#both true but i feel like both are reductive

[guiltycorp]

I feel the most upset over Mel though... realised this when i saw how my fellow fujoshis have reacted to her involvement in jayvik jdfhgfd, the Viktor parallels that i have always enjoyed and pointed out before are now treated as Yaoi Proof and nothing else. ...because well yeah they lead nowhere else this season sadly, her relevance was cannibalized by her future league iteration and by fandom's reductive approach to shipping. To me the parallels used to be interesting because Viktor and Mel in s1 were polar opposites in social standing/background & physical health and visibly disliked each other BUT they were more or less on the same page when it came to their rather centrist but ultimately pacifistic beliefs, and they both were enamored by Jayce's ambition from the second they heard him talk about magic, inserting themselves into his life immediately. Those comparisons and visual symmetry were compelling because Jayce was lowkey trying to find a way to unite the two most important people in his life (telling Mel about Viktor's importance to him, trying to get Viktor to accept his involvement in politics, having them in the room together) while technically opposing both of them ideologically by not caring that much either about applying hextech for the benefit of the Undercity or about Piltover's participation in global politics and preserving its neutral status. While initially it seemed like he had to 'choose' between them, ultimately their separate character journeys (Viktor with Hexcore and killing Sky, Jayce with Vi and killing a zaunite kid, Mel with hearing her mother's justifications of war) led them to be on the same page in the last episode of the season which was a cool twist. So logically for character growth they either needed to improve their relationships further or to have sudden conflict, right? ...but s2 ultimately went for... just getting rid of both Mel and Viktor entirely! Viktor's motivation to give himself more time to leave more of a mark on the world (and finally getting to feel good about his own efforts by focusing on the Undercity rather than working for Piltover's financial benefit) was overshadowed by Hexcore corruption and a sudden inexplicable wish to transform humanity into a hivemind, that's a different guy entirely. Mel's motivations ended up not mattering at all, the only progression was her hardening into a proper warrior, like sure yay... her vision for Piltover and her identity as a Medarda was rewritten by sudden magical powers that ultimately, yeah, also make her into a different character. She did have a brief argument with Jayce over seeing him as an 'investment' of sorts but they didn't even get to finish it and their relationship is just one big ? before Jayce fucks off to die alongside his one true partner, like all of their previous loving interactions were just a situationship they both easily moved past without even acknowledging it. Like sure yeah we got our yaoi fanservice but at the expense of female characters and previously established relationships and plotlines... And btw there's a lot to be said about the cowardly approach of the showrunners to once again centering a 'male friendship and brotherhood' while getting pissy at anyone who might interpret it as romantic at the same time, as if a canon lesbian romance is a great excuse to be saying shit like that. Also imo timebomb pairing got more actual development and emotional investment compared to CaitVi in this season despite how hollow Jinx's character felt, so there's still a vibe that a hetero ship was more interesting to the writers... while the only things they wanted from queer ships were the aesthetic and the fan engagement.

[perilegs]

not an astarion defender in the traditional sense, but in the sense that the whims he gets approval from are funny. i would also approve of someone throwing shit at people who asked them to smear their face with said shit

[thelastharbinger]

something something something loki's love for sylvie more appropriately manifesting as platonic rather than romantic because his love for her is a lesson in healing--particularly the inner child that still holds resentment towards a lying, unaffectionate father. loki's heart breaks for sylvie because it breaks for him too. he sees her and views the version of himself that is still angry and deeply, deeply wounded. his affection stems from the empathy of understanding what it is to have had a narrative for their life controlled/manipulated for them. in their sameness, loki offers the compassion he wishes he would've gotten or would've been able to receive. and because to turn back on her would be to turn back on himself. loki allows himself to be something other than the trickster god he made himself out to be in a desperate plea at taking back control. it is mobius that tells him he can be other than what he was and offers him another mode of survival, all of it a lesson in love. sylvie teaches loki radical self-love, how to show up for himself and others, and mobius is the conduit through which loki practices this healthier way of loving.

[exitwound]

how do U find connections

if someone surprises you with a level of vulnerability you didnt expect but now get to treasure.. that is both an offering and a request for you to do the same, you can take pleasure in returning it by exposing something about yourself in turn, this is way more intuitive w physical intimacy but its also true for talking about your feelings. it took me a bizarrely long time to realize this

vulnerability is always unexpected at first... its capacity to surprise, instruct, and delight is part of what makes it special... vulnerability is also rhythmic.. in this way it is like poetry

intentionally make random choices. do everything u can to escape rigid patterns of all kinds and seek different paths

the more connected you are to yourself and your life the easier it will be to find other people ... what does it mean to be connected to yourself thats the hard part but also when you know you know kinda....like u have to figure it out for yourself. sorry idk

tbh i have no answer

its completely mysterious to me

try looking for answers in molecular biology...molecules are really at finding each other ! like really really good. they are the experts to consult here. also see: entropy & making random choices

or maybe you need to use tautologies and reductive definitions of the self: if you are not finding any connections it might be because you are someone who is not finding connections. and you need to become someone who does find them in order to find them.

you will probably not be able to know who that someone is until you become them, but you can try changing in different ways until you start to find connections, then keep doing that. *by "changing" and "becoming someone else" i dont mean be inauthentic, i just mean:

what do you think of yourself, what do you believe about connection, what do you do about it, what do you force yourself to do, what do you want to try, what are you scared of,

try obsessing over the idea of breaking out of yourself (this is what i do)

i wish i had a more elegant answer to this question i really love it i want to try answering it differently over and over until i feel completely incomprehensible

I dont understand how I have ever connected to anything

I dont know how I have ever known or been known by anyone

I dont know how life came to exist

You just found a connection in sending me this

im here

we are connected

[zepskies]

Hey, I’ve really enjoyed reading your imagines. Would you be up for writing one where either Dean / Solider Boy / Beau, I don’t mind, has done something to upset/piss off the reader and goes out his way to make it up to her and then it’s all fluffy? I’m definitely in the readers position right now and hoping that’s what’s happening! Thank you.

Hey lovely anon!

Ooh this is interesting. So you didn't exactly ask for this, but this is where my mind went. I really enjoyed doing an imagine called "How Dean, Beau, and Ben would react to seeing your breast reduction scars."

So I'm going to do this one in that style...

Pairings: Dean Winchester x F. Reader, Beau Arlen x F. Reader, Soldier Boy/Ben x F. Reader

Tags/Warnings: Angst, arguments, hurt/comfort, fluff

Headcanon: How Dean, Beau, and Ben would make up for pissing you off.

Dean Winchester

Readers of Devour Me will recognize this scenario...

Dean can be an asshole sometimes. He knows it, but that side of him tends to come out along with his protective side.

He gave you...what you would consider a "firm suggestion" on a hunt. In his mind, it was a warning you were meant to follow: hang back.

The vampire nest was bigger than you guys expected.

You jumped in to save the woman they were keeping chained...but she was already drained dry. A vamp caught you, but before you could swing your knife, hot teeth sank into your neck.

Your scream rang through the air, tearing from your throat.

Dean's machete soon followed, killing the vampire and saving you in the process. He hid the depths of his worry. His fear, when he heard your scream, saw the monster bearing on you.

He buried the true depths of that turmoil and later holds you while Cas heals you. You thank him with a sigh and look up at Dean. Before you can apologize for ignoring his warning, his words simultaneously cut you to the bone and spark a blaze:

"I hope you learned your damn lesson," he says.

"Excuse me?" you hotly reply.

"You fucking heard me! When I say 'hang back,' I mean it. Hang the hell back."

"I've been hunting long before I met you, Dean."

"Yeah, well. Color me surprised that you've made it this long."

And that sparks the knock-down drag-out fight you and Dean have in the dirty, blood-splattered barn in the middle of nowhere. Even Sam and Cas are uncomfortable in the midst of you and Dean as they deal with the bodies of the vamps.

You don't let Dean touch you that night, even though you two still share the same bed. You sleep turned away from him, curled in on yourself.

He doesn't know how to make you understand. The sight of you with blood covering your neck and shoulder, running down over and under your shirt...

He hates it more than anything.

Even in the morning, the memory of your scream rings in his ears.

You've woken up before him, leaving your side of the bed empty. He wanders into the kitchen and finds you with your cup of coffee, stirring the creamer in for far too long. He watches you for a moment. He sees you're lost in thought. Maybe your eyes are a bit haunted.

He hates that too.

"Hey, sweetheart," he greets. His voice is still a deep rumble, but his gentleness is an olive branch.

You recognize that, and your own features soften. The truth is, you're too upset and spent to be angry anymore. You really just need him back.

He guides you into his arms, presses a kiss to your forehead, and sighs.

"...Look, I'm sorry," he says. He's grateful, even for this moment. Because it means you're safe, with him.

"I'm sorry too," you reply. You squeeze him tighter and bury your face in his chest. "I love you."

Dean hesitates. His heart clenches, both with warmth and the fear of what could have been. He lets out another deep breath as his fingers soothe through your hair.

"Love you too."

Beau Arlen

Don't let that adorable scruff fool you. Beau has his moments, just like everyone else...

You don't want to feel like the jealous "other woman." Because that certainly isn't what you are.

You and Beau have been dating for a while now. You know this is something special. He is special. A big-hearted man who leads by example, and makes his daughter a priority in his life.

You admire that more than anything. You've come to love Emily as well...

However, he's been consistently cancelling on you. Dates you'd planned, dinners you'd made, "office picnics" at the precinct that got rain-checked more than the goddamn weather channel.

