#era soapboxes

[flowerfaeriesinthegarden]

physically i’m here mentally i’m at candy corn acres

[merrysithmas]

lol i literally couldnt care less about fandom drama but i will i say i saw an entitled cishet say "NO ONE BETTER START SAYING MIZU IS they/them!!" and if you cannot consider Mizu, an outwardly gendernonconforming character who shows a distaste towards 'feminine' dress/makeup/roles and penis-in-vagina sex as potentially nonbinary, trans, or otherwise ... then like who is ok for the trans fans out here to imagine as trans??? like who will you give us permission for, Your CisMajesty?

lmao kiss our collective trans azz tbh

[vulpinesaint]

Do you have a fav blush? Do you like cream, powder, or liquid blushes?

ok so my favorite right now is the colorpop blush stick in cottage life it is a wonderful like. terracotta orange that looks super natural on me. so awesome. also super super blendable it blends out so easy... also used the elf putty blushes and those are good, i have two of the like. orangey shades (<— orange blush enjoyer) (checked. i have bahamas and one that doesn't have a shade name but i'm p sure is turks and caicos) and they're rlly nicely blendable and buildable with good color payoff :) other than that i have the nyx sweet cheeks one that's like. a tube. in coralicious and that's also a good one that's rlly colorful! i have to put that one on the back of my hand before i use a brush to apply it though which Is a little more of an inconvenience so. y'know. it also looks like my sunburn shade in the summer so i have mixed feelings on wearing it then haha. i would say a cream blush is probably my fave? powder blushes are delightful obvi but in terms of what i actually wear day to day the cream ones (i think the elf ones are cream to powder. but y'know) are more realistic. liquid ones are cool but they are often just too pigmented for me... would never use the rare beauty ones cause i just don't need that much color and if i did i would just layer up more of the ones that i can use for more natural looks

[justworthlessreblogs]

do you have any more pikario or yukari (or both) headcanons maybe

i still have a few!

rio:

he's a very trusting person originally but after yukari lies to him in episode 16 that trait slowly disappears and he becomes a lot less gullible

ghost/cryptid disbeliever despite being a literal fucking fairy and living around magic all his life

this one is incredibly random but i was rewatching the avengers for the millionth time last night and it occurred to me that if he was into superhero movies he'd be a black widow fan. like i don't think he'd be into superhero movies all that much (his interests lie elsewhere) but if he was i think he'd connect with her backstory a lot. overall he tends to like characters that go through redemption arcs gee i wonder why. during his julio era he would've been the most insufferable loki stan

yukari:

is a prankster! nothing too big or anything that would hurt anyone but she does like messing with others. stuff like switching out the water with sprite. aoi catches her setting a prank up one day but instead of ratting her out asks to join her. they become an absolutely terrifying duo

also ghost denier. now i want an akiyuka buzzfeed unsolved au because i can hear them saying so many of those quotes

[johndonneswife]

🌙🌵✨☀️ piñon tree smell after rain. u agree

[heartbeatkaleidoscope-new]

So right now would be a good time to remember that whenever Taylor writes about a relationship, her truth is just that: her truth. She writes about things from her perspective, so that's the only perspective we get. That however does not mean that the person she was with doesn't also feel some kind of way about HER, and her and her contribution to (or lack thereof) the relationship.

Taylor isn't perfect, she's human and humans are messy. This whole turncoating thing the fan community has been doing lately as Taylor has divulged more and more of why and how her relationship with Joe fell apart has to stop. She is a grown woman, she meant it when she said she doesn't need us to defend her against imaginary enemies on the internet. Reminder that we are all flawed human beings and unless actual abuse is involved, chances are both people do things in a broken relationship that aren't the healthiest or most mature, and that ALL OF US have been toxic at some point in our lives.

Taylor is not a fragile doll that needs rescuing, nor is she infallible. Allow her to be messy and to be human because placing someone on a pedestal and holding them to perfection is to do them a disservice and the OPPOSITE of love.

