#for the last part; I’m not pro or anti or whatever the kids call it these days

[cloudofdarkness]

25: common fandom complaint that you're sick of hearing

if you haven't already done this one. I didn't think I saw it when I was dash scrolling today....

If I listed all the ones I have for fourteen it would be fucking insane

But my main ones are literally anything regarding to characters. They can’t be changed bestie, just make the changes you want yourself to the characters and stop making it everyone else’s problem

AND ESPECIALLY “arr and stormblood are the worst expansions” not when you don’t have a little bitch in your ear telling you that. I recently replayed through both and found them pleasant. Surely the stories aren’t as strong and captivating as HVW and SHB BUT they’re still REALLY GOOD.

Also in general? Just ppl complaining about what others create. As an anti censorship cunt, stop telling ppl what they can and can’t do. Cop behavior fr fr

[makeste]

BnHA Chapter 296: Ngl, This One Pissed Me Off

Previously on BnHA: Deku was all, “p.s. I actually activated yet another quirk several chapters ago when Kacchan got stabbed.” Compress was all, “[gets captured and passes out].” Spinner was all “[rifles through Tomura’s pockets and slaps a random Charbroiled Hand onto his friend’s unconscious face].” Tomura was all, “SOMEHOW THAT ACTUALLY WORKED” and woke up again, except it wasn’t really him, it was everyone’s favorite Final Villain, AFO. AFO was all, “time to escape finally” and summoned a bunch of Noumu and Absconded with Spinner and the DabiMarble in tow. Skeptic was all, “Horikoshi forgot I existed, but I’m actually Absconding in marble-form as well.” Deku was all, “ATTENTION WORLD, I WOULD LIKE TO ANNOUNCE THAT I OFFICIALLY WANT TO SAVE SHIGARAKI TOMURA.” And then the arc just sort of ended lol.

Today on BnHA: Horikoshi is all, “but when you think about it, do we really need literally any female teachers at U.A. at all?” and for whatever reason doesn’t stop to wait for an answer. Midnight, who absolutely did not need to die, Dies, and I’m pissed about it. Ochako wanders the ruins of Jakku for what feels like hours, rescuing small children while her adult hero compatriots fall to pieces around her, because apparently the U.A. kids really are the only people who have their shit together. The citizens of Japan are all “damn that’s wild, wonder how fucked we are now,” but are actually super casual and chill about it which is oddly realistic. The chapter ends with AFO in Tartarus being all “lol time for the prison break arc,” without giving us so much as a chance to catch our breath, like holy shit. Are we on the clock or something now, goddamn.

lmao it’s like 7pm on a Sunday night and this is out already. this is like the worst possible timing lol. there goes my nice, relaxed evening. unless of course this turns out to be a nice, restful, soothing chapter, as chapters coming on the heels of traumatic, earth-shattering battles so often are. yeah, break out the Pina Colada song and the little drink umbrellas, I got a good feeling about this one

(ETA: I mean, I was obviously being sarcastic here but damn, Horikoshi.)

-- fff why did I laugh

it’s the crumbling city ruins in the background that really does it, I think. JUST LOOK AT THIS MESS THAT YOU HAVE MADE, EVERYONE. FOR SHAME

also, the title is dramatic af and I am so fucking excited you guys, like holy shit. BnHA’s In-Between arcs have always been my favorite part of the series, because it’s when all the character development and angst and/or catharsis happens. just, those little breathing spaces in between the action when everyone gathers to recuperate and compartmentalize their fresh new traumas lmao. bring on that angst!! but also, let’s please have some Comfort to offset all of this Hurt too, please and thanks

blah blah blah so the survivors were evacuated, good good, can you actually show us though?