It seems like any time you and Beau try to carve out a moment for each other, it gets waylaid by something that "just can't wait."

Sometimes it's due to the demands of his job (which you understand).

But more often, it's because he seems to drop everything to heed his ex-wife's requests, large and small. From moving boxes in downsizing her house, to picking up her dry cleaning.

Carla always laces her requests (demands) with something understandable, like dropping off Emily at school. As a lawyer, she's smart like that.

But you're smart too, and you see her game.

She's slowly but surely wrapping Beau around her finger, and it's driving you insane.

"Can't you see she's manipulating you?!" you finally ask him. Your hands gesture widely, your brows are knitted together, and so are Beau's. His mouth is pressed in a line.

"The hell do you mean?" he asks.

"Exactly what I'm saying," you retort. "She asks you to jump, and you say, How high, darlin'?"

Part of him wants to smile at your exaggerated Texan approximation of him. But mostly, he's irritated.

"That's not true! I'm just trying to do right by her. She's the mother of my kid--"

Your hand presses against your forehead.

"I know that, Beau. Of course I do," you say. Against your will, your deepest fears take hold. They make you feel ugly inside for thinking them, let alone saying them.

"But...either she wants you back, or maybe you want her."

Beau's frown deepens. "What? What're you talkin' about."

He tries to grab your hand, but you evade him. You cross your arms to give you the excuse you need to hold yourself together.

He blows out a frustrated breath and shakes his head. "She left me, remember?"

"Things change. Feelings change," you say hotly. Your eyes run over his face, as if trying to search his heart.

Beau finally understands just what you're thinking. He softens.

And then his expression firms.

"Not for me," he says.

He reaches for you. You allow him to grasp your elbows. He steps closer into your line of vision until his broad frame is all you can see, but you refuse to look up at him. Not until his curled finger prods under your chin, raising your face up to his.

His face lacks the jovial nature he usually carries, with a side of teasing that usually drives you crazy and lightens your heart in equal measure.

No. Right now, he's serious. His thumb grazes your cheek.

"Sweetheart, I'm not going anywhere. I'm sorry if I made you think otherwise."

Your eyes are lowered, with unshed tears swimming in them. Until Beau presses his lips to your cheek. Your eyes close, and you take in the tenderness of his touch. The smell of his cologne.

When you next open your eyes, he's smiling softly down at you. It leads you to smile a little.

"It'd be nice if you didn't cancel on me so much then," you can't help but mutter, a bit petulantly.

Beau's smile slips a bit. "I sure am sorry about that. And I'll talk to Carla. But uh..."

The rest of his good humor fades. "She mentioned something about taking Emily back to Houston."

Your eyes widen. Your hand moves to grip his wrist. "What?"

"I guess I was just...tryin' to butter her up a bit. If she settled in that new house, had everything she needed, maybe she'd stop thinking about leaving," he admits. "I want her to do what's best for Emily, but...I don't know if I can take it if she's in a whole other state."

You bite your lip. You try to soothe him with your fingers carding through his hair. You pull him into your embrace, and the roles of comfort reverse.

"You do need to talk to Carla," you say. "But I want to help, in whatever way I can. You just let me know."

You can't see it, but Beau smiles as he holds you a fraction tighter.

"You already are."

Soldier Boy (Ben)

Ugh, this (lovable) bastard...

There are a lot of opportunities to piss you off, and Ben has a habit of taking them.

He's protective, misogynistic (though you're surely trying with him), and doesn't give two shits about modern social protocols like tolerance and respect.

Nor does he give a fuck about being "nice" or "pleasant" if he doesn't want to. (And he never wants to.)

When he pisses you off, however, you have to pick your battles.

You're as patient as you can be with him, knowing all of his idiosyncrasies and foibles as well as you've come to learn them.

But when he nearly snaps a man's arm off for grabbing your ass in a musky club, you have to draw the line.

(Ben settled for jabbing the man in the face, hard enough to toss him back into an entire row of glasses. You'd winced at the man's scream of pain as glass shattered into his back.)

When you send your boyfriend a look, he's both unfazed and unapologetic.

"What, would you rather have that greasy fuck pawing all over you? No one's gonna have the balls to cop a feel right in front of me, unless they want 'em shoved up their ass."

You make a face of disgust, roll your eyes, and angrily storm out of the club. Ben follows you, now getting just as irritated. He grabs your arm and turns you around.

"What the fuck is your problem?" he demands. You raise a brow.

"Not everything is an affront to your manhood," you reply testily. "Are you really protecting me, or is it just your petty pride that another man would dare touch what's 'yours?'"

You turn to walk away from him, but he grabs you again. This time by the hand. He barely resists the urge to yank you back.

No, Ben waits for you to choose. To turn back to him. You're frowning in your anger, but even he can see the thread of hurt deep down. The fear that his motivations are only selfish.

His jaw ticks. But he sighs through his nose. "Come 'ere."

Reluctant though you seem, you take a chance in drawing back into him. His arms circle around you, with those heavy hands splaying across your lower back. He cages you securely against him and looks down you. His eyes are a fraction softer.

"You are mine," he says. "I'm not gonna let these cocksuckers forget it. Because I've got plenty of enemies who'd do more than just touch you."

It sucks to be reminded of that fact, but it's the cold reality. Still, you soften, seeing the sincerity in his eyes.

He's trying to send the world a clear message: he won't tolerate bullshit, of any kind. Least of all with you.

That, you can appreciate.

And you lean up to press a sweet kiss to his lips.

Knowing Ben, it doesn't stay sweet for long.

AN: Whew! 😮‍💨 Lots of angst diverted into hurt/comfort and fluff, there.

Do you guys like these Dean/Beau/Ben "reacts?" Let me know! 😉

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[frankingsteinery]

victor is one of the most psychotic characters i have ever read in literature and it all feels both surprisingly accurate and relatable given the time period; i have been meaning to make a proper analysis on victor's psychotic symptoms for awhile now, but have, ironically, been delayed due to my own psychotic symptoms, so here's more of an informal list--

i'll be breaking down victor's: 1. negative symptoms (loss of functioning)

2. positive symptoms (hallucinations)

3. disorganized thinking and speech/behavior

victor's psychotic symptoms, as well as his initial psychotic break during the creation of the OG creature, are brought upon by the stressors of creating the creature(s), both before, during and after the creation process. the first of these symptoms were negative symptoms.

negative symptoms of psychosis are a loss (thus--"negative") or reduction of normal functioning, and can include restricted emotional expression, lack of speech or monotone speech, difficulty thinking, reduced motivation and/or desire to initiate activities, reduced socialization and social withdrawal, and an inability or decreased ability to experience pleasure. they most commonly occur in the prodromal (initial) phase before the acute phase (characterized by hallucinations, delusions, and confused thinking) and in the recovery phase, which is true of victor's case.

andehonia (lack of pleasure):

"...but I did not watch the blossom or the expanding leaves—sights which before always yielded me supreme delight, so deeply was I engrossed in my occupation... But my enthusiasm was checked by my anxiety... I became nervous to a most painful degree" (paranoia, too) -- Vol I, Chapter III

"It was a most beautiful season; never did the fields bestow a more plentiful harvest, or the vines yield a more luxuriant vintage: but my eyes were insensible to the charms of nature" -- Vol I, Chapter III (1818)

"By very slow degrees, and with frequent relapses, that alarmed and grieved my friend, I recovered. I remember the first time I became capable of observing outward objects with any kind of pleasure..." -- Vol I, Chapter IV (1818)

asociality (social withdrawal) & alogia (impoverished speech):

"And the same feelings which made me neglect the scenes around me caused me also to forget those friends who were so many miles absent, and whom I had not seen for so long a time. I knew my silence disquieted them..." Vol I, Chapter III (1818)

"Study had before secluded me from the intercourse of my fellow-creatures, and rendered me unsocial..." -- Vol I, Chapter V (1818)

"This state of mind preyed upon my health, which had entirely recovered from the first shock it had sustained. I shunned the face of man; all sound of joy or complacency was torture to me; solitude was my only consolation—deep, dark, death-like solitude." -- Vol II, Chapter I (1818)

additionally, and in general, victor becomes incapable of initiating activities (avolition) while being cared for by henry at ingolstadt.

victor hallucinates several times throughout the novel. these hallucinations are almost exclusively visual, and primarily of the creature:

“'Do not ask me,” cried I, putting my hands before my eyes, for I thought I saw the dreaded spectre glide into the room; “he can tell.—Oh, save me! save me!” I imagined that the monster seized me; I struggled furiously, and fell down in a fit." -- Vol I, Chapter IV (1818)

"The form of the monster on whom I had bestowed existence was for ever before my eyes, and I raved incessantly concerning him..." -- Vol I, Chapter IV (1818)

"I saw around me nothing but a dense and frightful darkness, penetrated by no light but the glimmer of two eyes that glared upon me. Sometimes they were the expressive eyes of Henry, languishing in death, the dark orbs nearly covered by the lids, and the long black lashes that fringed them; sometimes it was the watery clouded eyes of the monster, as I first saw them in my chamber at Ingolstadt..." -- Vol II, Chapter IV (1818)

"All pleasures of earth and sky passed before me like a dream, and that thought only had to me the reality of life. Can you wonder, that sometimes a kind of insanity possessed me, or that I saw continually about me a multitude of filthy animals inflicting on me incessant torture, that often extorted screams and bitter groans?" -- Vol II, Chapter IX (1818)

"Sometimes I entreated my attendants to assist me in the destruction of the fiend by whom I was tormented; and, at others, I felt the fingers of the monster already grasping my neck, and screamed aloud with agony and terror." -- Vol III, Chapter IV (1818)

beyond that, victor's positive symptoms also include delusions of guilt, grandeur and persecution. however, this is complex enough that it warrants its own separate post. for another time... (edit: find it here)

victor also experiences disorganized behavior, behaviors that are inconsistent, contradictory, or don't fit the situation; for victor, the most obvious of which is catatonia, a symptom of psychosis characterized by abnormal movements, behaviors, and withdrawal. he demonstrates both akinetic (staying still, appearing unresponsive, staring blankly, lack of speech) and excited/hyperkinetic (moving in a pointless/repetitive way, appearing agitated or delirious, pacing, etc) catatonia.

