#but it doesn't make it hurt less

[respectthepetty]

[wasyago]

tango doodles

first you make up a guy and then you struggle to draw him correctly

[inkskinned]

you were raised in comparison.

it wasn't always obvious (well. except for the times that it was), but you internalized it young. you had to eat what you didn't like, other people are going hungry, and you should be grateful. you had to suck it up and walk on the twisted ankle, it wasn't broken, you were just being a baby. you were never actually suffering, people obviously had it worse than you did.

you had a roof over your head - imagine! with the way you behaved, with how you talked back to your parents? you're lucky they didn't kick you out on your ass. they had friends who had to deal with that. hell, you have friends who had to deal with that. and how dare you imply your father isn't there for you - just because he doesn't ever actually talk to you and just because he's completely emotionally checked out of your life doesn't mean you're not fucking lucky. think about your cousins, who don't even get to speak to their dad. so what if yours has a mean streak; is aggressive and rude. at least you have a father to be rude to you.

you really think you're hurting? you were raised in a home! you had access to clean water! you never so much as came close to experiencing a real problem. sure, okay. you have this "mental illness" thing, but teenagers are always depressed, right. it's a phase, you'll move on with your life.

what do you mean you feel burnt out at work. what do you mean you mean you never "formed healthy coping mechanisms?" we raised you better than that. you were supposed to just shoulder through things. to hold yourself to high expectations. "burning out" is for people with real jobs and real stress. burnout is for people who have sick kids and people who have high-paying jobs and people who are actually experiencing something difficult. recently you almost cried because you couldn't find your fucking car keys. you just have lost your sense of gratitude, and honestly, we're kind of hurt. we tell you we love you, isn't that enough? if you want us to stick around, you need to be better about proving it. you need to shut up about how your mental health is ruined.

it could be worse! what if you were actually experiencing executive dysfunction. if you were really actually sick, would you even be able to look at things on the internet about it? you just spend too much time on webMD. you just like to freak yourself out and feel like you belong to something. you just like playing the victim. this is always how you have been - you've always been so fucking dramatic. you have no idea how good you have it - you're too fucking sensitive.

you were like, maybe too good of a kid. unwilling to make a real fuss. and the whole time - the little points, the little validations - they went unnoticed. it isn't that you were looking for love, specifically - more like you'd just wanted any one person to actually listen. that was all you'd really need. you just needed to be witnessed. it wasn't that you couldn't withstand the burden, but you did want to know that anyone was watching. these days, you are so accustomed to the idea of comparison - you don't even think you belong in your own communities. someone always fits better than you do. you're always the outlier. they made these places safe, and then you go in, and you are just not... quite the same way that would actually-fit.

you watch the little white ocean of your numbness lap at your ankles. the tide has been coming in for a while, you need to do something about it. what you want to do is take a nap. what you want to do is develop some kind of time machine - it's not like you want your life to stop, not completely, but it would really nice if you could just get everything to freeze, just for a little while, just until you're finished resting. but at least you're not the worst you've been. at least you have anything. you're so fucking lucky. do you have any concept of the amount of global suffering?

a little ant dies at the side of your kitchen sink. you look at its strange chitinous body and think - if you could just somehow convince yourself it is enough, it will finally be enough and you can be happy. no changes will have to be made. you just need to remember what you could lose. what is still precious to you.

you can't stop staring at the ant. you could be an ant instead of a person, that is how lucky you are. it's just - you didn't know the name of the ant, did you. it's just - ants spend their whole life working, and never complain. never pull the car over to weep.

it's just - when it died, it curled up into a tight little ball.

something kind of uncomfortable: you do that when you sleep.

[beggars-opera]

Now that it's happened multiple times can we just accept that a little heartbreak is ok when something or someone from your childhood falls from grace? That it's ok to feel like formative parts of you are being slowly corrupted and ripped away? We can accept the reality of the situation but we shouldn't have to pretend that it was meaningless all along.

[elsecrytt]

masochist gojo. gojo who's in love with pain, so much that it feels like pleasure, he can barely distinguish between the two anymore.

gojo who's so starved for touch. who's had an infinite space between himself and the whole world for so long, for so many years, every day in and day out.

gojo who's survived off glancing presses when a barista hands him a coffee, the rare hug from his students (who are mostly orphans) that he can't bring himself to decline.

gojo who craves more but can't bring himself to accept it except in fleeting moments with strangers or students.

his hands that long to be held. he wants it so bad that he teases a cursed spirit, laces his fingers with its own, right before he utterly crushes the being in battle, untouchable all over again.

gojo whose skin is hungry for someone else's. he hasn't felt the warmth of a hand in his own in so long. not since - since his youth.

gojo who sometimes wishes he could get hit. who sees the impact of curse techniques on his infinity and feels a wild, strange desire for them to go straight through and strike him.

he imagines it, vividly, being impaled by a long spear (inverted spear) that goes straight through him. how it would lance his flesh so cleanly.

being struck so hard, across the face, in the stomach, enough to knock the wind out of him.

enough to feel it with his whole body.

