#but seriously WHAT IS THE POINT

[bywheeler]

Ok bear with me this is kind of long. So something (in my opinion) that helped confirm they would give Will his happy ending was the whole painting storyline. I just really don’t understand it’s purpose if Will and Mike don’t end up together. So first let’s start with the airport scene

We have them awkwardly hugging. Now I get that they haven’t seen each other in a year and have barely talked. That still doesn’t explain why this hug is so awkward. They’re supposedly best friends. Normally when you’ve been friends with someone so long it feels like no time has passed even if you haven’t seen each other in a while. Why is this any different? They ended on good (although Will didn’t get the apology he deserved) terms after their fight in season 3.

Will has the painting with him in the airport and he obviously planned to give it to Mike before he realized how awkward things were. This is when he lost a bit of hope. What exactly is it he hopes for? Is it for Mike to like him back? Why give him this hope if it was gonna end badly? It seems silly to include it if they’re just gonna end up staying friends.

Now to my next point. We have Will get this hope again after their talk in Will’s bedroom. When Mike says it’s better for them to work as a team. Friends. Best friends. The camera focuses on Will looking to Mike then he reaches for the painting and puts it in his backpack.

My question again… What is will hoping for? Now you could say he’s giving it to him as a friend but why be so hesitant to give it to him? We know from the Van scene it’s because the meaning behind the painting shows his true feeling for Mike.

Which leads me to the beloved van scene. Will’s plan was never to use use El’s name and act like she commissioned the painting. He was originally planning to give Mike the painting because of how he feels toward Mike. We can confirm this with our two other scenes. He was so excited to give Mike his painting in the airport until he lost hope. And then that hope is regained after their moment in his bedroom (which felt very flirty). He only decides to use El’s name to mask his own feelings because he believes that’s what Mike needs to hear. Mike’s telling Will that El doesn’t need him. Will knows that Mike wants to feel needed and the person who needs him most is Will. But that’s not what Will believes. He believes Mike wants El to need him so he uses her name while describing his own feelings because he thinks he’s lost any chance of Mike ever feeling the same about him. 

And for the third time I ask WHY WOULD THE WRITERS GIVE WILL ANY TYPE OF HOPE. It just seems silly to me that they’d make him suffer these feelings of unrequited love for no reason. I mean what is the point of the painting plot? We know in season 5 it’ll have to come up again. Mike is gonna figure out that El didn’t commission the painting. He’ll have to confront Will about it. If the writers wanted Will to come out to his best friend Mike then they really didn’t need to have a whole storyline drag over 2 seasons. I just don’t see how it makes any sense for the series to include all these scenes in season 4 as a way to confirm Wills love for Mike and not have Mike feel the same. What’s the point?

Sorry I am rambling and I don’t even know if this makes any sense. But if you read all of this thank you lol

[transkeiichi]

my dads shitty fox news i walked in on was a trump woman announcing "one party knows what a woman is, and the other thinks men can get pregnant and we need tampons in boys bathrooms" but tell me more abt how im not a target of transphobia and i need to keep my mouth shut and know my place as a perpetual shield and uplifter of other trans voices due to my inherent male privledge and lack of ever being oppressed for my identity

[housedyke]

The thing about Buffy is that it's been thoroughly established that she doesn't do casual sex. She rejects guys in high school who move too fast too soon, is devastated when she find out there isn't anything emotional between her and Parker, and makes no non-magical attempt to sleep with people she isn't in a relationship with

So option 1 is that she's decided Spike, of all people, will be the first time she has casual, no-feelings sex. Or, option 2, she knows they have some weird fucked up relationship but doesn't want to say it out loud

[chalkrub]

thank you for a great art fight! here's some of my final attacks. had a blast, already missing it - see you next year!

[huginsmemory]

As someone whose asexual and a monsterfucker and knowing that there is a large subsection of the monsterfucking community that is Ace or on that spectrum, Ford being very Ace-coded and implied to have fucked a a triangle feels accurate to me. representative, even.

[infamous-if]

I must say this first. Having your heart broke does not excuse mental abuse. What Seven is doing to mc is atrocious, I do not understand the community fans love for Seven. Deliberately using words, actions, lyrics to inflict pain because they are hurting is cruel an inexcusable. It also feels like they use Alina as a tool.