"Unable to endure the aspect of the being I had created, I rushed out of the room, and continued a long time traversing my bed-chamber, unable to compose my mind to sleep...I took refuge in the court-yard belonging to the house which I inhabited; where I remained during the rest of the night, walking up and down in the greatest agitation, listening attentively, catching and fearing each sound as if it were to announce the approach of the demoniacal corpse to which I had so miserably given life." -- Vol I, Chapter IV (1818)

"...my spirits became unequal; I grew restless and nervous. Every moment I feared to meet my persecutor. Sometimes I sat with my eyes fixed on the ground, fearing to raise them lest they should encounter the object which I so much dreaded to behold." -- Vol II, Chapter II (1818) 

"Then the appearance of death was distant, although the wish was ever present to my thoughts; and I often sat for hours motionless and speechless, wishing for some mighty revolution that might bury me and my destroyer in its ruins." -- Chapter 21 (1831)

he also displays inappropriate/unusual reactions, another example of disorganized behavior:

"I was unable to contain myself. It was not joy only that possessed me; I felt my flesh tingle with excess of sensitiveness, and my pulse beat rapidly. I was unable to remain for a single instant in the same place; I jumped over the chairs, clapped my hands, and laughed aloud... my loud, unrestrained, heartless laughter, frightened and astonished [Clerval]" -- Vol I, Chapter IV (1818)

victor shows disorganized speech through his "ravings" several times and there's quite a few examples of this but i can't be bothered to pull more quotes. here's just one:

"A fever succeeded this. I lay for two months on the point of death: my ravings, as I afterwards heard, were frightful; I called myself the murderer of William, of Justine, and of Clerval." -- Vol III, Chapter IV (1818)

as a side-note, in the 1800s, the term "fever" was used loosely in comparison to its modern definition, and the health of the mind and body was often viewed as interconnected--thus victor's "fevers" after periods of high stress that triggered psychosis—while being nursed back to health by henry, during his time in prison, etc.—could easily be viewed as mental illness rather than an actual physical sickness, or some combination thereof.

lastly, victor experiences disorganized thinking, which includes racing thoughts, flight of ideas, confusion, trouble keeping track of thoughts, difficulty concentrating, time processing disturbances, etc.

in general, victor experiences dream-like perceptions that leads to difficulty being present, concentrating, and processing reality, what he himself refers to as “strange thoughts” (Vol II, Chapter IX, 1818). for example:

“All pleasures of earth and sky passed before me like a dream, and that thought only had to me the reality of life.” – Vol II, Chapter IX (1818)

additionally, victor is known to lose time and “awaken to understanding” weeks or months later several times:

“What then became of me? I know not; I lost sensation, and chains and darkness were the only objects that pressed upon me…by degrees I gained a clear conception of my miseries and situation, and was then released from my prison. For they had called me mad; and during many months, as I understood, a solitary cell had been my habitation.” – Vol II, Chapter VI (1818)

“But I was doomed to live; and, in two months, found myself as awaking from a dream, in a prison…It was morning, I remember, when I thus awoke to understanding: I had forgotten the particulars of what had happened, and only felt as if some great misfortune had suddenly overwhelmed me.” — Vol II, Chapter IV (1818)

“I seemed to have lost all soul or sensation but for this one pursuit. It was indeed but a passing trance, that only made me feel with renewed acuteness so soon as, the unnatural stimulus ceasing to operate, I had returned to my old habits.” — Vol I, Chapter III

he also demonstrates flight of ideas, a thought disorder that involves rapid shifting of thoughts that are expressed in language. people with flight of ideas may speak quickly and jump between ideas that are not connected in a way that is difficult to follow, illogical, or nonsensical. this occurs just before alphonse visits him in prison:

“I know not by what chain of thought the idea presented itself, but it instantly darted into my mind that the murderer had come to mock at my misery, and taunt me with the death of Clerval, as a new incitement for me to comply with his hellish desires… “Oh! take him away! I cannot see him; for God’s sake, do not let him enter!’” — Vol III, Chapter IV

to which mr. kirwin “regards [victor] with a troubled countenance” in response.

aaand that's a wrap.

there's no real point to all this i just wanted to outline most of his symptoms so i could have it all in one place. i'll probably expand on this sometime with more actual thoughts and ideas of substance as well as building on the implications of a reading of frankenstein where victor experiences psychosis (and how actually acknowledging victor's mental illness forces a much more sympathetic interpretation of victor... which is why people tend to talk around it). do with this what you will!

[triptychgardener]

Oh also am I being a tad reductive when talking about the quadrants? Yeah absolutely. But I do think it's important to see what the comic actually says and demonstrates about relationships within these frameworks, rather than trying to find like. Some platonic ideal of a "TRUE" romance, or trying to figure out how the quadrants are actually *supposed* to work.

Like. We're supposed to take Meowrails as the platonic (no pun intended) ideal of a moiraillegience. They are quite literally used as The Symbol for it in comic (their typing quirks forming the <>).

And when we see their initial relationship online, it is... not great to say the least!

Equius is domineering and dismissive of Nepeta's agency, and is very explicitly *keeping her away from her friends* in this game, and keeping her with him, ostensibly for protection, a thing he does an awful lot despite Nepeta clearly being very capable (see him keeping Nepeta from FLARPing with the other teams. Even if that, in universe, may have been a good idea.)

And even though we do see softer moments between the two of them, and their relationships seems to have improved by the time we reach [S] Equius: Seek the highb100d, this is one of our FIRST demonstrations of a pair of moirails in the comic, designed to be indicative on the concept. In our other examples, Vriska seems barely cognizant of the idea that she's even IN a relationship with Kanaya to begin with, and it falls apart due to the boundaries between pale and red romance (boundaries that, like the human boundary between "friend" and "lover," are artificially constructed); Karkat and Gamzee failed so horribly that Karkat gives up, and it fails to prevent Gamzee from enacting more violence on Terezi; Feferi finds it utterly exhausting to constantly be preventing Eridan from committing violence, and rightfully breaks it off with him; and finally, Terezi is unable to prevent Vriska from inflicting a final and great violence upon herself at the end of the comic, especially when she wants clearly to be Vriska's everything.

For kismessitude, I keep seeing people groping around in the dark for what a True, Healthy Kismessitude is, and I really hope I don't have to tell you that you shouldn't build a relationship off of mutual hate. Our key example given for black romance is, well.

A relationship that literally always ends up with one member murdering the other. In both universes.

Also notable is that we almost never see a kismessitude where there *isn't* some significant power imbalance between the two parties. The Black Queen is Jack Noir's boss, Equius literally designs Aradiabot to be utterly subservient to him, and Gamzee specifically uses Terezi's disability and insecurity to trap her into a relationship with him.

A healthy rivalry or making fun jabs at each other is one thing. But a system is what it does, and kismessistude consistently produces abuse and often fatal violence between two people. The only one that ends without that violence is Eridan and Vriska. And that was just because Vriska didn't really care anymore.

Auspisticism is pretty rare in the comic, and even most of the characters don't seem to have a very strong grasp on the subject. Our example is... Kanaya auspisticizing between Vriska and Tavros.

Which mostly just feels like Kanaya is trying to stop Vriska from picking on Tavros, not facilitating a relationship.

Kanaya is kind of our Key Person here though, being described as "the vvillage twwo wwheel devvice" by Eridan when he is trying to proposition her to auspisticize between him and Vriska. It's a mediative position, that seems to mostly be used in attempts by Eridan to make women talk to him (getting Kanaya to mediate between him and Vriska, trying to get Feferi to mediate him and Sollux, both times unsuccessful because, again, they don't care.) It also exhausts Kanaya, she doesn't like it, and she's not very good at it, if there even is a good state to be in for auspisticizing, as anyone who's had to deal with polycule drama knows.

Ultimately, it's a way to offload the emotional baggage of a toxic relationship, either extant or imminent, onto a third party (always a woman for some reason! Funny that) because Alternian relationship structures seem designed to encourage violence and aggression for the purposes of imperialist expansion.

The REAL point where it matters is when Rose starts to get into Auspisticism, and we start to see when it can really go wrong.

During Game Over, while Gamzee is ACTIVELY BRUTALIZING TEREZI, Rose, who has been talking to both parties and trying to auspisticize, freezes.

Trying to understand this framework as an extant thing is actively causing her to undergo analysis paralysis. She sees, obviously, brutal violence being inflicted on her friend, but because she has positioned herself as the mediator of an obviously abusive relationship, the maintenance of this relationship is suddenly a priority in trying to navigate it. Her fear of getting in the way of what could be a "normal" relationship loses her precious seconds that may have ended up costing lives.