[petoskeystones]

one day into having a shoulder tattoo and im googling sleeveless shirts

[morgana-pendragon]

it would’ve been SO funny if they started chanting “wooder”

[rubinecorvus]

I feel like ik exactly which blog ur on about… the pipeline of ww2 to kpop must be studied

I totally didn't mean to vagueblog there... I think I clicked on a juicy The Pacific gifset and suddenly was taken to a BTS stan blog wiped of its traces of HBO War. I don't even remember who it was or who it used to be!

But also, is it? A pipeline, I mean. I don't know any other blogs this has happened to.

It seems a little counterintuitive bc WWII media (in my mind) has so much potential for life questions and philosophical thought, as well as just being about the most brutal times in history... and then kpop is like, people saying "poor little meow meow" on twitter

although I'm sure at least one person somewhere in the universe has probably referred to Eugene Sledge as their poor little meow meow so maybe that thought is redundant

[aethersea]

I think it's worth pointing out that there are two things kinda being conflated here, and also kinda overlapping – being perceived & perceiving. I'm saying this as someone who also hasn't watched these movies, so grain of salt lol, but Don't Look Up is basically "if you don't acknowledge the horror then it can't get you (yes it can)" while A Quiet Place is basically "if the horror can't find you then it can't get you."

(idk where Nope falls bc Jordan Peele is too good at his job so I've carefully avoided watching any clips or trailers. too scary. no idea where the nun thing falls either bc I haven't heard of it, though it sounds like a really interesting combo of these two.)

so first is the fear of being perceived, and I mean, we do live in the age of big data. fun little corporate panopticon we're all just marinating in. with that, plus the whole thing where we've known for an open fact the US government is spying on everyone to an egregious degree for, god, a decade now, and all that happened was Snowden had to go on the run for life – I feel it makes sense that we might have a pervasive society-wide anxiety about being noticed by a powerful force not entirely within our comprehension, which will devour us without a second thought.

and then the fear of perceiving, which I feel is more fatalistic/despairing. Don't Look Up is about how we're all fucking doomed and there's nothing we can do about it. feels like an unsubtle metaphor for climate change, though ofc I haven't watched it so I can't say for sure, but it applies really well to the pandemic too – there are all these problems that we're all aware of, but we feel powerless to do the slightest thing about them, and the people who do have power are using it on frivolous excess and/or saving only themselves. the movie's not even a horror story, except in the way that all satire is a form of horror.

(and like. as individuals, we are powerless. the solution™ to problems that affect the whole planet is to band together. but that's not something the american national psyche is really equipped for, conceptually – we're saturated in individualism so thoroughly that it's genuinely hard to apply any other philosophy to our own subjectivity.)

there's definitely an overlap between these two fears. part 1 of the overlap is maybe Bird Box – the fear that if you acknowledge the horror, it'll get you. this feels like the attitude behind all these loosened or absent covid restrictions even while people are still constantly dying – if we just act like there's no pandemic, then it's not real! it's the essence of your point about not facing up to things, like a child hiding under the blankets because if you can't see the monster then it can't see you.

the other part of the overlap might be the nun thing you mentioned – you keep your eyes fixed on something, don't look up, don't acknowledge the horror, and you're still fucking doomed because it's not actually up to you whether you're perceived. you can hold still and avert your eyes, you can run and you can hide, but it's all futile: the horror comes for us indiscriminately, impersonally, and there is no individualism really, we're all equally irrelevant in the face of the horror. we try to tell ourselves otherwise, we try to fool ourselves that we're special, but we all die just as easy no matter how we might struggle.

the one part I saw of Don't Look Up was the very end, as the meteor strikes. the movie cuts between moments of connection, courage, defiance, and love. we all die just as easy, that ending says, but that doesn't make the living any less meaningful. our connections to others transcend the banality of death – not only because we then live on in others, but because the connection itself is worthwhile, no matter how brief or how abrupt its end.

