos!” Thor shouted, charging into battle with his allies by his side. 

next >

[mbti-notes]

Hi. thank you for writing this blog, you're really helpful. I'm sorry if my question is weird. I'm physically unattractive and people often comment/mocking my looks. because I was a very sensitive kid, I withdraw from people and become really introverted. now I'm in college but my communication skill got worse. when classmates talk to me, my mind went blank and I always need seconds to answer. I want to know what's wrong in my thinking, is it because I can't accept the reality of my looks?

Not a weird question at all. No child deserves to be mistreated and I’m sorry that you had to go through the bullying. There are two main issues that I think you need to address: 1) the residual effects of being bullied, and 2) your standards for evaluating the worth of people, including yourself. 

1) People get bullied for all kinds of things. It’s missing the point to try to compare what kind of bullying is worse than others. The most important point, in terms of psychological health, is your subjective experience of the bullying and whether it had a significantly negative impact upon your well-being. In children, the experience of constant bullying is a recognized form of psychological trauma. 

When people experience emotional trauma, the way that they perceive and assess situations changes. It has to. All human beings have a survival instinct. When you live your life experiencing constant threats, it is normal and rational for the mind to find ways of protecting itself. Therefore, bullied children are much more likely to feel fearful, anxious, and/or defensive in social situations, since most of their social learning took place in situations that were legitimately threatening, hurtful, and painful for them. Unfortunately, fearful, anxious, or defensive behavior tends to get worse over time and causes problems in life when the original trauma is never properly addressed and resolved. This is why bullied children are more likely to struggle with mental disorders as well as socialization and relationship problems later in life.

Children need care, love, and affection to thrive, but many are thrust into bad situations, and it’s not their fault. As a child, you barely know up from down, so you can’t be expected to know how to fend for yourself in very negative social situations. Try to look at your situation more objectively. Imagine that, today, you were walking down the street and you witnessed somebody bullying a young child about their looks. How would that make you feel? Would you join the bully and ridicule the child, believing that the “ugly” child is worthless and deserves it? A sensitive person is capable of empathy, so I doubt that you’d want to be the bully. An empathetic person would immediately know that the child was being mistreated and want to stop the bully, would they not? A bully wants power over people, and their greatest success is to teach you how to bully yourself. Not only do they make you feel like shit by calling you ugly, they also gain complete control over you once they convince you to call yourself ugly, for the rest of your life. To be more objective, look upon your childhood self not through the disdainful eyes of your bullies but rather through the empathetic eyes of the good person that you are. You didn’t deserve to be bullied. You deserved to be loved. You deserve love.

Everybody needs to go through level 2 ego development in terms of learning how to adapt well to their social environment. If your social environment is loving and full of affection, you’re going to learn that the world is a safe and positive place, so you’ll naturally feel confident in navigating it. If your social environment is threatening and painful, you’re going to learn that the world is a frightening place, so you’ll naturally feel unsafe and insecure in most situations. As a child, you had to adapt to a negative social environment as best as a child could. From being bullied, you “learned” again and again that physically “beautiful” people get praised and physically “ugly” people get scorned. Since you were repeatedly called “ugly”, you’ve come to expect that people will scorn you, and you might even start to unconsciously attract people who confirm your distrustful worldview. Bullying is always worse for children because they have no preexisting knowledge of how to cope with it. The early adaptations that you learn in childhood tend to stay with you because they serve as your “default” mode. Whenever you feel a little bit stressed by a social situation, your psychology tends to “regress” to those early adaptations, even when the present situation poses no objective threat to you. It’s a mental reflex, aka a defense mechanism.

There’s a lot of debate in the psychological community about whether it’s possible to rid the brain of traumatic memories. However, even if you take the most pessimistic position of believing that childhood trauma is written into the brain and stays with you forever, that doesn’t mean nothing can be done about it. If you are able to improve your awareness and understanding of the many ways that your past trauma has impacted your cognitive, emotional, and behavioral patterns, you can then implement some practical strategies for disengaging your past adaptations, i.e., you can learn healthier coping mechanisms instead of allowing your “default” mode to run the show all the time. This is generally what they teach you in cognitive-behavioral therapy. A lot of people are in therapy to try to make sense of past trauma or abuse.

For example: You’re talking to someone new, and you suddenly freeze up. Why did you freeze up? What’s going on? Time to reflect on yourself honestly. Chances are, you are afraid. Based on your past experience, perhaps you’re afraid of trusting this new person only to have them turn around and mock you, and then you’re instantly that hurt kid again. It is a perfectly reasonable fear to have because you have experienced it several times before. Humans are considered smart for being able to learn from their past experience. Once you’re aware of the fear and its source and able to accept it as legitimate, then you have a chance to implement a better coping strategy. Perhaps you take a deep breath and remind yourself that this new person is not the old bully of your past. Remind yourself to give this new person the benefit of the doubt. You can’t develop a good relationship without giving a little trust and being positive. A lot of people can overlook physically unattractive features once they see a nice personality, but it’s a lot harder to overlook a negative and distrustful attitude. Another way to cope better is to work on your people skills and communication skills, which will help boost your confidence.