This sort of thing happens all the time. When you see a relationship as an object and a structure whose preservation is worth striving for, even when there is nothing to be gained by maintaining that relationship, it can leave you trapped in abusive and toxic scenarios. On Earth, the preservation of marriages beyond the point where one or both members of the contract get anything positive from it causes devastating unhappiness, inequality and abuse. The preservation of these structures has a purpose.

In America, as well as many other countries on Earth, the purpose of the institution of marriage is largely to put reproductive and financial power in the hands of men, and to construct the nuclear family along the lines which maintain structures like Christianity, capitalism and patriarchy. That has just historically been the case. Does that mean that no one should get married, or that no one can be happy in a marriage? Of course not. But people didn't fight for things like gay marriage, and are still fighting for marriage equality for disabled people and other groups, just for the sake of being "normal." They did it for a lot of reasons. Hospital visitation rights, the ability to have some say in what happens to their partners after death, insurance sharing.

But as the institution of marriage is expanding to include more people, we should really start questioning why these sorts of things are locked behind a contract that also assumes A Lot Of Things about two people that may not necessarily be true, i.e. a desire to live together, have sex, reproduce, share financial interests etc, when a more holistic approach to relationships where they aren't simply All or Nothing is going to make a lot of people a lot happier.

There's a couple of specific phrases in wider Homestuck Fanon that always bothered me. Those being that a relationship "is beyond or transcends quadrants" and that someone wants another person "in all four quadrants." Partially because it always seemed to just describe two people who really really love each other a lot, semantically similar to us calling something True Love but I digress. Like, in an ideal world, most relationships would transcend quadrants! Individual aspects of each type of relationship that are usually cordoned off should be available for you to pick and choose. The lines between a friend and a rival and a lover should be obliterated, but it's said instead to indicate when someone is No For Real In Love, when usually it's just two people who are human dating. There's a good swathe of people who seem to think that all the quadrants are bad EXCEPT for red which is the Normal Human Way Of Being In Love and is therefore good. I mean, this is kind of the whole thing the Candy timeline is based around, right? Everyone cordoning themselves off into neat little marriages, having babies and living in suburban houses with white picket fences.

And we all know how well that's going.

[qqueenofhades]

The thing that confuses me about the "don't vote" left (not the "I don't want to vote", I'm talking explicitly the "don't vote" left. I don't agree with the "I don't want to vote" left either but I can understand their logic) is they lose me at the final step of the logic. I've tried to connect the logic here, even if I don't agree with a political position I do try to understand where people are coming from (empathy for someones situation is not the same as cosigning it), but I just can't connect the dots here in a way that isn't deeply cruel. Does United States politics prioritize the lives of those in the US (and often white) over those in the Global South? Yes, it's a fucking atrocity. We should continue to make noise about it, cus Biden has used less drones and that shows progress, even if it's not enough. The part where I lose the plot is where the conclusion to this injustice is to let even more people die? Cus that's kinda how I see the idea of not voting: I can pick between shit and more shit, and at the end of the day, I'm picking whoever allows the most people to make it to the next day. Given Trumps stance on everything but specifically climate change, I feel like Biden is pretty significant harm reduction.

I don't think both things can't be true: that every life lost is a travesty we should not forget AND the more people we can save is worth fighting for.

The thing is, I have seen nothing among the "don't vote" far left (and I am talking here specifically about the people who both loudly announce their intention not to vote and try to convince others to do the same) to convince me that they actually care about harm reduction or stopping genocide. They only care about what makes them look the most Correct and/or superior to the Democrats. They yelled bloody murder about Obama using drones, they went dead quiet about Trump using them even more (even when he nearly started WWIII by assassinating the Iranian general Soleimani with one), and then said nothing at all when Biden reduced the drone program to almost nothing and withdrew the US from a failed war in Afghanistan it had long ago lost. Now they will yell all day about Israel/Hamas (something that Biden did not start and has had no direct military role in responding to) but they don't care about Russian genocide of Ukraine and Syria, Chinese threats to invade Taiwan, etc, because those governments are "anti-western/anti-American" and therefore should be defended. Their opposition to human suffering is extremely conditional and rests on whether they can look good out of it, and they never interrogate the hypocrisies of their own ideology.

Likewise: every country in the world prizes its own citizens above those of other countries. It's just a basic fact. Yes, the US has a grim history of intervening in other countries and causing untold civilian damage (especially during the Cold War and then in post-9/11 War on Terrorism). Yes, that legacy is complex and needs to be acknowledged. But literally none of that will be fixed, not to mention all the vulnerable people in America itself who will be punished, by Trump getting into power again. Biden is not just a grudging "lesser evil," but has done a lot of truly good and helpful things, regardless of the Online Leftists' constant lies, misinformation, and misrepresentation. If you spend all your time announcing what a champion you are for non-American marginalised people and/or those undergoing terrible suffering, and then deliberately and knowingly adhere to a course of action that will increase that suffering tenfold not only for those people but your own neighbors, friends, and family, then no, I don't believe you are a brave champion of social justice. You just want to know what categories of people you can gleefully and righteously punish and make to suffer for not believing the same things as you, that makes you just as dangerous as the right-wing fascists, and I can and will call out your ass accordingly.

[makeste]

BnHA Chapter 425: New Normal

Previously on BnHA: Everyone was all “and with that we conclude our final battle for better or worse!! We will now commence our slow return to the new normal, beginning with our protagonist and deuteragonist who are miraculously more or less intact, albeit exhausted and mildly traumatized. Also the words ‘more or less’ are kind of doing a lot of heavy lifting there.”

Today on BnHA: The Big 3 and Aoyama are OUT. Shinsou is IN. The Tododrama is PENDING, and the mysterious figure in the shadows is UNIDENTIFIED. Also class 1-A finally becomes class 2-A and it only took them 425 chapters and TEN LONG YEARS. Can you imagine if this series had actually run throughout their high school experience like people once expected. “THE YEAR IS 2044 AND MY HERO ACADEMIA IS FINALLY WINDING TO A CLOSE.” There’s an alternate universe somewhere where this actually happened and we were all so very, very tired.

This is once again a shorter than usual reaction summary post, as opposed to my typical page-by-page liveblog. Not gonna have time to do those for a while yet most likely, but like hell am I gonna miss out on the last days of the series, so here we are.

Once again basing this off of @pikahlua’s spoiler translation summary here!

watching the eighteen inch tall Rat Principal standing at a podium overseeing this graduation ceremony is surreal in the most wonderful way. it’s like receiving your diploma from a sentient Funko Pop

I love how they established that Mic sitting there screaming at the top of his lungs is also a beloved U.A. graduation tradition, and that the senpais just roll with it while everyone else is in varying stages of trying to decide if it’s too late to transfer to another school

ngl sometimes I forget that Ochako and Toga were actually the second canonical f/f ship in this series. shoutout to Hadou and her adorable girlfriend whose name I absolutely cannot recall

absolutely wild that Horikoshi gives credit to Rat Principal for coordinating the entire disaster recovery nationwide. are you serious. the “world-famous” Principal Nezu?? you’re telling me this little capybara is effectively the secret president of Japan now or something. when does he even sleep

“the principal made great contributions to quirk morality education” is also a VERY interesting tidbit that I really want to know more about. “hey guys what if we did a better job at teaching people not to be dicks with their quirks” AND JUST LIKE THAT JAPAN WAS SAVED huzzah

“we lost many things, but we gained nothing” is both HILARIOUS and soundly depressing, but I can see what he’s trying to get at. still an odd choice for a graduation speech though. “our job is all about harm reduction, and we couldn’t even do that this time around, but in the future we hope to balance things out and maybe even get some net positive impact going!” lmao. again it’s all true, and in all honesty it’s spectacular that they managed as well as they did, all things considered. and I guess it would have been disingenuous to just ignore the reality of everything this particular school body has been through and pretend like everything is great right now. but I still can’t help feeling like there was probably a more inspiring way to get this message across lol

regardless of what he says, Aizawa 100% either bribed or threatened Rat Principal behind the scenes in order to stay with his class. and will do so again next year. he can and will keep getting away with it. he is never leaving these kids

and the sheer relief from all of them upon hearing it is all the justification he needs. these kids have four thousand nine hundred and seventeen accumulated traumas among them. they don’t need a four thousand nine hundred and eighteenth. this man is their father ffs. MINA WAS CRYING AND EVERYTHING

Kacchan watched that YouTube video about a dozen times until he managed to tie his tie all on his own with the one hand. and he did an amazing job. he’s such a model citizen now

also it looks to me like he has his right arm hidden in a sling underneath his shirt, which is interesting. if I’m not mistaken (and I very well could be, since it’s been a hot minute since I did any BnHA timeline math), the final battle took place sometime in early May, so this chapter is taking place roughly one month later. the hospital chapter took place about a week after the battle, so it’s been about 3-4 weeks since then. I really want to know what kind of shape Kacchan’s arm is in, but I guess Horikoshi will get to it when he gets to it

also, “we all gotta be together today” was a real wakeup call to me in that it gave me just an absolutely ridiculous amount of feels. just a totally unreasonable amount. and it’s like. listen, self. Kacchan has completed his character growth arc. he’s a team player and a leader who loves all his friends and they all love him in return. we’ve known this for years now. it’s an established fact. you can’t keep bursting into tears or whatever every time he shows it. this is no way to live your life. I need an intervention

anyways later this evening class 2-A is gonna have a celebratory movie night in the common room, and Kacchan is gonna fall asleep two minutes in peacefully surrounded by all his classmates, and they’re all gonna nudge each other and smile fondly and cover him with a blanket and stay up until 2am and Aizawa will have no mercy on them the following morning. it’s gonna be so wholesome you guys

