#but not doing so is so fundamental to how he perceives/presents himself that to grow would be to abandon himself

[an-urgent-appeal]

I don't want bill and ford to be happy together but I want them to both fantasise about it iykwim

[alaynestone]

not to be overly applying real life concepts to a silly cw show lol but there's also something very perfect-victimy about the way people dismiss dean's victimhood vs sam's. like because dean's sarcastic or represses a lot of emotion or something people dismiss the things he went through. like obviously HE wants to forget about it and pretend it didn't happen, that's the point! but why are so many people dumb enough to hop right on board with that and literally erase/ignore things that happened to dean in the show (oftentimes in favor of pretending they happened to sam instead lol)... idk it's just a very weird thing that makes me feel protective of dean's character and what he represents in a way i don't usually with fictional characters. i love sam too but some of the samgirls or whatever take on a very cutting and aggressive tone that's slightly upsetting sometimes ngl. it just feels weirdly personal, not even at dean as much as like. anyone who dares to relate to dean as a character

i happen to think this "silly cw show" is actually far better at depicting complex trauma than people give it credit for.

but yeah, you are spot on here. it's absolutely about creating a perfect victim in sam and hyperfocusing on that while throwing nuance and context out the window entirely. even going all the way back to their childhood where dean is held fully responsible for the ways he responded to john's abuse by adapting rather than rebelling. dean is either considered responsible for his own situation or not a victim at all. he "liked" it, he perpetuated the "cycle", he was a lost cause, he was inferior to sam (and people loooove being classist about this, they think they're comedians) etc. which of course is NOT AT ALL the narrative presented to us by the show and erases the fascinating ways the brothers' arcs were paralleled throughout the seasons. for example, in season 2 you have dean only starting to confront the million ways john messed him up when he's not around anymore, just as sam is confronting his own destiny. the show explicitly links these two things yet dean is somehow generally viewed as the brother who's in charge of his own life. dean, who was controlled by his father until he was 27 and already in 1x11 admitting to sam that he admired him for making his own choices. i can't stress enough how "the one and only victim sam who completely lacks autonomy" is a fandom invention. and for what?

what you said about feeling protective of dean i think has always been part of his appeal. sam always had dean looking out for him, dean had no one. sam, even at his lowest, fundamentally valued himself and his own personhood, dean could never afford to because the survival of his family was up to him. he never coddled himself or let himself off the hook for a single perceived failure and i'm supposed to pile on? nah. his anger is so explosive in later seasons because he was never free to express his own feelings growing up and go through the regular stages teenagers and young adults do. i think there's a big effort to erase these nuances because if the actual story is taken into account, then it's impossible to forget how much dean went through so sam wouldn't have to. that sadly also ignores the impact it had on their relationship with dean's buried resentment towards sam, as well as sam's guilt for not always being there for dean in return. nearly every terrible traumatic thing sam experienced over the duration of the show is something dean had experienced already. at my most cynical, i think the purpose of reframing dean as this all powerful oppressor is because sam can only win the trauma olympics if dean is no longer vulnerable at all, no longer dean. and yes the trauma olympics approach is pointless, but if they're gonna insist on going there first, i'm not gonna hold back.

i mentioned sam's flinching and how it's valued as a trauma response compared to dean's anger but the thing is...before the cage, sam used to rage at dean and the entire world. his own anger nearly ate him up which he acknowledges multiple times. yet again, back when dean was fresh out of hell and sometimes genuinely freaked out by sam, including when he flinched at sam using his powers, it's still perceived as dean being cruel and abusive to sam. if sam feels bad about the moral implications and consequences of his actions it's because dean won't instantly get over it and support him. if dean doesn't trust him, it must be dean's fault alone. sam is the only one whose pov is taken into consideration and the only one whose feelings can be hurt. so it is a perfect victim thing but also about how only one of them gets to lash out and be vindictive and messy and remain sympathetic and good. essentially, sam gets to be a person but dean can only ever be sam's own personal giving tree.

it's classic fandom woobification with the childish "my fave can do no wrong" rhetoric, but since it's 2024 it's now hidden behind words like autonomy/cycles/abuse and passed around as objective analysis.

[delusionaid]

Headcanon: Wriothesley edition #54r - Christmas (ramble)

I have a cold and my brain is clogged so this meta has no structure or punchline, I'd apologize but I'm not even sorry. I bolded things for curious yet lazy readers like myself.

I SAW A CHRISTMAS TREE AND PRESENTS ON OFFICIAL ART therefore Christmas (or its Teyvat equivalent) exists in Fontaine (and Mondstadt) until proven otherwise so that's what I'll use in my writing because I love Christmas. Thank you for coming to my TE/D Talk.

That being said, most things that follow are NOT EXACTLY CHIPPER so if you're looking for a fun uplifting Christmas meta, please move along <;.<

The way Wriothesley perceives Christmas nowadays is strongly influenced by how he experienced it growing up. I hc that nowadays he likes it - he's not over the moon about it, but he likes the atmosphere, he likes getting gifts for the few people he considers friends, he likes the way the city is decorated and even the special holiday menu that's free for everyone at the coupon cafeteria. Sigewinne's special Christmas Shake not so much, but that's a different story..

I imagine the cafeteria to be decorated for Christmas. They have a tree (a real one, so it smells nice) with ornaments that are (by now) mostly created by inmates over the years, from all sorts of materials, such as straw stars, paper angels, tiny wooden toys and figurines, glass ornaments and lights. (I'm personally not a fan of super kitschy trees, but I leave it up to your imagination how colorful or sparkly the tree looks ;) )

There's also garlands and Christmas lights that give the whole area a warm and welcoming atmosphere that Wriothesley appreciates especially. Why?? Stay tuned!

There are no decorations inside Wriothesley's office or bedroom. He doesn't object to Sigewinne or anyone else bringing him decorations or putting them up, but he doesn't put in the effort of doing it himself. He's firmly seated in an oddly indifferent mindset after dreaming of all things Christmas during a time when he couldn't have it and then suddenly having the opportunity to get everything he wants but no longer needing its magic because of how fundamentally his life changed in general. It's bittersweet, in a way, when by the time your wishes come within reach you've forgotten how to dream. But he's not broken up about it.

Growing up the "family" Wriothesley lived with did "celebrate" Christmas but it wasn't much of a celebration at all. Their "parents" recognized the date and the traditions surrounding it being a thing, but there were no presents for the children, no special decorations aside from a wreath at their door and no special meal on Christmas Eve. No songs were sung nor did they ever go to any of the manifold events taking place in Fontaine during this time of the year. For a number of years Wriothesley didn't even know other families would celebrate a certain way, but once he heard of it and learned more about it he began to harbor a wish to experience it some day. Of course neither he or any of his siblings dared to ask it of their parents.

Things hardly improved after Wriothesley ran away and lived in the streets. He had no money and no real place to live, often went to sleep hungry and cold. There were no presents for him, no games and no Christmas meals, but he did enjoy walking through the city and looking at the way the shops and streets were decorated, figuring - in a way - these decorations were for him, too. Out of all the decorations the lights were always his favorites. They made the whole street look enchanted, like little fairies dancing around the trees and buildings, and when it snowed and everything was covered in a clean white blanket they sparkled like the ocean in the moonlight. Sometimes he would close his eyes a little bit until all he could see was a sea of blurry lights and imagine them to emit a bit of warmth for him.

On occasion he would see little groups of people sing carols in the streets and get the songs stuck in his head for days to come, never learning the words to them.

Although he likes the aspect of giving and receiving gifts and decorating to get the festive spirit, what he likes most about Christmas is the concept of getting together with loved ones and appreciating them. He was all for the opportunity for a Christmas celebration at the Meropide, figuring that no one who wanted company on that night should be alone or go hungry. At the same time, of course, nobody is forced to attend.

In some ways Christmas is a reminder of things Wriothesley doesn't have - and never will - but at the same time it is also a reminder of all the people he does have in his life, whatever their connection to him may be. As such it remains a bittersweet holidays but one he looks forward to with definite joy, regardless.

Tl;dr bla bla Christmas lights, pls make Wrio a hot chocolate.

[sourstiless]

also yeah, one of my twitter mutuals pointed out that eddie and buck are fundamentally two different characters with different needs. eddie’s arc was about opening up, and letting people in. accepting the helping hand that is offered because you don’t have to do everything alone. buck’s arc is about understanding you’re enough as you are, and that your worth is not defined by how other people perceive you. that their approval is not everything.

it makes sense that buck plays such a prevalent role in eddie’s development because eddie was a loner character. and by that i mean, he hides how he feels and pretends he’s okay, like being in the military and growing up on his household taught him that emotions were weakness. that they’re a burden. he needed to learn to allow people into his head, to ask for help. he needed to learn that he wasn’t alone. it was about building these relationships with his found family up. eddie has trauma, but not he same trauma buck has so yes, the way that it’s dealt with is going to be different.

bucks arc is about growing into yourself. learning how to be happy with yourself. learning that your worth is not fixed to the romantic relationships, and even platonic relationships in your life. so yes, it makes sense that a lot of his relationships are put on the back burner. because it’s not about letting people in. it’s not about building relationships with other people the way eddie’s was. buck wears his heart on his sleeve (in appearance) people generally know what he’s feeling because he’s never been afraid to express emotion. feeling has never been something presented to him as a burden. his arc is about loving himself, and who he is and realizing that just being him is enough.

so yeah, a lot of eddie’s development relies on other characters being present in his life but it’s not because he’s a less important character, or because his story is less important. it’s because his character is different from buck. his character had different needs. if every character was like buck, or every character was like eddie it would be boring and redundant. what makes it special is that their healing journeys have different necessities in order to move forward.

[earthstellar]

I like how this also highlights how aside from any cultural/historical/etc. associations Cybertronians may have in regards to alt-modes in general as a Whole Thing, there is clearly individual approaches to how important alt-modes are, how personal they are, and what they mean to the individual on an internal, personal level. 

Tarantulas: Your Alt-Mode is You 

Tarantulas explicitly states that an alt-mode isn’t needed to “complete” one’s self, but rather, it is an expression of who a bot is at their core.

Their personality, personal concept of identity-- To Tarantulas, an alt-mode is an outward embodiment of these things, and a deeply personal, natural choice.

And we can reasonably assume that Tarantulas may see alt-modes as holding a deep significance, as he relates it directly to the way someone both perceives and presents who they fundamentally are to the world around them as well. He does not change his alt-mode because he is Tarantulas, and this is who Tarantulas is. 

This train of thought is more along the lines of alt-modes not necessarily being a process of choice between X options, because a good alt-mode is just who you are; Your personality will shine through, you will know innately what suits you best, and there is no strict right or wrong because no two bots are really the same. 

So for example, two bots might end up with the same make and  model of a vehicular alt-mode, but there may be differences like paint job or custom elements like nitro boost/energon boost or fuel injection/energon injection etc. which further distinguish the individual’s identity. 

Bumblebee: Your Alt-Mode is a Choice 

Contrast this to Bumblebee, who also feels an alt-mode is important, but has also been shown to have changed alt-modes at least once while on Earth.

With Bumblebee, while he does encourage the younger bots to start thinking about alt-modes and helps get them used to the concept, he himself has switched alt-modes to one more suitable for the mission at hand. 

He does essentially encourage them to find an alt-mode that feels right, but it may be the case that he himself had to choose a new alt-mode out of necessity-- Lending a possibly more utilitarian feel to choosing an alt-mode in certain circumstances. 

“Picking out” an alt-mode implies choice in a more considered way, rather than letting your personality guide you entirely. (If I recall correctly, I’ll have to re-watch it to be sure, but I think this specific phrasing is used by Bumblebee and/or the kids in S1, and I can’t remember who said it or if there was any “correction” of any kind provided by Bumblebee or any of the older bots.)

Now, we don’t really know how Bumblebee might personally feel about it. Yet, anyway. 

It may have been purely a necessary difficulty, owing to his need to protect himself, carry out his mission, and stay hidden. A hard choice, but still a choice. 

It might also have something to do that he got a bit older over time on Earth, and may have simply felt as though he was growing out of his original alt-mode, and took his mission as an opportunity to try out a new “look” of sorts-- Which would also be a bit in line with Tarantulas’ reasoning, of an alt-mode reflecting the self. 

It could be a little of both, which is most likely. 

After all, his new alt-mode for his mission does retain his original colour scheme, thus leaving his paint job and colours in root mode essentially intact, thus retaining some identity.

Which is important to point out, since his whole mission is to go into hiding, yet his current alt-mode retains clear visual similarities to his original one! 

It is still true that he did choose a new alt-mode, and when he’s talking to the kids about their own alt-modes, he seems to have a little bit more of a set process to everything. 

It certainly isn’t a strict process, but there’s clearly a little bit of a methodology or approach to thinking about it that he tries to introduce to the kids, which feels a little more “stiff” compared to the more self-oriented approach Tarantulas has. 

Inevitably, choosing an alt-mode is still an expression of identity. 

Both of them emphasise the importance of an alt-mode, and emphasise that it isn’t the end-all be all.

Yes, it’s important. But it’s not the end of the world if it takes you some time. If you have to think about it. If you have to work it out. If you struggle at first, or if you don’t. 

Because ultimately in the end, you will end up picking something for yourself, and whatever your own unique internal process was when considering your alt-mode or working towards sorting it out, it was right for you. 

Whether your alt-mode is purely an expression of yourself and your individual characteristics, or if your alt-mode is a more calculated choice with other things in mind, because you are making the decision, it is still a reflection of you. 

All of this having been said, it’s super interesting to consider the differences in how individual Cybertronians/bots might think about their alt-modes, or what they think/feel about having alt-modes at all. 

It would be nice to hear more of Bumblebee’s personal take on things, so that a more detailed comparison could be done! 

They need to bring back Tarantulas if only so that he and Bumblebee can have a conversation about Tarantulas' refusal to change his alt mode despite the difficulty it causes for him since he can't disguise himself, vs Bumblebee giving up his old alt mode which he loved for a new one for the sake of his mission and his search for Breakdown.

[sexytiime]

Shulamith Firestone on Marx & Engels

From the first chapter of The Dialectic of Sex: The case for Feminist Revolution: 

“      Before we can act to change a situation, however, we must know how it has arisen and evolved, and through what institutions it now operates. Engels’s ‘[We must] examine the historic succession of events from which the antagonism has sprung in order to discover in the conditions thus created the means of ending the conflict.’ For feminist revolution we shall need an analysis of the dynamics of sex war as comprehensive as the Marx-Engels analysis of class antagonism was for the economic revolution. More comprehensive. For we are dealing with a larger problem, with an oppression that goes back beyond recorded history to the animal kingdom itself.

