#but if you really care about victims

[lgbtlunaverse]

"Nie Mingjue would still have died young even if Jin Guangyao hadn't killed him" Not as in "So it's fine to kill him because people who won't live for much longer have obviously already forfeit their lives" (what) But as in "If you don't get that Nie Mingjue has had an inevitable young and violent death hanging over him since he was a young teenager and has embraced it you can't fully understand his character"

[dxxtruction]

Louis' "You're boring!" Could mean so many things, but I think what's most apparent about that line is that Armand takes no initiative just for himself. He's not really anybody, because he never goes out and finds himself or gets attached to anyone but Louis. Without Louis as his guide he's literally just sitting on a couch picking lint! That's the thing.

He orbits constantly around what would make Louis happy, and never really fully going what would make me happy? Ultimately that drive to please Louis is what drives him to torturing Daniel, not so much that he'd care to just do it. Ultimately, not giving proper care to Louis is just a way to make sure Louis knows he has to orbit around him as well, with shoving Lestat onto him just that other nail on the coffin. So, even if he fails to figure out how to make Louis happy with him, he still knows what Armand is good for, and better than.

That dependency is what drives Armand's abuse. It really just comes down to that. Armand doesn't even realize how suffocated he is by his own dependency. This is just how life is to him. (It shouldn't be lost either that dependency is a theme considering this episode also deals with addiction).

Daniel's fascinating because he's just so driven to be somebody. He's largely independent, he seeks things because he wants them. It's his drug to poke and prod at all the things that he shouldn't. Daniel's exciting because he lets Louis in to something different, lets him in to all this potential in another person that he can also do the same with for himself. It's a real connection. A two way street. It's easy to tell how Armand can be smothering then because he's never introducing him to anything really new, and most the ways both of them connect are all painful and traumatic. It's never just fun because there's always that layer of that pain. Fun died with Claudia.

50 years on they've gotten to a lot better place, both of them, but it's still that same shit. No seriously, "How is this any different from last time, Louis?"

Well... Because Armand's going to be, at the very least, making one [1] decision only for himself - and that's to hold power over Daniel's life. Fucking sick foreshadowing.

They aren't driving each other to the brink anymore but "The vampire is bored" STILL. Maybe it's even worse, despite being in better places, because Louis' sort of just been defeated by it. (I mean, can he even really leave this either?). He's accepting the dependancy cause he kind of has to. He'd literally ended up letting all the enjoyment be up where he can't reach [The book shelves]. Armand so desperately wants Louis happiness but what really ends up happening is that Louis ends up having to give Armand all his own. He's got no one or anything else to get it from. But like an iPad and an over the top eating ritual. Two extremes of what's just more lint picking.

This whole relationship is one I find just tragic inside and out. You have to just pity it, really. There's ways in which you can find yourself feeling bad for both of them. But you can only really be mad at Armand for any of it. Armand, who isn't even 'free' in any sense, having so little concept of his own independence, but is at the same time so controlling over other's. It's a tragic cycle. It's an infuriating one.

Louis at least has the mind to know when enough is enough. If just needing that extra push to get there. Armand's too scared of it being over to even try.

[elviraaxen]

I'm probably not the first to admit this but goddamn was I a narcissistic prick when I wasn't on stimulants

[bitchapalooza]

I relate to Sanji too much because it really does seem like he’s adopted the mentality that physical and mental abuse is a form of significant affection but only directed towards himself, like he sees it’s wrong and unjust when other people are being abused, but when he’s the victim he feels this conflicted sense of I deserve it and Wow they love me so much! It’s heartbreaking just to think about tbh

[uncanny-tranny]

It's weird how people paint "daddy issues" and even "mommy issues" as, like, a joke or a failure on part of the person who has those issues, rather than recognizing that daddy and mommy issues stem, for so many people, from abuse. What this all is is just abuse apologia, and nobody seems to either notice or maybe even care.

When somebody with daddy or mommy issues opens up about the "why," I can't ever seem to shake the fact that they tend to have gone through a ton of abuse and bullshit as a child. It's just crazy that other people would look at that and see a joke or a failure of the once-child who was abused.