G is an alcoholic egotistical rockstar. B is an asshole pure and simple. E and S feel like background characters and kind of dull and lifeless. O is okay but still not interesting enough to pursue to me. V is not my preference. Oh, and A. Forgot A because sadly they seem forgettable. I can hope for single route maybe?

Interesting story, fun and entertaining, but I mean no offense or attack to you but you write better friends and side characters than love interests.

[justwannabecat]

DC/DP but Danny doesn’t explain why he has a thermos as his main weapon

Danny (ghost form): It’s soup time Skulker!

Nightwing: I’ve been meaning to ask… why do you have a thermos? Surely there are better weapons

Danny: Lol no

—————

Red Robin: What is this even made of? It’s like two pounds! I mean, that’s not a lot, but for a thermos?

Danny: Oh, you know, a special ghost-proof metal

Red Robin: *sarcastically* Oh, of course

—————

Red Hood: Seriously though, why a thermos?

Danny: I dunno, I didn’t make it

Red Hood: Then who did???

Danny: :)

Red Hood: ?????

—————

Robin: I have noticed that your catchphrase seems to be “Soup time”. Does this mean you cook and eat your enemies when you defeat them?

Danny: what the fuck

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

A gift horse for @piosplayhouse

[crescentlyautumn]

You know what’s funny? How I can say that I headcanon a character as somewhere on the ace spectrum and/or aro spectrum, and within minutes I am being treated as if I am somehow very unintelligent and know nothing of the world.

[oh-alicent]

what do you mean ao3 is down and i can't reread my favorite loustat and devil's minion fics for the seventh time this week?

[racetrackmybeloved]

i would give anything to watch a full movie on how the entirety of brooklyn came to be "spot conlon's territory". half of the brooklyn newsies are practically grown ass men, and they answer to this scrawny blond fifteen year old??

like come on

[snekdood]

"if we make america worse and more of a dictatorship that will be even harder to unravel and make it the way we want the country to be, maybe then everyone will join our Glorious Revolution!" bb girl you cant even be in the same room with someone who thinks you should vote, how in tf do you think you're gonna unite people to fight in The Revolution with you? it's gonna be you and your 5 friends, i hate to break it to you.

[fisheito]

still thinking about those promo pics where they locked the tops and bottoms in separate rooms

[jondoe279]

atp i genuinely doooon’t care if the old guard two is the worst thing put to film i just want to see the best character of all time (andromache the scythian) and her loser henchmen and everyone’s favorite girl nile freeman again

[stromblessed]

Mizu's spectacles, and the levels of her disguise

In drafting some more Blue Eye Samurai meta posts, I find myself writing out the comparisons between what Mizu can and cannot hide about herself, and how that affects how she moves through the world.

Like, I get the jokes about Mizu's glasses, if only color contacts had existed back then, etc. etc., and I think (hope) that most viewers don't take the glasses jokes seriously, as in "I don't care about the suspension of disbelief because BES is a cartoon." But I wanted to write these thoughts out anyway without burying them in a text post about something else.

I think the points I'm going to lay out here are viewed very differently by different people, so please feel free to add to this post, reply, or put your thoughts in the tags!

Not only do Mizu's glasses not actually help her that much, there's surely more to Mizu's mixed race appearance than just the color of her eyes.

In my view, this was pointed out in episode 1:

I'm willing to bet most of us were expecting young Taigen to say "blue eyes," not "ROUND eyes."

Obviously this is still about Mizu's eyes, but not even spectacles can hide their shape.

I don't think the show is obligated to point out everything about Mizu's face that isn't quite as Japanese as the people around her expect. Though the creators have said that they specifically designed Mizu - and her clothes - to read both as "white" and as "Japanese," as well as both male and female. I think there's more about Mizu's features that read as "white" than just her eyes.

This is where my own headcanons start entering the picture, but it's my impression that people can just tell that Mizu looks different, whether or not they can put a finger on exactly how.

There's the little girl who looks at Mizu and then hides on the way into Kyoto:

When there's more to your face you'd like to cover up than just your eyes, big hats are a big help!

By the way, most of these examples have to come from the first half of the season, since by the second half, either Mizu is too preoccupied with fighting henchmen, or everyone Mizu is facing knows who she is already, and she therefore has no reason to hide her mixed race identity.

