#ball has been dropped on that one

[whumpbby]

Some people seem to believe in the "true nature" the same way others swear up and down that horoscopes are true, that personality types are true, that blood-type can decide one's personality...

It's the same unacknowledged yet desperate need for finding a "key" to human condition that will lead us true. That will justify our snap judgements.

It's the "before you date someone get them drunk, then you'll see who they really are!" advice that won't tell you anything worthwhile except on how someone acts when micro-dosed with a poisonous substance - may as well drug them or give them some arsenic, or punch them out of nowhere, see how they deal with that.

You are absolutely right, a person is not a singular core sorrounded by fake faces forced on us by the society.

The issue I have people that believe in these "true self" ideas - and something that really concerns me when it comes to them - is that the base "true self" depends solely on the level of charity the person in question is afforded.

Because it's easy to say JC's Moment of Truth is the strangling scene if you already don't like him.

But, actually, what says this Moment can't be JC instinctively turning his back in WLJ when his mother is in danger? Why can't it be him sacrificing himself for WWX? Why can't it be the moment he jumps between Wangxian and a blade in Guanyin temple? All of these are a speck-of-a-moment decisions made without conscious thought -why not choose these?

Cause if I follow that tune, - why can't Wei Wuxian's Moment of Truth be the one where he viciously tortures Wen Chao and horrifically murders his girlfriend? When all chips are down, no consequences await, he is drunk on his own power and there's no one to stop him, no Madame Yu to slap his hands - isn't this who Wei Wuxian really is? Nothing more than a hateful monster that will attack a man in front of his dead family, for the sole sin of being rude to a guy he likes?

Why Wangji's defining moment isn't the one where he casts a silencing spell on a kid he has no authority over? Or the one where he attacks and wounds 30 members of his own family that raised and loved, and enabled him his whole life, for a guy he wanted to fuck? Or the one where he turns away from a brother that raised, loved and enabled him his whole life, when said brother needs him most? With no one to judge him, and no one to slap his hands, LWJ is a real POS.

I mean, we're leaving the grace and context out of this, so why not?

there is no such thing as a singular "true nature"

recently saw a (or rather, yet another) post dunking on jiang cheng for blaming wei wuxian and trying to strangle him after the fall of lotus pier. which is fair, because that honestly was rather terrible of him.

however, one specific aside in that post stood out to me:

as i saw in the post i'm now being a hater about, antis have the tendency of boiling down an entire character to just their worst moments. but the section i highlighted above interests me precisely because i think it sheds light on what logical fallacy causes the anti tendency towards this boiling-down.

one common thread i've seen across antis of all sorts of characters - whether the characters they're bashing be jiang cheng, jin guangyao, su minshan, or wei wuxian himself - is this idea of a singular "true nature." the idea is that people have a "true nature," which is typically hidden by polite manners and civilized society, but may then be exposed during moments of stress in which those manners are stripped away.

the implied corollary to this idea of a singular "true nature" that is only revealed on occasion, then, is the existence of "false natures": if the self that is exposed during moments of high duress is one's "true nature," then the self that is seen during moments of normalcy is not one's "true nature." one's "true nature" is determined from solely these moments of high duress; the "nature" implied by one's actions during all other times does not count. if we follow this framework, then the you who goes apeshit after a bad day is closer to your "true nature" than the you who has a normal day of fun with your friends; the you who goes apeshit after a bad day is more real than the you who has a normal day with friends; the you who goes apeshit after a bad day matters more in the cumulative assessment of your existence than the you on every other day of your life.

as you might expect, i don't agree with this worldview. i don't condone boiling an entire person down to their single most extreme moments, not only because it is uncharitable, but also because i don't accept this idea of a "true nature" to begin with. to make such sweeping statements about an individual's "true nature" is overly simplistic and reductive of the full complexity of humanity. furthermore, in order for the idea of [a true nature that is only revealed in moments of duress] to work, one must rank all of the actions and behaviors of an individual from least to most "true," as described above - but, in fact, everything an individual does makes up who they are.

there is no such thing as a singular "true nature." you are not some fundamental "true nature" hidden away under layers and layers of pretense. everything you do - not just the things you do in moments of duress - makes up your character. you are the sum of all of your actions, both mundane and extreme: the you who has a normal day with friends is very bit as true, as real, as the you who reacts in extreme ways in extreme circumstances.

