#complete exposure

[ritualharm]

The truths of your past stalk you from afar, the sulfuric stench of caked on rust and grime that clings to your soul.

You have tried to scrub out the filth,

Excise and treat the wounds,

Even kill yourself.

None of it worked, did it?

You are still searching for something, aren't you?

What did they take from you?

And what will you do to get it back?

[kesoyotes]

I never drew warrior cats enough to have my own designs for them but I decided that changes now (I guess)

[sonknuxadow]

ive seen people say knuckles would be homophobic and/or transphobic at first because hes so sheltered and that take has never really made much sense to me because like. he was just chilling by himself until he met sonic literally who or what would have been influencing him to have a problem with lgbt people . is the master emerald homophobic and sending him homophobia brain waves or something ?

[ghostofcrow]

Management: Roll out the new protocols! Go! Go! Go!

[ef-1]

labour | female rage playlist, part 2

[lonesome-ocean]

there is nothing that shows d9's sanitization of the vibe of the original life is strange as a whole than the stark difference between the original photo and d9's retcon of it

[marlinspirkhall]

[Arachnophobia TW]

I love that spiders pay rent if you leave them in peace. They're also territorial enough that once you have 2 or 3 spiders hiding out in your room it's kinda the max capacity.

[arpeggio]

this is the first poem i've written in a while, and although it's not perfect, it's very dear to me. titled revision of the fourth of july.

[danikoshi-doodles]

I don't watch Fionna and Cake BUT-

[fire-in-my-woods]

❗️LIFE IS STRANGE: DOUBLE EXPOSURE SPOILERS❗️

When. When Safi realized the last piece of her was inside of max and. And she placed a hand over max's heart and asked. Asked if it was weird that she wanted it to stay inside her

[autoboros]

Oh yeah I recently (yesterday) beat Inner Agent 3. It took like 10 tries to get past the fucking autobomb spam phase but once I got past that I managed to beat him

This doesn't look all that impressive but this guy is kind of stupid

[yuripira4e]

2024 sequels and the mischaracterization of complicated lesbians in this essay I will-

[thedeafprophet]

Getting my covid booster tomorrow [yayyy good thing] and trying not to be overly anxious about being poked again for the first time since my hospital stay

[mirage-of-the-virtuoso]

Alright, I need input on something, just to get closure, and I feel like I am driving myself crazy over something that probably isn't that big of a deal. The reason why I make this poll under the cut:

Some time ago, like in the last year, year and a half maybe, I had joined a strike through lfg for OLC, and the only thing that the comm had listed was for the players to be experienced.

To me, experienced meant "knew the mechanics of the fight" and "unlikely to die if something got messed up via weirdly timed mechanics"

So I joined. This commander was complaining about people joining and ditching on the first wipe they got. Felt a little sketch, but I was still relatively new in terms of joining lfg for daily strikes. So I thought I was imagining things.

As someone who's still new and relatively inexperienced (and frankly horrible at build crafting), I thought just knowing the mechanics and following the commander should have been enough.

With this comm, apparently not.

The moment we started, they were demanding to know what my comp was in the middle of the fight. Maybe I just can't multitask in these types of games, but I cannot type and fight at the same time, because any moment spent typing is less dps I'm outputting. So I didn't respond.

I got told after we wiped that I should go back to the training tab in lfg (which, even if I agreed - which I didn't - no one was doing once a strike had been out for a couple of months, and therefore no chance of improvement otherwise, considering my schedule), and had rattled off numbers that I had zero knowledge of knowing. (According to what they were rattling off, I was apparently doing 3k dps on a very poorly built virtuoso, which I was quickly corrected by a trusted friend where the fault was. That's what happens when you put a soloist with no prior experience into endgame content, who also was unaware of certain etiquette with joining squads)

Am I crazy for blocking and reporting that person for being what I thought was misleading in their lfg post? Because, if experienced meant "must have a meta build" even though I barely had resources to even have ascended armor (which turned out to be the wrong stats), then not a lot of people are going to get the experience of endgame content like that (obviously in regards to people who want that experience)