In creating such an analysis we can learn a lot from Marx and Engels: not their literal opinions about women – about the condition of women as an oppressed class they know next to nothing, recognizing it only where it overlaps with economics – but rather their analytic method.

Marx and Engels outdid their socialist forerunners in that they developed a method of analysis which was both dialectical and materialist. The first in centuries to view history dialectically, they saw the world as process, a natural flux of action and reaction, of opposites yet inseparable and interpenetrating. Because they were able to perceive history as movie rather than as snapshot, they attempted to avoid falling into the stagnant ‘metaphysical’ view that had trapped so many other great minds. (This sort of analysis itself may be a product of the sex division, as discussed in Chapter 9.) They combined this view of the dynamic interplay of historical forces with a materialist one, that is, they attempted for the first time to put historical and cultural change on a real basis, to trace the development of economic classes to organic causes. By understanding thoroughly the mechanics of history, they hoped to show men how to master it.

Socialist thinkers prior to Marx and Engels, such as Fourier, Owen, and Bebel, had been able to do no more than moralize about existing social inequalities, positing an ideal world where class privilege and exploitation should not exist – in the same way that early feminist thinkers posited a world where male privilege and exploitation ought not exist – by mere virtue of good will. In both cases, because the early thinkers did not really understand how the social injustice had evolved, maintained itself, or could be eliminated, their ideas existed in a cultural vacuum, utopian. Marx and Engels, on the other hand, attempted a scientific approach to history. They traced the class conflict to its real economic origins, projecting an economic solution based on objective economic preconditions already present: the seizure by the proletariat of the means of production would lead to a communism in which government had withered away, no longer needed to repress the lower class for the sake of the higher. In the classless society the interests of every individual would be synonymous with those of the larger society.

But the doctrine of historical materialism, much as it was a brilliant advance over previous historical analysis, was not the complete answer, as later events bore out. For though Marx and Engels grounded their history in reality, it was only a partial reality. Here is Engels’s strictly economic definition of historical materialism from Socialism: Utopian or Scientific :

“Historical materialism is that view of the course of history which seeks the ultimate cause and the great moving power of all historical events in the economic development of society, in the changes of the modes of production and exchange, in the consequent division of society into distinct classes, and in the struggles of these classes against one another.” (Italics mine)

Further, he claims:

“...that all past history with the exception of the primitive stages was the history of class struggles; that these warring classes of society are always the products of the modes of production and exchange - in a word, of the economic conditions of their time; that the economic structure of society always furnishes the real basis, starting from which we can alone work out the ultimate explanation of the whole superstructure of juridical and political institutions as well as of the religious, philosophical, and other ideas of a given historical period.” (Italics mine)

It would be a mistake to attempt to explain the oppression of women according to this strictly economic interpretation. The class analysis is a beautiful piece of work, but limited: although correct in a linear sense, it does not go deep enough. There is a whole sexual substratum of the historical dialectic that Engels at times dimly perceives, but because he can see sexuality only through an economic filter, reducing everything to that, he is unable to evaluate it in its own right. 

Engels did observe that the original division of labour was between man and woman for the purposes of child-breeding; that within the family the husband was the owner, the wife the means of production, the children the labour; and that reproduction of the human species was an important economic system distinct from the means of production. 

But Engels has been given too much credit for these scattered recognitions of the oppression of women as a class. In fact he acknowledged the sexual class system only where it overlapped and illuminated his economic construct. Engels didn’t do so well even in this respect. But Marx was worse: there is a growing recognition of Marx’s bias against women (a cultual bias shared by Freud as well as all men of culture), dangerous if one attempts to squeeze feminism into an orthodox Marxist framework - freezing what were only incidental insights of Marx and Engels about sex class into dogma. Instead, we must enlarge historical materialism to include the strictly Marxian, in the same way that the physics of relativity did not invalidate Newtonian physics so much as it drew a circle around it, limiting its application - but only through comparison - to a smaller sphere. For an economic diagnosis traced to ownership of the means of production, even of the means of reproduction, does not explain everything. There is a level of reality that does not stem directly from economics.

The assumption that, beneath economics, reality is psychosexual is often rejected as ahistorical by those who accept a dialectical materialist view of history because it seems to land us back where Marx began: groping through a fog of utopian hypotheses, philosophical systems that might be right, that might be wrong (there is no way to tell), systems that explain concrete historical developments by a priori categories of thought; historical materialism, however, attempted to explain ‘knowing’ by ‘being’ and not vice versa. 

But there is still an untried third alternative: we can attempt to develop a materialist view of history based on sex itself. 

The early feminist theorists were to a materialist view of sex what Fourier, Bebel, and Owen were to a materialist view of class. By and large, feminist theory has been as inadequate as were the early feminists attempts to correct sexism. This was to be expected. The problem is so immense that, at first try, only the surface could be skimmed, the most blatant inequalities described. Simone de Beauvoir was the only one who came close to - who perhaps has done - the definitve analysis. Her profound work The Second Sex - which appeared as recenlty as the early fifties to a world convinced that feminism was dead - for the first time attempted to ground feminism in its historical base. Of all feminist theorists De Beauvoir is the most comprehensive and far-reaching, relating feminism to the best ideas in our culture. 

It may be this virtue is also her one failing: she is almost too sophisticated, too knowledgeable. Where this becomes a weakness - and this is still certainly debatable - is in her rigidly existentialist interpretation of feminism (one wonders how much Sartre had to do with this). This, in view of the fact that all cultural systems, including existentialism, are themselves determined by the sex dualism. She says:

“Man never thinks of himself without thinking of the Other; he views the world under the sign of duality which is not in the first place sexual in character. But by being different from man, who sets himself up as the Same, it is naturally to the category of the Other that woman is consigned; the Other includes woman.” (Italics mine.)

Perhaps she has overshot her mark: Why postulate a fundamental Hegelian concept of Otherness as the final explanation - and then carefully document the biological and historical circumstances that have pushed the class ‘women’ into such a category - when one has never seriously considered the much simpler and more likely possibility that this fundamental dualism sprang from the sexual division itself? To posit a priori categories of thought and existence - ‘Otherness’, ‘Transcendance’, ‘Immanence’ - into which history then falls may not be necessary. Marx and Engels had discovered that these philosophical categories themselves grew out of history. 

Before assuming such categories, let us first try to develop an analysis in which biology itself - procreation - is at the origin of the dualism. The immediate assumption of the layman that the unequal division of the sexes is ‘natural’ may be well-founded. We need not immediately look beyond this. Unlike economic class, sex class sprang directly from a biological reality: men and women were created different, and not equal. Although, as De Beauvoir points out, this difference of itself did not necessitate the development of a class system - the domination of one group by another - the reproductive functions of these differences did. The biological family is an inherently unequal power distribution. The need for power leading to the development of classes arises from the psychosexual formation of each individual according to this basic imbalance, rather than, as Freud, Norman O. Brown, and others have, once again over-shooting their mark, postulated some irreducivle conflict of Life against Death, Eros vs. Thanatos.

The biological family - the basic reproductive unit of male/female/infant, in whatever form of social organization - is charactereized by these fundamental - if not immutable - facts:

(1) That women throughout history before the advent of birth control were at the continual mercy of their biology - menstruation, menopause, and ‘female ills’, constant painful childbirth, wetnursing and care of infants, all of which made them dependent on males (whether brother, father, husband, lover, or clan, government, community-at-large) for physical survival. 

(2) That human infants take an even longer time to grow up than animals, and thus are helpless and, for some short period at least, dependent on adults for physical survival.

(3) That a basic mother/child interdependency has existed in some form in every society, past or present, and thus has shaped the psychology of every mature female and every infant. 

(4) That the natural reproductive difference between the sexes led directly to the first division of labor at the origins of class, as well as furnishing the paradigm of caste (discrimination based on biological characteristics). 

These biological contingencies of the human family cannot be covered over with anthropological sophistries. Anyone observing animals mating, reproducing, and caring for their young will have a hard time accepting the ‘cultural relativity’ line. For no matter how many tribes in Oceania you can find where the connection of the father to fertility is not known, no matter how many matrilineages, no matter how many cases of sex-role reversal, male housewifery, or even empathic labour pains, these facts prove only one thing: the amazing flexibility of human nature. But human nature is adaptable to something, it is, yes, determined by its environmental conditions. And the biological family that we have described has existed everywhere throughout time. Even in matriarchies where woman’s fertility is worshipped, and the father’s role is unkown or unimportant, if perhaps not on the genetic father, there is still some dependence of the female and the infant on the male. And though it is true that the nuclear family is only a recent development, one which, as I shall attempt to show, only intensifies the psychological penalties of the biological family, though it is true that throughout history there have been many variations on this biological family, the contingencies I have described existed in all of them, causing specific psychosexual distortions in the human personality.

But to grant that the sexual imbalance of power is biologically based is not to lose our case. We are no longer just animals. And the kingdom of nature does not reign absolute. As Simone de Beauvoir herself admits:

“The theory of historical materialism has brought to light some important truths. Humanity is not an animal species, it is a historical reality. Human society is an antiphysis - in a sense it is against nature; it does not passively submit to the presence of nature but rather takes over the control of nature on its own behalf. This arrogation is not an inward, subjective operation; it is accomplished objectively in practical action.

Thus the ‘natural’ is not necessarily a ‘human’ value. Humanity has begun to transcend Nature: we can no longer justify the maintenance of a discriminatory sex class system on grounds of its origins in nature. Indeed, for pragmatic reasons alone it is beginning to look as though we must get rid of it. 

The problem becomes political, demanding more than a comprehensive historical analysis, when one realizes that, though man is increasingly capable of freeing himself from the biological conditions that created his tyranny over women and children, he has little reason to want to give this tyranny up. As Engels said, in the context of economic revolution: 

“It is the law of division of labour that lies at the basis of the division into classes. [Note that this division itslef grew out of a fundamental biologival division.] But this does not prevent the ruling class, once having the upper hand, from consolidating its power at the expense of the working class, from turning its social leadership into an intensified exploitation of the masses.”

Though the sex class system may  have originated in fundamental biological conditions, this does not guarantee once the biological basis of their oppression has been swept away that women and children will be freed. On the contrary, the new technology, especially fertility control, may be used against them to reinforce the entrenched system of exploitation. 

So that just as to assure elimination of economic classes requires the revolt of the underclass (the proletariat) and, in a temporary dictatorship, their seizure of the means of production, so to assure the elimination of sexual classes requires the revolt of the underclass (women) and the seizure of control of reproduction: not only the full restoration to women of ownership of their own bodies, but also their (temporary) seizure of control of human fertility - the new population biology as well as all the social institutions of child-bearing and child-rearing. And just as the end goal of socialist revolution was not only the elimination of the economic class privilege but of the economic class distinction itself, so the end goal of feminist revolution must be, unlike that of the first feminist movement, not just the elimination of male privilege but of the sex distinction itself: genital differences between human beings would no longer matter culturally. (A reversion to an unobstructed pansexuality - Freud’s ‘polymorphous perversity’ - would probably supersede hetero/homo/bi-sexuality.) The reproduction of the species by one sex for the benefit of both would be replaced by (at least the option of) artificial reproduction: children would be born to both sexes equally, or independently of either, however one chooses to look at it; the dependence of the child on the mother (and vice versa) would give way to a greatly shortened dependence on a small group of others in general, and any remaining inferiority to adults in physical strenth would be compensated for culturally. The division of labour would be ended by the elimination of labour all together (through cybernetics). The tyranny of the biological family would be broken. 

And with it the psychology of power. As Engels claimed for strictly socialist revolution: ‘The existence of not simply this or that ruling class but of any ruling class at all [will have] become an obsolete anachronism.’ That socialism has never come near achieving this predicated goal is not only the result of unfulfilled or misfired economic preconditions, but also because the Marxian analysis itself was insufficient: it did not dig deep enough to the psychosexual roots of class. Marx was on to something more profound than he knew when he observed that the family contained within itself in embryo all the antagonisms that later develop on a wide scale within the society organization, the bioloigcal family - the vinculum through which the psychology of power can always be smuggled - the tapeworm of exploitation will never be annihilated. We shall need a sexual revolution much larger than - inclusive of - a socialist one to truly eradicate all class systems. 

I have attempted to take the class analysis one step further to its roots in the biological division of the sexes. We have not thrown out the insights of the socialists; on the contrary, radical feminism can enlarge their analysis, granting it an even deeper basis in objective conditions and thereby explaining many of its insolubles. As a first step in this direction, and as the groundwork for our own analysis we shall expand Engels’s definition of historical materialism. Here is the same definition quoted above now rephrased to include the biological division of the sexes for the purpose of reproduction, which lies at the origins of class:

“Historical materialism is that view of the course of history which seeks the ultimate cause and the great moving power of all historic events in the dialectic of sex: the division of society into two distinct biological classes for procreative reproduction, and the struggles of these classes with one another; in the changes in the modes of marriage, reproduction, and child care created by these struggles; in the connected development of other physically-differentiated classes [castes]; and in the first division of labour based on sex which developed into the [economic-cultural] class system.”

And here is the cultural superstructure, as well as the economic one, traced not just back to economic class, but all the way back to sex: 

All past history [note that we can now eliminate ‘with the exception of primitive stages’]  was the history of class struggle. These warring classes of society are always the product of the modes of organization of the biological family unit for reproduction of the species, as well as of the strictly economic modes of production and exchange of goods and services. The sexual-reproductive organization of society always furnishes the real basis, starting from which we can alone work out the ultimate explanation of the whole superstructure of economic, juridical and political institutions as well as of the religious, philosophical and other ideas of a given historical period.

And now Engels’s projection of the results of a materialist approach to history is more realistic: 

The whole sphere of the conditions of life which environ man and have hitherto ruled him now comes under the dominion and control of man who for the first time becomes the real conscious Lord of Nature, master of his own social organization.  

“

[champion-prism]

Fluff Alphabet- Champion Leon

Activities - What do they like to do with their s/o? How do they spend their free time with them?

Initially, it’s all a bit Pokemon centric. Going to the Wild Area to see wild Pokemon, battling and training, occasionally even grooming and dressing Pokemon up (you have a picture of Charizard with pink ribbons around his ear/horn things). But Leon is observant, he quickly takes notice of your special interests and plans activities surrounding them. 

Beauty - What do they admire about their s/o? What do they think is beautiful about them? 

Leon thinks the most beautiful thing about his s/o is how kind they are. He is encouraging and sweet by nature, wanting to bring out the best in everyone around it- it warms his heart when he sees how kind you are to the people around you, especially if you’re dealing with children.