[branwinged]

jonelias bluebeardposting: lonelyeyes edition

NBC Hannibal S03E12 - "The Number of the Beast is 666" // MAG 159 - "The Last" // MAG 160 - "The Eye Opens"

[moghedien]

I don't want to be a spoil sport or whatever, but I just feel like every fantasy story set around the Salem Witch Trials which suggests that the victims of the trials were actually witches is almost certainly regressive and bad and the writers should be shamed

[vaugarde]

havent seen this take in a while thankfully but it popped up in my head and i wanna post this anyways. i think everyone who talks about how siffrin “got off too easy” at the end of isat and his friends should have abandoned him should go read warrior cats if they want an example of a character using their trauma as their god-given jailbreak card to treat their family and peers (a good amount of whom who were completely innocent) like dogshit, and who faces zero consequences from the narrative for it (and in fact bends over to blame their peers). like read all the shit jayfeather does while the narrative sobs over how tragic but awesome and quirky he is and then look me in the eye and tell me siffrin’s ending was poorly written.

[rebellum]

I feel like... Perhaps... Arguing that transphobia is defined by murder and that anything other than murder doesn't even matter... May NOT be conducive to fighting for trans rights.

Like... people want the right to exist as they are. They want to have access to hrt and surgeries and prosthetics. People want access to clothes that fit them and reflect how they want to be seen. People want access to medical care (eg. Getting screened and treated for sex-based forms of cancer can be impossible if you have the "wrong" sex listed to receive those tests). People want to be respected and treated well. People want to not be sexually assaulted and beaten and abused. People want to have access to housing and jobs, and the protection to not lose those things for being trans. People want access to shelters for homeless people or survivors of domestic abuse. People want name changes.

Acting like all of those things don't matter because at least they weren't murderered by an individual (and instead die of suicide or state violence, or survive and suffer) isn't okay.

[something-about-sunflowers]

OFMD fandom:

Stop minimizing the severity of harm and manipulation that happens to people in cults by comparing a small fandom subgroup (literally, there are fewer than you're imagining) to cults. Stop acting like people disagreeing with YOU means they're incapable of seeing another point of view. Stop acting like people disagreeing with you is somehow policing you. Stop. . . just. Stop.

For the love of all that is good and joyful in this world just. If you don't want to see Izzy fans or the Canyon then just. Stop. Leave them the fuck alone. Get out of those tags. Stop commenting on their posts. Stop sending them rude shit (or ANY shit) in their ask boxes. Stop making up hypothetical Izzy fans/Canyonites to get mad at. Go get mad at your boss or your government officials or something actually productive instead.

I do genuinely wonder if the more normal people in the fandom see any of this and like. Question this behavior because. Like. Jesus fucking christ.

[lupins-hehim-pussy]

I wanna know ur Fontaine msq criticisms 👁️👁️👂I’m all ears

I'm not sure if you wanted me to talk about this secretly or publicly but! Here I go!

The TLDR: Fontaine MSQ aestheticised prison, poverty, child abuse, the justice system/court and didn't properly address any of it.

More:

Focalors/Furina has way too much of a sympathetic angle for a dictator who's lets people drown with her inaction.

Neuvillette feels Bad for sentencing some people to death/prison, but that's it. He's one of the most powerful people in Fontaine. If he felt like there are systemic injustices, I.E sending an abused Child to prison, he should be the first person to DO something about it, not just cry and be sad so the audience can be like aw, that's complex character writing isn't it? No it's not! And guilt doesn't absolve you!!!!!!! (These are stuff we deal with in OTCOJ read my fic now /j)

Meropide has children in it, both Sentenced there (Wriothesley) and BORN THERE (Lanoire), and this is just a quirk of the place. Not only that, Meropide accepts prisoners of all genders and crimes. There are abusers and abuse victims in one place. Do you know how bad that is? How much potential for crimes to happen in a place like that— oh wait, Meropide isn't under Fontaine's jurisdiction. If you are assaulted as an inmate it literally means nothing to the court.

Wriothesley had no qualifications when he took over. Depending on how long he lived on the streets, how old he was when he killed his parents, how old he was when he was first taken in by the orphanage, etc, the man might never have more than 4–5 years of formal education. Sigewinne probably had to teach him how to write reports. And do Meropide's spreadsheets. Edit because I forgot to elaborate on this one: This isn't a point brought up anywhere, which is bad, because when poverty and incarceration robs you of a proper education (and the rights to vote in many places too, too, by the way), it reduces your prospects for jobs, reduces many people's ability to get a home etc etc. Wriothesley was just, narratively, Given his position.

Meropide is an industrialized prison, and they portray this as a good thing. Prisoners are paid in coupons for their labour, and this is also portrayed as a good thing.

