#castigators

[flo-85]

Castigators from the Black Judges

Name of the chamber: The Black Judges The chamber's credo: We are the final judge.

[choutaph]

castigate.png

[is-the-fire-real]

So I wrote an addition to a post recently talking about punitive justice on Tumblr.

Someone reblogged it, then deleted their reblog and went with reblogging the original post.

I had gone to their blog to see if I'd be interested in following them, so I noticed this when I wouldn't have otherwise.

I wish I could believe they'd disagreed with my point overall. It happens.

But I don't. I believe they reblogged me, then noticed my final point about how Tumblr folks have redefined "Nazi" to be synonymous with "Zionist" and "Zionist" to mean "Jew".

And, based on their other posts on the current war, they realized they'd be ejected from the terrorism fandom if they publicly agreed that Jews have been badly treated on Tumblr in the last year.

[canisalbus]

The way you draw bodies, especially the way you draw hands, is so genuine. It's so nice to look at because it looks so natural, graceful even. The body language and expressions of your characters say so much without them having to say anything at all, it's masterful work.

Thank you! Body language and believably expressive hand gestures are really high on my list of priorities and I put a lot of effort in trying to get them right. So it's really encouraging to hear people notice them!

[kerosene-in-a-blender]

It sort of got buried due to the sheer amount of other stuff that happened, but it is very funny that Veth has, at least once, employed the services of the Plank King of Dartow to track down her errant teenage son

[tomatikoma]

She's never afraid to get her hands dirty. Time after time, she dips her fingers into the darkest corners of the souls. Maybe that's why she likes hands so much. Especially the big, strong hands that... Ahem. On the other hand (sorry... I just... it's stronger than me...), it's part of her job to help wraiths maintain the remnants of sanity in this ruthless and insane world. But... Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? OC belongs to @malky-tea <:3

[anubiarts]

box of shame

[vulpusthewildspirit]

[lilnasxvevo]

Jiang Cheng is fashionable and rich and handsome and politically powerful and strong and skilled and smart and funny and he is still somehow a deeply cringefail sopping wet Pomeranian of a man. Now THAT’S talent.

[chronomally]

I went to a local production of Romeo & Juliet where all the actors pulled their roles out of a hat two minutes before showtime and my favorite joke was the actor who played Juliet wore a trucker hat that said "GIRL" on it until the scene where Romeo and Juliet imply they've consummated their marriage, when he dramatically threw it to the side and pulled out another hat that said "WOMAN" on it

[mxtxfanatic]

Fandom Gripes #24: Fans acting like the act of interfering in a rapidly deteriorating situation with the intention of helping makes you not only a bad person but also just as bad as (or worse than) the person/people causing the bad situation has got to stop. Blaming mxtx protags for not successfully saving the people they tried to help despite directly helping while others were either 1) actively trying to kill the people the protags were trying to help or 2) passively watching as others actively tried to kill the people the protags were trying to help is like irl when a good Samaritan saves someone’s life but then get sued later because saving said person’s life left them with injuries. Which is why we now have to have Good Samaritan Laws in America to discourage people from deciding that saving a life isn’t worth the consequences.

[the-cornuthaum]

shirt 100% worn by Irene of Iberia (at least when off duty)

[queen-boudicca]

The biggest tragedy of arcane season two is sevika's haircut. Like girl what are you doing

[saul-tortellini]

[ibetittering]

FREAKING OUT THE MUSIC IS BACK I'M SO HAPPY

[lord-squiggletits]

On the MegOP fandom trend of saying "Optimus should apologize to Megatron"

(Speaking specifically for IDW1, though it applies to a lot of MegOP especially ones that do continuity soup with heavy reference to IDW1)

I was talking to a friend in DMs and they mentioned a common headcanon/fanfic trope that I also concurred with, and both of us said it's something that bothers us: a common take in the MegOP fandom goes basically along the lines of "If Optimus had just apologized to Megatron, the war would've ended" (or other variants including "if he'd tried harder to understand Megatron/work in collaboration with him").

And firstly, this is incorrect for a number of reasons:

There were attempts at peace negotiations during the war, but they fell through. So Optimus WAS trying to work with Megatron to the point of participating in formal diplomatic meetings.

Optimus tried multiple times on page to convince Megatron to just stop fighting and work with him for peace (Autocracy, Chaos Theory) that Megatron rejected. Given that these on-page examples take place at the start of the war and at the end of the war respectively, it makes sense that Optimus asking Megatron for collaboration is something he was trying/willing to do the entire time. So again, Optimus was always willing AND ATTEMPTING to work with Megatron and find a joint solution

Even before the war when Optimus was still Orion, he was very explicitly inspired by Megatron's writing and names Megatron as one of the people who "opened his eyes" to the wrongs of Cybertronian society. So how is it that people claim "the war went on for too long because Optimus never tried to understand Megatron" when OP literally named Megatron as one of his biggest idols, thus implying that OP does understand Megatron's ideals

But the primary purpose of this post wasn't to defend Optimus, actually. Even though I personally think Optimus did plenty (dare I say, everything) to try to end the war, there are some who may still think otherwise, so instead of arguing about whether Optimus did "enough", or who should apologize to whom, or who "deserves the blame" for starting/continuing the war, I'd actually rather talk about this:

No matter who is most "to blame" for the war, it's my firm belief that neither Megatron nor Optimus would even expect/demand the other to apologize to them at all.