(ETA: I decided to go back and have some more feels about this one tiny Kacchan panel, because apparently the four paragraphs I already wrote about it weren't enough. so the thing is, Sero's wonderment at Katsuki being out of the hospital initially read to me as half bemused awe, and half "oh boy, time to get back into our usual rhythm of antagonizing Kacchan!" but my second time around, I can't help remembering that all of Kacchan's classmates got to watch this kid getting tortured and strangled and stabbed through the heart in 4K. like, even if they were busy with their own fights at the time, there's no way they didn't see the footage later on afterwards.

and that had to have been traumatic for them. their friend literally died and was just lying there so still for so long afterwards. and him getting better and going back to his usual asskicking self later on doesn't just erase those memories, you know? especially with him having lasting, permanent damage afterward. not just his arm, even! like who even knows if his heart is going to be okay long term. when people get organ transplants they have to go on immunosuppressants afterwards because otherwise their body will try to attack the replacement organ. so I wonder how exactly it works when it's still your heart, but it's being held together by various bits and pieces of a spindly little floss man. idk, but I bet you it's still pretty rough.

anyway so long story short, I'm now reading this as one-third bemused awe, one-third joking antagonism, and one-third genuine "no seriously, is it okay for you to be here, please don't do anything to put your health at risk because we seriously cannot handle you dying on us again." and Kacchan's not even disagreeing with him lol, which has to be the most concerning thing of all. "they said it's okay if I rest." even he knows he's pushing it, but it was too important of an occasion to miss. anyway please take it easy kiddo.)

Aoyama leaving makes me sad but it makes total sense for his character after what he’s been through. he needs time to sort things out and continue down his own personal honor-regaining journey. respect

also glad to hear that it was his own choice and that both Rat Principal and Nao would have supported him if he stayed. I still to this day do not understand Naomasa’s actual level of authority lol. like, he’s supposedly a detective, and yet he seems to be personally in charge of every single important police operation, on like a national level. and he has the authority to make decisions like letting Aoyama go free. he is the law, literally

Aoyama trying to feed Deku some farewell cheese also took me out. like he just walked in there and was all “sorry everyone, I’m leaving, but I’ll still aim for the path of a hero and will one day return, don’t you worry!” and at some point in the midst of this tearful speech he made a beeline directly to Izuku and tried to give him some cheese that he apparently just had in his pocket or something. and Izuku was all “YEAH!” all solemnly but HE DIDN’T EVEN TOUCH THAT POCKET CHEESE. like he loves you and accepts you for who you are Yuuga but COME ON

at this point in the chapter it also became clear to me that Aizawa has his hair up in some sort of loosely assembled messy bun and that’s why it looks so especially flowing and gorgeous today. this is great cinema

and then AT LONG LAST, the admission of Shinsou into class 2-A. they tried everything they could to keep him out, BUT NOT EVEN THE END OF THE WORLD COULD STOP HIM. his rightful place

Ojiro’s scandalized response to hearing Fuwa refer to Aizawa as “Era-sen”, and then Fuwa subsequently revealing all of Aizawa’s secrets and Aizawa getting flustered and kicking her out, was one of the most delightful sequences I’ve read. “nooooo don’t tell them that, what the hell am I gonna threaten them with now”

Izuku has not even attempted to crack a smile since the final battle, aside from when he was frantically trying to reassure Kacchan in the hospital. I’m worried about him but also loving this a little bit, ngl. I am content to wait for you to eventually have a proper breakdown, mister Greatest Hero

also I singled him out on the whole not-smiling thing, but really this is true for just about all of them. my heart aches :(

were there really so many people freaking out over Izuku’s hair that Horikoshi felt compelled to throw in that “HEY DEKU-KUN, YOU SHAVED YOUR HAIR LIKE THAT DUE TO AN INJURY, RIGHT? BUT IT’LL GROW BACK, RIGHT!?” line in there lol. the hilarious thing is that this chapter was already in the books before 424 was released, so it means that Horikoshi anticipated the backlash ahead of time. the man knows his audience

and now for this mysterious little barefoot man randomly emerging from some rubble somewhere. who are you. fandom already thinks you’re everyone from Tenko to Hisashi lol. my personal theory is that he’s just a random citizen who’s hurt and traumatized and needs help. and unlike what happened with baby Tenko once upon a time, this young man actually will be helped by a hero in his moment of need, and it’ll be all hopeful and stuff because SOCIETY IS CHANGING FOR THE BETTER NOW HOORAY

or maybe he really is Tenko, idk. what do I know lol. don’t listen to me

lastly, Shouto out here immediately leaving U.A. after class and ruining my dreams of a class 2-A movie night. FINE THEN. GO AND BE WITH YOUR FAMILY my precious little life preserver. and I’m actually really, really excited to see what their endgame is actually, so yes, Horikoshi, bring it on please and thank you

[silvercat-s]

Silco's death magically making Jinx sane contradicts Season 1 entirely. In Season 1, we see how obsessed Vi is with killing Silco because she believes her sister is brainwashed by him. She thinks removing Silco from the equation will fix everything and Jinx can go back to being the adorable little girl she once was.

Episode 9 completely destroys that notion. Jinx explicitly says that it wasn’t Silco who made her this way, it was Vi (while obviously not wholly true, Vi did play a part in it). Silco's death is what pushes Jinx to stop trying to convince her sister (and herself) that she can be Powder again. It’s the moment she fully embraces her Jinx persona, culminating in that horrifying dramatic act in his honor

Now season 2 completely backtracks by suggesting that Silco’s death did fix everything! We’re suddenly back to square one with the Jinx vs. Powder conflict, even though the final episode of Season 1 was supposed to resolve that. Silco’s years of influence, both good and bad, are simply erased from her life. The trauma, emotional manipulation, paranoia, and codependency are just... gone. The time she spent with him is not even mentioned

It’s starting to feel like Silco had her under some magical mind control, and his death broke the spell. That’s not only reductive but also undermines the complexity of Jinx’s character arc. I really thought we were past this

[casscainmainly]

Duke Thomas and the Robin Mantle

There's been some minor discussion about whether Duke counts as an 'official' Robin or not. While that discussion is interesting, I actually don't think it's the crux of the Duke and Robin issue. To me, the question is whether or not he should be Robin. And, to me, the answer is definitively yes.

This is purely my opinion, and I haven't read every single Duke comic so it's possible I've misread/missed things. Any Duke fans, absolutely feel free to add or disprove anything here!

The Changing Robin

The first thing to understand is that Robin, as a mantle, has shifted with each person it's been passed to. Tim's Robin doesn't mean the same thing as Jason's Robin, which doesn't mean the same thing as Damian's. A mark of a true Robin is the ability to shift the meaning of Robin by wearing the colours.

Duke absolutely fulfils this criteria. In fact, him and his We Are Robin crew are the biggest shift in the meaning of Robin since its creation.

Cover from We Are Robin #1. The phrase "We're not sidekicks. We're an army!" signals the shift from Robin as individual to Robin as collective; from Robin as tied to the singular Batman to Robin as a wider movement, a socio-political force. The last question, "are you ready?", is vitally important as well. Duke as Robin is meant to be different. He's meant to be non-normative, a groundbreaking turn in what Robin looks and feels like.

At the end of the first issue, a disguised Alfred (who started We Are Robin) thinks the following:

Alfred infuses the phrase "of color" with two meanings: the Robin colours, and People of Colour. By explicitly linking Robin to POC, the comic is suggesting that not only can kids of colour be Robin, but that they should be Robin. Robins of Colour are the "future of this city," and Duke is the vanguard of this future. It's no coincidence that the Robin before (Damian) and the one after (Maps) are both POC. Duke, however, is the Robin that gives the mantle an explicit direction towards diversity: him and WAR use Robin as a social movement, and in doing so transform the colours of Robin into a symbol for the diversity in Gotham and the world.

Robin as Collective

Duke doesn't change Robin alone. The point of We Are Robin is that Robin is a collective, and it's important that Duke doesn't start WAR (as much as people like to say he did). By joining late, the comic demonstrates that Duke is part of a bigger movement.

The Robin community represents POC solidarity, the necessity and ability of the oppressed to band together. Lee Bermejo ends We Are Robin's final issue with "stress on the word "we"" - Duke's arc, in one sense, is learning to rely and work with others (he initially mistrusts basically everyone). The WAR community is essential to both Duke's character development and his tenure as Robin.

So to have this page, affirming his loyalty and love for them, to be followed immediately by them being written out is... something.

Duke appears next in Batman: Rebirth, where Bruce gives him the yellow suit and tells him he's not looking for a Robin. As soon as he stops being Robin, the community around him quite literally falls apart. Izzy sticks around for a bit but fades into obscurity, Riko and Dax turn evil, Dre ends up in Arkham - all of these fates are antithetical to these characters and genuinely tragic.

Batman: The Secret Files: The Signal is possibly the worst Duke story in existence, but it's important to understanding why Robin!Duke mattered. Riko calls Signal 'Bat-Signal', highlighting his sudden reduction to a Batman acolyte. His friends turning on him shows how, by losing Robin, he also lost the community formed by WAR. In every way, his transition into the Signal was saturated by loss.

Robin Doesn't Need A Batman

Bruce giving Duke the Signal suit is borderline insulting. He already had an identity predicated on the fact that he didn't need Batman.