Comfort - How would they help their s/o when they feel down/have a panic attack etc.?

Wraps his cape around you. It’s heavy, but warm and comforting and it smells like him. Soft kisses on your face, gently asking if you want to talk. 

Dreams - How do they picture their future with their s/o?

He won’t easily admit it, but he likes to think about getting a farm, somewhere far away from the lights. A farm and a barn and some Wooloo around, maybe a few kids? He loves his job, both when he’s champion and when he’s running the battle tower, but he longs for the quaint rusticity of Postwick sometimes; he wants to whisk you away to someplace pretty and natural.

Equal - Are they the dominant one in the relationship, or rather passive?

Dominant. Leon is very sweet, he’s a good guy, but for all that, he’s used to being an unstoppable force. He’s also an older sibling, someone who had a parental role from very early on, so Leon is used to thinking that he is responsible, that he knows best. He can be a bit overbearing at times, but he’s aware enough to take it down a bit when you point it out.

Fight - Would they be easy to forgive their s/o? How are they fighting?

If it’s a fight about something fundamental that you disagree on, Leon will try to compromise, but he won’t keel over. If push comes to shove and you violate one of the principles he holds fundamental to himself, that’s a deal breaker. However, with petty little fights and squabbles, he can be difficult. If you’re upset with others, Leon can be very understanding. If you’re upset at him, that’s a different case altogether. He’ll move directly to appeasement without understanding the issue, he’ll be cranky if his attempts at apologizing don’t work- the good news is, once you properly communicate to him why you’re upset, he’ll genuinely try to make a change. If he’s upset with you, still difficult. Leon doesn’t like to admit he’s hurt, he doesn’t like to admit that he had expectations that weren’t met. You’ll have to pry it out of him, then apologize with lots of kisses.

Gratitude - How grateful are they in general? Are they aware of what their s/o is doing for them?

Moderately grateful. Leon’s observational skills pertain directly to what he chooses to focus on. With his head up in the clouds, he may miss a few things that you do for him here or there, but on the whole he’s very appreciative of you. Loves it when you take time off to come to his battles, to travel to different cities or regions with him. The thing he’s probably most grateful for is when you wash his hair- the first time you did it, he assumed you were going to have shower sex, but you ended up carefully untangling, washing, and unconditioning his hair. The sheer care and effort made him tear up a little, to be honest. 

Honesty - Do they have secrets they hide from their s/o? Or do they share everything?

He’s not dishonest, more so repressed. He doesn’t want to tell you things that he thinks would unnecessarily make you worry, and he’s careful when he talks about himself- years of diplomacy in practice. You get to know Leon slowly, over late night pillow talks and rare moments of vulnerability and exhaustion- but it’s all worth it, in the end.

Inspiration - Did their s/o change them somehow, or the other way around? Like trying out new things or helped them overcome personal problems?

To Leon, real love should be a means of self actualization. He knows he’s truly in love with you when he realizes you both make each other better. You admire and learn from his work ethic; because of you, Leon learns to become more emotionally open, and it helps all his relationships, especially with Hop.

Jealousy - Do they get jealous easily? How do they deal with it?

Unfortunately, yes. He doesn’t seem like it, but Leon is a little insecure, along with being competitive. His insecurities stem from how he feels the need to be perfect- he needs to be the ultimate whatever- the ultimate trainer, the ultimate boyfriend, etc. He tends to focus on what he perceives as flawed within himself, and it helps him grow, but at the same time, it can get a bit unhealthy. So when he sees you with other guys, or if someone flirts with you, he gets a bit withdrawn and sulky- in his head, he’s trying to figure out how to better himself to the point where there’s no chance of losing, become the ultimate boyfriend you’d never dream of leaving. It takes a lot of prying to get these things out of him, and a lot of talking to eventually make him realize that you like him for him. 

Kiss - Are they a good kisser? What was the first kiss like?

Good kisser. The first kiss is gentle- he’s figuring you out, he goes in slow and soft, fingers cusping your chin with one arm around your waist. HIs lips are soft against yours, and he ends up smiling against your lips before he goes in to kiss you again. 

Love Confession - How would they confess to their s/o?

Woah, boy. It does not come easy. Leon is a strategist by nature, so he plans and plans and plans. He lays the groundwork. The thing with romance is, it doesn’t have the same degree of predictability as a Pokemon battle, so Leon is a bit out of his element. After a lot of times of backtracking, chickening out mid sentence, and very unassuming flirting, he ends up just telling you when you’re talking at his place one night, his eyes wide and misty as he looks into yours and tells you he’s falling in love with you.

Marriage - Do they want to get married? How do they propose?

Definitely wants to get married. He wants a soft domestic situation with comfort and mutual affection. His proposal would be private, one moment in his life he definitely doesn’t want to share with the public. Probably a soft romantic date, followed by a midnight walk where he’s holding your hand, saying sweet romantic things, before he leads you back to his apartment. He’s got a sweet little setup on his balcony, overlooking the Wyndon skyline, with an assortment of cushions and blankets on the floor where you sit and cuddle and talk until he sets himself up, gives a tiny speech, and pulls out the ring. When you say yes, Charizard emerges from within the apartment, carefully another, daintier ring between his teeth as Leon laughingly explains that his Pokemon wanted to propose, too. 

Nicknames - What do they call their s/o?

In public, he’ll stick with a shortened version of your name, or something like babe. In private, he has personal nicknames for you, some teasing, coming from inside jokes.

On Cloud Nine - What are they like when they are in love? Is it obvious for others? How do they express their feelings?

Leon is very guarded with others, but when he’s in love, the people close to him notice that he’s more energetic than ever. Happier, more upbeat, maybe even a little giddy. His happiness permeates everything he does, and he’s even more sunshiny that usual.

PDA - Are they upfront about their relationship? Do they brag with their s/o in front of others? Or are they rather shy to kiss etc. when others are watching?

Very, very private. Leon’s entire image is carefully controlled, and he doesn’t like bringing his personal life into it at all. He’s a bit possessive, so he might hold your hand and glare around any guys that happen to look you over, but nothing more than that. However, with his friends and family, he’s obviously very proud of you- doesn’t brag, but he’s always the first to appreciate your achievements and support you. 

Quirk - Some random ability they have that's beneficial in a relationship.

He’s a very caring person in a responsible way, so he’s always making sure you’re well fed, happy, exercising, things like that. 

Romance - How romantic are they? What would they do to make their s/o happy? Cliché or rather creative?

Romantic and creative. He’s always finding clever ways to make you happy, either through presents or gestures that involve humour and inside jokes and a very personal touch.

Support - Are they helping their s/o achieve their goals? Do they believe in them?

He’s a whole cheerleader, no matter what you do. Always cheering you on, always believing in you, hyping you up, telling you to believe in yourself. He does whatever he can to help you with your goals, whether it’s helping you keep fit, or waking you up in the morning for classes.

Thrill - Do they need to try out new things to spice up your relationship? Or do they prefer a certain routine?

Prefers routine. He doesn’t want thrill or exhilaration from his relationship, he gets enough of that at work. He wants comfort. He wants to cuddle on the couch and chatter mindlessly, drag you playfully and be dragged, eat dinner together, read, be all warm and comfy and safe.

Understanding - How good do they know their partner? Are they empathetic?

Empathetic and observant, he knows you well. He remembers every little detail he’ picked up about you, whether directly from you or from other sources. 

Value - How important is the relationship to them? What is it worth in comparison to other things in their life?

The more time elapses, the more important it is to him. Leon’s altogether too busy to simply be messing around, and as you guys are in it for the long run, your relationship is one of the most valuable things in his life. You’re a solid part of his life, someone he knows and respects and loves.

Wild Card - A random Fluff Headcanon.

One of his favourite things to do with you is just watch you play video games when he’s snuggled up beside you, your legs entangled in a blanket. If it’s an RPG, he’ll get invested in the storyline and ask you not to play without him. He’s an enthusiastic cheerleader during boss fights. LOVES Super Mario Odyssey- he makes you buy Mario a snapback, and he even ends up playing co-op with you when he learns that he can play as Cappy. 

XOXO - Are they very affectionate? Do they love to kiss and cuddle?

Privately very affectionate, even a little sappy. Lots of chaste kisses here and there- on your forehead, your cheeks, your shoulders, your hands. When he has time to relax, he loves being held and having his hair played with or braided. It might make sleeping a lil complicated because you end up with a big, dense man with his arms and legs thrown over you, but you appreciate it all the same.

Yearning - How will they cope when they're missing their partner?

He works harder and smarter than ever. He’ll throw himself into training, but when he gets back home at night, he’ll miserably yearn to be cuddled and held, especially when he’s so tired. 

Zeal - Are they willing to go to great lengths for the relationship? If so, what kind of?

As long as he knows you’d reciprocate, Leon will go above and beyond for you. It doesn’t matter what you need- care, attention, presents, gestures he’ll do them. It gives him a huge rush to see you happy because of him, to see you light up and pull him in for a passionate kiss.

[thechildoflightning]

Vergilius

Title: Vergilius

Fandom: Sanders Sides

Pairings: none

~~~

Summary: Vergilius. Vergil. Virgil. Different spellings for the same Roman poet.

For some reason no one talks about the fact that Virgil's name does in fact fit the dark sides naming pattern.

-

Or: Logan and Virgil have a discuss about the name 'Virgil' and what it means.

Warnings: none

[ao3 link]

~~~

Vergilius

It’s after a meeting with Thomas- who is once again panicking over the simplest of decision making, though to be fair, a large part of that is Virgil’s responsibility as well- when Logan corners him.

Virgil recognizes the situation for what it is right away. Logan gets this shine to his eyes, not quite a twinkle, more of a glimmer. Virgil knows what that look means. Logan is curious and he wants answers and he won’t leave until he gets them. 

It's one of Logan’s best traits, his determination and dedication. It’s also one of his worsts.

“Why Virgil?” Logan asks, once he’s fully entered the room and checks that they are alone. (Logan’s not subtle to begin with, and it’s Virgil's job to notice the things others don't, he’s not going to pass over Logan’s sweep of the room for what it is. Logan’s making sure that they are truly alone).

“What?” Virgil replies, “Logan I have no clue what you’re talking about. I’ve literally done nothing.” A brief course of panic. “Wait, why- Logan is something wrong?”

“No, no, no,” Logan confirms, and Virgil relaxes. He lets his muscles and fists untense from where they were coiled and ready to strike as if he had the physical ability to fight every single problem away. 

“Not ‘why, comma, Virgil,’” Logan clarifies, “why Virgil.” Or attempts to clarify, because Virgil is now even more lost than before. 

“Why the name Virgil?” Logan asks, “Why not change it completely.”

Virgil blinks at Logan. Once. Twice. 

“What?” Virgil asks, completely thrown off balance and one word rebuttal coming off slightly harsher than he intended. He trusts Logan- he does- but vulnerability has never been his strong suit and his name- well… but Virgil’s working on it. He is. He’s trying. 

(Why does he feel like trying is never good enough).

“I don’t understand why you would keep it. I thought you would have changed it,” Logan remarks, oblivious too or plain ignoring Virgil’s inner turmoil.

Logan’s dismissal of his name stings more than Virgil’s ready to admit, and he realizes he has to do something fast. Because Virgil is his name, of course it is, and he’s not getting rid of it. But Logan- are the other light sides mad at him for keeping his name? Do they think it ties him to the dark sides that much more?

(Virgil’s so tired of being a dark side. So tired of everything he does being marked bad. He’s still having to relearn that he is not fundamentally a bad person after all these years).

“Logan,” Virgil says weakly, not sure how to build his defense on this particular subject, “Logan it’s my name.”

“I know,” Logan agrees, “and I would have thought that you don’t like it. You have already taken small measures to change it. I thought it was strange you stopped at that. Do you not wish to change your name? Am I mistaken?”

“I-” Virgil stutters, trying to gather his thoughts on the matter. Because Logan’s right. Virgil doesn’t like his name, doesn’t like how it rolls off the tongue. Too many syllables, too much weight, too much history. 

Virgil is a small change. But it’s so so so much better. 

Virgil is Virgil. 

“I- I mean- yeah- I don’t like my original name. But Virgil- Virgil is better.”

Logan considers him for a moment, watching Virgil with a steady gaze before giving a slight nod.

“Alright,” he agrees, “as long as it works for you.”

Virgil nods, and thinks that’s it. 

But Logan hovers in the rooming, leaning forward slightly. Virgil can practically see his mind racing. It’s obvious he has something to say. 

Virgil raises an eyebrow. 

“Yes Logan?”

“May I ask two questions?” Logan asks, “the second might be uncomfortable or invasive. You may refuse to answer at any time, even if you give me consent to ask it now.”

Virgil mulls over the words and reminds himself that this is Logan. He would never hurt Virgil intentionally. Unintentionally- sure, but it’s happened in the past. It could certainly happen here. 

But Virgil’s willing to take that risk. 

He nods. 

“I don’t understand why Virgil is acceptable to you,” Logan prefaces, “Virgil is nothing but a shortened version of Vergilius, and both names along with Vergil- spelled with an ‘e’- are all alternate titles for the same historical poet. They seem so completely connected together that I don’t understand how you could find one comforting and the other repulsive.”

Which is fair. Like Logan said, Virgil is one of many spellings, but all the spellings refer to the same name. It’s like when people sometimes spell Kaitlyn with a “c” or a “i” instead of “y”. Alternate spelling, sure, but the same name. 

That’s all Virgil has done, switching from Vergelius to plain old Virgil. 

“So,” Logan continues, “My question for you is wherein lies that difference? What allows you to be comfortable with Virgil but not Vergilius?”

Virgil has an answer. He’s thought about this for quite some time himself, even if he had never expected anyone to ask him about. But Virgil represents anxiety, and he double, even triple checked his own name, his own reasoning to determine that he was completely satisfied with it. 

Now how to explain it in words?

“We all started with names,” Virgil says slowly, “Intentionally or not, Thomas assigned us names that fit us when we were formed. Right?”

“Yes- well not exactly,” Logan responds.  Virgil raises his eyebrows at him. “The names Thomas gave us represented how Thomas perceived us when we formed, not necessarily are true authentic selves.”

Virgil gives a small nod of acknowledgement. 

“Fair enough,” he allows. “So- Logan, a question for you. Why were you named Logan?”

“Logan. Logos. Logic,” Logan reciters, “the principle of reason and judgement.”

