#complicated truths

[boyfailurecharliekelly]

I hate when people get on your back about a ship because it's 'toxic' like bro i said they are in love not that they should be.

[inkskinned]

before you know about women, you hear that you do not need to love the man, just that you need to love him through his manhood. which is to say you have seen the future painted in lamb's blood over your eyes - how your mother shoots you a look about your father's inability to cook right. how your aunt holds her wineglass and says i'm gonna kill em. men, right! how your best friend bickers with her boyfriend, how she says i can't help it. i come back to him.

you learn: men are gonna cheat. men aren't going to listen when you're talking, because you're nagging. men think emotions are stupid. they think your life is vapid and your hobbies are embarrassing. men will slam things, but that's because men are allowed to be angry. if you get loud, you're hysterical. if a man gets loud - well, men are animals, men are dogs, men can't control their hands or their eyes or their bodies. they're going to make a snide comment about you in the locker room, about your body, about how you're so fucking annoying. you're going to give him kids, and he will give you the money for the kids, and you're going to be running the house 24/7 - but he gets to relax after a long day, because his job is stressful. the man is on stage, and is a comedian, and says "women!"

and you are supposed to love that. you are supposed to love men through how horrible they are to you - because that's what women do. that's what good women do. wife material. your father even told you once - it'll make sense when you're older. it was like staring down a very lonely tunnel.

it feels like something's caught in your throat, but it's all you know, so. it's okay that you see sex as a necessary tool, a sort of okay-enough ritual to keep him happy, even though he doesn't seem to care about happiness as-applied-to you. it is relationship upkeep. it is kissing him and smiling even though he didn't brush his teeth. it is getting on your knees and looking up and holding back a sigh because he barely holds you as you panic through the night. it's not like the sex is bad and you do like feeling wanted. and besides! he's a man! like... they're another species. you'll never be able to actually communicate, right. he isn't listening.

you just don't get it. you don't feel that sense of i'm gonna climb him like a tree. mostly it just feels fucking exhausting. you play the part perfectly. you smile and nod and are "effortlessly" charming. and it's fine! it's alright! you even love him, if you're looking. you could have good life, and a good family, and perfectly happy.

in the late night you google: am i broken. you google i'm not attracted to my husband. you google i get turned on by books but not by him. you google how to get better in bed.

the first time he yells at you, it almost feels like blankness. like - of course this is happening. this is always how it was going to end up. men get angry, and they yell, and you sit there in silence.

you mention it to your friend - just the once - while you're drunk. she shrugs and says it's like that with me too, i just try to forget and move on. men are always gonna hear what they want to. pick your battles and say sorry even though he's in the wrong. you play solitaire online for a month. you go to your therapist appointment and preach about how you're both so in love.

after all, you have a future to want. nobody lied about it - how many instagram posts say marriage is hard. say real love takes work. say we fight like cats and dogs but the best part is that we always make up. how many of your friends say happy anniversary to the best and worst thing to ever happen to me. if you really loved him - loved yourself too - you'd accept that men are just different from you.

the first time she kisses you, it's on a dare at a party. something large and terrifying whips through your body. you wake up sweating from dreams where her mouth is encrusted with pearls and you pick them off one by one with your teeth. fuck. you sit at the computer and your almost-finished game of sim city. you think about your potential perfect life and your potential future family. you google am i gay quiz with your little hands shaking.

you delete each letter slowly. you don't need to love him. you just need to keep going.

[voltaical-art]

im in agony. a little self indulgent but I think wyll deserves to be told he's loved and have a small breakdown about it

[feralchaton]

...both&...

[dosesofcommonsense]

[jesncin]

Hello, I had a question. When it comes to who is the "true Kal El" some pieces of media lean towards Clark being his true self, while others lean more towards Superman being his true self. I was wondering what your preferred version of Kal's "true self" is. Personally, I prefer a mix, where both are true, but both involve a little pretending too (depending on who he's around).