Edit: for further clarity, this was for daily normal run OLC (priority strike that day I think), so idk why this comm was so worked up over a fairly new-ish player not being full meta 30-40k dps, esp someone who was never into endgame content before

Edit 2: Don't be afraid to tell me I'm in the wrong. I made this poll to get perspective for myself. I have since grown from this, and while it was a hard experience for me to go through, it was an important lesson for me - as a newer endgame player - to get a better understanding of the endgame community and the expectations

[storkmuffin]

Hello! I literally just came back to Tumblr after a several year hiatus because of the tiktok drama, and stumbled across your posts. It's been really fun to see your thoughts, especially getting a bit of cultural context here and there has been wonderful! You've written a lot about what you like about each member, but I'm curious about how you feel about their relationships with each other, especially as a baby atiny. I find their interconnected friendships really interesting, even outside of a shipper context (and I am curious about how you feel about that as well!) I have always had a huge weakness for found families lol

Hi! Welcome back :D Thank you for reading and commenting!

TLDR for what follows: I take a much harder, colder stance on the 'found family' narrative they keep pushing with Boy Idols than perhaps befits an Atiny about Ateez, but I do have my reasons.

I take the view that first and foremost, Idol groups are business working groups. I'm a little bit (okay, a lot) skeptical of what's presented as 'family' and 'friendships' among these people, generally speaking, because Kpop Idols are just following Korean norms of social interaction for coworkers.

Hopefully this isn't boring but I need to just use myself as an example: I am the 'leader' of my working group of 5 people in my department that has about 70 people in my Korean company. I report to 3 levels of bosses but mostly they let me 'run' the group. My one group-mate is the same age as me, the other three are younger. The woman who's the youngest (our maknae, though not by a lot) - she's a baseball freak. The rest of us dgaf about baseball, but whenever we have our monthly 'bonding' lunch (obligatory, by the way - I'm given a monthly budget that I have to spend eating with this group, all together), all of us take turns indulgently asking her about baseball news, and ooh and ahh and pamper her in her baseball speeches. Do you see what I mean? This is just how we behave. It probably looks like family, to a Westerner, but truth be told, we are none of us actually friends.

The fact that Hwa and Wooyoung have both called their CEO Father freaks me out, by the way. Absolute heebie jeebies, though this too is a feminist, gendered thing. Sexual harassers pre-MeToo always said they'd 'forgotten themselves' because they felt like they were 'family' with the woman they raped or molested. It sounded just as insane in Korean as it does in English, but that was an accepted excuse until it totally wasn't.

In addition, one of the requirements of Boy Idols is that they provide emotional succor to their almost entirely female audience (I am organizing my thoughts and what I've learned through research about why this is for another post). Korea is an exceptionally family-focused society, but that is often exploitative and terrible for women. (Which is why so many women keep saying they don't want to marry and form families - the potential personal burden is ruinous.) So Boy Idols showing what a 'family' can look like when nobody is a woman - when even the 'mommy' or the 'bossy big sister' or the 'baby sister' is all men - and are shown to always, in the end, get along, is the non-sexual equivalent of BL fiction, which I think functions to let straight women 'escape' from misogynist heterosexuality and enjoy the concept of male sexuality in an ultimately quite straight way. Boy Idol groups being 'found famliy' gets you to enjoy the nice things about a voluntary family completely denuded of even the possibility of misogyny, because women just don't exist in the story at all.

Further, because so many megastar Idols have committed suicide in recent years, and because the people who were in training for years and ultimately didn't make it also tell nightmare stories about their lives, it's become necessary for Idol groups to advertise that they are not toxic workplaces. So I see the 'miraculous getting together of pairs of friends to make a successful kpop group!' mythos as part of that counter-narrative, as well. My bet is that the 연습생 world, like any sort of prep situation in Korea, is fucking hostile. It has to be. In the normie world of just college prep, people don't share notes or pretend to be civil or anything other than competitors. Your failure increases my chances of success, type of deal.