“Right,” Virgil agrees, because his has always been one of the easiest to make sense of. “And I’m Virgil. Again with the Greek and Roman origins. Potentially coming from the term ‘vigil,’ to keep watch. As anxiety that’s my job. Then the connection to the poet- which sure that takes us closer to Roman’s territory but the few times Roman and me have actually gotten along is when we’ve mixed his creativity and the way I feel emotions- specifically surrounding anxiety and fear- to create art.”

“Yes,” Logan agrees. 

Virgil nods and considers how to continue. He knows what he wants to say but he has to think about it for a moment and calculate the proper way to present his feelings to Logan. Logan wants facts, knowledge, logic. That isn’t Virgil’s default and it takes him a minute to speak Logan's language. 

“Your name fits your role. My name fits mine. It’s not a name I chose, but I feel that it fits me well. It- my name allows me to be more than anxiety. Anxiety has always restricted me, made me be one thing. Virgil gives me the freedom to choose and be myself while still providing comfortable familiarity. I don’t have to limit myself to a simplified emotion. I can just be… Virgil.”

Logan studies him for a moment, eyes sweeping across his body as if searching for a lie. 

“Okay,” he eventually says, “I can understand that. But then why not keep Vergilius?”

Virgil gives a weak smile. 

“I thought that would have been obvious.”

Logan frowns. 

“Your name doesn’t make you a dark side.”

“But it matches the undeniable pattern,” Virgil points out. 

Logan hums but doesn’t protest. It’s not like he could. Virgil’s right. 

Roman. Patton. Logan. 

Remus. Janus. Vergilius. 

“It hurts,” Virgil admits finally. And it’s hard to admit but he’s trying to be vulnerable, trying to open up and he’s going to give Logan the benefit of the doubt. (Even so his heart beats louder and his breath grows slightly shorter and his fingers and toes curl tight and tense up). “It hurts to know that somewhere in Thomas’s subconscious, he sees us as good and bad.”

Logan's frown grows deepens. 

“That’s an over simplification of the complex roles each of us carry out.”

“I know,” Virgil says. He didn’t once upon a time. He used to truly believe that there was good and bad and that he was bad, that he hurt Thomas no matter what even when he tried his hardest to be good. But those days are mostly behind him. Mostly. He still had some bad days. “I know that Logan. But Thomas hasn’t always seen it that way.”

“Do you think Thomas sees you that way now?”

A few weeks ago Virgil would have said yes- that Thomas only thought he hurt them and would be glad to get rid of Virgil and the pain he brought with him. 

Now though…

Thomas told him that he was wanted, that he was needed, that he was loved. 

What a strange concept. 

“I-“ Virgil hesitates, “I think Thomas is learning to see shades of gray.”

Logan nods. 

“And you are of course aware that Thomas was raised religious.”

Virgil snorts. 

“No shit Logan, it wasn’t like I was there for all of it or anything.”

“You weren’t?” Logan friend, eyebrows knitting in, “I was certain you had formed by then, am I-“ Logan pauses, clears his throat and adjusts his glasses, “right. Sarcasm.”

Virgil quirks a smile and gives a small nod.

“Got it in one teach.”

Logan straightens his posture, hands coming to rest in front of him and head up. Virgil recognizes it as Logan’s “I’m about to give you a shit ton of info posture.”

“Okay then. Well then you are aware that Thomas was raised with the awareness that things were either good or bad. Thomas was raised with extremes. And as he grew, he eventually started to learn about shades of gray. But as a very young kid it’s hard to see things as nuanced and detailed as they actually are. Add religious teachings that emphasize that good and bad are opposite absolutes and it makes sense that a young Thomas’s brain divided us that way. But that does not mean we still are that way.”

Virgil is- quite honestly Virgil is touched. He’s used to putting up strong walls, ready to fight back against whatever tries to hurt him. He’s still getting used to the idea that people actually want to interact with him and being validated so strongly by Logan almost makes him glow. 

“I know,” Virgil says softly, “I know. The world isn’t black.” Vergilius. “Or white.” Something entirely new. “It’s grey.” Virgil. “And I- I’m not exactly sure where I fall now. I’m not- I’m not a dark side, but I don’t think I’m a light side either. I’ve uh- kinda created my own little space.”

Logan looks at Virgil with his piercing gaze. 

“Ah. I understand now. Thank you Virgil.”

And for some reason, Virgil thinks Logan really understands it. His name, and so much more.

(There’s so much more than light or dark).

“Yeah sure. Anytime.”

Logan gives him a final nod and turns to exit, leaving Virgil to his thoughts. 

Just before Logan passes out through the doorway, he turns around. 

“Virgil?”

“Yes.”

“You have a nice name. It is- admirable that you chose to keep parts of it and alter the rest to best define you.”

Warmth. warmth everyone, sleeping across his body and into his heart, through his entire being. 

“Thank you,” he manages. 

And then Logan is gone.