It's worth mentioning that the mere fact that Mizu has to hide multiple aspects of her identity - her mixed race and her sex - results in her having to choose clothes that really, really cover her up, which doesn't win her any favors either:

(Zatoichi reference, anyone?)

If it were as easy as, for example, tying her glasses to her head and wa-lah, nobody would ever know she was half-white - then (1) Mizu would've just done that long ago, and (2) Mizu wouldn't be so on guard and on tenterhooks 100% of the time the way she's depicted in the show, even when her glasses are on.

Her spectacles sure don't help her in the brothel, which is full of observant women who are trying to seduce her, meaning they get good long looks at her:

Mizu never takes her glasses off, but they still send a woman to her who has light eyes, thinking that must be what will interest a blue-eyed man:

No wonder Mizu gets mad after this, lol

So Mizu never takes her spectacles off in the brothel, it's dimly lit inside, and the women can still tell that she has blue eyes. I'm getting the sense that Mizu putting on her spectacles isn't a guarantee that people suddenly can't tell that she looks different.

And yet no one spots that she's female.

Mizu can hide her breasts, can wear her hair in the right style, can hide what's between her legs, can walk and talk and behave like a man - and she's been doing it for almost her entire life, to the point that not only is she very good at it, but the threat of being found out as female is deadly, but isn't presented in the show as omnipresent.

Let me explain.

She threatens Ringo for nearly saying the word "girl" out loud, because while she's constantly ostracized for being mixed race, being a woman traveling without a chaperone, carrying a sword, and disguised as a man will get her killed or flogged or arrested or some combination of these things.

But in addition, it's been drilled into her since she was a child that if she is discovered as female, the combination of her being mixed race and female will identify her as someone extremely specific, someone known to some bad people, and she will be killed:

I think of it as Mizu thinking to herself, "Being found out as mixed race means I'm treated badly. Being found out as mixed race and a woman means I'm dead."

Mizu's hair is cut as a child. But she isn't made to wear a big hat, or cover her eyes somehow, or anything like that. Because hiding her sex is a more successful endeavor than hiding her race.

Ringo finds out she's female by accident, but once Mizu accepts the fact that he won't rat her out, she relaxes pretty early on in the season. Because the threat of being found out as female is mitigated pretty much 99.9%, since Mizu has gotten so good at being a man. And also, because most of the time, people see what they want to see. Even if Mizu's face makes her stand out as "not 100% Japanese," no one in the world of BES looks at Mizu's clothes, her bearing, her sword, hears her voice, and will ever in a million years conclude that she is a woman, because expectations around gender roles in the Edo period were so rigid and so widely enforced.

One detail that proved this to me is after the Four Fangs fight:

Ringo takes off Mizu's clothes so he can stitch her up, then leaves her clothes off even after he's done. He doesn't even throw her cloak over her as a blanket or anything. There's a little a straw (pallet?) as a divider there on the left, but anyone could just peek around it and see Mizu and her chest bindings. (I think it's mostly there as a windbreaker.)

And Taigen is right there, but he doesn't give a shit:

Opinions probably vary hugely on this, but my impression is that because the show doesn't make any kind of deal about Taigen being in the room with Mizu here, my guess is that Mizu isn't in any danger of Taigen thinking she's female. Even when I watched the show for the first time, I assumed that Taigen had seen Mizu out of her clothes here, and that he thought nothing of it.

Eat your heart out, Li Shang (Mulan 1998). I actually do think that this scene is a direct and purposeful side-eye to that movie, lol

There's obviously some nuance to how "severe" being mixed race is compared to how "severe" being a woman is for Mizu:

After all, Swordfather can't bear to listen to Mizu confess to being a woman.

So a Japanese man can go wherever he wants, whenever he wants in BES. A Japanese woman has limited options: marriage, religion, or a brothel. A mixed-race man is an eyesore in this story. A mixed-race woman is a death sentence.

May as well eliminate the female aspect, and do what you can about the mixed-race aspect. Because that's just realistic.

Meaning Mizu can avoid the strictures Edo society places on women. But she can't avoid the repercussions that come with being mixed race. And I truly don't think that it's just because "there's no brown contacts yet."

[gynoidgearhead]

Forget Traditional Homeownership: Meet the Transgender People Who Have Given Up On The Unattainable Ideal Of Traditional Personhood