AHHHHHHH

PIXIE BOB SURVIVED!!!! WASH IS STILL ALIVE LMAO HOW. THIRTEEN’S FACE, OMG SHOULD I LOOK AWAY. IS IT LIKE MANDALORIAN RULES. IDK HOW IT WORKS

HOW THE FUCK ARE THEY ALIVE. LOLS ANYWAY I’M HERE FOR IT. FEEL FREE NOT TO KILL ANYONE ELSE HERE HORIKOSHI, I THINK WE’RE GOOD

(ETA: it’s like talking to a brick wall.)

oh my god do we really need exposition about how the heroes tried to stop TomurAFO from escaping and OF COURSE failed completely because they suck lmao. oh my god I am shocked, that is such shocking news

wow they only managed to defeat three of the Noumus. holy shit. again, all of the Not-Kid Heroes are only slightly more useful than cardboard cutouts of heroes at this point, MORE AT ELEVEN

so Tomura may have lost the PLF, but he still more or less has an army then, huh. I really don’t know how anyone could expect a timeskip with that threat looming over everyone’s heads

oh nvm lol there are only seven Noumus left. wait so you’re telling me there were only ten Nearly High Ends in that last chapter?? felt more like fifty but whatever lol I’ll take your word for it

COMPRESS YAY YOU’RE ALIVE TOO

MAYBE THEY CAN EVEN REATTACH HIS ASS. I’M SERIOUS LOL, BECAUSE HE STILL HAS IT, DOESN’T HE? OR IF NOT, THEY CAN REBUILD HIM WITH A PROSTHETIC ASS. he’ll be more powerful than ever

WHAAAAAAT YEAH BOIIIII

WOOO, EDGESHOT, WOOOOO. THAT’S HIS WAY OF THE NINJA

YEAHHHHH SUCK IT, PLF

(ETA: for the record I don’t think Cementoss is dead here, just badly wounded. if he had died he would have been included in the forthcoming In Memoriam page along with the others.)

GET BENT LOL. TRUMPET I FOR REAL FORGOT YOU EVEN EXISTED. I NEVER WANT TO SEE ANY OF YOU LOSERS AGAIN PLEASE. ONLY INTERESTING CHARACTERS MAY PROCEED PAST THIS POINT

dsflksaldkh;l

that’s... holy shit. that’s a bigass mansion, that’s what that is. also so does this mean there are still eighty thousand PLF members still at large, because that’s a plot line I very much do not care about in any way whatsoever lol. can’t we just retcon to say that Re-Destro was exaggerating? I mean hell, a CEO criminal pulling some Enron-type bullshit is pretty believable, isn’t it? those poor bamboozled shareholders

“makeste, here’s an idea, what if you scrolled down to read the rest of the page” lol gtfo of here with your logic and your sense

well those 132 people have made it onto my enemies list, but at least it sounds like they more or less took care of the rest. good riddance

and Toga escaped, as we knew already, and is now on the lam. hopefully she reunites with the League again at some point. although her doing her own thing could also be very interesting. idk what I want lol

anyway so there’s another big panel showing how fucked up the city is, just in case it hadn’t already been hammered into our skulls yet. there’s a car dangling off a roof somehow. how does that even happen. did Machia pick it up and put it there or

NOOO OMG RANDOM SMALL CHILDREN IN PERIL WHAT IS THIS

OCHAKO PLEASE SAVE THEM OMG

“if it falls on me, I want you to have my Endeavor pouch” OH MY STARS. HIS MOST PRECIOUS POSSESSION. NO MY CHILD YOU CAN’T GIVE UP HOPE YET

LMAO

“FOR THE LAST TIME NOBODY CARES ABOUT YOUR DUSTY-ASS POUCH, KYLE” fffff these children are dying and I am cracking up so hard my eyes are tearing up what is wrong with me

YAY THEY SAVED THEM

but listen. not that I don’t love seeing the girls kick ass, because you know I do. but I also really, REALLY need to know what’s going down with the Musketeers, and I’m not looking forward to waiting three whole weeks for that so please Horikoshi. please hurry this along so we can get to them

goddamn it Tsuyu is saying she’ll take the boy to the shelter to get first aid, and I was all “okay great because that’s probably where Kacchan and the others are too”, but now someone else is shouting for help and Ochako’s all “I’ll go” and it’s like OKAY BUT PLEASE? this chapter is already more than half over omfg. ‘bout to start wringing some hands here

oh my god

is this Toga again??? WHAT THE HELL, THIS CREEPYASS HALF-DEAD DUDE BETTER BE LEADING UP TO SOMETHING INTERESTING, I AM REALLY GETTING IMPATIENT