If this is what being accepted is like- well, he might want to get used to it.

~~~

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[n0longerhuman]

Kuroo, bokuto, oikawa, and suga with a s/o with a s/o plays a lead in a musical

a/n: I apologize for taking so long, I hope you like it. I had a lot of fun writing this because I too have a passion for singing so yeah, let me know if something is wrong so that I can improve!

also, I invite y'all to help me grow a little, I would like it if more people had the opportunity to read my writings. tysm. ♡

𝐤𝐮𝐫𝐨𝐨, 𝐨𝐢𝐤𝐚𝐰𝐚, 𝐛𝐨𝐤𝐮𝐭𝐨 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐬𝐮𝐠𝐚𝐰𝐚𝐫𝐚 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐚 𝐬/𝐨 𝐩𝐥𝐚𝐲𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐚 𝐦𝐚𝐢𝐧 𝐫𝐨𝐥𝐞 𝐢𝐧 𝐚 𝐦𝐮𝐬𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐥.

despite probably not giving this impression, I see Kuroo as a person extremely interested in music of all kinds, despite giving me more rock vibes

but certainly the mere thought that his girlfriend can be as passionate about music as he is makes him absolutely happy

precisely for this reason, his reaction is highly imaginable when you warn him that you will take part in a musical: you surely see his eyes light up and a smart smile forming on his lips

over the course of the several weeks of rehearsal prior to the show, he asks you numerous times to be able to come and watch you and he doesn't give up despite the number of negative answers you have given him

«Tetsurō, it's only a small part, it's nothing important and you can watch me in a few days, why all this haste?»

when he sees he can't do anything about it because of your stubbornness, he decides to wait for the big day because he doesn't want to bother you too much

and when the day of the musical arrives, you are so agitated that it is almost impossible to talk to you, kuroo understands it and decides not to make the situation even worse, therefore he leaves you behind the scenes and heads to his place among the audience, of course in the first seats because he's too impatient to see you

and when he sees you coming out of the stage, our boy almost jumps on his seat, just leaning forward as if to look at you better and he also notices your agitation from there

as soon as you start singing that piece that belongs to you, which in that case is a single song that you have to sing on your own, kuroo completely immobilizes and widens his eyes

your voice, your expressiveness and your gestures leave him so impressed that for a moment he doesn't seem to breathe even a little

you are so good that it almost seems that you are the character you are playing and this thing makes him shiver

he remains with this expression throughout the show, until it ends and he waits for you until you are finished preparing to leave

the moment you reach him, he says nothing and simply kisses you, taking you completely by surprise

«When the fuck were you going to tell me you're so good?»

Ever since you know you got the role in that musical, you don't hesitate to ask Oikawa for help immediately to practice

you know how strong his organizational skills are and how determined he is in his passion and also in studying, and you also believe that his help would count more than a hundred others despite the fact that he isn't an expert on the subject

although initially you were afraid to ask him, at the moment of the proposal oikawa accepts without thinking twice; to be honest, he is totally curious to observe what your abilities are and he wants to learn more about you also in seeing the way you act in this type of situation

and trust me, his expectations are not disappointed by you even for a moment: secretly, he loves to see how determined and stubborn you are at the same time when you are convinced that you cannot take a note or not interpret a passage correctly, because in this behavior he recognizes himself with his passion

he can not do anything but admire who gives his 100% for something he loves to do, especially if that someone is you and this thing makes you happy

he helps you understand what is the right interpretation to give to a given measure or an entire song from his point of view, and this will be fundamental for you since you will have put your heart into it thanks to him

anyway, although you know it could help him to help you in turn, you don't let him come to your rehearsals since you know that acting and singing with everyone else would be different for you if this happen in front of him

therefore oikawa waits with you for the day of the show, making sure to indulge you until the last moment so that you don't make your insecurities even deeper, not before you manage to give the best of yourself

he sits in an isolated place so he can better follow the whole musical, and from the moment you enter alone on stage oikawa cannot look away from your figure even a second

all the while, he focused so much on the technical part of which he knew even little or nothing that he had never noticed how incredibly good you were in his eyes

for this reason, from that day on, oikawa will urge you to continue with that dream all the time and will offer to help you at any time when you would've needed it, because he believes that it isn't something you should absolutely abandon

«I wasn't expecting anything less from my girl.»

our boy's reaction to this news is somewhat predictable as unbelievable: immediately his mind starts with a thousand fantasies about how much you can be a kind of divinity in the spotlight, and certainly you don't want to destabilize his mood because seeing him with that spontaneous, big smile also improves your mood

he always keeps asking you about it because he doesn't know much about the world of musicals either, and you are always happy to answer him because nobody had ever been so interested in your passion and it makes you genuinely happy

you show him the scripts and make him listen to the songs you will have to interpret, and once again you see the usual enthusiastic sparkle in his eyes; he loves to see how excited you are for this thing and recognizes it as a passion as strong as his for volleyball

every time you talk to him about this show, the admiration that bokuto feels towards you grows more and more and every time he seems more and more energetic around you

he doesn't stop supporting you for even a second, when you throw yourself down he will be the first to encourage you to try again because only with training you can reach the moment when you can have fun and show how brilliant you are, and you ttake it as a sincere advice from him because you know that's what he does to be constant in his volleyball career

every time you practice, bokuto tries to secretly listen to you because his curiosity is too much to hold back, but few times he actually succeeds in his intent if not for a few notes

and in the week before the actual musical?  be sure that bokuto is almost as excited as you are, he makes sure that you don't forget anything and that you can keep calm and never lose sight of your final goal, he assures you that you will be very good, that he trusts you and will be there to support you from the audience

«Are you ready? Of course you're ready, baby! You can do it and I'm sure about that, no matter what.»

and when the day of the show finally arrives, bokuto makes sure he takes one of the first places too, bringing akaashi with him to show him how proud he is of you all the time, he probably won't even let him follow the show well

in fact, it is akaashi who keeps him calm and makes sure that he doesn't start to cheer as if he were the only one present in the audience, since all the time his expression is that of a child looking at his favorite cartoon

looking at you there on stage, his initial fantasies are confirmed only and now for him you are like a professional actress or  singer, almost as if you were his muse

«YOU MUST ABSOLUTELY TEACH ME HOW TO DO IT!»

for some reason, don't ask me why, I see sugawara as someone who would be able to manage the organization of a musical or who could take part in it anyway

I just imagine him with a beautiful voice

therefore he is the only one of the four who actually follows your rehearsals step by step, despite not having an important role as yours

and trust me if I tell you, whatever he is doing, the moment it is up to you he stops doing it and sits listening to you and watching you carefully because he loves to observe you and hear your voice, it is so harmonious that it judt makes him shiver

he also proposes to help you at any time you need him because he absolutely doesn't want you to be wrong because of your useless insecurities

your time as a couple is still occupied by rehearsals for the show, so he always looks for a free moment to be alone with you and distract yourself a bit from all the pressure that you are forced to feel as the leading role of the musical

also try not to make you think too much about it, not to exercise yourself excessively because you could get the completely opposite effect from what you want

he simply explains that no matter what result you get, which will still be optimal, you will always have given your best and it is the only thing that really matters as personal satisfaction

also for you, he gives the best because this musical is perfect from every point of view, both technical and scenographic aspect

on the day of the show  there is total agitation behind the scenes, but suga knows that you have all fought with all your strength and that it will certainly be a success, I can also see him giving a short speech about it just to encourage those who are down  moral

he follows your performance from behind the scenes, he is surprised by how much better you are there on stage in front of everyone and how much you are able to make perceive what you are reciting to the audience and above all to him

at the end of the show, after congratulating everyone, don't forget to thank you for hitting him so deeply

«You were absolutely fantastic and beautiful.»

[recentanimenews]

ESSAY: Berserk's Journey of Acceptance Over 30 Years of Fandom

  My descent into anime fandom began in the '90s, and just as watching Neon Genesis Evangelion caused my first revelation that cartoons could be art, reading Berserk gave me the same realization about comics. The news of Kentaro Miura’s death, who passed on May 6, has been emotionally complicated for me, as it's the first time a celebrity's death has hit truly close to home. In addition to being the lynchpin for several important personal revelations, Berserk is one of the longest-lasting works I’ve followed and that I must suddenly bid farewell to after existing alongside it for two-thirds of my life.

  Berserk is a monolith not only for anime and manga, but also fantasy literature, video games, you name it. It might be one of the single most influential works of the ‘80s — on a level similar to Blade Runner — to a degree where it’s difficult to imagine what the world might look like without it, and the generations of creators the series inspired.

  Although not the first, Guts is the prototypical large sword anime boy: Final Fantasy VII's Cloud Strife, Siegfried/Nightmare from Soulcalibur, and Black Clover's Asta are all links in the same chain, with other series like Dark Souls and Claymore taking clear inspiration from Berserk. But even deeper than that, the three-character dynamic between Guts, Griffith, and Casca, the monster designs, the grotesque violence, Miura’s image of hell — all of them can be spotted in countless pieces of media across the globe.

  Despite this, it just doesn’t seem like people talk about it very much. For over 20 years, Berserk has stood among the critical pantheon for both anime and manga, but it doesn’t spur conversations in the same way as Neon Genesis Evangelion, Akira, or Dragon Ball Z still do today. Its graphic depictions certainly represent a barrier to entry much higher than even the aforementioned company. 

    Seeing the internet exude sympathy and fond reminiscing about Berserk was immensely validating and has been my single most therapeutic experience online. Moreso, it reminded me that the fans have always been there. And even looking into it, Berserk is the single best-selling property in the 35-year history of Dark Horse. My feeling is that Berserk just has something about it that reaches deep into you and gets stuck there.

  I recall introducing one of my housemates to Berserk a few years ago — a person with all the intelligence and personal drive to both work on cancer research at Stanford while pursuing his own MD and maintaining a level of physical fitness that was frankly unreasonable for the hours that he kept. He was NOT in any way analytical about the media he consumed, but watching him sitting on the floor turning all his considerable willpower and intellect toward delivering an off-the-cuff treatise on how Berserk had so deeply touched him was a sight in itself to behold. His thoughts on the series' portrayal of sex as fundamentally violent leading up to Guts and Casca’s first moment of intimacy in the Golden Age movies was one of the most beautiful sentiments I’d ever heard in reaction to a piece of fiction.

  I don’t think I’d ever heard him provide anything but a surface-level take on a piece of media before or since. He was a pretty forthright guy, but the way he just cut into himself and let his feelings pour out onto the floor left me awestruck. The process of reading Berserk can strike emotional chords within you that are tough to untangle. I’ve been writing analysis and experiential pieces related to anime and manga for almost ten years — and interacting with Berserk’s world for almost 30 years — and writing may just be yet another attempt for me to pull my own twisted-up feelings about it apart. 

  Berserk is one of the most deeply personal works I’ve ever read, both for myself and in my perception of Miura's works. The series' transformation in the past 30 years artistically and thematically is so singular it's difficult to find another work that comes close. The author of Hajime no Ippo, who was among the first to see Berserk as Miura presented him with some early drafts working as his assistant, claimed that the design for Guts and Puck had come from a mess of ideas Miura had been working on since his early school days.

  写真は三浦建太郎君が寄稿してくれた鷹村です。 今かなり感傷的になっています。 思い出話をさせて下さい。 僕が初めての週刊連載でスタッフが一人もいなくて困っていたら手伝いにきてくれました。 彼が18で僕が19です。 某大学の芸術学部の学生で講義明けにスケッチブックを片手に来てくれました。 pic.twitter.com/hT1JCWBTKu

— 森川ジョージ (@WANPOWANWAN) May 20, 2021

  Miura claimed two of his big influences were Go Nagai’s Violence Jack and Tetsuo Hara and Buronson’s Fist of the North Star. Miura wears these influences on his sleeve, discovering the early concepts that had percolated in his mind just felt right. The beginning of Berserk, despite its amazing visual power, feels like it sprang from a very juvenile concept: Guts is a hypermasculine lone traveler breaking his body against nightmarish creatures in his single-minded pursuit of revenge, rigidly independent and distrustful of others due to his dark past.

  Uncompromising, rugged, independent, a really big sword ... Guts is a romantic ideal of masculinity on a quest to personally serve justice against the one who wronged him. Almost nefarious in the manner in which his character checked these boxes, especially when it came to his grim stoicism, unblinkingly facing his struggle against literal cosmic forces. Never doubting himself, never trusting others, never weeping for what he had lost.

    Miura said he sketched out most of the backstory when the manga began publication, so I have to assume the larger strokes of the Golden Arc were pretty well figured out from the outset, but I’m less sure if he had fully realized where he wanted to take the story to where we are now. After the introductory mini-arcs of demon-slaying, Berserk encounters Griffith and the story draws us back to a massive flashback arc. We see the same Guts living as a lone mercenary who Griffith persuades to join the Band of the Hawk to help realize his ambitions of rising above the circumstances of his birth to join the nobility.

  We discover the horrific abuses of Guts’ adoptive father and eventually learn that Guts, Griffith, and Casca are all victims of sexual violence. The story develops into a sprawling semi-historical epic featuring politics and war, but the real narrative is in the growing companionship between Guts and the members of the band. Directionless and traumatized by his childhood, Guts slowly finds a purpose helping Griffith realize his dream and the courage to allow others to grow close to him. 

  Miura mentioned that many Band of the Hawk members were based on his early friend groups. Although he was always sparse with details about his personal life, he has spoken about how many of them referred to themselves as aspiring manga authors and how he felt an intense sense of competition, admitting that among them he may have been the only one seriously working toward that goal, desperately keeping ahead in his perceived race against them. It’s intriguing thinking about how much of this angst may have made it to the pages, as it's almost impossible not to imagine Miura put quite a bit of himself in Guts. 

  Perhaps this is why it feels so real and makes The Eclipse — the quintessential anime betrayal at the hands of Griffith — all the more heartbreaking. The raw violence and macabre imagery certainly helped. While Miura owed Hellraiser’s Cenobites much in the designs of the God Hand, his macabre portrayal of the Band of the Hawk’s eradication within the literal bowels of hell, the massive hand, the black sun, the Skull Knight, and even Miura’s page compositions have been endlessly referenced, copied, and outright plagiarized since.

    The events were tragic in any context and I have heard many deeply personal experiences others drew from The Eclipse sympathizing with Guts, Casca, or even Griffith’s spiral driven by his perceived rejection by Guts. Mine were most closely aligned with the tragedy of Guts having overcome such painful circumstances to not only reject his own self enforced solitude, but to fearlessly express his affection for his loved ones. 

  The Golden Age was a methodical destruction of Guts’ self-destructive methods of preservation ruined in a single selfish act by his most trusted friend, leaving him once again alone and afraid of growing close to those around him. It ripped the romance of Guts’ mission and eventually took the story down a course I never expected. Berserk wasn’t a story of revenge but one of recovery.

  Guess that’s enough beating around the bush, as I should talk about how this shift affected me personally. When I was young, when I began reading Berserk I found Guts’ unflagging stoicism to be really cool, not just aesthetically but in how I understood guys were supposed to be. I was slow to make friends during school and my rapidly gentrifying neighborhood had my friends' parents moving away faster than I could find new ones. At some point I think I became too afraid of putting myself out there anymore, risking rejection when even acceptance was so fleeting. It began to feel easier just to resign myself to solitude and pretend my circumstances were beyond my own power to correct.

  Unfortunately, I became the stereotypical kid who ate alone during lunch break. Under the invisible expectations demanding I not display weakness, my loneliness was compounded by shame for feeling loneliness. My only recourse was to reveal none of those feelings and pretend the whole thing didn't bother me at all. Needless to say my attempts to cope probably fooled no one and only made things even worse, but I really didn’t know of any better way to handle my situation. I felt bad, I felt even worse about feeling bad and had been provided with zero tools to cope, much less even admit that I had a problem at all.

  The arcs following the Golden Age completely changed my perspective. Guts had tragically, yet understandably, cut himself off from others to save himself from experiencing that trauma again and, in effect, denied himself any opportunity to allow himself to be happy again. As he began to meet other characters that attached themselves to him, between Rickert and Erica spending months waiting worried for his return, and even the slimmest hope to rescuing Casca began to seed itself into the story, I could only see Guts as a fool pursuing a grim and hopeless task rather than appreciating everything that he had managed to hold onto. 

  The same attributes that made Guts so compelling in the opening chapters were revealed as his true enemy. Griffith had committed an unforgivable act but Guts’ journey for revenge was one of self-inflicted pain and fear. The romanticism was gone.