jiang cheng is the person who blamed wei wuxian for the fall of lotus pier and tried to strangle him for it. jiang cheng is also the person who spent his childhood shielding wei wuxian from dogs. jiang cheng is also the person who loves jiang yanli and sincerely wishes for her happiness. jiang cheng is the person who repeatedly tried to warn wei wuxian from messing with lan wangji and who carried wei wuxian after he got beaten by the lan. jiang cheng is the person who feels his father loves wei wuxian more than him. jiang cheng is the person who failed to stand up for mianmian out of concern for his own sect. jiang cheng is the person who ran restlessly for seven days to rescue wei wuxian (and lan wangji) from the xuanwu's cave; jiang cheng is also the person who resented not being thanked for his hard work. jiang cheng is the person who spent 3 months tirelessly looking for wei wuxian. jiang cheng is the person who allowed wei wuxian to secede from yunmeng jiang without any support in order to keep yunmeng jiang safe. jiang cheng is the person who helped jiang yanli sneak into the burial mounds so that wei wuxian could see her wedding clothes. jiang cheng is the person who blamed wei wuxian for jiang yanli's death. jiang cheng is the person who led the first siege of the burial mounds. jiang cheng is not the person who killed wei wuxian.

jiang cheng is the person who blamed wei wuxian for the downfall of lotus pier and then tried to strangle wei wuxian for it. jiang cheng is also the person who, barely a few hours later, sacrificed his everything in order to save wei wuxian from the wens.

both of these statements are true. all of these statements are true. the fact that one of these statements is true does not stop any of the others from being equally true. the reason why i dislike this "true nature" framework so much is that it cherrypicks certain moments as unique truths at the cost of all others - it centers one specific moment as indicative of an individual's entire nature, and in doing so discards all other moments as mattering less. in favor of a singular, easily digestible statement (eg. "jiang cheng's true nature is one of selfishness"), it erases the full complexities and contradictions true to humanity.

it is erroneous to say that "jiang cheng trying to strangle wei wuxian indicates his true nature," because of all the other shit that jiang cheng did. but it is ALSO erroneous to say that "jiang cheng sacrificing himself to save wei wuxian indicates his true nature," because of all the other fucking shit that jiang cheng did. the fact is that jiang cheng did both of those things and also a whole bunch of other shit, and we all just have to accept it.

what's funny here is that this same "true nature" thinking also gets applied to wei wuxian himself in-universe. to the general public in MDZS, wei wuxian is the guy who invented demonic cultivation, who created the weapon of mass destruction that was the yin tiger tally, who killed jin zixuan, who got jiang yanli killed, and who in a moment of extreme emotional distress killed over a thousand people at the nightless city pledge conference. in their discussions of wei wuxian, the public centers these specific acts as indicating wei wuxian's singular "true nature." everything else wei wuxian was - his inventiveness, his kindness, his selflessness, his playfulness, his genius - gets dismissed as "false natures" in comparison to the one "true nature."

but this isn't an accurate description of wei wuxian, because to take just wei wuxian's very worst moments and then make those moments his entire being is not fair. wei wuxian tortured countless wen cultivators during the sunshot campaign, wei wuxian killed jin zixuan and heavily injured jiang yanli before her death, wei wuxian killed over a thousand people at the nightless city pledge conference. wei wuxian also sacrificed his everything for jiang cheng, abandoned the easy way out in favor of protecting innocent people from suffering, and has repeatedly chosen to help others when he could have easily not done so. all of these statements are true. the fact that one of them is true does not prevent any of the others from being equally true. the wei wuxian who chose to help the wen remnants is every bit as real as the wei wuxian who killed over a thousand people at nightless city, and to take either of these moments and assert that it alone reveals a "true nature" while ignoring the other is to commit a logical fallacy.

tl;dr - people contain multitudes.

regarding what the op of the screenshot actually said: they are correct in that jiang cheng does display a repeated pattern of behavior in which he blames wei wuxian for his family's misfortunes and thus lashes out at wei wuxian. but the degree to which wei wuxian is actually blameless for this misfortune, i think, is much greyer than the op said.

[sittinginsunflowers]

I can’t stop thinking about how every parental figure in Kristen’s life has failed her by prioritizing their other kids.

Obviously, her bio parents are racist assholes who raised her in a fundamentalist cult, and kicked out at 15, all because her parents were offended she was “taking her friends’ side over theirs.” Which she didn’t, what she did was ask for answers and tell them that Daybreak tried to kill her but they refused to believe her. Instead, they chose to make her homeless so she doesn’t spread the idea that her parents don’t know everything. Two years later, and they’re still doing the same thing at the diner.