From Batman (2011) #45, Batman: Rebirth, and Night of the Monster Men. "Robin doesn't need a Batman" is an inversion of Tim's 'Batman needs a Robin' - in many ways, Duke is the opposite of Tim, who's rich, White, and whose Robin is the most focused on helping Batman. If Tim is the ideal Robin-as-partner, Duke is the ideal Robin-as-individual. His idea of Robin is not, and has never been, associated with Batman.

People who say Duke isn't an official Robin since he was never Batman's partner miss the point. He is Robin because he was never Batman's partner. That's what Robin means to him - a mantle free from Bruce and all authority.

"Batman is on the gargoyle. Robin... Robin is on the street." Robin is the person on the ground, who lives and belongs to the people. When Duke becomes Signal, this ground aspect - as well as his separation from Batman - is gone.

In this cover from Batman & The Signal, they gave him a Bat symbol and put him on a gargoyle. They erased every single part of his Robin philosophy.

The Original Robin

Post-We Are Robin, Bruce becomes the Batfam member Duke interacts with the most. Besides the insult of Bruce withholding Robin, this fact also strips away one of my favourite aspects about early Duke - he was tied to the Batfamily through the Robins (especially Damian and Dick), not by Batman.

It's Dick, the original Robin, who chooses him.

Dick recognises that him and Duke have a lot in common. He tells Duke in Robin War that he's "got it," and that he's a natural leader - Dick knows Duke has what it takes to be Robin, and explicitly endorses him.

Not only that, but when Dick sends Duke to jail (along with the other Robins, official and unofficial), he tells Duke that he "take[s] care of [his] family". He basically inducts Duke into the family then and there!

Dick's endorsement of Duke makes it more interesting that Bruce doesn't make him Robin. Despite Duke's disillusionment at the end of Robin War (dispelled soon after in WAR), the events in RW confirm that Duke can and should be Robin. Bruce not making Duke Robin is defying both Duke's potential and Dick's right to choose Robins.

Robin as Family

On the rooftop in Robin War, Dick tells Duke that Robin is about family. This is the fundamental connection between them both: Robin acts as the link to the families they've lost and gained.

For Dick, Robin keeps John and Mary Grayson alive, while also symbolising his connection to Bruce. For Duke, Robin is the intersection of three families: the heroic legacy of his parents, the tight-knit community of We Are Robin, and the newfound friendship of the Batfamily.

In Batman (2011) #45, Duke tries to give his friend Daryl a Robin badge. He says, "you and me, we came up together. We're fam[ily]." Even before Dick, Duke associated Robin with family, and Daryl implies in the next issue that Duke became Robin because of his parents' inclination to help. Signal, of course, also comes from his mom; but unlike Robin, Signal isn't a legacy mantle. As Robin, he constantly inducted people like Daryl, Riko, Damian, etc. into his family. As Signal, his circle shrinks immeasurably, until it's really only the Batfamily and the Outsiders if we're being generous. (Daryl also turns evil - a really unfortunate pattern for Duke side characters).

Lark and Conclusion

I'm going to end with this panel from Batman & The Signal #1, which is emblematic of the way DC has treated Duke and Robin as a whole. Bruce tells Duke that Lark is "too soft" a name. DC was probably debating between Lark and Signal, but it's telling what they went with. How is Lark too soft, exactly? How is it any softer than Robin?

By overtly dismissing the bird-like name, Bruce - and DC editorial, or whoever decided this - is definitively moving Duke away from Robin. And it's a shame. In Duke's transition from Robin to Signal, he has next to no agency. Bruce tells him he's not Robin, Bruce gives him the suit, Bruce tells him not to be Lark, Bruce gives him another suit. It's a stark contrast from his induction into Robin - though Alfred arranged it, he gave Duke a choice. Duke chooses Robin.

Duke being disallowed the Robin mantle is, to me, on par with DC stripping Cass of the Bat symbol during the New 52. The racism behind both these decisions cannot be overstated - both Cass and Duke redefined their mantles, and their mantles defined them. At least Cass' mistake has been corrected, and lots of writers and fans acknowledge how horrible that period was. For Duke, he was never given a real chance. And it's unlikely he ever will be.

This is not a knock against the Signal identity or any writers. However, it genuinely saddens me to think that all of this story potential - Duke's redefinition of Robin, his relationship to Dick, his connection to We Are Robin, and above all his ability to choose who he wants to be - has been neglected and cast aside. Even if they never acknowledge his role as Robin, I hope future stories centre him once again, because it's what he deserves.

[smitethestate]

"If voting was worthless they wouldn't be trying to make it harder."

"If voting worked they'd make it illegal."

Okay these are both fun slogans but let's talk about what really happened here in the US.

First they made it so only white landowning men could vote. Then over the years other groups of people kept fighting for the right to vote and winning and the white landowning men were like "fuck well we can't defeat the masses outright on this so we'll just make a bunch of rules that make it hard for them to vote." And the oppressed masses fought against those too and won a bunch of gains on the issue like the Civil Rights Act.

So the powerful learned from their mistakes and made other, more subtle rules to make it harder to vote as the two parties battled back and forth to win the most power and influence and corporate donor money.

Republicans fought by making it as hard as possible to vote because they tend to win when less people vote, and especially when only the privileged with a lot of money and free time can manage it.

Democrats fought by trying to get more people to vote, but it's a bit more complicated than that. They're still beholden to wealthy corporate donors, so they can't just let pure democracy happen. They can't let real leftists become presidential nominees or allow real leftist policy like universal healthcare to pass. What they can do is convince you over and over to vote for the "reasonable" option under threat of Republican Hell so that you not only give them more power, but hand over your money and your time/energy to convince other people to give them more power and money.

Republicans benefit from the same kind of threat to their constituents, even as they're more blatant in their fight to stop people from voting.

The result is a system in which both the statements at the top of this post are true. If our voting system threatened to turn the US into a socialist utopia where the masses had all the power, they'd make it illegal. Democrats have never made a serious move to abolish the Electoral College. They absolutely mobilized to prevent even Bernie from becoming the Dem nominee. They'd do it again.

And you can see the same patterns in similar nations. Labor gained power in the UK only to become an anti-labor neoliberal party practically overnight. France elected a leftist government and Macron just went "nope."

But they're never going to make voting all the way illegal for just landowning men again, let alone make it outright illegal, because they know that would inspire the masses to rise up and make too much trouble again, and who knows what they'd lose? The current situation is working out great for them.

Meanwhile, of course Republicans want to make voting a certain amount of hard because they do want the most power, but even Trump probably knows better than to outlaw voting. At most he'd turn the US into a sham democracy like his idol Putin.

Which would of course suck, but the point it that the two statements up top are both essentially true but reductive.

Voting isn't worthless but those in power are never going to let us vote our was into a society that removes or even significantly reduces their power. You can maybe make things temporarily a little better or prevent them from getting worse for some people by voting.

But the problem is that people aren't just voting. They're voting and then telling themselves that they did their duty and using that as an excuse to do nothing else. Or they're voting and donating millions to Kamala in mere hours while GFMs for Palestinians and other desperate people stagnate. Or they're voting and giving all their attention, energy, and time to the two big party presidential candidates by volunteering or yelling at people on social media or both so all the money and power is funneled back into those who already have nearly all of it.

And nothing is left to actually fight for a better world.

I don't care to tell people whether to vote or how. It feels to me like a choice between a fast death or a slow one, which sucks either way. What pisses me off is that we're letting the powerful convince us to invest so much in them with this perpetual election season as the world circles the drain, and the most powerful know full well that this leaves us with too few resources to ever topple them from their thrones.

You're letting them pull your strings instead of breaking them. Things get worse every year and the longer we do this, the worse it's going to be for us all, and worse still for future generations. How long are you going to fight to slow down the train that's headed for the cliff instead of jumping off it while there's still time?

Don't scold me about voting on behalf of the train conductors hoarding all the train food. It's not a perfect metaphor ok but the point is fuck off and fuck this.

[omniscientwreck]

I will preface this by saying that I haven't directly seen anyone trying to "cancel Smitten" but I've seen a lot of reference to it, and a lot of reference to people being very upset with him and I have a lot of thoughts about that.

Spoilers under the cut

Firstly, I think trying to make moral judgements about the goodness or badness of any of the Slay The Princess characters kind of shows a bit of a lack of comprehension of what the game is trying to say.

The voices represent feelings and impulses that get stronger based on your actions and the events you experience. Just like in real life, different people lean to different emotions based on what happens to them and who they are and what they nurture. This works because we feel all the emotions we feel and even the less present ones are still present in our minds and bodies.

So the Voices are that right? Feelings. They're slivers of you that have distinct voices to show the player how the characters affect and perceive each other.

What I've learned in therapy is that you have to acknowledge and balance your feelings and emotions. They are your helpers, but when things happen to us that cause us to favour one, it can take over too much and make us worse (my overwhelming shame makes me avoidant, non-confrontational, contributes to my anxiety, and outwardly wishy washy to make sure I am accepted by others).

Smitten has always been covetous, idealistic, obstinate, and naive. He is the part of you (as the Long Quiet) that desires the princess, not desire in the mostly sexual sense, but in the sense that he wants, he needs.

When you bear your heart to the princess, when Smitten takes over to get his happy ending, to get what he wants. He wants his happy ending. He wants the princess to be happy and he wants to protect her and he covets her.

None of these things are inherently bad, feeling these things doesn't make you evil, it's what you do with it that makes you evil.

The voices all internally push their agendas, they try to convince you to do what they think is right. They're balanced by each other, and by you making the choices (except when you can't, when one of them asserts themself over you).