Part of the Ateez self-narrative about how they came together to me also just seem pretty typical of people who are in the performing arts in general, as well. The School of American Ballet takes in little kids to train them, and if they manage to make it through many cuts over a number of years, they then debut with the New York City Ballet or American Ballet Theater, where they will compete against and/or partner with each other until the end of their usually short (like 10 years or less) careers, trying to get to the 'top.' The kpop Idol industry follows this system of 'growing' its own artists, often in boarding schools or specialized institutions, just like ballet dancers. It looks different because the cultural context is different, but the essence is the same.

I've seen all the K-Atiny flutterings about, THIS IS FATE and stuff, but given that K-Pop Idol has really specific physical requirements, it makes sense to me that as they got older, the kids who were really determined to do this as a job and also were not kicked/ flunked out would eventually all meet and some to become friends.

The fact that Mingi followed Yunho, and Wooyoung followed Yeosang to this small venture that had never launched an Idol group before can be seen in two ways, I think. One is that they are best friends, in a pure, childhood way. It's so sweet and moving that it doesn't feel quite real, and doesn't fit with how you expect people who in essence wanted to be child stars and then rock stars to be like. It makes them very lovable.

But, just to be the ultimate cynical bitch about it, the paths Ateez took may have more to do with the fact that Mingi-Yunho and Yeosang-Wooyoung are the tall and short versions of being 2% Off the Idol Standard, to my Korean eyes. These two sets of friendships may have come from sharing the same problem - of being almost, but not quite, 'right' or 'ripe' for debut.

Mingi and Yunho, despite the fashion for tall Boy Idols, seem to have not made the cut to become 연습생 (prep students? how do kpop international fans call this?) at any of the big houses nor get recruited off the street. And that makes sense - Mingi is in the 짐승돌 (Beast-Idol) mode, which has fallen out of fashion for some time, and Yunho suffers from being too standard and initially appears indistinct as a result.

Yeosang and Wooyoung seem to have fallen into a different kind of 연습생 hell - good enough to get a spot, do well enough not to get kicked out, but not have enough of what it takes for a 'big house' to include you in an actual group that will debut. Yeosang often being a mild person who doesn't react in a lightening fast way would have disadvantaged him for sure. Wooyoung is so handsome but like, if you compare him to say, Felix of Stray Kids, he also looks just so manly, which would have made him difficult to place. To drop out of Hybe 연습생 to try out this thing with KQ, which had never done it before speaks of a certain desperation.

Other than HongJoong, who did a really weird and unusual thing of making a company build a program around him, the 99z were all up against a fast approaching deadline of aging out of being able to debut, since they have a hard stop at age 28 each, and one of the key ways to cultivate a hardcore Korean female fandom is to have them participate in 'raising' you. Can't do that if you debut at 25, you know?

Almost 7 years later? First, they've achieved wild success, together, when none of them were necessarily the most likely to succeed, and they definitely are NOT with the company most likely to successfully launch an Idol group. That's gotta be great for bonding. Second, only the eight of them can actually really understand wtf that life is like - the hardships or pains that come with what otherwise just looks glorious. Third, all the psych studies agree that singing together and dancing together with other humans makes you love them more, and feel more bonded and more belonging, and doing singing and dancing together is these people's full time job. Fourth (sorry the cynicism is back), if they can't make it work within this group, they will have a hard time pursuing show business careers in the future. You have to have 'good character' as an Idol to not be decimated by the anti-fans, and an essential element of 'good character' in the Korean style is knowing how to be a good member of a collective. And fifth, what KQ and Ateez are doing vis-a-vis each other (Company v Contractors) as well as inside Ateez is a sort of positive-reinforcement of Mutually Assured Destruction with all this family talk. They're family and brothers and the CEO is their DAD and their producer Eden is their big brother so ... when the 7 year contract deadline rolls around, KQ shouldn't stomp on Ateez, Ateez shouldn't stomp on KQ, and the members should not go for broke as individuals. I think that's part of it.

[agnesandhilda]

this is a meme but this idea is key to ocd treatment. genuinely