OR, I GUESS, WE COULD DO THIS INSTEAD

“SO AS IT TURNS OUT, NOT EVERY CHARACTER WHO NEEDS HELP SAVING THEIR SPOUSE FROM FALLEN RUBBLE IS ACTUALLY TOGA IN DISGUISE” HUH, OKAY. DULY NOTED. FILED AWAY FOR FUTURE REFERENCE

but fucking... okay, look. I love Ochako, I do. but I like her a whole lot more when she’s interacting with other characters I actually care about, as opposed to running around in the rubble rescuing random people while the fate of my other children is still up in the air. like okay, I get it, shit’s bad, now if you don’t mind we really don’t have to spend all day here though

...anyways but nope, we’re still staying with her. she’s bouncing around rescuing all of these other people. omg. I literally have no patience here at all and it’s terrible, I know, but oh my god

omg finally something interesting is happening!!

look at that, an adult hero standing around being useless while the kids are busy getting shit done. why is this becoming a recurring theme

MY DUDE, THIS IS SERIOUSLY NOT THE TIME THOUGH

I GET THAT IT’S OVERWHELMING AND THAT YOU’RE TRAUMATIZED AND SHIT, BUT GUESS WHAT, SO IS EVERYONE ELSE. THAT’S WHAT YOU SIGNED UP FOR. JUST LOOK AT OCHAKO! SHE’S SO EXHAUSTED HER HAIR HAS EVEN LOST ITS FLOOF, AND YET SHE’S STILL OUT HERE DOING HER BEST. ONE SAVE AT A TIME MY MAN. GET IT DONE. LITERALLY A SMALL CHILD IN THE BOTTOM RIGHT CALLING FOR THEIR MOMMY AND YOU’RE JUST STANDING THERE ALL “WAHH IT’S TOO MUCH” LIKE COULD YOU PLEASE POSTPONE YOUR CRISIS UNTIL AFTER YOU SAVE THEM PLEASE

OH MY GOD

MAYBE YOU SHOULD!! oh my god I really cannot, like wow. oh no I actually have to save people and do my job, god forbid. jesus christ, at least the other heroes tried. but Moping Hero: Bellyache here is just throwing in the towel and fuck everyone who still needs his help I guess. you are like the anti-Deku my dude

OH MY GOD OH MY GOD NO OH FUCK

THAT’S MIDNIGHT’S HAND OH FU -- SHE BETTER NOT -- HORIKOSHI I SWEAR TO GOD --

I’M GONNA LOSE IT I REALLY AM!!!!

HOLY SHIT HOW INTENSE OF A RAGE DO I NEED TO BRACE MYSELF TO BE FEELING HERE. THIS CHAPTER WAS ALREADY TRENDING TOWARDS DISAPPOINTMENT, DO WE REALLY NEED TO GO AND COMPOUND THAT

WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON

you’re telling me Tomura wasn’t brought back by that electric shock, but by his “fuck you” attitude? why are you explaining this to us now, again??

......

HEY, SO UM, FUCK ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING ABOUT THIS, THOUGH. (: OH MAN. OHHHHHH MAN. I HAVE... I HAVE GOT A LOT OF WORDS FOR THIS AND HERE ARE SOME OF THEM

FUCK

THINGS THAT SHOULD BE IN THE DICTIONARY NEXT TO “SOME BULLSHIT”: THIS

FUCK

GET FUCKED HORIKOSHI

AND ALSO PLEASE FUCK RIGHT OFF!!