In The Epilogue, when he is separated from you, he's alone, and so he doesn't have other voices tempering him and he doesn't have you to choose a different path. So he is all the things he is, and he is them uninhibited and unbalanced. He goes to his extreme because he isn't a whole person, he's just a sliver. This is why he manifests as a shadow.

This is just how he is, he is simply acting out of nature. And that hurts the princess and it hurts you but that's what the whole game is about. You and the princess hurt each other over and over again but that's not all of who you are, it's not your whole relationship.

There are many ways to hurt each other within Slay the Princess, and I understand the strong emotional reaction that comes with it, but in my opinion trying to cancel Smitten or to apply real world motality to anything within the game is reductive. This isn't to say that if you're triggered that you're wrong or bad for having reaction, but the Smitten isn't uniquely evil here. He isn't good and he isn't bad, he's Smitten. Can't judge him by human morals because he isn't operating on the same scale as we are.

It's fine to not enjoy things or to recognize that they hit too close to home, but I think that for me at least, that's the beauty of this game. To recognize myself in it and to process parts of myself that are difficult to cope with or love. And to understand that I am not one aspect or facet of myself, but that I am a whole person with lots of qualities and tendencies and thoughts that are good and bad, and to know that that's true of others as well. And to be able to explore that in fiction and see myself both in TLQ and TSM is incredibly powerful and one of the reasons I love this game so much.

[buckyssexcmetalarm]

ngl i’m tired of these reductive generalised comparisons of cole = conrad and alex = jeremiah because while the similarities between shows are glaringly obvious, this is just a bad take.

clearly conrad and cole are both the broody yet caring older brothers while jeremiah and alex are the friendly and sweet younger brothers, but the comparisons end there. and to be honest, it’s a disservice to your precious conrad fisher to equate him to cole simply based on you shipping him more with jackie. not even two dimensional shitty book conrad intentionally would’ve amped up the flirting with belly while her and jere were clearly together. i don’t give a shit whether cole had feelings for jackie, as soon as her and alex got together he should’ve taken an automatic step back. not to mention that cole’s safety blanket of “not doing relationships” is really just the douchiest excuse in the book to openly treat women badly, play with their feelings and get away with it. he deserved everything he got at that bonfire for how he was treating ellen and the other girls and his brother’s relationship. for a man who spent whole episodes swearing up and down he would never have stolen alex’s girlfriend he really didn’t have any problem doing exactly that. so, no cole is not conrad, really his behaviour aligns more closely with jeremiah if we’re really being honest here.

i know we’re supposed to see beneath cole’s hard exterior and recognise his heart of gold and his true love for jackie despite everything, but i just can’t. regardless of alex’s clingyness he’s still leagues better than cole and did not deserve what was done to him.

besides, i happen to like them clingy, sweet and freckled.

[liquidorcard]

Think you can take a look on this video on villains like Magneto? To say she misses the point is an understatement.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YouOhoCDVkw&pp=ygUUbGlseSBvcmNoYXJkIG1hZ25ldG8%3D

Oh fuck I saw the thumbnail of this video manifest a few times and I avoided watching it because I knew it was going to make me mad.

I'm going to do this one as a "real time reaction." Unlike the Harley video, I'm going in blind. Might edit a bit after I'm done writing it all out, but.

Lily Commits Elder Gay Mutant Abuse, feat. "Eldritch Lily" (Part 1)

[Part 2] [Part 3]

Get ready DILF fuckers. We 'bout to go to war for our beloved magnet man.

-0:30: Lily rambles about dumb bullshit to do with tropes, and fandom, and inventing problems. . . Oh my god, why.

So like, right at the beginning here she's just . . . Making noise? Waisting oxygen? I THINK what she's trying to say is people like tropes . . . And that's illegal if it isn't the tropes she likes . . . I don't . . . Lily.

She's using way too many words to say, in essence, I presume, Magneto is dumb, "fanboys" just like him because they like "sympathetic villians." But her rational here is a degree of reductive it makes it almost impossible to respond to. Lily is arguing against a theoretical hivemind of a strawman from another dimension - totally divorced from the one the rest of us live in.

I may hazard a guess that I, conceptually, as someone who both likes sympathetic antagonists and likes Magneto, am from Lily's point of view a part of this "fandom" hivemind she's hallucinating.

I don't know what to say to that other than, no Lily. No. That's not why I like Magneto. I am much more likely to enjoy sympathetic antagonists, as that is my personal taste. I am less likely to enjoy mustache twirling cartoon villans, for as it were, that is not my personal taste. But that is not the beginning and the end of my preferences. Bby grill, I don't know what to tell yah.

Also, a "sympathetic villian/antagonist" isn't really so much a trope as it is a description. I understand why like, TV tropes and for other cataloging purposes the definition of "trope" gets stretched a bit-- however. It's like calling "first person limited" a trope.

-1:21: Lily's "favorite villains,"

I try not to roast Lily on her just strictly expressing her personal taste (when she's not trying to argue her personal taste is superior), but considering the topic of the video-- I gotta laugh. Lily's examples for villains she likes is that one fucker from Kingdom Hearts who's only notable trait compared to the rest of the antagonists is him not being an evil twink (or Pete, or Maleficent) and the Lich King.

I have played at least most of the Kingdom Hearts games. I played WoW when Wrath came out. I played the Warcraft games where he was originally introduced as Arthas.

I guess I can see in a very superficial way why Lily identifies with Fabio Night's King maybe . . . Hot Topic Heidelberg though, I'm at a loss. I can't even remember his name, and I don't care to look it up.

-1:30: "Sympathetic villains are a double edged sword [ . . . ] you can only make them so sympathetic before their status as a villain starts to be questioned."

Might as well bring this up now-- Lily is currently engaging with one of my all-time pet peeves with media discussion: calling all antagonists "villains."

I try to be careful as to when I correct people on this. I don't like nitpicking the language people use. If their meaning is getting across just fine, what ever. I don't want to make them feel stupid for confusing to very similar concepts. Sometimes, my brain shits out too, and I use a suitable substitute even if it's not exactly the right word for the thing I'm trying to refer to. Everyone does it sometimes.

However, villains and anotagonists aren't the same thing. The exact definition as to what makes a character a true "villain" is very subjective-- more often than not vibes based. Where as an antagonist is very concretely the protagonist's foil and/or a source of external conflict. A villain is more defined by the framing, an antagonist is identified by their utility in a narrative. You can have protagonists who are arguably villains and antagonists who are arguably heroes as well. Stories where there isn't enough moral framing and judgment either way, so the protagonist and the antagonist can't really be described as heros or villains. Before we get into discussing whether or not Magneto is truly a "villain" or not, I have to point out Lily's confusing those two concepts. I'm going to surmise the majority of her arguments in this video could have been dismissed if she understood the difference.

So, yes, if you make a villain too sympathetic, they're no longer a villain . . . They're just the antagonist.

I also need to preface all this by saying that Magneto is a particularly complicated case in this regard. He's been around as the "Malcom X" analog in the very messy civil rights allegory of the mutants since the 1960s. He has, in a lot of ways, mirrored the very challenging feelings people have had towards more aggressive and violent forms of activism.

I don't think iterations of Magneto where the narrative condemns his methods outright are wholly invalid-- though I have personally soured towards them. That doesn't align with my perception of what Magento represents. And on a narrative perspective, I think it's always more interesting when the moral question as to whether the X-Men/Charles's position is correct or the BoM/Erik's position is correct is left as ambiguous as possible for the audience to decide for themselves. I think both forms of activism Charles and Erik represent are equally flawed as they are important. Fighting for civil rights is a thing of chaos historically, and there's no real clear "right answer" in most circumstances. A lot of messy incoherence of effort and resistance that slowly over time collectively move the dial-- often in a round-about way.

It also doesn't help that most non-comic reader's perceptions of Magneto are so heavily colored by the movies. As much as the ever effervescent Sir Ian Mekellen elevates that version of the character with his outstanding performance. . . That Magneto is a much messier bitch than his comic counterpart. Much less calculated and considerate in his violence. Same thing overall by the Michael Fassbender version, though he's characterized a little better.

I feel it's pretty safe to assume Lily's going to be arguing mostly against her vague memory of Fox movies while confidently being wrong about the comic version being the same.

Oh my god we're fucking 2 minutes in.

1:52: "It's a very dated metaphor for racism in the 60s, and the film are a very dated metaphor for LGBT youth in the 2000s."

Sorry, we're nitpicking Lily's word choices again. She's getting allegory and metaphor confused. The X-Men are intended as an allegory-- traditionally. Not always, but traditionally.

And as a blanket statement I'm sort of in agreement with her . . . But also not really. Again, the X-Men have been around for so long there's a diverse range in the ways the civil rights analog has been handled. I think typically the mutants are at their best when they are being treated more as a metaphor than an allegory, and for no real specific civil rights issue. Something more organic to the Marvel universe itself the audience can take away from as a meditation in a none-direct one-to-one.

My favorite X-Men Rogue is a character I deeply identify with on multiple layers personally as a queer person, a survivor of abuse, someone who's had struggles with both platonic and romantic intimacy. There's a lot of ways someone could connect with her that aren't direct translations of who she is in canon.

Also, the 2000s Fox movies was not the first time the X-Men were interpreted as a queer allegory instead of a racial one. I can't tell you when the first time was, if there is an official "first time" as POC and LGBTQ+ rights issues have overlapped quite a few times-- but the Legacy Virus was quite literally mutant AIDS. Unambiguously.

