#could just find some online

[sunlitmcgee]

does anyone know if there's a way to make c!Tubbo's name into like. a Spanish translation like with c!Tommy w "tomas?"

[erinwantstowrite]

if you want people to get into the canon comics and lead everyone away from fanon misinterpretation (which is a losing battle because there will ALWAYS be this) then why not be helpful instead of being a dick about it 🤨

the comics are hard to get into because it's hard to know where to start, and there's so much content that people are able to fill themselves in by reading fanfic or watching something on tiktok or seeing posts about it on here. perhaps instead of telling people they're stupid for not realizing your favorite character is being mishandled by others, you could write up a list of your favorite comics and/or how, if you could read them for the first time again, you would order your favorite comics to get the best reading experience. and also write your own fanfiction and draw your own fanart or make a passionate post, answer questions politely

[trash-and-trash-accessories]

Constantly citing this article and the studies it uses.

Here's a quote:

"That study shows that transmasculine individuals were actually more likely to be victims of childhood sexual assault, adult sexual assault, dating violence, domestic violence, and stalking than were transfeminine individuals (as shown in the chart below).

The only category in which trans women were more likely to be victimized was by hate violence, and even there the difference was small: 30 percent of trans women reported having experienced hate violence, compared to 29 percent of trans men."

[sacchiri]

Hellsing 2002 calendar illustration.

Ein wunderliche und erschröckliche Hystori von einem großen Wüttrich genant Dracole wayda Der do so ganz unkristenliche marrter hat angelegt die mensche, als mit spissen als auch die leut zu Tod geslyffen

A wondrous and frightening story about a great berserk called Dracula the voivode who inflicted such unchristian tortures such as with stakes and also dragged people to death

[good-to-drive]

Abuse, Silence, And Why Kevin Can Fuck Himself

I recently finished watching Kevin Can Fuck Himself on Netflix, and, aside from being the most brutally honest portrayal of domestic abuse I have ever seen, I discovered a beautifully written examination of narrative as power and silence as abuse and how this manifests in our larger culture. 

Without going into too much detail, the show is filmed in two distinct styles that are interleaved throughout each episode to tell a cohesive story. Allison and Kevin’s relationship as seen by the rest of the world is told through a multi-cam, laugh-track sitcom that depicts a very typical “goofy husband, shrewish wife” mainstream comedy. Allison’s life through her own eyes is told through a single-cam drama/thriller about Allison planning to murder Kevin to escape his abuse. 

It’s an absolute masterclass in screenwriting, but more than that, every episode explores the difference between truth, fact, and reality, and how none of these things are quite as much or as little as story. But while the process of transforming the chaotic and plotless reality of life into a story is as involuntary and essential as breathing, misogyny and the degradation of women is just as ubiquitous in our society, and a story that exists at the expense of another person’s lived reality is a refutation of their humanity. 

It's also just a great show for anyone who likes to engage with history (or reality TV or true crime or “real life stories” in general), because while we have to tell ourselves stories about her own lives, we have to tell ourselves stories about other people as well. Eternal silence is narrative death, and the perpetual silence of an unspoken narrative is often the last death we can visit on someone whose story we’d rather ignore. 

I also pulled up some books – Lolita and Disgrace – that dealt with similar themes, but from the perspective of the abuser. And what strikes me the most is that, across three beautifully written stories about narrative and silence within a culture that normalizes abuse, Allison, who began her story within a state of narrative death, was the only point-of-view character who had any chance of surviving. 

One of the main themes of Kevin is that a compelling story is often a story that reinforces what we already believe or like to believe, and while the story may be factual and true it often also exists at the expense of someone's lived reality. The exact same series of events can be a silly joke or a harrowing tale of abuse depending on the lens through which we view it, but historically we've only been willing to see the multicam, laugh track, sitcom perspective on unbalanced relationships.