2) Beauty has a very important place in human psychology. Without connection to beauty, people wouldn’t be able to access all the good, positive, wonderful, and sublime things about being alive. I would never downplay the importance of beauty; however, the fact is that most people’s concept of beauty is superficial and wrong. For a lot of people, beauty is merely about ego: comparing and contrasting, competition and jealousy, self-harm and violence. If beauty is meant to be a human good, then why does it drive people to be their worst selves? There’s something rotten going on. True beauty is NOT about whether you are more/less beautiful than, it’s about nurturing the ability to see the best side of everything in the world. Not many people nurture this ability in themselves. If you did, you’d never ever call yourself ugly, because everything in this world has some beauty in it. If you aren’t able to see it, then the problem lies in your own perception, not the object itself.

Human brains are built to process information about physical appearance very quickly. This cannot be helped. We all make snap judgments based on physical appearance because this ability was very useful for human survival. However, human beings also have the capacity to reflect on the veracity of their snap judgments as well as the intelligence to realize that outward appearance and inner qualities are two different things. Failure to use one’s higher intelligence means remaining very hasty and shallow in judgment. To be shallow isn’t just to care about appearances, because we are all primed to care about appearances, it’s to take appearances as the only/primary standard for JUDGING someone’s WORTH. Shallow people easily become bullies when they feel the need to elevate themselves socially by putting others down. All you have to do is read through comment sections on gossip pages to know that no one is immune to having their appearance mocked, not even beautiful celebrities or supermodels. No matter how objectively beautiful you are, there’s a shallow person out there ready and willing to pick you apart, for their own egotistical reasons. The fact of the matter is that there are lots of shallow people in this world. There’s no avoiding them, there’s no wishing them away, but you can always render their judgments meaningless, and thus very easy to ignore. 

Be brutally honest with yourself, would you rather use the criterion of “physical beauty” or the criterion of “good moral character” to choose a mate/friend for yourself? I’m not saying that the two criteria are mutually exclusive, I’m simply asking which one is more important to you. If you say “physical beauty”, then you must count yourself as one of the shallow people. And if you are shallow, you’re going to care a lot about what other shallow people think. By being shallow yourself, you’re doomed to judging yourself through the eyes of a shallow person - you. If you say “good moral character”, then congratulations, because you understand what really counts for creating a successful relationship. It takes someone of good moral character to recognize another, and when you have good moral character and prioritize it, it’s easy enough to see through shallow people and their meaningless judgments. If you surround yourself with people of good moral character - people who are capable of appreciating you for the good person you are and vice versa - you will exist in a very different social space, a place where shallow people can never get any real foothold.

Many people make the mistake of thinking that they need to be beautiful to be loved. Makes no sense. When you focus only on physical beauty, you turn people into mere objects, and, worse, you turn yourself into a mere object and allow others to treat you as such. Genuine feelings of love don’t come from physical beauty, they come from deep within the heart. What is it that you really want from people? Do you want them to praise your face and body? Is it going to make your life meaningful and fulfilled in the long run? No, because what people really want is love. To experience love, you must be a good person who is capable of love, and then you will have the ability to spot good people who are capable of loving you. If you are not even capable of loving yourself and seeing the beauty in yourself, how can you ask others to? If you are not capable of loving people and seeing the beauty in them, what kind of people will you attract and who would want to be around you?

You are not a passive player in social situations. Children who are bullied often feel passive and helpless for good reason, but that doesn’t have to be the case for the rest of your life, does it? You get to choose your attitude towards socializing (whether to trust or distrust), you get to choose how to engage with people (whether to focus on outer or inner qualities), you get to choose what sorts of people to engage with (shallow or kind), you get to choose who to keep as your long term friends (those who praise your looks or those who appreciate your true beauty). When you always default to the old lessons you learned from childhood trauma, you’ve essentially given up the power to choose, thus remaining a victim indefinitely, trembling in fear in every social interaction. And if the only standard you have for navigating social situations is the “physical beauty” standard that shallow people told you should be elevated as the most important human quality, you’re going to live a very shallow existence, devoid of love, because you’re not using the right standards in your approach to relationships. Do you want to think in the same way that the bully taught you, or do you want to have your own way of looking at the beauty in the world and trust in yourself?