  Farnese’s inclusion in the Conviction arc was a revelation. Among the many brilliant aspects of her character, I identified with her simply for how she acted as a stand-in for myself as the reader: Plagued by self-doubt and fear, desperate to maintain her own stoic and uncompromising image, and resentful of her place in the world. She sees Guts’ fearlessness in the face of cosmic horror and believes she might be able to learn his confidence.

    But in following Guts, Farnese instead finds a teacher in Casca. In taking care of her, Farnese develops a connection and is able to experience genuine sympathy that develops into a sense of responsibility. Caring for Casca allows Farnese to develop the courage she was lacking not out of reckless self-abandon but compassion.

  I can’t exactly credit Berserk with turning my life around, but I feel that it genuinely helped crystallize within me a sense of growing doubts about my maladjusted high school days. My growing awareness of Guts' undeniable role in his own suffering forced me to admit my own role in mine and created a determination to take action to fix it rather than pretending enough stoicism might actually result in some sort of solution.

  I visited the Berserk subreddit from time to time and always enjoyed the group's penchant for referring to all the members of the board as “fellow strugglers,” owing both to Skull Knight’s label for Guts and their own tongue-in-cheek humor at waiting through extended hiatuses. Only in retrospect did it feel truly fitting to me. Trying to avoid the pitfalls of Guts’ path is a constant struggle. Today I’m blessed with many good friends but still feel primal pangs of fear holding me back nearly every time I meet someone, the idea of telling others how much they mean to me or even sharing my thoughts and feelings about something I care about deeply as if each action will expose me to attack.

  It’s taken time to pull myself away from the behaviors that were so deeply ingrained and it’s a journey where I’m not sure the work will ever be truly done, but witnessing Guts’ own slow progress has been a constant source of reassurance. My sense of admiration for Miura’s epic tale of a man allowing himself to let go after suffering such devastating circumstances brought my own humble problems and their way out into focus.

    Over the years I, and many others, have been forced to come to terms with the fact that Berserk would likely never finish. The pattern of long, unexplained hiatuses and the solemn recognition that any of them could be the last is a familiar one. The double-edged sword of manga largely being works created by a single individual is that there is rarely anyone in a position to pick up the torch when the creator calls it quits. Takehiko Inoue’s Vagabond, Ai Yazawa’s Nana, and likely Yoshihiro Togashi’s Hunter X Hunter all frozen in indefinite hiatus, the publishers respectfully holding the door open should the creators ever decide to return, leaving it in a liminal space with no sense of conclusion for the fans except what we can make for ourselves.

  The reason for Miura’s hiatuses was unclear. Fans liked to joke that he would take long breaks to play The Idolmaster, but Miura was also infamous for taking “breaks” spent minutely illustrating panels to his exacting artistic standard, creating a tumultuous release schedule during the wars featuring thousands of tiny soldiers all dressed in period-appropriate armor. If his health was becoming an issue, it’s uncommon that news would be shared with fans for most authors, much less one as private as Miura.

  Even without delays, the story Miura was building just seemed to be getting too big. The scale continued to grow, his narrative ambition swelling even faster after 20 years of publication, the depth and breadth of his universe constantly expanding. The fan-dubbed “Millennium Falcon Arc” was massive, changing the landscape of Berserk from a low fantasy plagued by roaming demons to a high fantasy where godlike beings of sanity-defying size battled for control of the world. How could Guts even meet Griffith again? What might Casca want to do when her sanity returned? What are the origins of the Skull Knight? And would he do battle with the God Hand? There was too much left to happen and Miura’s art only grew more and more elaborate. It would take decades to resolve all this.

  But it didn’t need to. I imagine we’ll never get a precise picture of the final years of Miura’s life leading up to his tragic passing. In the final chapters he released, it felt as if he had directed the story to some conclusion. The unfinished Fantasia arc finds Guts and his newfound band finding a way to finally restore Casca’s sanity and — although there is still unmistakably a boundary separating them — both seem resolute in finding a way to mend their shared wounds together.

  One of the final chapters features Guts drinking around the campfire with the two other men of his group, Serpico and Roderick, as he entrusts the recovery of Casca to Schierke and Farnese. It's a scene that, in the original Band of the Hawk, would have found Guts brooding as his fellows engage in bluster. The tone of this conversation, however, is completely different. The three commiserate over how much has changed and the strength each has found in the companionship of the others. After everything that has happened, Guts declares that he is grateful. 

  The suicidal dedication to his quest for vengeance and dispassionate pragmatism that defined Guts in the earliest chapters is gone. Although they first appeared to be a source of strength as the Black Swordsman, he has learned that they rose from the fear of losing his friends again, from letting others close enough to harm him, and from having no other purpose without others. Whether or not Guts and Griffith were to ever meet again, Guts has rediscovered the strength to no longer carry his burdens alone. 

  All that has happened is all there will ever be. We too must be grateful.

      Peter Fobian is an Associate Manager of Social Video at Crunchyroll, writer for Anime Academy and Anime in America, and an editor at Anime Feminist. You can follow him on Twitter @PeterFobian.

By: Peter Fobian

[rickybowxn]

hey!! ok so i just need someone else’s opinion bc i haven’t seen anyone talking about this and i literally can’t wrap my head around it lol ok so ricky and nini dated for a YEAR and never once said i love you? and if ricky isn’t ready to say it was he going to wait till 2 years? 3? 4? or was he never going to say it? i also don’t understand why he doesn’t understand that he broke her heart :( i love him but he essentially broke up with her after she told him she loved him on their anniversary 😭

hiya! this is such a great line of discussion and so there’s a lot to break down, bear with me this is gonna be a long one :)

let’s start with the thought that ricky doesn’t understand that he broke nini’s heart. i agree and disagree with you on this. i think that as a 16 year old boy, in the heat of the moment after he saw the instagram post and was clearly overwhelmed by it, he definitely didn’t know that he deeply hurt nini when he decided to not say it back and break up with her. he was as impulsive and sudden in action in response to a post/declaration that in his perspective, was impulsive and sudden by nini. he definitely underestimated the consequences and the weight of him not saying it back in respect to nini’s emotions, and thought that there was space to come back from not saying it back (and i’ll get to why he assumed that in a bit). now, fast forward to junior year, i think he’s definitely understood just how much he broke nini’s heart. i think kourtney’s resentment toward ricky in respect to how nini was treated and more importantly, nini’s general irritation/stand offishness and just distaste towards him throughout the first three episodes allowed ricky to understand how hurt she was by it.

now let’s get when ricky was supposed to/will say ‘i love you’. i don’t know about you but i personally believe that every relationship has a pace, and that pace is different for everybody. saying ‘i love you’ simply doesn’t have a timer on it, it could happen in weeks, or months, or years. how fast or how long it takes to say those words neither validates nor weakens the relationship, and that’s what i believe. personally, i’d argue that throwing around ‘i love you’s’ at 14/15/16 is more unusual/immature than a healthy/mature response (and i’ll elaborate on that in a bit as well) in a relationship. with respect to rini/rickini/ricky and nini, it’s more about each character’s motivation and circumstance with respect to their relationship, as well as their relationship as a whole. tackling that first bit, ricky is in a really rough spot in his perception of love atm, it’s been skewed into negativity since his parents’ marriage started falling apart, i’ve mentioned it in another post of mine when i was analysing ep4 - ‘the only concept of love that he grew up with, his parents - he witnessed them be in, and slowly fall out of love. his only understanding of love is that it is temporary and painful’. now parallel that with nini’s perception of love, beautifully explicated by the subtext of kourtney’s (kinda) monologue in ep5 “i don’t get it, what happened to the seventh grade nini who used to belt this song… ever since you discovered boys, you’ve spent way too much time trying to see yourself through their eyes”, we know that they are worlds apart in how they perceive and pace the idea of love, as well as a relationship itself. nini, from what kourtney said, can be deduced to loving the idea of love - having a boyfriend, getting attention and affection etc. she’s a 14/15 year old girl who started a relationship with the first boy she met and seriously had feelings for. it’s even safe to assume that she jumped into saying ‘i love you’ because she thought ricky was ‘the one’ and she must have watched about 3737328473 romcoms and musicals that pushed the agenda and romanticised relationships and being in love (which no doubt influenced her version and understanding, which is still completely valid and integral, of love). it’s really important for us to understand that just like ricky’s understanding of love is twisted, so is nini’s, neither of them have really gotten to knowing the depth of how good and not so good love can be, and how big of a commitment it is, and that’s because of what i talk about next!

the bombshell that has created the entire arc of the ricky and nini relationship is immaturity. immaturity! ricky and nini are teenagers who are still developing skills such as communication, their independent values and beliefs, as well as self-image. these are all fundamental aspects that encourage and foster a healthy environment for a romantic relationship to grow. getting into a relationship so young, at 14/15 and committing to a person is so difficult simply because you don’t have a developed skillset of these things yet, and ricky and nini are a poster example. remember how i said i’d get back to why ricky thought that he could come back from not saying ‘i love you back’ to nini? well we’re here now, it was immaturity. ricky didn’t have the empathy or emotional maturity to understand how it would effect nini, and nini didn’t communicate, (and actually still hasn’t communicated), why not saying ‘i love you’ back hurt her, she’s just been lashing out so far. now the mature thing to have done is to have sat down with ricky and talked through it, asked him and understood his train of thought. she didn’t do that and ricky just walked away without explaining himself. that, is called a lack of communication. and that skill, comes from learning and ageing. yes it was obvious to us as an audience what he’d done was so wrong, but seriously, as a 16 year old coming from a broken home and never having experienced/seen a healthy relationship, i doubt you any of us would be able to fully grasp it if it was happening to us. and that’s why i’d argue that taking a relationship slow, feeling it out and getting into it as older and more mature individuals is more thought-out. your feelings at any age toward another person are valid, especially in the case that they are reciprocated, but that doesn’t mean you will have a functioning relationship. that’s because relationships. are. work. and kids can’t handle the work because they don’t have the skills that match the job description. ‘i love you’ encapsulates that promise - exercising communication, empathy and support, it’s more than just an emotion i think. in this case, i actually think that ricky understands that better than nini does, because as i said in my other post, one of the motivating reasons he didn’t say it back is because his parents didn’t keep their promise - they fell out of developing their skillset and supporting each other. 

now the most important side-note: none of us will ever perfect these skills that make a relationship work, its constant practice in empathy, in communication, in understanding, in esteem and confidence, and in support. i just think that nini and ricky never got to experience even developing those skills independently and that’s why their relationship fell apart in the way it did. this break has already matured them, ep5 showed nini gaining genuine confidence in herself and ep4 showed ricking communicating to nini how he felt about everything going on at home. them independently going about their lives and growing is already inevitably readying them for being in a relationship and committing to them the right way, when they’re ready for it! i’m so excited to see it

finally, as for when ricky will say/was planning to say ‘i love you’ - i think the writers are taking us on that journey right now! the break ricky and nini have been going through is perfectly setting them up for that mutual and satisfying understanding of the love they have for one and other. i personally think that ricky has loved nini from the get-go, his fear of externalising those emotions is that he’ll have the same outcome as his parents, his insecurities right now don’t allow him to believe that he can have, or even deserves, more than his parents’ fate. hopefully gets out of his rut with talking about how he genuinely feels about nini and how he’s ready for that relationship soon. nini is already getting better at being more sure of herself and what she wants, i think she’ll soon realise how ricky is different to her, and how that doesn’t take away from his legitimate and very strong feelings that are ever-present for her.

what ricky did sucked and he was undoubtably a douche. but that was the exposition to his, and ricky and nini’s story, it only gets better from here! it already has xx

(i’m so so sorry it’s this long, you just really got my analysis flowing lmao, hopefully this wasn’t just a mumble and was kind of an insight. i have so much to say but my brain feels like ramen rn)

[lo-lynx]

Masculine embodiment in ASOIAF- aka, what’s up with the eunuchs?

CW: Sexism, cissexism, rape, sex, description of genitalia and bodily functions.

Spoilers: All of A Song of Ice and Fire, and a tiny spoiler from Game of Thrones season 8.

“’I hold the man’s balls in the palm of my hand.’ He cupped his fingers, smiling. ‘Or would, if he were a man, or had any balls.’” (Martin 1996/2011, 194) Ah, classic Littlefinger burn about Varys. In George RR Martin’s world of ASOIAF such jokes are frequent, but when last time when I re-read A Game of Thrones this one joke in Ned’s fourth chapter stuck out. Perhaps it was because I had recently watched the last season of Game of Thrones where Varys comments on Tyrion’s ever-present jokes about Varys being a eunuch (Game of Thrones 2019, 04:27). Perhaps it’s because issues of gender and sexuality interest me in general (see: all of this blog). Regardless, it got me interested at seeing how eunuchs are described in the books. I soon found that the connection between a man’s genitals and masculinity seemed to be very strong. Now, before I go any further, I feel like two disclaimers are in order. 1: I’m not saying that having a penis is necessary to be a man, I’m saying that both our society and the world of ASOIAF seems to think so. 2: I’m not saying that GRRM thinks this either, I have no idea what his personal stance on these things are, but I’m saying that he seems to have transferred these views from our world into his world. Now that we’ve got that out of the way, why focus on this aspect of masculine embodiment in ASOIAF? Well, as I intend to show in this analysis, by analysing how eunuchs are portrayed in the books, I think one can infer quite a bit of how men and masculinity is conceived of in Westeros and beyond. So, firstly I want to give a brief overview of how sex/gender was conceived of in our medieval world (mostly to show how this DOES NOT seem to match ASOIAF), and secondly how these things are conceived of in more modern times and compare this to ASOIAF.

So, before the 18th century or so, European conception sex/gender relied on what has afterwards been called a “one-sex model” (Mottier 2008, 33). This model was very influenced by the Greek philosophical idea that men’s bodies were active, hot and strong; women’s bodies being passive, weak, damp and cold (ibid, 5).

As the historian Thomas Laqueur has pointed out, the classical model of gender involved a ‘one-sex model’: since gender was fluid, men risked becoming more feminized if they lost heat, while women could become more like men if their bodies heated up. The psychological consequences of such beliefs was [sic] that gender did not appear as a stable, biological characteristic, but as an identity that was potentially under threat. (Mottier 2008, 6)

That is to say, during this time sex/gender was seen as fluid, and not a biological fact. As mentioned, this view didn’t really change until the 18th century. Mottier describes that shift like this:

From the 18th century, the traditional idea of the ‘one-sex’ body, which conceptualized women’s bodies as similar but inferior versions of male bodies (with female genitals being thought of as internal, much smaller versions of male genitals) started to be replaced with the idea of a clear biological differentiation between men and women. Male and female bodies came to be seen as fundamentally, biological different, not as part of the same hierarchical continuum. The gender hierarchy remained, however. (Mottier 2008, 33)

From this we can infer then, that during the medieval period in Europe, female bodies were perceived as sort of defect versions of male bodies, not fundamentally biologically different. It was after this model was replaced with the ‘two-sex model’ that men and women were seen as biologically different creatures. This biological difference also began being used as a justification for social difference (and inequality) between men and women. That is not to say that such social difference didn’t exist before that, but it wasn’t though to be the result of biological differences in the same way. In my view, this later conceptualisation of sex/gender is much more in line with how sex/gender seems to be perceived in ASOIAF. Throughout the books there are several references of women being of the gentle/weaker sex, or similar descriptions. One such is in Catelyn’s last chapter in A Game of Thrones when Catelyn tries to persuade Robb’s lords to sue for peace with the Lannisters. The Greatjon then says that because she is a woman she does not understand such things, while Lord Karstark says: “You are the gentle sex (…) a man has a need for vengeance.” (Martin 2011, 770) Such a view, seeing the female sex as gentler/weaker than the male sex, seems much more in line with a “two-sex model” than the “one-sex model” that would’ve existed in Medieval Europe. I shall therefore proceed to explain the male body has been conceived in more modern times.

In general, one can say that the male subject is expected to embody strength, toughness, and have a capability to exercise power over a space (Whitehead 2002, 189). This expectation also carries through to expectations of men’s sexuality, which is why many aging men might start to lose confidence in their sexuality when they can’t live up to this expectation (ibid, 200). This connection between masculinity and strength, virility etc. also impacts the importance being put on having “normal” genitalia. As Fausto-Sterling writes about the male body, from a medical point of view, the existence of a “functional” penis is often considered crucial for manhood (1995, 130). This is taken to the extreme that children born with a penis that is considered too small (even though the size of the penis at birth doesn’t seem to be a good indicator of adult size) will have their genitalia surgically changed into a vagina (for more on surgery on intersex children see for example: Amnesty 2017). Presumably this is partly because the sexual act of penetration is so closely linked to masculinity, that having a penis that is considered “too small” for this is inconceivable (as someone who works with sex education, I just want to add SIZE DOESN’T MATTER THAT MUCH. Just communicate with your partner and figure out what works for you!) Other studies have also analysed the way testicles are perceived in modern society and found that those seem to be closely connected to masculinity as well (Karioris & Allan 2017). The most obvious example of this is of course the phrase “grow a pair”, said when wanting someone to toughen up. Kaioris and Allan also write that fear of castration is often linked with a fear of losing one’s masculinity. This is all to say, that in our society genitalia seems to be very important to manhood and being “a real man”. Now, is this also the case in ASOIAF?