The alchemical process of turning a series of disjoint facts and experiences into a narrative creates something new and compelling, and erases much of what previously existed. In this way, it’s entirely irreversible. We spin our experiences into a very thin thread, a story we can tell ourselves that elicits something within us, something we need in order to live with the complex, uncertain, and unsatisfying reality of life. In think in many ways the thing we elicit in ourselves is truth. But truth is both more and less than fact, often more a reflection of our own beliefs and desires than the events of our lives. And in telling that truth we may never stray from the facts, but we almost by definition cannot give voice to another person’s reality.

There's a scene in season 2 of Kevin when Allison is hit by a door – a la the classic excuse – because of Kevin’s carelessness. And while he absolutely did not hit her, the way it's written is such an incredible allegory for how Kevin has curated their story and curated their friends' and family’s perceptions of their story such that even if she tells everyone the exact, unvarnished truth of what's happening to her and begs for help, they will only be capable of seeing the laugh-track, sitcom, “Kevin is a harmless goofball and his wife is a total shrew” perspective on the events of their lives. 

As so often happens with abuse, their friends and family saw Allison being hurt because of Kevin. But the alchemy of creating a narrative around Kevin and Allison is irreversible, and the series of events they witness can only be spun together to a joke, an accident, a silly, childish mistake. Allison’s reality, Allison’s pain and fear, is completely elided. Like a lost sound in the middle of a sentence, her experience goes silent, and their larger understanding of her relationship never has to change. And you feel so acutely how Allison lives her entire life in that silence. 

Storytelling is human, it’s essential, there’s no other way to engage with our own lives. And it’s not lying. It’s never lying to tell the truth. But it doesn’t reflect every reality, either, because another person’s reality can’t be reflected within our own narrative, because that’s what it means to be another person. To spin two different threads.

And because narrative is the essential process by which we understand our reality, denying someone their own narrative, or denying that this narrative be heard, is inherently abusive. To allow someone a voice is to give them humanity, and to suppress it is to strip that humanity away. 

Disgrace, by J.M. Coetzee, follows the story of a professor, David, who rapes a student and then fails to protect his daughter, Lucy, from being raped by intruders in their home. He destroys his daughter’s life  – not through failing to protect her, but through twisting her rape into a story about why the rape of his student wasn’t wrong. The main theme of the book is generally considered to be exploitation, but Coetzee doesn’t deal with the exploitation of the rape. That’s too direct, too immediate, too easy for the reader to understand as misogynistic and wrong. Rather, Coetzee delves into “the innocuous-seeming use of another person to fill one's gentler emotional needs” (Ruden).

The rape is how we understand David as a fundamentally exploitative person, a person who denies others their humanity by converting them into a vessel for his own desires, who erases their voice in order to speak through them and give himself the things he needs. And that’s how we recognize that the way he absorbs and claims the stories of his daughter and his student is another kind of violation of their humanity. Another way of turning women into vessels for men’s pain and fear and need. 

What’s fascinating is that David's student finds her voice – files a complaint against him – and is eventually able to continue with her life. The woman he raped is less damaged by him than his own daughter, because she was the woman he couldn’t permanently silence. 

In Lolita, another brilliant novel about abuse, dehumanization, and storytelling, Humbert turns to the reader at the end and says, “Imagine us, reader, for we don’t really exist if you don’t.” 

It’s not that Humbert knew he was fictional, but that he knew everyone was fictional. Believed the entire world only truly existed in his own mind, because anything beyond that was irrelevant to his needs. He coped with the collapse of his ability to dehumanize Dolores (who he called Lolita) by demanding that his voice be resurrected. Demanding immortality. Demanding his narrative exist in another person’s world, and thereby be given the existence and humanity that Allison and Dolores and Lucy and David’s student were denied. 

Pushing his needs, finally, onto the reader, because we are the only person he has left, and a person like him can only exist through the use of another. In that way, Humbert was powerless. In that way, Kevin and David were powerless, too.

In Disgrace, David’s dream is to write an opera, and at the end of the book he realizes he’ll never finish his magnum opus. He’ll never be able to terminate the process of converting himself, his world, into a story. But he does learn to decenter himself in that narrative. And it’s when he loses all fear of death, and any conception of the self, that he gains the ability to give dogs – who he generally equates to women – a voice within his opera, his life’s work. 