a beautiful ending, so much so that I almost watched the movie for it, and the avenue by which an individualist worldview usually aims for collectivism. and look, it is working. slowly, ponderously, but it is. if the horror is climate change, well, just a hundred years ago you couldn't see the sky in half the cities of the world because the pollution was a permanent cloud, rivers through major cities were too toxic for life, species around the world hurtled toward extinction and barely anyone cared (statistically speaking). but a hundred years of regulation and collective effort have slowly, painstakingly, cleared the skies and the waters, brought species back from the brink of extinction, and taught your average person on the street the importance of ecological preservation. if the horror is the pandemic, a hundred years ago the spanish flu killed more people than world war one, but we had covid vaccines within a year of the virus being identified. if the horror is the panopticon.....no actually that one's just worse. but we are fighting it, in a myriad ways, from all of us installing adblock to the US justice department suing google for monopoly. and I mean, look at all the unionizing that's been happening in the past few years, and the immense boom of them in just the last few months. we're getting better at collectivism. the fight for a better world is long and slow and full of stumbling, but it is ongoing. it spans far longer than a single human life.

I hope our children's children look back on us with sympathy, but I also hope they look back with that same detached uncertainty we feel about Victorian sexual mores or Cold War paranoia. I hope they don't quite get it, even when they understand intellectually. I hope ecological conservation is a foregone conclusion for them, the panopticon a thing of the barbaric past, public health an obvious priority. they'll have new fears, and new battles, but they'll be better at fighting them than we are. we're getting better at this. we just have to keep going.

changes and trends in horror-genre films are linked to the anxieties of the culture in its time and place. Vampires are the manifestation of grappling with sexuality; aliens, of foreign influence. Horror from the Cold War is about apathy and annihilation; classic Japanese horror is characterised by “nature’s revenge”; psychological horror plays with anxieties that absorbed its audience, like pregnancy/abortion, mental illness, femininity. Some horror presses on the bruise of being trapped in a situation with upsetting tasks to complete, especially ones that compromise you as a person - reflecting the horrors and anxieties of capitalism etc etc etc. Cosmic horror is slightly out of fashion because our culture is more comfortable with, even wistful for, “the unknown.” Monster horror now has to be aware of itself, as a contingent of people now live in the freedom and comfort of saying “I would willingly, gladly, even preferentially fuck that monster.” But I don’t know much about films or genres: that ground has been covered by cleverer people.

I don’t actually like horror or movies. What interests me at the moment is how horror of the 2020s has an element of perception and paying attention.

Multiple movies in one year discussed monsters that killed you if you perceived them. There are monsters you can’t look at; monsters that kill you instantly if you get their attention. Monsters where you have to be silent, look down, hold still: pray that they pass over you. M Zombies have changed from a hand-waved virus that covers extras in splashy gore, to insidious spores. A disaster film is called Don’t Look Up, a horror film is called Nope. Even trashy nun horror sets up strange premises of keeping your eyes fixed on something as the devil GETS you.

No idea if this is anything. (I haven’t seen any of these things because, unfortunately, I hate them.) Someone who understands better than me could say something clever here, and I hope they do.

But the thing I’m thinking about is what this will look like to the future, as the Victorian sex vampires and Cold War anxieties look to us. I think they’ll have a little sympathy, but they probably won’t. You poor little prey animals, the kids will say, you were awfully afraid of facing up to things, weren’t you?

[flowerfaeriesinthegarden]

blah blah blah hercules on the west end blah blah tiktok inspired musical uhhhhhh whEre the FUCK is my Broadway version of the princess and the frog???

[wingherc]

this is going to be my personality for the next week

[daylight-13]

i need someone to write a long S.T.A.R.S fic just them being happy and silly as a team PRETTY PLEASE WITH A CHERRY ON TOP🙏🙏

[rororowyourboat18]

My headcanon (heart-canon) that Mickey is Ian’s peace goes hand and hand with my headcanon that he is also Ian’s safe space. 

