#because I don’t deserve it

[liesmultixxx]

.

[shot-by-cupid]

There’s nothing wrong with wanting unconditional love from your f/o, there’s nothing wrong with being ‘the exception’ there’s nothing wrong with making ur self ship super lovey dovey- there is nothing wrong with making your f/o love you in the way you want to be loved!!!!! It’s your ship do whatever you want

proship/variants + neutrals and RPF DNI

[crabussy]

by the way if you think an endangered species deserves to go extinct because it takes effort to save them/they can’t look after themselves, you need to reevaluate the way you look at the world because that is an extremely flawed, messed up, and sad worldview.

[m1ckeyb3rry]

hate when the tags are full of like those “𝓱𝓲𝓼 𝓼𝓮𝔁𝔂 𝓱𝓪𝓷𝓭𝓼 𝓪𝓻𝓮 𝓬𝓸𝓵𝓭 𝓪𝓷𝓭 𝓵𝓸𝓷𝓰” two sentence ass posts followed by the most random list of unrelated characters AND THEN. AT THE END. they say “ + your fav!” YOU DON’T EVEN KNOW MY FAV!!!! what if his hands are short and warm and unsexy. or what if he doesn’t even have hands to begin with

[whatohitsonfirewelp]

You know what? I don’t WANT an awkward double date. I don’t WANT buck coming out and people having the ‘I know’ reaction or the ‘is it Eddie’ reaction.

You know what I do want?

I want Buck panicking over what to wear for the date. I want Buck flopping on his bed like very teenager after their first kiss all giggly and happy and touching his lips because he kissed a boy

I want Buck smiling every time he says Tommy’s name because maybe it isn’t forever and maybe he’s not even looking for forever anymore but he’s so happy and he’s so light and being with Tommy feels good

I want Tommy to keep calling him Evan, because before Buck was Buck he was Evan and Evan deserves to be happy to be treated so softly and lovingly and Evan deserves to be free.

I want Buck to be happy. To be happy and free and queer in the way we all deserve.

[heartless-aro]

The thing is, I don’t care that much about the actual act of someone shipping aromantic characters nearly as much as I care about the biases and amatanormative beliefs that underlie so many people’s decision to do so. The problem isn’t that individual people ship aromantic characters sometimes. It’s the fact that shipping aromantic characters or expressing disappointment that a character is aromantic and thus “can’t be shipped” almost seems to be the default in fandom spaces. Aromantic representation, especially nonpartnering aromantic representation, is treated as something that will “ruin people’s fun” (see: the Hazbin Hotel creator explaining why she won’t say whether or not Alastor is aromantic).

And yes, SOME aromantic people can still date or have non-romantic partners. But the fact that some people are so vehemently against the idea of fictional characters being nonpartnering is still something to be questioned.

Because, really, that’s the crux of the issue. It’s perfectly fine if people like the idea of an aromantic character being partnering or romance favorable. In fact, it would be wonderful to see more characters written as partnering and/or romance favorable aromantics. But when someone ONLY shows interest in characters being partnering or favorable aros in response to those same characters being interpreted as nonpartnering, it often comes across less as a desire to have representation for partnering and favorable aros and more as an opposition to having representation for nonpartnering aros.

[fah-ren-heit]

not to be a chantry man liker on main BUT. i’ve always thought that sebastian and hawke do have a very fun thematic something going on, and by fun i mean it makes me absolutely insane every time i think about it. the roles of youngest and eldest siblings of your respective families. being forced to relinquish your claim to royalty vs clawing your way up from the bottom to being recognized as nobility. losing everyone in your family all at once and not being able to make any effort to prevent it vs losing everyone in your family one by one even though you were right there trying to prevent it the whole time. they’re parallel but completely inverse and i’m so unwell about it.

[theotherbuckley]

I am free

[morganbritton132]

Even more add-ons for the Steve Has Older Siblings AU:

1. One time Jason asked out a girl at the park but she turned him down because she can’t date someone with a kid. Instead of explaining that Steve was his brother, he left a four year old alone at the park to go see a movie. Steve got bored and hungry so he walked to Tommy’s house because it was close by. Mrs. H called his dad’s office and they both got in trouble.

2. Steve went to work with his parents for Take Your Kid To Work Day when he was five and his dad pointed at a guy and said, “This is Matt McDonald. One day his job will be yours.” Matt was an unpaid intern and also his dad spent the entire day berating him so much that he looked like he was going to cry. Steve slipped out the room the moment he got the nerve up and sat under his mom’s desk for the rest of the day.

3. During Steve’s first year lifeguarding, Claire and Richie brought their kids to the pool and Jason, who doesn’t have kids, came too to hang out. No one asked if Steve wanted to come. None of them even talked to him while they were there even after they must’ve seen him working.