Then there’s Jawbone and he’s Tracker’s guardian, and unlike Adaine, she didn’t get a speech about how he’d take her in, or what their relationship was, she just moved in with her girlfriend, and he was the adult of the house. And now that she and Tracker have broken up, he and Sandra Lynn don’t seem to have made the time to talk to her about what that means for her place in this family. Adaine came back from spring break to gifts for every birthday she had without Jawbone and adoption papers. Kristen’s mail from her school was going to her parents’ house when she lives with the guidance counselor.

Then, there’s the fact that when Sandra Lynn and Jawbone moved in together, she took on a role she clearly wasn’t ready for, as she was still repairing her relationship with Fig. Kristen had to be the one to finally snap her out of her self destructive spiral with Garthy and then Sandra Lynn asked her to keep it a secret. Meaning she wouldn’t be able to tell Tracker, the only person who has been meeting her emotional and physical safety needs, above just giving her a room to live in. (And we know this is true because part of the reason Nara and Tracker are together is because Nara doesn’t need those things from Tracker). And yes, Sandra Lynn apologizes to the whole group, as she should, for putting their home in jeopardy, which is a massive step. But she never talks to Kristen about putting her between the 3 people responsible for keeping her out of her parent’s house.

So Sandra Lynn calls Fig, ���her only daughter in the world,” and Jawbone is only legally responsible for Adaine and Tracker, and neither of them, nor any other adult, has asked if Kristen feels safe or if she’s okay. Like I’m sorry, who the fuck is taking care of the cleric who’s god and teacher died in the same year, is going through deprogramming from a cult that wants her back, her first breakup, seeing her estranged parents and siblings again, and now being expelled on zero grounds despite working herself to the bone to make sure her party gets to go to college?

[the-valiant-valkyrie]

i feel like more people would be able to appreciate And When You Fall for what it really is if they dissected the lyrics as they would poetry. despite the fact that it only plays during a fraction of the endings, to me it has to be intentional that it shares the same motif with the main menu, pause screen, and epilogue showcase.

considering you only get it as a credits song during either of the bad endings in the Jeremy Only route, it seems obvious to imagine that the song is tethered to jeremy. i like to consider And When You Fall as an ode to him, from either megan, jenny, or a combination of the two of them.

the first two verses alone are what really fucking gut me, if only because they encapsulate the themes of the entire rest of the game beautifully. "and when you fall; please let me down gently".

as long as jeremy is alive, there isn't a moment where he isn't pushing back against the perceived injustices around him. it could be advance, it could be disrupt, it could be channel one. jeremy is a potent blend of stubborn and moralistic, and that combination is dangerous. it's dangerous for others, and- more importantly in the contexts of when the song is played- it's dangerous for him.

i love the resignation in the word choice used here. "when you fall". not if. it's inevitable. anyone who knows jeremy knows that he's going to kick and scream and fight until he can't anymore. these endings just highlight the sorts of things that force him to stop, be it death at the hands of betterment, or torture so all-consuming that jeremy as we knew him might as well be dead.

ultimately, i pick up a lot of jenny's language in the first two verses alone, when considering who the words are meant to be referring to.

"i can't ask you not to kill yourself for the sake of a better world. i can't ask you not to die. we both know you're going to do that inevitably. just don't break my heart when you do it. please."

[marvel-starwarsfangirl]

here's a horrifying thought (mild spoilers for "Infiltration"):

something something identity has been one of the focal points of Crosshair's character and he confirmed that wiping one's identity away completely is part of the Clone X program.

Hemlock tried to destroy who Crosshair was completely after the poor guy was having an internal crisis for two whole seasons. I am not ok right now.

[ilovedthestars]

my thoughts on the nimona movie (no spoilers)

I literally just finished watching the nimona movie. It is SO good. I liked the graphic novel and the trailers looked incredibly promising and it absolutely lived up to my expectations. It is so queer, and so trans, and knowing that ND Stevenson wrote Nimona years before coming out gave me a lot of emotions about the way this was realized on screen. I don’t know how much he was involved in the adaptation, but it’s absolutely something he should be proud of.

I wondered how Nimona would work as a movie, knowing that Hollywood is sometimes bad about book adaptations. But the trailers gave me the impression that they were changing some things but keeping the spirit of the graphic novel alive, and after seeing the movie I think that’s 100% true. They mixed things up quite a bit—there are a few scenes that are straight out of the graphic novel, but most of the events of the plot were new or reworked in a different way from the original. But the original themes underlying Nimona are not only still there, they’re made even more big and bold and obvious by the changes.