Mickey is the safe space Ian needs when dealing with bipolar episodes.

As soon as Mickey found out that Ian was bipolar, he immediately took it as just another one of his responsibilities.  It was a given to him that they would deal with it together.  Fiona suggested having Ian committed, but Mickey was not having it. Yes, it would be tough to deal with, but Ian is not a burden to him, and they would work through the episodes together.

When Ian was manic, Mickey provided a safe environment for him have his episode.  When Ian wanted to kill the homophobes, he helped rein in the “crazy” and provided an alternative.  Instead of murder, just your regular old run of the mill blackmail would do.  He didn’t try to stop Ian because he knew that wouldn’t be possible, but instead helped him through his episode in a manner that was less risky.

I just know that if he would have been around during Ian’s Gay Jesus era, Ian wouldn’t have ended up in prison.  Mickey would have helped him accomplish his goals in a less destructive manner while he found a way to express his concerns over it being a manic episode.

Because, unlike others, Mickey’s first reaction is NOT to ask about meds, but instead to observe and see how he can help Ian through whatever he is going through.  We see this when he observes that Ian is feeling down about losing his shitty warehouse job.  He does ask about meds but only after spending the entire day together and giving Ian something else to focus on.  Mickey knows that sometimes Ian needs him to be chaotic so Ian can get out of his own head and focus on whatever nonsense Mickey is doing.

However, Mickey knew when it was time to get outside help. The summer that they were living together he researched, and he was willing to ask Lip more about looking for outside help.  When Ian did the porno Mickey was mad because of the cheating, but I also think he realized that he could no longer provide the safe space Ian needed.  Ian went and did this extremely unsafe thing in a place where he, Mickey, couldn’t protect him.   

Mickey allows Ian to have feelings and emotions.  He doesn’t immediately label Ian’s joy and energy as mania or label his sadness and anger as a depressive episode. Mickey observers and tries to understand Ian.  Just because Ian is bipolar doesn’t mean that he can’t have extreme emotions like any other person.  It doesn’t mean that he can’t have an off days.

So Mickey Safe Space Milkovich, knows his husband and understand that sometimes he has to be a concerned husband and sometimes he has to be the shit-talking, bitch-slapping piece of south side trash Ian fell for.

Okay time to get off my soapbox 🤗

[genericpuff]

What’s your current thoughts on what we’ve seen of Eleanor’s Deathbed?

IDK, there isn't enough of it so far to even make any sort of judgment, and whatever judgments I do have to make are largely rooted in Rachel's past work because... well, because we've seen this project at least twice before in the past already.

Like so far the only strong opinion I can make about it is "same shit different day". It's kind of like a fusion of Lore Olympus and The Doctor Foxglove Show, because evidently she's only been able to write and draw the same character dynamic and romance plotline for the past decade. All we've seen is the art and it's honestly fine, I think at the very least it's a great sign that the corporate Webtoons burnout is finally starting to lift and she's creating art that doesn't look like that anymore. I can at least acknowledge that as a refreshing improvement.

That said, it's still a far cry away from the stuff she used to create back in the day (in the Foxglove era) and above all else, the art at this point doesn't really matter to me, it's her writing that's always been her weakest skill and evidently one that hasn't improved at all over the years, both on account of her apparent refusal to learn but also what seems to be an incredibly limited perspective that's influenced the severely problematic undertones of her work and its messaging.