Short answer, yes. One example is of course the quote with which I started this text, when Littlefinger seems to equate Varys’ lack of testicles with his lack of manhood. Another example comes from A Clash of Kings when Tyrion expresses a similar sentiment when comparing himself to Varys: “Yet I’m still a man.” (Martin 1999/2011, 120). But the linking of lack of genitals with lack of masculinity doesn’t stop with Varys, it is also something we see with Theon after his torture by Ramsey. He himself thinks that he is no man (Martin 2011/2012, 566). Later, when Ramsey forces him to be a part of raping Jeyne Poole, he jokes about Theon (not) getting an erection by seeing Jeyne, and then says that Theon is: “Not even a man, in truth.” (Martin 2011d, 582). This equating of (lack of) a penis and testicles with (a lack of) masculinity/manhood isn’t contained to Westeros, however. Daenerys thinks a similar thing when describing the unsullied in A Storm of Swords: “(…) they were no men at all. The Unsullied were eunuchs, every one of them.” (Martin 2000/2011, 314). Speaking of Daenerys, in A Game of Thrones we learn from her chapters that in Dothraki culture, the only ones who ride in carts are those with a disability, women giving birth, the very old and the very old. Oh, and eunuchs (Martin 1996/2011, 373). Here it becomes very clear that eunuchs are seen as weak and unmanly when they are grouped together with pregnant women, old people and those with disabilities. How disability is portrayed in ASOIAF is not something I will go into further here, but I recommend the text “Power and Punishment in Game of Thrones” by Mia Harrison that does explore that. However, it seems clear that those with disabilities are not seen as “real men” either.

So, based on this, we can see that the Westerosi (and Essosi) view of what a man is seems to presume that he is strong, active and virile. It is apparently also very important to have functioning genitalia (whatever that even means). Therefore, those who cannot live up to that, such as eunuchs, are not real men. This is a very narrow definition of masculinity and manhood, yet it unfortunately rings true in our world as well. Not only does it exclude trans folx completely, it also limits people of all genders. We see the consequences of that in ASOIAF when Brianne is excluded from knighthood based on her gender, and in the way people of Westeros treat all of its “imperfect” men. And we can most definitely see it in our own world.

  References

Amnesty International. (2017). “First, do no harm: ensuring the rights of children born intersex.” Accessed 1 December, 2019. https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2017/05/intersex-rights/

Game of Thrones. (2019) Winterfell. [TV-show]

Harrison, Mia. (2018). “Power and Punishment in Game of Thrones”, pp. 28-43 in Schatz, J L & Amber E George (Eds.), The Image of Disability: Essays on Media Representations. North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc.

Fausto-Sterling, Anne (1995). “How to build a man”, pp. 127-134 in Berger, Maurice, Brian Wallis and Simon Watson (eds.) (1995). Constructing Masculinity, Routledge, New York

Martin, George RR. (1996/2011). A Game of Thrones. Harper Voyager: London

Martin, George RR. (1998/2011). A Clash of Kings. Harper Voyager: London

Martin, George RR. (2000/2011). A Storm of Swords 1: Steel and Snow. Harper Voyager: London

Martin, George RR. (2011/2012). A Dance with Dragons. Harper Voyager: London

Mottier, Véronique. (2008). Sexuality: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Whitehead, Stephen M. (2002). Men and Masculinities, Cambridge and Malden: Polity, pp. 181-204

[counterror]

* GHOST META.

                          DO NOT REBLOG.

as previously discussed in this meta, ghost is a persona created by simon riley as a defense mechanism.   ghost is a fortified shell for simon to live within.   many say the mask is for anonymity but there are thousands of options out there to protect his identity.  why the skull ?  skulls have been a symbol of death and warning for a long time.  in the military, they typically serve as a warning to those who see them, that the wearer brings death and mortality to those he encounters.   they elicit fear in the enemy and mostly bring an understanding to combat that life is short.   it is a symbol of coming justice, and with ghost it is a silent label.   he presents himself as an untouchable, indomitable and unkillable dead man walking.  you cannot kill or escape a ghost.  you can, of course, escape a man  -  you can evade a man, hurt a man and torture a man ... such as simon riley, but the representation of death cannot be manipulated in such a way.   man cannot avoid inevitable death.  in the comics, ghost states that the mask is a tribute to an old friend of his  -  simon riley.   it is, in all its dark and murky glory, reference to his faked death and the trials he had to go through.

it is important to distinguish that, while effectively ghost and simon are the same person, ghost is the outcome of simon compartmentalizing and channeling specific aspects of himself in order to achieve what’s required of him.  after everything, simon had to step back and analyze how he was supposed to exist on the front line and maintain control during covert operations.  how he was going to keep his own mental stability safe, despite being extremely fragile.  ghost was the answer.  considering how simon was struggling to maintain composure, it became immeasurably easier by presenting himself as a character  -  a persona others would grow to respect and perceive in a way that would protect simon.

simon riley is a damaged and broken man.  it is extremely unlikely you’d ever know anything about him, including what he looks like.  save for his name, which could also easily be fake.  fundamentally, he doesn’t exist.   there are no records of him, there is no data or photos to be obtained of him.   he is a ghost  -  with or without the mask.  however, the second the mask goes on, he becomes ghost.   as it’s pulled on, every part of simon riley that holds a risk of getting in the way of the mission is pushed out / buried out of sight and out of mind.   leaving ghost, who presents rage, tactics, precision, focus and absolutely no empathy.   his morals and ethics are gone, more or less.  there is no wavelength of good or bad in the way he operates, he is objective and driven to achieve the mission and won’t allow anything to stand in his way.

an example of this is, were a civilian to be taken hostage by a high value target and have a gun held to their head, ghost would be assessing the situation and analyzing the best possible route to take to achieve his mission : which would be to take out the hvt.   this means that, while civilian casualties are avoided as best as they can be, ghost would take a shot through that civvie’s leg or arm if it meant he was able to sever an artery of the hvt’s by sending the bullet through the civvie.  on top of this, he would consider ways of how to have the civilian fall / which direction depending on which limb, in order to achieve an immediate headshot to the target afterwards.  very objective and very analytical, he would do whatever it takes to achieve the desired outcome.  wanting to harm the civilian or not wanting to has nothing to do with it.   his job is to take out the target, and if someone’s in his way it’s not going to stop him from doing that.

this apathetic perspective allows ghost to succeed in his mission, whereas it’s likely simon alone would’ve been exposed and at risk of being manipulated or hesitation.  by putting on the mask, he’s compartmentalizing and basically ensuring that the waters aren’t muddied by empathy and emotions.  though it’s important to remember that, beyond this dedicated, aggressive and devoid of empathy persona is a man rich in complexities.  simon riley is capable of the majority of the emotional depth of any human.   but he has his fears and he is broken beyond repair, and it’s likely that without the mask’s benefits he would’ve struggled to have progressed to where he is now and possibly might’ve failed in doing so.  

it is not impossible for simon riley to sometimes bleed through the mask.   similar to how it’s also not impossible for ghost to bleed through simon riley.   they are not separate entities, and due to simon’s mental instability there have been occasions where an emotional or reactive simon has pushed through during an event.   this is where ghost is most likely to stumble.  these circumstances will typically, above all else, involve vulnerable children.   with his history of abuse and trauma, simon riley has an overwhelming urge to protect children.   he lost his nephew, who he treasured, during the massacre of his family, and was scarred  -  thinking of the fear and confusion the child must’ve felt in his last few moments.  

if there is ever a time where simon’s empathy bleeds through, it’ll be when he feels ghost should go out of his way to help someone or do something.  however, ghost is capable of tripping himself up.  apathy and objective thinking are important for him to achieve what he does, but when certain decisions are required to be made : such as in mw2 when they’re chasing down a target that they need to keep alive in order to extract intel, ghost struggles  -  which is shown when he suggests taking a shot at the target and ending the chase.  his captain tells him it’s too risky, which appears to be something ghost fights to accept.  it’s containable, his straying of rules and orders, though it is capable of going out of control which can, at the very least, result in dangerous confrontation / disagreements.   

the important thing to take note of is that ghost is surely capable of close to anything in order to achieve his mission.   he is there to protect simon and eliminate all risks.  the traits you may see in simon are not seen in ghost, unless simon bleeds through which would put you in an extremely volatile and unpredictable position.   ghost is a result of trauma and defensive mechanisms.  he is there for simon to progress and maintain composure, better than he would without the mask.

[dailyhobi]

The interview is from a book called Interviews with K-POP Stars by Park Hee A [x,x,x,x,x]

disclaimer!! this thread is meant to summarize what hoseok said in the interview and keep everything close to the original context, however it may still contain some of op’s personal interpretation of his words, so just keep that in mind :D

1. as a kid, hoseok didn't like sports, but instead fell in love with the warm-up exercise routine (which was like a light dance to him). he joined school talent shows because his schoolmates and teachers recommended him.

2. hoseok realized how much he loved dancing; his dad was against it but his mom got him into an academy. they struggled financially so his dance teacher, the leader of Neuron, let hoseok join their dance team bc he was so good, and he wouldn't have to pay for lessons anymore.

3. hoseok learned a lot of technique from the dancer AKIN and took dance lessons from him in gwangju. he also loved boogaloo (a sub-genre in popping) so much that he practiced like there was no tomorrow (and won competitions) and this was where he mostly got his style from.

4. hoseok thought street dance would help him as an idol, but was surprised to learn that there were many constraints in their choreography and made it so hard to show his dance skills. over time, he learned how to show more since BTS had been covering different dance styles.

5. street dance involves individual freestyle, but their choreography was set in frames and angles, so experiences in these two help shape the style hoseok has today.

6. bts's music videos used to focus on synchronized dance, but ever since I NEED U, they started focusing on acting. they studied acting, expressing themselves as characters, performing their roles in the story.

7. blood sweat & tears is hoseok's favorite title track choreography. he struggled with expressing his emotions, and perhaps it's the struggle that makes him feel prouder about finally being able to perform the dance.

8. the mic drop choreography is the opposite of blood sweat & tears; hoseok knew mic drop was his song and ambitiously prepared for the freestyle part with old school hip hop.

9. it was a completely new experience for 3J trying to incorporate traditional dance (fan dance, drum dance, mask dance) into their 2018 mma performance. they wanted to take things further from the oriental features in IDOL by putting a traditional concept on stage.

10. since bts was attending lots of award shows in late 2018, hoseok was afraid that they'd become complacent about attending and performing there. but he thinks if artists want the audience to have fun watching them perform, the artist should actually have fun themselves. 11. hoseok said bts wanted to make it enjoyable for the audience, even if it was more exhausting on their end. bts honestly do enjoy award show performances, and they remind themselves they receive awards from fans there so the ceremonies are meaningful to them. 12. hoseok tells us that comeback stages are for tv, demonstrating the performance as is, whereas awards ceremony and concert stages involve audience interaction. 13. at award shows, bts can't be too liberal with audience interaction because there might be fans of other artists and people who don't know them, so they usually try to stick to a script. 14. bts tries to prioritize fan interaction at concerts since the audience is mostly comprised of their fans. eye contact is a must.

15. even when bts agree on going freestyle and try to look carefree on stage, things are still strictly planned out (communication with audience is more important than performing however they want).

16. hoseok describes that he is a human being with flaws, and there are things he can’t change, but he does tries to aim for perfection.

17. to hoseok, every moment of their performance and the process behind, pouring their blood and sweat and resolving issues, made who he is today, and every moment is equally as meaningful to him.

18. hoseok's mixtape allowed him to show who he is, what he stands for, and how he wanted people to view him. by establishing his identity with this, he'd be able to relax about showing his different sides, and maybe let himself go a little next time.

19. the difference between him and namjoon/yoongi is that hoseok knew music through dance, whereas they knew music just through music. they influenced hoseok a lot, and the team gave him the opportunity to widen his spectrum on music.

20. as the choreography team leader, hoseok was really inspired by the other members' effort in dancing, even if they weren't dancers to begin with.

21. it’s important for the team to practice and move in the same mindset and work together on every move of the dance, but now that they understand each other so well, they know exactly what they need. bts always remind themselves that they perform because they love it.

22. hoseok believes the core of bts’s performances isn’t synchronized dances or powerful acrobatics, but the unique energy that comes from their heart.

23. because of long concert set lists, bts tries to conserve their strength instead of using it all up at once. saving energy isn’t slacking. they choose to focus their energy differently on what they consider important (or what requires more hype/energy).

24. hoseok tries to serve as the balancing role in group dances. though he is able to encompass different dance styles, and even if at times he wishes to be more visible, he gives up what he can to the other members, for the sake of the performance.

25. hoseok believes he has moved a step forward by integrating his experiences from past performances; they have widened his spectrum.

26. he combines improvisation with planned parts for performances like mic drop, depending on how his body goes, how the music flows, and how they vibe together.

27. boy meets evil is a painful song about a boy meeting the devil and struggling with sweet addiction; it gave him a chance to ask himself what it takes to express himself well with this challenging piece, full of acrobatics and difficult moves. (he said he really met the devil)

28. for trivia: just dance, hoseok's goal was to just enjoy it. he wanted to show how he fell in love with dance, how much he loves it and how it feels, and also showing how it fits within the narrative of his life.

29. dancing as bts j-hope is different from dancing as jung hoseok; j-hope has to consider the dance, expressions, gestures, coordinating with members and audience; hoseok’s performance would have to become more professional to be like j-hope, who receives more diverse attention.

30. hoseok has always wanted to showcase his dance like how he did as a kid, so he started doing “hope on the street” to revisit those feelings and dreams as a kid. he still loves dancing and hopes to carry on as long as he can as a performer.

31. hoseok doesn’t categorize his dance into contemporary or street; boundaries between genres are often blurred and depends on how each person perceives it. to him, it’s just about listening to the music and letting his body move. he dances just because he loves it so much.

32. when everyone in the team is worn out, hoseok gives them energy. he doesn't do it on purpose, but the members have come to embrace him that way naturally, and they have also grown to understand each other and function so well as a team.

33. bts try to express a clear message through their albums. when working on albums, namjoon and yoongi play key roles lead discussions with their insight, stories they wish to tell, and what fans are saying. they get so much energy sharing advice with each other.

34. as bts has been growing in popularity and becoming well-seasoned artists, hobi says they are able to explore more diverse possibilities and share their opinions on new ideas. it's hard to always be in agreement, so they suggest even more and better ideas in their discussions.

35. hoseok says he feels so amazing and energized on stage, but his body aches terribly as he comes off the stage (especially during the US leg of the LY tour). he thinks the gap between how he feels being on and off stage is unfairly large. that’s why he prefers being on stage.

36. even though hoseok has been on stages of drastically different sizes and shapes, they are all fundamentally the same to him. he just feels alive whenever he dances and performs, interact with the crowd, and get cheered on.

37. hoseok likes to dance because it's when he doesn't have to think about anything in the moment. all he wants is for the crowd to know that he truly enjoys it. but since bts’s stages have been growing, the added pressure makes it harder for them to perform just for enjoyment.

38. hoseok says he would like to work on stage production in the future. since he’s been on different kinds of stadiums, he thought about what kind of show he wants to present, based on his observations and experiences, though performing is still his priority.

39. he believes dance has the power to move hearts. even though how much dance means to people vastly differs, dance is effective at moving others because its power comes from “actions” that one can see, and hoseok also started dreaming about dancing as he watched others dance.

40. finally, hoseok thinks his identity is pretty straightforward: he followed that pulling attraction from dance, which led him to bts, and fans have come to appreciate him as part of bts and as a dancer, all of which have accumulated to his identity as jung hoseok and j-hope.

[chrisemrysfics]

What are you thankful for?

To be honest, it’s rather correct to say pretty much everything in my life. Or to be precise, I can find gratitude in any aspect of my life.