gojo who wants to be touched so bad he doesn't even care if it hurts anymore. infinity couldn't protect him from geto's betrayal.

gojo who keeps infinity up not because he doesn't want to get hit, but because he's terrified of what he might do when it happens.

gojo who got hard whenever geto sparred with him. he still doesn't know if it was because of geto, or because he had no infinity back then, no way to block the strikes.

he dreams of his youth. bruises littering his pale, pretty form like kisses, proof that he was human, there, that there was someone who could reach him.

dark purple things that turned pretty colors as they healed. he remembers pressing into them, relishing the hurt, feeling like he was getting hit (touched, reached, connected) all over again.

nothing ever touches him again. not like that. not like anything.

he never feels it. he never feels anything.

satoru gojo who wants, so very very badly, to feel something.

pain is a choice for him, always a choice. he alone has the privilege of deciding whether or not anything can touch him.

he could try to let more strangers touch him. one night stands, discreet arrangements. he had a pretty face and a body to match. there was no shortage of willing partners.

he lets them touch him, lets them hurt him. lets them drool over his body and use it at their leisure. they tell him he's beautiful, and he believes them.

white hair, blue eyes, sprawled out with a lean, unmarred body full of bare flesh for them to bite and scratch and bruise. he finds people who will do it, do it hard, fuck him up until he's lost entirely in the feeling of being touched, having someone against him, with him, above him.

it makes him feel like a piece of meat. it makes him feel good.

or he thinks it does, anyways.

sometimes, when he's gone particularly long without sleep, when his partner has gone particularly hard, he gets a real rush.

heart racing out of his chest. a cold sweat that overwhelms him. breaths coming in labored gasps. he can heal himself, he's physically fine, so this must all be in his head.

he acknowledges that information, distantly, like it's not happening to him. it doesn't help.

it feels like part of his body has been ripped away from him, something vital and important, and it's about to get up and run away.

always, always, it happens when his partner is no longer touching him. when he lays alone in the sheets, by his own volition, because of course these partners are not meant to be attachments.

love is not a privilege, though, not for the strongest sorcerer. it's a curse.

it's the only curse which infinity cannot protect him from.

so gojo stays untouchable. distant.

but the hunger doesn't go away. never.

he likes to imagine that suguru swallowed this one last curse before he died. something sweet and bitter, like losses at the arcade, sunny days at the beach, walking together with shoko, nanami, haibara.

but even suguru couldn't have absorbed this curse. it's in his bones, deep, longing and wanting even after he's dead and gone.

gojo is hungry. he is so, so hungry. and he has nothing to eat that will not leave him just as empty as before.

touch-starved. love-starved. pain-craving.

if someone could hurt him then it wouldn't matter that he was terrified of attachment. they could latch onto him, into his heart, under his skin. bury themselves in his chest like they belonged.

they could kill a hundred and twelve people and it wouldn't matter, because he wouldn't be able to kill them.

gojo is hungry, so hungry.

please feed him.

[buttdumplin]

as someone who loves reading x reader pieces, it can be fucking debilitating to do so as a person of color. because i can always spot the exact moment when i'm ejected from the piece, when i know there's no way of me actually being reader, not even pretending. the microaggressions and stereotypes writers engage with always make it very clear that i am not welcome in a piece.

so i ask you, as one writer to another, to take your biases and internalized racism and really fucking look at them. think outside of yourself. it doesn't take much to be fucking considerate. and if that's not something you are willing to do, well then that says a lot about the situation and how you interact with the world, doesn't it? because nothing exists in a vacuum.

there's a difference between saying "not every piece is for everyone" and using the tactics of white supremacy, whether it is done knowingly or not.

[dykedvonte]

Crazy that one of Jimmy's first thoughts about rations after the crash is keeping Curly alive so he stays fresh in case things get dire. No one else brings it up, they barely mention Curly outside of the crash or his medicine actually.

He's a non factor to them now which is also a little heartbreaking considering how much he did care (even if his judgements were off) about them. It really shows the subtle ways that the game and the world they are in attach value to what you can do and can't do. He's no longer Captain or even Curly, just an after thought, a bad after taste. Yet, Jimmy still sees him as something worse.

It's the fact that to Jimmy, Curly was always someone meant to service and prolong his life. Even in pain and agony, all the thought he can give Curly is his use to him to the extent he is willing to consume him physically to get all he can out of him and of him.

[etoilesdeglace]

The way that Poseidon knows that Sally doesn't want to take Percy to camp, the way he wants Percy to be able to be as much like Sally as he can... Maybe he knows that Sally's goodness is paramount to Percy's ability to eventually save Olympus, or maybe he just wants his son to take after the woman he loves - a woman unlike any he'd met in a thousand years. Further, the way he so clearly wants to be there for them both but knows he can't. The way that's obviously killing him to not be a part of their lives, and so he takes this opportunity to be there for her, even if it hurts him to hear what she has to say. The way he encourages Sally to speak her mind and re-assures her that its' not fair, that she hasn't failed, that she's doing well by Percy, that she's raised him well, and he promises to be there for Percy when he can (and in his own way he has been when it matters).