The reason these issues were so apparent in LO was because it was the first time she ever had to complete a story (and also the fact that she and WT's alike marketed LO as something it wasn't - a "feminist retelling" that was trying to "help people"). It's why LO was so enjoyable for many of us in the beginning, just for it to fall apart by the end of S2 which made us even more aware of the cracks that were always there from the very first episode, we just didn't notice them or were more forgiving of them because the story was still "setting up" and Rachel clearly "had something planned". That feeling of betrayal and frustration that's shared among everyone within the antiLO community largely started with the creeping and eventually explosive realization that Rachel did not in fact have anything planned to resolve all the questions and loose ends she had created, she was writing by the seat of her pants the whole time and she had finally flat on her face... but with the added arrogance of blaming the "haters" for pulling the seat out from under her.

Credit where credit's due, she's always been pretty good at coming up with fascinating premises and concepts, both of which are present in her pre-LO stories like The Doctor Foxglove Show and Woman King. But they never lasted long enough for us to see how they would have played out from start to finish, and so all we have to judge them by are their foundations, not the completed house.

We were able to judge LO by those metrics, though, and the way it turned out in the end proved that having a good idea doesn't automatically make for good writing.

Maybe Eleanor's Deathbed will improve upon those problems, but considering most of what I've seen so far of the 'writing' through her mini comics, eh, just looks like it's gonna be more of the same "uwu cinnamon bun girl who's casually racist / classist" x "creepy death man who's competitively racist / classist" shtick. And at the end of the day, when so many of her writing issues are rooted in - as mentioned above - her limited perspective of real world problems and over-inflated ego, I have zero reason to believe that ED isn't just gonna be LO with a new coat of paint, with all the same amateur writing, poorly developed characters, self-indulgent soapboxing, poorly disguised trauma dumping, and problematic messaging disguised as "feminism".

When I said a while back that I wasn't interested in following Rachel's work post-LO, I meant it. At the end of the day, what made me fall in love with LO originally was LO, not Rachel herself. My interest in her work died with LO, only extending to the stuff she did before as a sort of morbid fascination with where it might have all gone wrong. And I think the simplest - and most disappointing - conclusion I've ever come to is, "Rachel has always been like this, the downfall of LO just made us look."

The characters, art style, etc. of ED so far are just not compelling to me in the way LO once was, they're not even compelling to me in the way that Foxglove was in hindsight once I knew of its existence (because at least looking back at those pieces, all I could do is wonder how the beauty of those pieces was lost).

If I do ever read ED in the future - assuming it ever even materializes beyond her social media doodles - I want it to be because I'm genuinely interested in her future work, not because I entitle myself to haunting her like a ghost. I'm already surely haunting her enough as it is by not letting her live down LO, but at least I actually liked LO at one point (and still kinda do, if you count my love-hate relationship with it LMAO). I'm not at all interested in Eleanor's Deathbed on account of what I've already experienced of Rachel's work through LO (and through our deep-diving of her pre-LO career) and because, like I said, what I've seen so far is just not really all that compelling. So I just really don't have any reason to invest my time or care into it.

She, like anyone else, has the right to try and move forward from the tire fire that was LO, even if that tire fire is still worth pointing out and discussing in many ways. Maybe Eleanor's Deathbed will succeed upon LO in ways that it failed. Maybe it won't. I'm not compelled to follow along and find out. I'd rather just cut my losses.

Plus if I really want this woman to fade into obscurity the way I think she deserves, well, the only thing I can reliably do to manifest that reality is to not pay her future work any attention whatsoever LMAO Such an individual effort doesn't mean she'll just suddenly disappear, she's clearly got a support network now through Inklore and Webtoons to keep force-feeding her relevance down people's throats, but hey, we all have our own gardens, and I don't have to keep planting her in mine. The carnation that was LO still thrives on, and I care for it through Rekindled and the odd analysis post / rant about LO whenever I happen to think of something new worth discussing. But whatever Eleanor's Deathbed is or will become, it's just not something I want in my garden.

[flowerfaeriesinthegarden]

no bc how tf did ricky just randomly know the words to ej’s song he’d never heard before like he just jumped in for a duet to parts that ej wrote??? 😭 he wasn’t even reading lyrics from a notebook or anything like maddox