4. None of them met Nancy. Steve made real damn sure of that.

5. Its not the first argument between his parents to scare him but it’s memorable because it’s New Years Eve and they break the model car he got for Christmas. It’s also memorable because it’s the first time someone calls the cops. They stand on the front porch with Chief Hopper, and his mom is saying that she’s taking the kids to her mother’s, and Richard is saying that she can take her kid but not his. He gives in when Claire starts crying, and they sleep four in a row on his grandma’s pullout couch. The next morning, Richard shows up with flowers and breakfast, and they all go home. Everything forgiven.

6. Steve gets pulled aside by his dad later that day and given a lecture on when it’s appropriate to call the police and when something is a family matter. Steve tells him that he didn’t call 911 and gets his tv privileges revoked for lying even though he wasn’t. He asks about his model car and Richard says he’ll get him a new one. He never does.

[kelin-is-writing]

I am feeling extremely unwell this is sickening dammit…

[rainbow-sunshine-unicorn]

I actually love Anthony Bridgerton’s “I will humble myself before you” speech because it’s not only the perfect culmination of Anthony’s character arc throughout season 2 but also of Kate’s.

Throughout the season, we see Kate as someone who believes that she has to earn the love in her relationships. She believes that if scrapes and begs and borrows to keep her family afloat, then she can earn her place with Mary and Edwina. If she pleads with the Sheffields even at the cost of her own pride to make sure Mary and Edwina are taken care of, then she can continue to earn her family’s love. Kate is so used to sacrificing everything she has and then going even beyond that, to earn her place in her personal relationships.

And then here comes Anthony with his “You do not have to accept it or embrace it or even allow it”.

His love is freely given, without even the expectation of acknowledgment, right from the moment he confesses it to Kate. So right from the very beginning, Kate knows, and not just in an abstract sense but from his actual words, that she does not need to earn his love, it’s hers because of who she is, not because of what she can do for him.

This man that she did not concede an inch to, where she’s used to hacking away at herself in an attempt to earn love, simply loves her. He loves her even if she has nothing to give, not even an acknowledgment of his confession.

Then when he proposes all he asks of her is her presence in his life. That’s all he expects from her.

“I will humble myself before you” was the lesson Anthony’s proud ass needed to learn, but it was also the lesson Kate needed. That she’s worthy of receiving and not just to give and keep giving and give some more.

And I absolutely love that this is the beginning of her marriage. A relationship that starts with her knowing in the most absolute sense that she does not have to earn her place in it.

[happypeachsludgeflower]

So, in PIDW, there was obviously wife plots that could bring back the dead (mushroom body being one of them), and since we know Airplane is a hack that reuses concepts over and over, there’s probably multiple wife plots that could work, so like, where’s the PIDW fics where Liu Qingge somehow comes back to life, memories of Shen Jiu trying to save him intact, and goes to hunt the asshole down so he can repay his life debt, and along the way accidentally clears Shen Jiu’s name of all his crimes and now everyone is convinced Shen Qingqiu is a saint.

[potato-lord-but-not]

Your most recent post I just made me think about John (because I’m always thinking about John) and if having his wrists pinned would freak him out. Like, the level of trust he would have to build with Oscar to give up what little control he does have, give up that little piece of autonomy he clings too. Idk your art makes me crazy and then I get thinking and here we are—

no you’re so right my god. I need to draw more of these three navigating being intimate because it makes me go INSANE. I need more John being reluctant to trust Oscar and Oscar being patient with him because he’s probably a little bit scared of him but also he knows what it’s like to be ignored and to lose some of your autonomy (I mean he’s coming from the religious trauma stand point but still you get me) NOW YOUVE GOT ME RAMBLING DAMN IT I need to draw them so bad

[margoshansons]

Dreamfyre you’re still the mother of Daenerys’s dragons in my heart and will be until GRRM comes out of his hole to tell me otherwise

[ecoterrorist-katara]

The tragedy of Katara’s parentification

Sokka and Katara were both parentified, and it’s a profoundly life-changing thing for both of them. One of the saddest things in ATLA, though, is how Sokka sort of got to outgrow parentification, but Katara never did.

Sokka’s told to be the man. The provider, the protector. He’s not so good at the former (his hunting failures are a consistent source of comic relief), and he takes failures of the latter very, very hard. He doesn’t manage to save Yue, and that wrecks him. After Yue, he becomes extremely protective of Suki in a way that’s borderline offensive to her. He’s willing to do anything to protect his friends and his family, including something as irresponsible as breaking into the Boiling Rock. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Sokka is the only one of the Gaang who unambiguously kills. The rest of them may technically have clean hands because of cartoon logic, but Combustion Man is very dead, and Sokka is the one who killed him. We don’t know how he feels about it, because the show never goes there, but I have a pet theory that Sokka is so uncharacteristically (remember he was team “leave Zuko to freeze to death”) against Katara confronting Yon Rha in The Southern Raiders because he’s the only who knows what killing feels like and wants to protect Katara from it.