It’s in death that we discover our true unimportance as human beings, that we learn to let go of vanity and our conception of the self entirely. And David had degraded women so thoroughly in order to justify how he used them to meet his own emotional needs that it was only in losing all value for his own life that he could gain the ability to see them as equal voices. To actually put those voices into his own life story. It's at the cost of himself that he allows other people to truly exist, in the death of the self that he finally allows the world to exist outside of himself. It’s almost a positive character arc. Almost.

When Kevin finally loses the ability to abuse Allison, he, like many abusers, loses all desire to live. His world was built on a structure of superiority and inferiority, on beings and vessels, on the inherent value of men and the inherent meaninglessness of women’s lives. The system on which he based his entire reality has been destroyed by Allison’s declaration of the self. And, if he was a being because she was a vessel, then in losing the ability to treat her as a vessel, to fully and completely dehumanize her, he has lost his own humanity. 

It may be perfectly summed up here: “Become major. Live like a hero. That's what the classics teach us. Be a main character. Otherwise, what is life for?” (Coetzee).

If you’re not to be a main character, if there indeed is no split between major and minor characters, between people and the paper dolls that populate their story, between living beings and the vessels into which they pour their need – what is life for?

Nothing. At least, not for people whose narrative must exist at the expense of another. 

And that’s why I say that only a narrator like Allison could survive this kind of story. Despite beginning her story trapped in eternal silence, her reality fully elided no matter how immediate and obvious it became, Allison was the only point-of-view character of any of these three stories who didn’t establish her power through the degradation of another. Who didn’t conceptualize the world via being and vessels. Whose narrative didn’t exist, by necessity, at the expense of another person’s humanity. Whose thread could exist in a larger tapestry without destroying her sense of self.

Don’t get me wrong, she’s not generally a likable character. She’s misogynistic, cruel, selfish, jealous, desperate, afraid, and in pain. Like anyone in an abusive relationship, she’s not at her best, and she’s often pushed to do things that are ugly and disturbing because she’s simply been pushed too far. 

But, for me, the power in her character is in how her last scene never felt like a final scene. Her story didn’t have to be killed, her conception of the self didn’t have to be killed, in order to reveal the brutal reality of stories twisting and intertwining without any inherently superior truth or narrative among them. Allison’s story was one of declaring herself. And that’s why it didn’t feel like it ended at the end. Instead, this felt like a beginning.

[la-galaxie-langblr]

today on random languages my brain is going 👀 at is biblical hebrew and biblical greek

[soupmanspeaks]

you ever wonder if the Glamrocks's face tracking acts up when they look at Glamrock-Freddy, like they'll look at his face, and the recognition will register as Freddy, but their systems for whatever reason or another think that there is a face overlapped on Freddy's do you think they see two small squares next to him, at his side, roughly child sized, but no one is physically there.... right...?

[tariah23]

Are people really that afraid of pirating everything they consume???

[deepspaceboytoy]

is there any hope for me at all if im a virgin at 23? if i tried hard enough i could probably lose it- i wipe my ass and know how to read, which puts me ahead of most men- but my gender dysphoria gives me such a massive disconnect from myself and my body that i dont think i know myself well enough to be a good partner to someone, either in a short-term sexual encounter or a long-term romantic relationship. and honestly, i just dont want to have sex as a man, but i lack the material conditions to transition, so im stuck. i feel like its a moral failing that im a virgin this late in my life, like no matter what my actual feelings or opinions are, im no better than the most terminally online neet. i dont know if i even actually want sex or if i just want to have it so i can feel equal to my peers. idk. im sorry for dumping this in your inbox but i like how mean you are and im kinda hoping that youre just gonna tell me to kill myself lol