The One-Meal-A-Day reform was something Paimon gushed about being so great of a perk, that people might want to go to jail for food (could be interesting and reflective of systemic poverty if MHY had brains, but they don't, so I was just Pissed because essentially all Paimon wanted to say was "Prison isn't so bad, but still don't go to prison guys! Prison labour is really hard!"). By the way, in most real-world prisons they are obligated to feed you three meals a day. Because that's how much food a human needs. MHY went with one meal just so they can say "if you want to eat more, you have to work." And then the welfare meal is a goddamn gacha. So imagine you're a starving child who's too weak to work in the fucking robot assembly line, and you wander up for your first meal in 24 hours, only to luck in with a shit one. I'd kill myself.

They wrote Wriothesley, who's a victim of the system, into a guy who's say shit like "I'm the Duke I can do whatever I want" for a cool moment where he choke-slams an inmate (I know he was a bad guy. But also, in copaganda when cops are violent/disregarding protocols, they are always only portrayed to do that against bad guys, so what does our critical thinking tells us about this one?) They wrote Wriothesley, who was an inmate of a prison so bad, so notorious that it is the literal boogeyman of Fontaine, that has a legal (???) fighting pit, with an administrator who abuses his position to be unreasonable, to willingly stay in the place and become an Administrator who would choke-slam an inmate while saying a cool line about how he has the power to do whatever he wants. They wrote him, the guy who had to be fed on the streets by melusines, to think one-meal-a-day was a good enough reform (while he spends god-knows how much on his boat). This wasn't a victim-turns-into-abuser narrative either, they want all this to be seen as positive character growth.

And then, the final kicker is, they gloss over his entire abuse. You can only read about these shit in his profile, which most people don't because they don't Have Him or doesn't care to unlock it/read it online, and they jammed his entire backstory into a flaccid info-dump at the end of his character story quest. This man isn't Allowed to feel abused and neglected and show any reaction to it within the narrative of Fontaine itself, because if they actually Gave Weight to what happened to him, they'd have to confront THE FUCKING JUSTICE SYSTEM they had NO PLANS on criticising. I don't think they ever explicitly said the fucking Crime-Theatre nonsense was Bad either.

I could go on, but this is already so long. But yeah, I hope this gave you an idea.

[fvckw4d]

I do not have anything against people just having a good time or shipping stuff I don't like or that is fucked up in the story or whatever, but sometimes I see people's read on the situation and go "I don't think this is a matter of morals or taste, I think you just need to get better critical thinking skills."

[lord-squiggletits]

Okay another instance of "fuck canon" that's not just Pharma-related, but Ambulon related. I keep thinking of Luna-1 where Ambulon called Pharma "Doctor DJD" and I feel like that's such a total "he would not fucking say that" moment. Obv JRO controls the characterization so what's in the comics is canon/right, I just think that it doesn't make sense for someone in Ambulon's position with his backstory to be that petty towards Pharma?

Ambulon's a Decepticon traitor, he's on the DJD's List. Moreover, he's stationed on Messatine which is the DJD's home planet and is (was?) still an active battle front until very recently.

Proof that Messatine being the DJD's territory is common knowledge: not only First Aid, who's stationed at Delphi, but also at least three Autobots on the Lost Light, know that the DJD make Messatine their home. And this is long before Pharma does his monologue to Ratchet about his t-cog blackmail with Tarn.

Proof that Delphi/the nucleon mines were in an active warzone at least until Pharma started his plague: Pharma wouldn't have had any t-cogs to harvest if there wasn't a continuous stream of soldiers/war-dead coming in to use as his supply.

So then, Ambulon knew fully well that he and all of the rest of them were right next to the DJD's home base, and as an ex-Decepticon he knows he would be on the list. Probably not very high on the list, since Ambulon was a mere MTO who got turned into a failed combiner experiment, but he IS on the list; just because the DJD only proceed through the list in order of importance, doesn't mean that Ambulon wouldn't know that they'd come for him eventually.

And this is a really fucking neat idea to play around with! We don't ever get a canon/explicit explanation for why Prowl decided to station those three medics on Delphi, especially one who's an ex-Con on an execution list. Did Ambulon have a choice? Or was he told to go there with no argument? Either way, I think Ambulon deserves some major kudos, because he must have ball (bearings) of steel to be an ex-Con in DJD territory without constantly being on the verge of a mental breakdown or panic attack. I could honestly write a whole post on the question of "why were these three stationed on Messatine" in itself, but that's for another time.