I'll sort of agree with Lily, just a little, as a treat here-- a fair bit of X-Men shit is real dated.

-2:32: "Now while Magneto was around since the 60s, this wasn't an established part of his character until about 1980s. 10 years after the man who created him Jack Kurby left Marvel."

UM, ACTUALLY.

Magneto wasn't always a holocaust survivor-- that is true. Quickly googling it, that element of Magneto's backstory was first established in Uncanny X-Men in 1981. Some part of me feels like it was at least hinted at earlier, but let's just call that about right. It doesn't really matter.

This quote from Jack Kurby is so ubiquitous I knew I could find it just by going to Magneto's Wikipedia page:

"I saw my villains not as villains. I knew villains had to come from somewhere and they came from people. My villains were people that developed problems." -- Jack Kurby, Jack Kurby Collector #22

Not a surprise but, this tells me Lily is not familiar with Kurby's work as a whole.

And guess what, this wasn't the quote I was looking for, but it was right underneath, and the source checks out:

"[Stan Lee] did not think of Magneto as a bad guy. He just wanted to strike back at the people who were so bigoted and racist...he was trying to defend the mutants, and because society was not treating them fairly he was going to teach society a lesson. He was a danger of course...but I never thought of him as a villain." --Marvel Spotlight: Uncanny X-Men 500 Issues Celebration, pp. 5-7

You're now arguing against BOTH Magneto's daddies, Lillian.

3:16: " 'You're just one bad day away from being me' - Erik Killmonger, probably"

Oh haha yes Lily so funny you put the Punisher line but said it was Killmonger, that's so funny--

EXCEPT THAT QUOTE IS A REFERENCE TO THE JOKER'S FAMOUS MONOLOG IN THE KILLING JOKE. LILY NOT AGAIN WITH THIS, OH MY GOD, YOU'RE GOING TO ACTUALLY KILL ME. JUST ADMIT YOU HAVE NOT READ A FUCKING COMIC EVER.

3:28: "Where even though Magneto has long since stopped being a Villian in the comics. . ."

According to Lily's definition of "villain," that is not true. As in, he's still mostly used as an antagonist. And he was arguably never really a villain, he's just become less villianized, evolving with our cultural perception of activism-- but I'll give Lily this one.

3:30: " . . . in film adaptations, he's still a holocaust survivor, and still the bad guy for no reason."

LILY ARE WE TALKING ABOUT THE FUCKING COMICS OR THE MOVIES!? I take issue with how Erik is characterized in the movies too, especially in the Bryan Singer (fuck him btw, he's a predator, look it up) movies. BUT YOU'RE ALL OVER THE PLACE HERE LILY, GOD DAMN. Is Magneto as a concept bad, or do you not like the FoX-men movies, which is it!?

3:49: [The prelude to the Kevin Bacon coin murder from First Class.]

Lily, people criticized the choice to make Charles argue with Erik here and how it's framed when this movie came out. Who are you arguing with?

With the themes of the movie they tried to play the angle of Charles' more privileged life giving him the luxury of the pacifist position that Erik does not have. I really like this in concept, this has been explored before in other X-Men media, but they fumbled the bag here with the framing. There's some issues with the cinematic language used. I don't blame people for getting the impression you're supposed to wholly side with ol' Chuck here, even if the text implies otherwise. I agree with her that this is a problem with mainstream films overall havin' a hard time kicking bad habits from the Hays Code.

But that's not really the argument She's making. I don't know if Lily knows what argument she's making.

God forgive me I am at the four minute mark and this post is already this long. Okay, I'm gunna have to split this up into 2 or 3 posts. I'll add the various links to each part as I finish them to each post. Lily gishgallops this fucking badly. . . Stay tuned for part 2.

[frenchtantan]

Okay, after that mini-date between q!Tina and q!Bagi, I have some gripes to settle regarding how some people have been reacting.

First and foremost, cc!Tina. Miss ma’am, I know you’ll probably never read this, but let me tell you, if I hear you one more time saying you’re not good at roleplay I will SCREAM! You are SO passionate and in the moment, so immersed, and you immediately level yourself with how into it the people you’re interacting with are. You’re not afraid to make your character show vulnerability, fear and sadness. This is PEAK roleplaying skills, and it’s so enjoyable to watch! Please never feel invalidated just because you don’t have a 60 pages Word document about your character. You’re SO talented, and your monologues from the mini-date are incredibly poignant.

Secondly, I wanna touch upon the notion that q!Tina is easily swayed. This has some truth to it, and it did show with q!Bagi most of all. Many times she changed an answer about a question or a topic because q!Bagi had a different one. However, those were all about menial things. “But what about her opinion about the Federation?” I hear you ask. Well, it’s true that the people she’s been hanging out the most with (q!Foolish, q!Jaiden and q!Ironmouse) are either pro or neutral towards the Federation. However, because they are still keeping her at arm’s length, they don’t go into too much details as to the why and how. q!Foolish and q!Jaiden especially have a mutual trust and share secrets that they’d never tell q!Tina, at least not now. As such, while at first simmering in a relatively Federation-friendly climate, it wasn’t such a big focus point, especially since she was so new. Like she said, she lived in blissful ignorance, and the people surrounding her didn’t really do anything to change that.

Then comes q!Bagi. Slowly but surely, they both develop a crush on each other, and as such, q!Tina wants to impress. She grasps at a small excuse to flip her view of the Federation as a way to do that, but again, in that moment, it’s not a big deal. And because they are very shy with each other and clumsily flirt, the seriousness of the topic is still somewhat behind a curtain, even though q!Bagi has been knee deep into the dark side of the island. The terrible truths and secrets, the violence, torture, betrayals, she’s seen it all already, but when around q!Tina, she puts on a brave face and acts all sweet, because it’s clear she likes her a lot! However, she does sometimes let a smidge of truth slip out, which q!Tina unconsciously hears and stores in her memory for safekeeping without thinking too much of it.

Finally comes the turning point. q!Bagi discovers q!Cellbit is her long lost brother, and he reacts badly to it, leaving her profoundly sad. q!Tina is present enough to start to see how complex her crush’s life is, through multiple days. After a setback, q!Bagi decides to invite q!Tina on the mini-date and fully opens up to her. Despite building up to it, this wave of information comes crashing down. q!Tina is hit with everything. But most importantly, she is confronted with how blissful her ignorance was, and she is SCARED, leading to her AMAZING monologue about it. However, this fully awakens her critical thinking, and she actually starts to reflect on the situation! Seriously, I don’t know how people didn’t see that! Multiple times through the mini-date, she not only expresses her honest opinion, but even does so when it CHALLENGES q!Bagi’s. She defends q!Foolish, q!Jaiden and q!Forever, she tells her that one of the Cucuruchos is nice, she questions the idea of leaving the island, the Federation’s desire to harm, and so on. At that moment, she’s not trying to impress anymore, she wants to understand, and suggesting otherwise is highly disingenuous, reductive even.

By the end, there isn’t even a real agreement reached on any of those questions! However, what becomes clear is that q!Bagi did something nobody has truly done yet for q!Tina: she opened her heart, and decided to be completely honest. For a while now, q!Tina had become jaded about who to trust, noticing how much the others were keeping secrets, even her close friends. It upset her, and made her act irrational. Yet q!Bagi, without any second thought, chose to trust her. Not to manipulate her, not to test her, but because she truly wanted q!Tina to know who she was. She did that out of respect, to give her all the keys to make the most informed decision about their relationship. Through some more heart-to-heart, they realize they both feel the same way about the others keeping secrets, and now they know they have each-other, at least for the time being.

This leads me to the third misconception: q!Foolish. Doozers, I love you guys. The past months, you’ve fought tooth and nail to make sure q!Foolish wasn’t mischaracterized by the fandom, and I fully support you for it. However, there is something you need to realize: the other cubitos are NOT the fandom. They shouldn’t know, CANNOT know his POV, or q!Jaiden’s. As a result, the hard truth is that due to q!Foolish’s chaotic nature and seemingly wavering loyalty, NOBODY apart from q!Jaiden actually trusts him with regards to Federation matters. He’s often filibusting, joking around, and deviating when it comes to these matters, he has shown to be ready to arrest people. He CHOOSES to act like that, and since others don’t know his endgame, you cannot in good conscience blame any of them when he does not appear trustworthy. Even q!BBH with whom q!Foolish has somewhat of an unspoken bond, doesn’t tell him everything. I know you all want q!Bagi to have a conversation with him to understand him, but it’s going to take way more than that for any islander (again, other than q!Jaiden) to see him the way you do, much less q!Bagi.

This includes q!Tina by the way. As she said during the date, he’s been keeping her at arm’s length, so she’s started doing the same. He may have good reasons to do so but she can’t know them. Now, as she also mentioned, this has become kind of a mutual understanding of what they’re willing to share, and while it remains so, their friendship is almost certainly not endangered. That being said, if it WERE to come to blows, you cannot fault her if she ends up siding with q!Bagi, who’s shown willingness to cross bridges he hasn’t. Again, this is the worst case scenario. She’s still defending him so it’s suuuuuper unlikely to happen.

So yeah, that’s about it! TL;DR

q!Tina might sometimes be easily swayed, but keep in mind that when things get serious, she does have a good head on her shoulders and is capable of critical thinking.

While it’s important for the fandom to understand q!Foolish, it’s equally crucial to realize he does not appear trustworthy to almost all islanders because they don’t have the information the viewers have.