Took me a while to compose the response I wanted for this but I want to start off by saying there’s no wrong or right age to have sex for the first time, especially for us lgbts. Shit’s hard both out there and inside our heads and it doesn’t help that there’s immense societal expectations to lose your v card young. I have friends who are several years older than me and still waiting or they don’t experience attraction or they just want to focus on shit other than their sex lives and no matter what your reason is for not having lost it, it’s perfectly fine. Under no circumstances should you take my dumb fuckin horndog ass any sort of barometer for where you are in regards to your relationship with gender. Honestly, I know it feels like it sucks that you haven’t had any sexual experiences but from the way you described your gender issues that may be for the best, I have a lot of friends who hadn’t reconciled their identity yet and rushed into sexual relationships because they felt they needed to or it was expected and it really hurt them or set them back, I think inside the struggles you’ve been having is a good awareness you may not be in the right space right now for sex.

Sex is a tough one because everyone’s relationship to it is vastly different. I talk a lot about casual relationships and short flings but it’s not a one size fits all either so don’t let the way I talk about it influence how you want to approach your sex life, now or in the future.

Lastly, I’m not gonna tell you to kill yourself because despite appearances I am a less caustically hostile rude asshole now than I have been on here, we could charitably call it personal growth. You’re in a rough place in your life, just like a lot of our community, and that’s both perfectly understandable and not at all a moral failing. Ultimately, if you’re looking for a guide on sex I’m a bad person to come to because I have what I think for most people would be a pretty unhealthy relationship with it. It works for me and when it doesn’t I seek out longer, more serious relationships, but each person is different. Focus on yourself and doing the things you need to do to become more comfortable with yourself first and you’ll find that it unlocks sexuality in a huge way. For me, that unlocking came in high school when I realized I really fit in well with the freewheeling casual stuff, but like I’m sure I’ve said in here before, it’s not a one size fits all. You’re doing fine

[xoxo-ren-xoxo]

really weird thing ive noticed lately re: hermits getting critiqued for stuff theyve said or done is that as soon as someone holds a shit opinion (even if it's just them being stupid, or a centrist, or saying a bad word without knowing what it means, or whatever) people immediately seem to flock to the 'this guy should die' 'kys' 'why are we giving this person a platform' rhetoric and like. that's not how meaningful change is made?

like, yeah, if one of my beloved CCs posted a tweet or video tomorrow about how much they hate gay people, or believe in conservative ideals, or they just said a bunch of slurs or whatever (these are hyperbolic examples obviously) then yeah, fuck them, they should go rot. but like, having some dumb takes, or saying bad things in the past, doesn't = evil terrible person...

idk, i feel like we can critique content creators without getting so insane about it. like, shit, there are things some of my favourites do that i don't like, but theyre not even really worth bringing up tbh. unless its something actually important, i feel like it just creates more drama out of nothing and all these assholes come crawling out of the woodwork to tell everyone how much they hate that creator. or find their content boring anyway so clearly they have no real merit to anyone.

more of an explanation of what i mean in the tags but yeah.

[creepyscritches]

Since I stopped regularly posting my art online it's nuts the psyche reset my art brain went through. Ego death of whatever deviantart mentality. I'm back to drawing w markers bc it's fun, baby. Making my weird little things and breaking crafts bc it's not always an unusable result lol. Waiting to get back to my 12yr old mary sue generator brain, it's the next step to making more things I enjoy making

[zukkaoru]

this is probably a long shot but does anyone know any US stores (or online/international shops that will ship to the US) that carry peach rings with no artificial dyes? specifically no artificial red dyes (i.e. red 40)

[torchickentacos]

The world may change at rapid paces that induce constant emotional whiplash, but at least there's one constant (pokemon xy anime discourse on twitter)

[melting-sugar-cubes]

♡Textless/clean edit of the color spread page for TGR, Case 18♡

{Please like or reblog rather than reposting, thank you~♡}

[huginsmemory]

When they were like write for yourself and your dick and you're like Okay! And then you see some very specific trends...

[afamiliarsword]

Honestly kids who're being exposed to their first couple of art classes against their own will should just be given pinterest and then told to send nice messages to artists they like. I think that would be cool.