Generally I think convos that focus on "Is Clark Kent or Kal-El the truer self" are trying to fit Superman into a Batman mold where that simply isn't the case for Superman's themes. Since Superman is an allegorical immigrant, I see the Kal-El name (therefore original personhood) as his cultural name and the Clark Kent name (therefore adopted cultural personhood) as the assimilated-into-America name. Let's focus in on the meaning of names to talk about "true self". If we compare this to the diaspora experience, we'd recognize that having multiple names is more complicated than just "which one is the real me".

Clark grew up with the name "Clark Kent" for most of his life, it's a name given to him by people who love him and had no clue where he really came from. Kal-El is a name given by his birth parents, but he barely remembers them from being sent away as a baby. It makes sense that even though he grew up with "Clark Kent" as his name, that he'd feel attachment to "Kal-El". It's all that's left of a nearly extinct culture. So much like how you'll meet migrants with multiple names, they can have complicated feelings about both names. Maybe they'll only use one of their names around family, maybe only some trusted few get to learn about it, maybe some are embarrassed by their given names.

In terms of persohood, perhaps there's a level of code-switching involved where you feel more comfortable presenting a side of yourself to people of your community. I notice J'onn tends to call Clark "Kal-El" most of the time. It's that alien solidarity.

When asking "which is the truer self, Clark or Kal" it's like asking which of Superman's parents are his "true" parents. His birth parents or his adopted ones? They're both important to him, so they're both true.

[scliffe]

Thinking of the parallel between Ciel–Sebastian’s relationship and Sieglinde–Wolfram’s;

How both Sebastian and Wolf were initially not much interested in taking care of their master—Sebastian was merely killing time and Wolfram was only following orders—and yet, they inevitably form an emotional connection with their young charge; despite Sebastian’s demonic nature and Wolfram’s stiff personality.

Still, Sieglinde and Wolfram also serve as foils to Ciel and Sebastian—Sieglinde wholeheartedly trusted her butler but she was betrayed; Wolfram wrapped her in fancy illusions while hiding his own guilty feelings for lying to her. By breaking her feet, he prevented her from standing on her own two legs and escaping from the people who had manipulated and used her.

Wolfram took away Sieglinde’s chance to learn the truth; with her feet bound and an entire village set up to fool her—if Ciel and the others had never come to her rescue—it’s unlikely that she would have ever found out how she was actually being fooled throughout her life. She would have lived her whole life on a lie.

And in the end, even though he wanted so badly to shield her from the painful truth—he failed.

Sebastian, on the other hand, was the one who allowed Ciel to escape his abusers, establish his position as Earl Phantomhive, and stand firmly on his own feet despite the past abuse and humiliations—despite everything; Sebastian gave Ciel the strength to face the truth.

Sebastian came to Ciel—who had barely been clinging on to life by relying on his twin brother as his last hope; just two little kids fooling themselves into thinking they could somehow escape and survive on their own—and Sebastian’s presence—which could not be here without a human sacrifice—at all times reinstate to Ciel over and over again: “Your brother is dead. And the dead could never return; for all eternity”. This cold and brutal truth gives birth to a lie; Ciel decided to live by assuming the identity of “Ciel” Phantomhive—but he is the one who’s in control and makes up the narrative.

Sebastian is the one who gives Ciel the power to change the lie into truth.

[arsenicflame]

sometimes i remember "I have love for you" & "I loved you, best i could" is canon and i have to chew glass about it

[stuck-in-jelly]

Rayla should’ve known someone was up after her dad and boyfriend came back from their Father/Son-in law bonding trip when Runaan immediately started it off with “he’s a good man savannah” after two weeks of not being the chummiest with Callum

[mr-payjay]

fan doesn't actually Have social anxiety. he's not actually made anxious by social interactions. just Look at how he acts. just because he casually Said that he has social anxiety doesn't mean it's True. all fan ever does is argue he will literally talk to anyone (have you ever noticed him actually being ANXIOUS in a pathological manner when talking to someone?) and he will always fight for his opinion. characters make mistakes when they Speak, just like real people. this is a mistake he made. slightly more explained in tags

[gayofthefae]

We don't envision season 5 right when we talk because what is that actually gonna be like? This isn't a romcom. Mike finds out about the painting but Will is like throwing up blood and slugs in the corner.

edit: to clarify I wasn't saying "no time for romance" I was saying "it's horror show with raises stakes and angst. Mike will have to figure out how to bring up this truth bomb he discovered when more important things are clearly going on and there aren't the most conversational opportunities". I mean MORE juice, not less.