I have an amazing mother, whose support has been fundamental to heal from the deep trauma I had as a child, and all the wounds gained through the teenage years of not quite understanding other people, of feeling deeply sensitive. Her support was also fundamental to being able to feel free to pursue my dream career, to feel free to talk about anything, and in turn through the years I’ve had the immense pleasure to see my mother grow herself, learn for me when I learned in ways she couldn’t due to her own environment growing up. She is my best friend and through the years, I’ve known how truly amazing it is to have her. She always said that she raised us in the way that she was not raised, that she told herself I won’t do this to my children. She wanted us to feel free, to find happiness, and she’s taken both the roles of father and mother. She always look to know if I’m happy, if she isn’t putting too much on me, and she honestly gets too hard on herself, however I’m also very grateful that in the past few weeks, she’s really grown into the sincere wish to love herself and take care of herself.

I have a brother that, despite his own issues, has always been present, has always shown us he loves us, has never liked to see us hurt. What’s truly amazing is that, due to the way my own father treated him once I was born (I rarely say it and I forget it genuinely most of the time, but we’re half siblings), my brother wasn’t kind to me at first, not in violent ways, and honestly I can’t recall, but from what I understand, he was a bit mean to me, distant, easily angered. But my mother made him see my father’s fault were not my own, and when he allowed himself to care for me rather than see me as the reason my father stopped being nice to him, he showed he cared. I think it has surprised him recently to see me truly evolve into an independent person, to my deepest self, as I think he never quite realized I wasn’t a child, teen, anymore. I know I’ll always be his little sibling, despite the joke we often had that it felt more like we were twins. But I know who my brother is in his heart, and him, mom and I, we’re a team.

I have had short terms friendships, with classmates, in general that didn’t last once we weren’t in the same classes anymore, though with some we shared multiple years in the same classes. I’ve had friends on internet who drifted away after a while, and I’ve had a childhood friend that we spent years as friends, before the way we lived our lives just didn’t seem to fit anymore. All these people, I have shared happy moments, and I’m thankful for them all. It’s a blessing that almost all the time, it’s never been argument that has separated us, but a genuine drifting away, where it just happened, that we felt less and less pulled to talk until it stopped. I have had friends I choose to cut off from my life, but I will never forget the good times, and I was blessed to have one come back into my life two years later, and gratefully we also both evolved, the issues that pushed me to cut ties was not present anymore and we were able to discuss things honestly.

The friends I have now, there is so much I feel grateful about. They helped me evolve as a person, to be more honest, to be more open, and I know I still need to learn to open up more. They supported me, even financially at times, and no matter what, I know our bonds are strong, and to me, they are family. The same way my mother and brother are family of heart rather than blood for me, the friends I have now are also heart family. I feel cared for by them, and I feel so blessed to have them in my life.

I also know good people in the two, three servers I’m active in, I tend to be a quiet person in group settings, yet I feel at home in these servers, with these people, and I feel known by them. I also feel very grateful to the people I can see regularly rebloging or liking my posts. And I feel grateful for all the readers I get, and how I can be assured to see kudos mails at least once every two days, if not everyday. Sometimes it’s one, or two, sometimes more, sometimes two/three days do pass at least, but I don’t think I have ever seen a full week pass without at least one or two kudos mail. And that’s so amazing, to know every week, there’s at least one person who read my fic that I can see did so.

I feel grateful that I have my own space, my own home in my mom’s home, we have struggled in the past and sometimes we still do, but our situation vastly improved in the past two years, a big part when mom finally entered retirement. We always made it work, and it’s easier now. It’s way easier to feel free to buy food, to treat ourselves from times to times, and I’m grateful for every single moment I can buy anything for the household, necessities and treats and gifts alike.

I’m so, so grateful I feel free to write, to be a writer. Inspiration, imagination, building worlds and stories, it’s such a core part of myself, and to write as my main activity, it feels like I am constantly indulging myself. In truth, it is my career because it is what I’m legally marked as (independent writer), but in practice? I’m just living my life, freely and happily. I write, I take care of my mom, I relax, I live my days. And there is so much more than being focused on “how much do I earn each month” because there is so much that matters. For the longest while, while sometimes I felt like a burden and had to talk myself up from that mood, I would know that, if I can’t financial support, I can emotional support, I can do a lot of stuff. When I finally did the papers for a governmental allowance, and it passed, finally I could do more, though as seen from this month, sometimes a end of month can be a bit harder. But what I prefer to see is, before we had my brother often help us, and now, for the most part I can help. And whenever there has been support, I’ve always felt so grateful I would spazz internally.

I also feel very grateful to have found my spiritual path, I’m a curious person by nature, and there is so much you can learn, and then you find what feels right to you, what feels good, what makes you heal yourself more, what helps you. It isn’t that spirituality has made me a better person, it’s that it taught me to love myself in its truest definition, and in turn, I am able to truly show who I am at the core. What I believe in is between me and myself, and anyone who doesn’t judge (whether or not they believe in the same ways), I have no shame and no fear of speaking about my beliefs, of course certain things are more personal, and I don’t feel it’s necessary to broadcast it. But I don’t hide it either, because this is also part of me. The confidence it has given me, the joy in life, the ability to perceive in different manners, I am so grateful for it. To be spiritual is to believe in beings that are non-physical, and to me, those beings have been a very strong source of support and love.

So, as you can see, there is a lot I can be grateful for, and I didn’t even touch details. I’ll feel grateful for finding a fic I like to read, I’ll feel grateful for finding this special offer, I’ll feel grateful for the fun of gaming, and so on. The more I have voiced to myself what I feel thankful about, the more I have seen that there is so much you can be happy about it. And feeling happy is something I feel grateful for in itself! But feeling sad too, I’m thankful it allows me to express what hurts, what I long for, etc. I’m grateful for anger as it will show me when a boundary is crossed, when something doesn’t feel just, etc.

I’m going deep here but to finish: I am deeply grateful to the very ability to feel grateful. It’s more than just feeling gratitude to being able to find things I’m grateful for, it’s the very feeling. If there was absolutely nothing in my life I genuinely felt grateful about, then the feeling of gratitude that exist, and that is lacking, would tell me everything in my life need to change, and I would be grateful that gratitude exist to let me know what needs to change, what is making me unhappy. So gratitude in itself is a blessed feelings, all feelings are, but when you ask yourself what you are grateful about, feeling the emotion is the first gratitude in your life.

[pettishrew]

MIND MY WICKED WORDS AND TIPSY TOPSY SLURS; I CAN’T TAKE THIS PLACE, NO, I CAN’T TAKE THIS PLACE.

𝖖 𝖚 𝖔 𝖙 𝖊 𝖘

i don’t feel very human anymore. —7:59 pm 4/28/15; l.m.

Where did you get those big eyes? My mother. And where did you get those lips? My mother. And the loneliness? My mother. And that broken heart? My mother. And the absence, where did you get that? My father. —Inheritance, Warsan Shire

“And I’m a master of speaking silently—all my life I’ve spoken silently and I’ve lived through entire tragedies in silence.”— The Meek One, Fyodor Dostoevsky

How do you move on? You move on when your heart finally understands that there is no turning back. —J.R.R. Tolkien

“There are no permanent friends, only permanent interests”

UNTIL LIONS HAVE THEIR OWN HISTORIANS, THE STORY OF THE HUNT WILL ALWAYS GLORIFY THE HUNTER.— Chinua Achebe

“Self-hatred is only ever a seed planted from outside in. But when you do that to a child, it becomes a weed so thick, and it grows so fast, the child doesn’t know any different. It becomes as natural as gravity.”— Hannah Gadsby, Nanette

You got to take a deep breath and give up. The system is rigged against you. Bo Burnham

𝖇 𝖆 𝖘 𝖎 𝖈

NAME: Peter Thomas Pettigrew NICKNAMES: Pete, Wormtail, or Wormy AGE: Twenty BIRTHDAY: August 22nd GENDER: Male PRONOUNS: He / Him

𝖋 𝖆 𝖒 𝖎 𝖑 𝖞

MOTHER: Enid Pettigrew. 47. Alive. FATHER: Sean Morivan. 52. Status Unknown. SIBLINGS: None

𝖕 𝖍 𝖞 𝖘 𝖎 𝖈 𝖆 𝖑 𝖆𝖙𝖙𝖗𝖎𝖇𝖚𝖙𝖊𝖘

FACE CLAIM: Alex Wolff BUILD: Moderately Overweight HAIR:  In need of a haircut. Curly and unkempt. HAIR COLOR: Brunette. In the summertime, it gets a golden, almost colorless hue. EYE COLOR: Brown SKIN COLOR: Light with olive undertones DOMINANT HAND: Right ANOMALIES: He has a birthmark on his left shoulder.  His skin freckles in the summer. He also has faint scars on the inside of both of his forearms. He also has a small tattoo on the outside of his right thigh. Peter got it on a dare and it looks like ( x ) SCENT:  He often smells like chocolate or peppermint. Mostly because those are the last things they would have eaten. ACCENT: British. More of the cockney nature than anything else. ALLERGIES: He is moderately allergic to dairy. Not enough to stop him of course, but enough to make him uncomfortable if he eats too much of it. DISORDERS: N / A FASHION: Peter wears whatever is comfortable and fits for the most part. He does tend to stick to neutral colors, like black, grey, and beige. He doesn’t like to draw attention to himself. NERVOUS TICS: He stutters when he’s nervous. He also rubs the back of his neck when he’s uncomfortable. QUIRKS: His quirks are identical to his nervous tics. One doesn’t often happen without the other.

𝖑 𝖎 𝖋 𝖊 𝖘 𝖙 𝖞 𝖑 𝖊

RESIDES: Plainview Point Apartments BORN: St. Mungo’s RAISED: A little outside of London PETS: A Tawny Owl named Eros

CAREER: Obliviator EXPERIENCE: 2+ years in the position EMPLOYER: The Ministry of Magic

POLITICAL AFFILIATION: The Order BELIEFS: Peter doesn’t believe strictly in anything. MISDEMEANORS: None FELONIES: None DRUGS: None SMOKES: Tobacco, and occasionally Marijuana ALCOHOL: Infrequently DIET: Poor

LANGUAGES: English, Welsh, and some Italian

PHOBIAS: Death or Serious Injury. HOBBIES: Reading and Baking. TRAITS: { + }: forgiving, analytical, easy-going, optimistic { - }: fearful, cunning, indecisive, meek

𝖋 𝖆 𝖛 𝖔 𝖗 𝖎 𝖙 𝖊 𝖘

LOCATION: Anywhere that is small, where Peter feels like no one can get to him. SPORTS TEAM: Ireland GAME: Wizard’s Chess. MUSIC: He doesn’t care much for music. If he does listen to it it’s softer sounding music, that’s almost wistful. MOVIES: Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope 1980. Alien is a close second. FOOD: Anything sweet. Peter’s sweet tooth is insatiable. BEVERAGE: Pumpkin Juice or soda. COLOR: Pale Yellow

𝖒 𝖆 𝖌 𝖎 𝖈

ALUMNI HOUSE: Gryffindor WAND: UNICORN: Unicorn hair generally produces the most consistent magic, and is least subject to fluctuations and blockages. Wands with unicorn cores are generally the most difficult to turn to the Dark Arts. They are the most faithful of all wands, and usually remain strongly attached to their first owner, irrespective of whether he or she was an accomplished witch or wizard. Minor disadvantages of unicorn hair are that they do not make the most powerful wands (although the wand wood may compensate) and that they are prone to melancholy if seriously mishandled, meaning that the hair may ‘die’ and need replacing. FIR: My august grandfather, Gerbold Octavius Ollivander, always called wands of this wood ‘the survivor’s wand,’ because he had sold it to three wizards who subsequently passed through mortal peril unscathed. There is no doubt that this wood, coming as it does from the most resilient of trees, produces wands that demand staying power and strength of purpose in their true owners, and that they are poor tools in the hands of the changeable and indecisive. Fir wands are particularly suited to Transfiguration, and favor owners of focused, strong-minded and, occasionally, intimidating demeanor. 9 1/2 Inches and unyielding. AMORTENTIA: Chocolate, Peppermint, Garlic, and Old Books. PATRONUS: He cannot produce one. BOGGART: Prior to the war it had been his mother dying. He truly doesn’t know what he would do without her. However, since the war has begun his Boggart is Lord Voldemort.

𝖈 𝖍 𝖆 𝖗 𝖆 𝖈 𝖙 𝖊 𝖗

MORAL ALIGNMENT: True Neutral MBTI: INTP

INTPs are often thoroughly engaged in their own thoughts, and usually, appear to others to be offbeat and unconventional. The INTP’s mind is the most active place, and their inward orientation can mean that they neglect superficial things like home décor or appropriate clothing. They don’t tend to bother with small talk but can become downright passionate when talking about science, mathematics, computers, or the larger theoretical problems of the universe. Reality is often of only passing interest to the Architect, as they are more interested in the theory behind it all.INTPs are typically precise in their speech and communicate complex ideas with carefully chosen words. They insist on intellectual rigor in even the most casual of conversations, and will readily point out inconsistencies of thought or reasoning. Social niceties may fall by the wayside for an INTP who is more interested in analyzing logic, and they may offend others by smallmitting their dearly held values and beliefs to logical scrutiny. Trivia: - more likely than other types to study a foreign language  - most frequent type among college students committing alcohol and drug policy violations - have the lowest level of coping resources of all the types - one of the types least likely to believe in a spiritual power - highest of all types in career dissatisfaction in school have lower grades than would be -- predicted by aptitude scores - more likely than average to complete engineering programs - personal values include autonomy, freedom, and independence - Overrepresented among working MBA students - Commonly found in science and technical occupations - famous intps: albert einstein, abraham lincoln, marie curie, and charles darwin

MBTI ROLE:  The Architect or the Logician ENNEAGRAM: Type Five ENNEAGRAM ROLE:

The Observer: Fives are alert, insightful, and curious. They are able to concentrate and focus on developing complex ideas and skills. Independent, innovative, and inventive, they can also become preoccupied with their thoughts and imaginary constructs. They become detached, yet high-strung and intense. They typically have problems with eccentricity, nihilism, and isolation. At their Best: visionary pioneers, often ahead of their time, and able to see the world in an entirely new way.

TEMPERAMENT:

Melancholic. The melancholic temperament is fundamentally introverted and thoughtful. Melancholic people often were perceived as very (or overly) pondering and considerate, getting rather worried when they could not be on time for events. Melancholics can be highly creative in activities such as poetry and art - and can become preoccupied with the tragedy and cruelty in the world. Often they are perfectionists. They are self-reliant and independent; one negative part of being a melancholic is that they can get so involved in what they are doing they forget to think of others.

WESTERN ZODIAC:

Leo With the Sun approaching the end of Leo, August 22nd has its peak in creativity and our childish need to present our inner being and express ourselves. This is an emotional date when passions need to be calmed in order for us to swim out of them with a clear mind and a plan we can hold on to, so our dreams can be reached. Those born at this time are connected to others on a different level than the rest of Leo representatives and feel a constant need to set free from ego battles and follow their hearts.

CHINESE ZODIAC:

Year of the Rat The Metal Rat are honest, frank, and optimistic, and will not get depressed no matter how terrible the situation is. They have a quick respond and strong environmental adaptability. They treat people kindly. But most of the people born in 1960 year of the Rat are self-centered. They always think of themselves first. They are impatient, suspicious and kind of vain.

PRIMAL SIGN:

Otter: Social, funny, and outgoing, those born under the sign of the Otter use their warmth and charm as their primary tool in navigating life. Like their animal namesake, members of this sign are clever, feisty, and gregarious. They usually spend a lot of time grooming themselves for their looks are of great importance to them. They are not terribly territorial either, preferring to sleep where their adventure takes them for the night. A nice home will eventually be required, but a young Otter can travel the world for years without getting too homesick. Otters like to be in charge. This way they can not only get what they want, but receive attention and respect while doing so. They can occasionally behave somewhat self-centered and egotistical, but are usually smart enough not to push their self-proclaimed authority too far. Otters want to be the best, and they understand that being the best takes work. As long as they get to do thing their own way, there is little they won’t undertake.Members of this sign have a sense of pride that only a few other signs can top. They absolutely hate looking unintentionally foolish (though they will act the part of the fool if it gets them a good laugh) and have little tolerance for those who don’t respect this important (if unspoken) rule. They like to be seen as evolved, wise, and powerful, which they often are, but this can sometimes cause them to hesitate trying new things. Above all things, Otters don’t like to live by other people’s rules. As long as they keep life in perspective this shouldn’t be a big problem, but out of perspective Otters risk becoming greedy and narrow-minded and there is always a chance that they will take what they want if nobody is willing to offer it up to them. Members of this sign can also be a bit judgmental of others, particularly those who are less successful than they are at that point in their lives. As they mature they tend to realize that everyone operates differently, and will slowly come to accept this, especially if they have a hard road to reaching their goals.

TAROT CARD:

The Fool: The Fool, at its core, represents the unfettered soul. Free of experience and prejudice, they are also free of fear, and therefore come into new events without the trepidation often experienced by those that know what they might expect. This is both a benefit and a detriment to the Fool, their eyes are on the path ahead, or on the sky, but not at what is right in front of them. This can make the Fool easy to trick, to persuade, or to side-line. But they also do not know what others believe is ‘NOT’ possible, and this makes them capable of greatness, new ideas, and innovation. They do not know a thing cannot be done, so they merrily set about to do it anyway. Sometimes they succeed.

TV TROPES:  

All the Other Reindeer, The Chessmaster, Cornered Rattlesnake, Dirty Coward, Fair Weather Friend,  and Opportunistic Bastard

SONGS:

- Little Lion Man by Mumford and Sons - If It Kills Me by Jason Mraz - Sinner Man by Idris Elba - Creep by Radiohead - The Devil You Know by X Ambassadors

IDEOLOGIES:

- Beer is the scum of all the alcoholic beverages. He think it tastes akin to piss and doesn’t understand why anyone would opt to drink it willingly. - Peter has never had a pet aside from the owl. And doesn’t understand the want to keep things in captivity for your own benefit. This principle extends to muggle zoos as well. - Chocolate frogs are the best candy that Honeydukes sells, this is not a matter of discussion that he is willing to hear. - Peter believes that if something is easier done through violence than diplomacy that in those instances the people should be empowered to pursue violence without diplomacy first. - Wool is a terrible fabric and he won’t wear it. It’s itchy.