[shannonsketches]

[shalom-iamcominghome]

People findinging out that antisemitism does, in fact, victimize people

[utilitycaster]

Various CR characters, the latest of which is Ashton Greymoore: I don't believe in fate

Matthew Mercer, descending directly into the narrative: the interplay of fate and free will is the most consistent culture-spanning theme in the entire universe I built and is set up as the crux of the finale of Campaign 3 so your belief does not actually matter but this is a great character trait for you to have so go off

[cdroloisms]

one of my most random but lowkey biggest pet peeves I think about c!Dream and the prison is the assertion that c!Dream...didn't expect it to be bad. like yeah he didn't expect it to break his whole psyche sure, this guy also very likely tortured himself to Figure Out How To Fix Death And Also The End Of The World before he even put himself in solitary. he knows what solitary confinement is! he didn't start throwing himself in lava Just Because he "didn't know" how bad it'd be to put himself in a small enclosed room with almost no amenities and was so negatively affected by solitary alone that he was burning himself in molten rock within 24 hours. he wasn't just "betrayed by Sam" in the sense that he thought that the prison would be a cushy easy stay in a safe location until Sam started hating him out of nowhere when c!Dream literally purposely made the guy hate him and then proceeded to aggravate the point even more by talking about exile and c!Tommy specifically. like. was the prison worse than c!Dream expected? oh, 100%. but was the prison also designed to hurt? well.

[shiraishi--kanade]

I have Words to Say about disabled characters in Proseka but I'm especially kind of... Eeh about Saki, because of how perfect she is.

I've talked about this before but Saki is just not allowed, by the narrative, to be flawed. We have some very, very brief moments of anger or lashing out from her (NSNF, Doll Festival in particular), but aside from that Saki is just... So cliché and surface-level regarding her disability. That especially reflects in how the writers handled her relationship with Leo/need.

Yes, she is not angry at her friends for, let's call it what it was, abandoning her (besides Ichika). She is not upset with them or feels betrayed by them. She just forgives them for doing that because she's a good friend and that kind of person, to not dwell on the past and just look forward. She's only really upset at her illness, rate, and herself.

Do you know how shitty of a story that is to sell to disabled people? Oh look, this character suffered a lot and then their friends just stopped visiting them at some point! But no big deal though, they're all good! She doesn't hold a grudge against them so it's actually totally understandable and fine and you should look up to that attitude.

Sure, Saki isn't upset with Honami and Shiho. My point is that she fucking should be. I know their reasons and I don't care about them; what they did is shitty and I hate how the story just moved on from that and we never confront that again and probably won't. Why the hell not? It would make for an interesting conflict and story. It would make Saki an absolutely stunning character, and reflect many of our struggles with loving and caring for people that don't understand us and don't stand with us. Why do we have a story we do now, where Shiho and Honami's fuck up only bothers them but not the person they hurt?

Oh wait, I know the answer: because god forbid disabled characters be anything than inspiration porn.

[masque-of-plague]

If you feel like you need "permission" to do something in fandom, this post is for you!

Something I've noticed a lot of in this fandom is that people hesitate so much to do so many wonderful things they want to do because they feel like they need someone else's "permission" in order to do it.

Understandably, there was a HUGE history of people dog-piling, harassing, and bullying people for doing things that were not explicitly approved by either the creators or the fandom at large. I am so happy that the tumblr fandom in particular has moved away from that horrible time, but the effects it had on people still linger, even beyond things that "weren't allowed."

So if you need permission to do something you've been thinking of doing, I'm giving you permission. 💕

Do you have an idea for a fan event but you need someone to tell you that you can? I'm telling you right now that not only can you start that fan event, but you will do a great job AND people will love it.

Do you have an idea for a fanfiction but you're worried that people won't like it? I'm holding your face gently and promising you that there is an audience for everything and if absolutely nothing else, you deserve to make that fic.

Do you have a headcanon that directly conflicts with common headcanons in the fandom? I support you having that headcanon. YES, even if other people dislike or even hate that headcanon. YES, even if some people are upset about that headcanon. It's their job to avoid that headcanon then-- it's not your job not to have it.

You deserve a space to be heard, to make your creations, to hold you headcanons. Anything that brings you joy, amusement, euphoria, validation, healing, catharsis, anything that you find interesting or enjoyable, you deserve to engage with it.

I promise you are capable. I promise you are not doing anything wrong. I promise you are not hurting anything.

Whatever you thought about while reading this post? I am giving you permission to do it.

[foundfamilywhump]

truly i don't care who thinks it's stupid or boring or "doesn't count" or can't be as intense as what they think of as "real whump" or whatever else, whump with comfort and recovery and caretaker(s) is always going to be my style of whump and i'm gonna have a blast vibing with people who also enjoy that

[thisonelikesaliens]

twice now this month my taiwan bl's have hurt me with the term 搭檔 (da dang aka business partner)

Xiao Hai is my business partner

adding 搭檔 to the list of terms that are a straight punch to the solar plexus