And let’s talk about the animation for a second!! Nimona might not quite be as flashy as spiderverse, but the animators were absolutely still doing groundbreaking things with the animation. It’s 3D animated, but rendered in a way that’s designed to look more like 2D animation. Instead of hyperrealism they went for stylization, but still with the super dynamic motion of 3D models. This article [https://mashable.com/article/nimona-animation-style] talks a little bit about the artistic choices that went into it, and how they were going for the vibe of "graphic novel come to life." (I still have no idea how they pulled off cel shading on 3D models, but I’m so impressed.) The lighting in particular stood out to me as very cool, and the transitions when Nimona shape shifts were absolutely seamless. The whole movie just looked incredibly cool.

Speaking of the artistic skill that went into this film, two of the three main characters (Ballister and Ambrosius) were drawn as white in the graphic novel, and were changed to people of color in the movie, with such skill that when I went back to reread the original to prepare for the movie I had a genuine moment of “wait, they were white?” Their character designs were adapted so perfectly as to be instantly recognizable, while also fitting their style into the updated aesthetic of the movie. (Which has a super cool medieval/futuristic thing going on, expanded from what we see in the graphic novel.) Nimona is also, I cannot overstate, so perfectly Nimona. It’s clear that a lot of effort went into capturing the essence of ND Stevenson’s drawings.

The plot of the movie was not anything particularly new—“maybe the monsters aren’t monsters after all” is an oldie but a goodie—but it was done very well. Even though I’d just reread the graphic novel, there were enough changes that there were plenty of surprises. Also, did I mention how funny it is? There are so many hilarious lines & visual gags that don’t veer into the awkward place that animated movies aimed at a young audience sometimes land. And again, I cannot emphasize enough that it is even more explicitly queer than original, and they leaned into the trans vibes of Nimona very hard. Props to Stevenson and everyone else who worked on this movie.

[rivilu]

currently fighting the demons (wanting to play wotr again)

[radiantmists]

so im rereading homestuck bc my life is a mess and it brings me nostalgic joy, and it just occurred to me that hussie missed a HUGE opportunity in the end of act 6 by having Robo-Jack leave the Felt fight to take on the Striders, because if he'd played it right, he could have had him run into Karkat. You know, the guy whose session he was from. The guy who actually felt betrayed when Noir killed him, because he thought of Jack as his friend. That guy.

But instead, he's defeated by the Striders, who he could not give less of a shit about-- and Terezi, who exiled him I guess, but with no acknowledgement that he even remembers who she is. What a waste.

[hauntingblue]

Inept 8 year old boy dragon tries to save floating island is such a concept

[joshuaalbert]

another thing I do wish had at least come up in ds9 while talking about the bajoran faith is the idea of just like. secular bajorans. I think the way they’re written that’s kind of ‘everyone just believes in the religion and that’s it’ is honestly a little flat? but I think there would be people who have a very complicated relationship with the prophets, who maybe didn’t believe in them before the events of the show and now maybe they have to but they think of them more as the wormhole aliens rather than gods, or just don’t believe (anymore, if they once did) that they should be worshipped because they allowed the events of the occupation to happen. but that wouldn’t mean entirely disengaging from the practices of religion as a community thing, or as comfort in times of need bc sometimes that sense of ritual can be a good one, who still wear the earring not so much as a sign of faith but just as a sign of being bajoran and being connected to their people.

idk not to sound like I’m overexplaining secular approaches to an ethnoreligion when that’s a lot of people’s lived experience but I’m just kind of thinking about what it would look like in this context, and I don’t know that it ever would have been a whole plotline but I think a mention could have been interesting. maybe something as small as rearranging duty schedules and it’s something that would interfere with religious services, but a couple specific bajorans are willing to take that because they’re not religious, and it’s a one line mention (which is the kind of thing ds9 often did well so it would feel natural), but it makes them a little less homogenous as a species.

[coldflasher]

the flash should have ended with barry quitting his job at ccpd to become a stay-at-home husband and that's on that

[izzy-mccalla]

there's so much deep costume analysis i could do about the notebook if only young allie's first dress wasn't fucking blue

[gatheringkeepsakes]

i think it's really significant that Weiss's words we're the last we heard before Ruby - after nine volumes of repression - finally snapped.

[anarkhebringer]

Still think how stupid it is that NO major game company really supports their SEA playerbase and actively shoot themselves in the foot every time they make payment changes that make it impossible for that demographic to pay, which ends up wiping out a huge chunk of their playerbase and profit. Squeenix need to revert that region lock and fast, it's even affecting regions that ARE supported in terms of ability to process payments.

[gollumpanties]

well i'm so overwhelmed i just burst into tears ✌️

guess i'm not getting anything else done today. i have Reached My Limit.

[settingorange]

Sitting here like. I submitted my little poems for contest now what.

[impossible-rat-babies]

i am standing by how there hasn’t been a good looking bow in ffxiv in years