But by the end of the show, Sokka’s in a place where he can start to let go of his need to protect. Objectively, all his friends are unbelievably powerful and can take care of themselves, including his sister and his girlfriend. Suki is the one who saves him in the final battle, representing not only a reversal of his initial cartoonish misogyny, but also demonstrating that he is worthy of protection. And of course, he and his friends saved the world, so there isn’t really an enemy that he has to protect them from anymore. Sokka’s loved ones create the conditions under which his parentified behaviour is no longer necessary. Sokka would still have to take the first step to stop seeing himself as the one who has to lay his life on the line, but at least it’s possible for him.

But not Katara.

Katara had to take on the mom role after their mother was murdered, which meant she was responsible for domestic labour and emotional support. Sokka says in The Runaway that her role was to keep the family together. Unlike protection, that’s always a full time job regardless of the war. We see Katara spending more screen time than anybody cooking, getting food, mending, and generally doing women’s work. We see Katara giving everyone emotional support, including strangers and her enemy. We see Katara putting aside her own discomfort and her own hurt in The Desert because if she falls apart, they all die. Nobody ever showed her that she doesn’t need to be the only one who cooks, or that somebody else can be responsible for the emotional wellbeing of her friends, or that — god forbid — someone else can actually be responsible for her emotional wellbeing.

That’s why I never cared for the Ka/taang argument of “he teaches her to be a kid again!” Putting aside the fact that Katara ends up taking care of Aang a lot more as the series goes on, the whole tragedy of parentification is that you can never again be a child. That part of your childhood, your god-given right, is robbed from you. It is extremely precious and important to still be able to be a kid, but breaking free of parentification is not about seeing yourself as a kid. It’s about breaking free of being responsible for everyone’s feelings and behaviours.

For Katara, that responsibility is not problem of perception, but of reality. Unlike Sokka, who was told and shown that his loved ones are capable of protecting themselves, Katara has zero reason to believe that her loved ones are able to feed and clothe themselves and not fall apart emotionally. Between Toph and Sokka who emphatically don’t want to do this work, it all falls on Katara. Telling a parentified child that they just need to loosen up is akin to telling an overworked mother that she needs to just relax (“happy Mother’s Day! You get a break from chores, which you will catch up on tomorrow because nobody else is doing them”). It doesn’t accomplish anything if nobody creates the circumstances under which it’s possible to let go of responsibilities. A lot of Zutara fans, spanning all the way back to the early days of the fandom, like the “Momtara and Dadko” trope where Zuko also does chores. Why? Because even without the concept and language of parentification, many fans recognized that Katara’s performance of domestic and emotional labour is inequitable and probably very taxing.

Growing out of parentification is about more than just letting go of old expectations: it’s also about finding a new way to value yourself beyond the role you grew up with. I’ve said this before, but it’s very important to acknowledge that just because a kid is parentified doesn’t mean they’re actually good at being a parent. In fact, it’s probably a given that they’re not, because they’re kids performing roles that are developmentally inappropriate! Sokka remains a shit hunter; he becomes a decent fighter but he’s still miles behind his friends. A big part of healing from his parentification is finding another area — strategy, engineering, project management (what else do you call that schedule) — where he actually excels, to which he can dedicate his time and from which he can derive satisfaction and a sense of identity. For Katara, fighting for the oppressed and combat waterbending give her that. Crucially, however, Katara does not stop being a girl when she becomes a warrior. She’s still responsible for domestic and emotional labour. Unlike Sokka, whose protector duties were more or less relieved as the series went on and he found new ways to contribute to the group, Katara continued to perform her old role in addition to her new one (which is depressingly realistic btw, look up feminist theory around the concept of the second shift). Still, it’s important that she found these new ways to value herself and her contributions…

…which disappear in her adult life. Where’s adult Katara fighting for the oppressed? Where’s adult Katara enjoying her status as a master waterbender? Where’s Mighty Katara? Where’s the Painted Lady? Where’s the person who vanquished a whole Fire Lord?

What do we know about adult Katara? She’s no longer a rabblerouser or an ecoterrorist. She did not translate her desire to help the downtrodden into a political role, like being Chief or on the United Republic Council. She’s not known as the best waterbender in the world, only the best healer, even though her combat abilities are what she took the most pride in. Even as a healer, she established no hospitals, trained no widespread acolytes (except Korra, I guess?), and made no known contributions to the field.

What Katara is known for…is being a wife and a mother. The same role she was forced to take on at age 8. One which she performed for the next 80+ years.

[wickjump]

i hope everyone who preaches about how the only way to enjoy fandom spaces (especially in this fandom) is by strictly abiding by canon interpretations and thinks everyone else is ruining fandom spaces remembers that uwu baby cutesy dream is not in fact fanon but very much so how dream is canonically portrayed so if you want to stick strictly to canon and villainize fanon you’re gonna have to make that guy fucking insufferable and infantilized to hell and back sorry. it’s canon and if you do anything else you don’t actually deserve to be in the fandom that’s just how it works i guess