[velvetwyrme]

doodle based on something that happened to me recently 😔

[arte072]

"Sansa bullied Arya? Oh so you think she's worse than Tywin Lannister, Gregor Clegane and Ramsay Bolton??" is such a hyperbolic, insincere and ultimately non-existent argument. Literally name one person who says this shit with any sort of sincerity, if at all lol

This is up there with "Talking about Arya's importance to the North means you think Jeyne Poole's life doesn't matter!!!" in terms of disningenous talking points.

It's only ever used to shut down any attempts at considering Arya's feelings and well-being when discussing the girls' relationship.

and no offense, but why are 🫵 YOU🫵 equating the acknowledgement of a fictional child's flaws with calling her a war criminal? why are you treating it like that?? 👀👀👀

I mean, this fandom regularly says Arya lacks morality for surviving war zones with violence. They consider her a walking tragedy whose story is about losing her humanity and becoming the ultimate killing machine. Everyday Dany gets called a N@zi Barbie for not abolishing slavery perfectly. But Sansa gets clocked as a mean girl bully in the first book and y'all fall apart at the seams at that?? C'mon now

[misstrashchan]

So. What's the opposite of a sacrifice?

With the final episode looming it's a question we've been turning in our heads, so I wanted to give my best guess/analysis as to what it might be before Jon and Muna come to tear our hearts out in the final episode.

This is the question Hayward asks Paige, and later Carpenter, and it seems to be the underlying thematic statement of the series, in response to Carpenter's exposition in the first episode of the Silt Verses that introduces us to the fundamentals of the world and system they live in:

CARPENTER:

A god must feed.

A god must be fed.

This is a fact agreed upon across every territory in the Peninsula. And so, really, the only difference between the people born to the water and the people born to the land...

...is the precise nature of the sacrifice we need to make.

There is a God for anything in their world as long as there is someone believing in it. But all Gods need human sacrifices. A god must feed. A god must be fed.

These simple rules have been used as fascinating and horrifying metaphors of our modern society, and to explore themes of faith and sacrifice throughout the story.

And so the final question the last season proposes is if we can find a way to make something better, that can exist outside of this ultimately unsustainable exploitative system and the harm it inflicts upon ourselves and the world, when it has come to define so much of the way we live and how we think. And that means figuring out the opposite of a sacrifice, if they want to kill the idea, the lie, that is at the heart of their world.

At first I thought the opposite of a sacrifice, of offering up to the gods, was about killing your gods. Starving them out. Refusing to offer up anything. And that is part of it, I think. I mean it's literally been a repeating mantra of multiple characters this season once they've reached they're breaking points. Violence in revolution as a tool to overthrow oppresive systems is sometimes needed and necessary. But what about after? What kind of future or vision for a better world can there be? There needs to be something at the heart of that movement that isn't just about violence against their opressors, because you then define yourself in relation to them.

This is even illustrated in the Many Below god Paige created having predator and prey emeshed together, a movement defined by their resistance against the predators of the world, the beasts, cannot seperate themselves to meaningfully create a better future that exists outside of that dichotomy. I think Hayward realises that even earlier in S2:

HAYWARD:

There’s a hare in the grass, half-buried and bloodied.

A barn owl has latched onto its back, its talons driving deep into the flesh of the hare.

Both animals are dead.

Familiar black stone veins protrude from the carcass of the victim, twisting like branches, driving upwards into the predator’s skin.

Hare and owl are locked together, inseparably.

The god must have struck just as the prey died.