On Megatron's side, he would never seek to judge Optimus negatively for the decisions to the point of saying "you wronged me, apologize." Whether it's evil Megatron who doesn't care about atrocities and revels in an opportunity to expose Optimus as a hypocrite, or post-war/Autobot Megatron who knows that his own evil actions are irredeemable, the idea of Megatron judging Optimus and demanding an apology for the war specifically strikes me as out-of-character. Why would Megatron demand or even want an apology from Optimus when Megatron knows fully well that he has his own sins to bear, he prolonged the war for his own selfish/material gain, and that he is responsible for an untold amount of suffering? Demanding an apology would imply that Megatron sees himself as the wronged party and Optimus as the wrongdoer, but by the end of the war, Megatron is too aware of his own part in the war to ever demand such a thing of Optimus. Even if he DID think that Optimus was "equally to blame" for the war (which he doesn't/wouldn't, btw), Megatron's own feelings of guilt would prevent him from trying to seek the petty satisfaction of the moral high ground or making Optimus beg for his forgiveness.

Additionally, Megatron knows Optimus very well as a person: he knows that the position of leadership is full of "loneliness [and] agonizing self-doubt" for Optimus (Chaos Theory) and that "when Optimus hurts others, he hurts himself" (MTMTE). Another reason that Megatron wouldn't demand nor want an apology from Optimus is because Megatron knows Optimus so well that he already knows that being a war leader fills Optimus with immense guilt and suffering. Given that Megatron knows about Optimus' self-doubt and guilt, why would he even need an apology when he already knows how much Optimus regrets the war and desperately wishes/wished for it to end?

Then, as established in the previous paragraphs, Optimus is too full of guilt for his part in the war (both before it started and in being unable to stop it sooner) to demand an apology from Megatron. Again, demanding an apology would put Optimus in an implied position of moral superiority and/or victimhood, but Optimus doesn't see himself as morally superior or as a victim (or rather, he sees himself as being responsible for these bad things happening and internalizes this as a duty to do better/fix wrongdoings). In other words, Megatron and Optimus both share this view of themselves and each other: Their hands are so dirty, and they both feel such guilt over this, and they know each other well enough to know that the other feels this way as well. Because both of them feel blame for the war and are acutely aware of their own flaws/part in suffering, both of them feel far too responsible for the war happening for them to ever blame their archnemesis for "not trying harder" or "being responsible for the war."

Hell, if you even look at the socio-political climate of Cybertron before the war started, neither Megatron nor Optimus were the ones who put this conflict into motion. The corrupt legacy of the Primes, Functionism, class issues-- all of these things existed before Megatron and Optimus did. Even once they started doing things like writing about social issues (M) or fighting against the Senate (OP), both of them were "underlings" in sense that they weren't leaders:

Megatron's writings may have inspired the Decepticon movement, but that movement existed as an independent entity with its own leaders and speakers long before Megatron became the "official" ruler of the Decepticons. He wasn't even the leader of the 'Cons until he took control of the gladiator arena and the nonviolent sections of the Decepticons were (presumably) subsumed into the underground, exploitative battle culture that Megatron created.

Optimus-as-Orion was a police officer to start, but even once he started going against the Senate, he mainly worked in collaboration with others like Senator Shockwave and Zeta (later Zeta Prime), who he either saw as his idols or who were literally superior to him in rank due to government/military structures.

So with this in mind, even from a social level, while Megatron and Optimus may have been "catalysts" of a sort that caused the war to escalate to an outright planetary/galactic level, the scenario is too complex to solely lay the blame for the war at either of their feet. I'm not confident in saying that Megatron/Optimus would explicitly think of this when talking to each other, but what I'm trying to say is that M/OP were just catalysts in a long chain of brewing tension that exploded into a war. Even if one could claim that one of them "started" or "escalated" the war, the social issues that caused the war and the positions of power that allowed them to become leaders in the first place were falling into place before either of them actually BECAME leaders.

In other words, this shared fate of being the final reaction that exploded a societal conflict into outright war... Megatron and Optimus both have that in common. And because of this, I really don't think either of them would even think to ask the other to apologize because they're both in such similar positions, with such similar feelings of guilt and responsibility, that they understand each other's feelings without words. To demand an apology would be akin to taking that shared vulnerability/guilt and stepping on it, attempting to claim that one is right/superior and the other is wrong/inferior, and that the inferior one needs to grovel and take responsibility for the bad things that happened.