The point I'm trying to make here is basically that Ambulon of all people should've been sympathetic to the circumstances that drove Pharma to do what he did: they were ALL stationed in the DJD's territory and they knew it, they ALL knew that the DJD's playbook is horrific torturous murder, they ALL knew that Ambulon was a former Decepticon. It wouldn't take a genius for everyone at Delphi to piece together the fact that the DJD would come for Ambulon eventually if either he wasn't evacuated or Delphi as a whole wasn't evacuated. But I mean, this is wartime, right? Every soldier is risking their life, everyone could die at any moment. They can't close down Delphi or evacuate all of the personnel in an active war front battling over a mine just because a medic or three might feel unsafe. Nowhere in war is safe. If High Command let everyone abandon their posts who was afraid of being killed, nothing would ever get done because war comes with inherent risk of death that all soldiers accept by participating, as well as accepting the obligation to follow orders on threat of punishment. (Almost as if Pharma couldn't have just evacuated or run away like Ratchet suggested, but JRO clearly isn't a military expert so I'll digress/chalk it up to "wasn't plot relevant to bring up".)

We got all of like, two pages that showed Pharma and Ambulon's working relationship, and the best we have besides that is JRO's word of god that Pharma and Ambulon had 'mutual reluctant respect' for each other. It's highly unlikely that the two were best buddies regardless, but I don't think you need to be friends with someone like Pharma, while sharing the same situation as him, to be a little more sympathetic to him? Like I get that Ambulon would be offended by the idea of his boss trying to frame him for murder to cover up his own murders, but the "Doctor DJD" line always seemed weirdly callous and petty to me. "Doctor DJD" implies that Pharma was some sort of willing collaborator or servant to the DJD which clearly wasn't the case. And I find it hard to believe that Ambulon, who knows exactly what kind of people the DJD are, would have an opinion of Pharma that was just "oh he should've tried harder/been less of a coward and resisted." Hell, Ambulon's reaction to Sonic and Boom showing up at Delphi asking for refuge was to instantly take pity on them and offer them shelter immediately; if he feels protective/sympathetic towards literal random nobody Decepticon soldiers, shouldn't he have at least as much feeling (if not more) for another Autobot who he worked with and supposedly had respect for?

Assuming that Ambulon got the full details of Pharma's blackmail deal. I mean, there's no reason to assume that Ratchet would've lied to First Aid and Ambulon about what Pharma told him (unless??? conspiracy theory!!!!) , so Ambulon should've heard about the t-cog deal and how it was the only reason the DJD didn't raze Delphi to the ground so long ago. Then again, maybe Pharma's story got explained to him and First Aid via Ratchet's extremely judgemental take on events, so who knows how much of Pharma's side of the story Ambulon would've actually known.

But wouldn't it be so much more interesting if, instead of sneering at Pharma as "Doctor DJD", Ambulon had a more conflicted perspective of Pharma's face-heel turn? Would he wonder how it is that someone who he had such respect for could've been so despicable? Or, more sympathetically, would Ambulon ever wonder if Tarn threatening Delphi was his fault for being there? Would Ambulon wonder what he would've done in Pharma's position, being forced to bargain to postpone his own horrific execution? Would he be angry at Prowl or the higher-ups for stationing them all in such a dangerous post to begin with?

I mean, the answer is that Ambulon was a tertiary cast member at best, to the point that half of his appearances on the Lost Light literally are shown in retrospect after he died, so there would've been no room to explore this in the plot, and Ambulon and Pharma were way lower priority compared to other, more important protagonists. I just think it would be interesting to explore these questions in other metas and fan works.

And yes, I do think Ambulon would not fucking say that ("Doctor DJD") regardless of what canon actually says lmao.

[mintharasthrone]

okay so larian really just shat all over minthara’s character and her arc huh

[discjude]

Yeah this is about right (as always my thoughts are in the tags so there's actually kei content there lmao)

[shopcat]

omfg people really need to calm the fuck down about people disliking some characters like it's not always a deep seated prejudice or an inability to empathise it's because we are human beings with our own experiences and normal biases and fictional characters are not real and it doesn't matter if you don't like them for pretty much any reason at all and doesn't make you suddenly x just because the character is y it just means you don't like them. obviously other indications of actual prejudice or a repeated pattern mean something else entirely but you can just dislike a character because get this they're a character and not a real person. you can dislike real people too even it's almost like we've got free will. please oh please can we get out of the torture chamber together.