White crocus is flowering up from the two entwined bodies.

(Unhappily)

And suddenly I begin to feel deeply afraid.

It all makes me think of a dormouse, dead in the dirt, its ribs showing. Of rabbits, teeth chattering, hungering from their cages

I kick dust up over the corpses. Nudge them aside into the long grass so they can’t be seen from the path.

Paige doesn’t need to know about this, I tell myself.

There’s no sense in worrying her. Not yet.

Which then makes sense why he's the one proposing the question of what the opposite of a sacrifice is to Paige (and Carpenter), for this very reason.

I think the answer is pretty simple and yet, like most simple truths in this world, it's forgotten and overlooked or twisted as naïve.

Preservation. The opposite of a sacrifice is preservation. To better explain this let me use an example:

If someone who cared about you tells you you're working too hard at your thankless job, sacrificing your sleep, your time, your personal relationships, your physical and mental wellbeing, far past the point considered sane, they'd tell you to stop. To make sure you take care of yourself. Instead of endlessly feeding yourself into a machine to justify your existence.

Applied to the world of the Silt Verses, it's not just self preservation and caring for yourself. It's about caring for, protecting, and preserving the lives of those around you, that is the ultimate act of rebellion and political warfare, the first steps forward towards a better world. Caring for humanity.

Whenever our characters reach a breaking point of turning against their gods, there's a common thread of wanting to save their fellow man, and realising the inadequacy of a god's ability to do that. Whether that's somebody close to them (like Faulkner and Paige):

Or humanity as a whole (VAL and Shrue):

SHRUE:

Use them, pass them on, do not forget the suffering that keeps the engines of this world turning, forget the name of your god and cherish the name of your neighbour that was swallowed up by it-

Cherish your neighbour. Be kinder to one another.

This can even go back to Carpenter's rejection of the Trawler-Man back in S1, her fury at the fact those she loved had been eaten (her family) and would continue to be eaten (Faulkner).

CARPENTER:

(Yelling to the river)

It's over between us, you twin mouthed prick!

Do you hear me?

Does that stir you from your torpor? Pry the barnacles loose from your sodden ears?

My father and mother were Gregory and Sandra Glass. My grandmother was Adalina Glass. My brother was Em.

They died for you.

Every single one of them died for you and they thought it meant something.

My name is Carpenter. And I am still alive!

I have loved you for so long. I have tried to know you for so, so much longer.

And I'm done with you. Here and now. I'm not laying down my life for you.

I'm not dying, do you hear?

The same breaking point for Faulkner at turning against his parish and finally snapping is the idea of Carpenter being offered as a sacrifice, an offering returned, begging for her to live.

I must clarify this is my own interpretation of the question and themes the story proposes. I'm

I'm not sure we'll actually get a hard answer so much as different characters offering their own answers and us as the audience encouraged to think for ourselves what it might be. I think this is what Hayward's answer might be at least, anyway, because like me he's a corny motherfucker:

If a sacrifice is the idea that the most meaningful and transformative thing you can do is to give up your life, your sense of self, to die, then the opposite of that would be to try to keep on living, and finding meaning and transformation in that, surely?

[aroceu]

i think one of the things that's really Gets Me (in a bad way) about the predominant value of "moral purity" in any sort of narrative especially among young people these days is that many if not most narratives outside of children's media are about extremely flawed human beings in a way that explores those flaws within the nature of being human. like, so many fictional characters are fucked up. that's their whole thing. that's the reason why those stories are written. because once you're no longer a child, the stories you read or watch or consume aren't to teach you right from wrong, they're to show you the nuances and messiness and moral complications that come from being a human in this world. but the people obsessed with purity still expect some sort of explicit "so this is the moral of the story :)" and "the good guys win and live happily ever after" and "any character with a notable flaw is irredeemably Bad" because they still expect everyone to have the neural development of a five year old

[intertwinedquote]

“I’m like: fvck! …but I never tell you who.”

i n t e r tw i n e d Quotes.