AND SERIOUSLY THOUGH FUCK YOU

NO BUT YOU KNOW WHAT THOUGH!! YOU COULD HAVE KILLED OFF ANYONE. LITERALLY ANY CHARACTER. YOU HAD TWELVE FEMALE PROS. TWELVE. YOU COULD HAVE MADE MORE OF THEM. PROBABLY, IF THERE ACTUALLY WERE SUPERHEROES IN REAL LIFE, THERE WOULD BE MORE THAN TWELVE OF THEM IN AN ENTIRE NATION. BUT NO, YOU WERE ALL “TWELVE IS MORE THAN ENOUGH.” AND THEN WHEN IT CAME TIME TO KILL PEOPLE OFF, YOU WERE ALL “WELL ALL RIGHT THEN, LET’S SEE, I PICK... THESE 18 RANDOM SIDE CHARACTERS WITH LITTLE TO NO DIALOGUE, PLUS THE ONE SINGLE FEMALE U.A. STAFF MEMBER WE ACTUALLY HAD. YEAH THAT OUGHTA DO IT”

AND BY THE WAY, HORIKOSHI, I PICKED SOMETHING UP FOR YOU ON MY WAY HOME, HERE IT IS, ┌П┐(・＿・) do you like it it was on sale. I saw it and was like, “Horikoshi would really like that.” so there you go. sorry it wasn’t gift-wrapped

p.s. I hope y’all can tell that that’s supposed to be a middle finger and not... something else lmao. er. anyway

(ETA: so I got a few asks from people who were really put off by this part of the reaction post, and so I’m just adding an extra note here to make it clear that I do not actually wish harm on Horikoshi in any way or even particularly dislike him. I wasn’t happy about Midnight’s death and I wanted to convey that, and so I went with my usual LOUD CAPSLOCK REACTION tone, but looking back on it I can see that it’s kind of a lot, lol. 

so just to be clear, the “fuck you” stuff is almost entirely tongue-in-cheek. that’s on me, I forget sometimes that there are people who share these sentiments unironically and so I didn’t think to make sure my intended meaning here was clear. anyways, killing Midnight was still a really problematic decision for numerous reasons but it is what it is. Horikoshi is not perfect, the story isn’t perfect, and I’m not gonna pretend like it is, but again just to be clear, I don’t harbor any actual ill will toward Horikoshi here.)

shit. and wow this man really went and killed off fucking Mystic too on top of that. have you ever seen a character fail so spectacularly at living up to their hype. r.i.p. Mystic you were like the Star Wars sequel of characters

(ETA: I have no fucking idea why I keep thinking Majestic’s name is Mystic lol. rest in peace you old scarecrowy bastard.)

and poor Momo, though. fuck. lost two mentors in a single day. and do not even get me started on Aizawa holy shit

so now we’re cutting to some random townspeople who are gossiping about the Todoroki drama. this is actually interesting in spite of my newfound determination to hate this chapter lol

ngl I am kind of heartened to see that not everyone fell for Dabi’s bs hook line and sinker though. Jeanist returning from the dead literally two seconds after Dabi was all “I SWEAR ON MY HONOR AS A VILLAIN THAT HAWKS MURDERED HIM” probably helped with that a bit! but there will doubtless be many other people who do believe him, or are at least still inclined to side-eye the heroes in general either way given how much they sucked in this arc. very, very interesting

so it seems though that even more than the whole Endeavor reveal, at the end of the day it’s going to be the heroes failing to live up to their end of the “put your faith in us and let us use our quirks and in return we’ll protect everyone and keep them safe” implied social contract that’s going to have the biggest impact on people’s opinions moving forward. basically this was always going to be a disaster no matter what

OH MY GOD FINALLY AHHHHH

Horikoshi really tapped into some of the real-life political energy of the past few years huh. Fuck Him Still for killing off Midnight, but I will admit that so far this is hella intriguing and I am really, really curious to see where things go from here

OH MY GOD THE LITTLE KIDS FROM THE BABYSITTING ARC

“FIVE PEEPEE MAN WOULDN’T LIE TO US” YES CHILDREN YOU’RE ABSOLUTELY RIGHT. at least the little ones still have faith

UM

 ( •̀ へ •́  )

that’s great. that’s really keen. all we need right now, amirite

GOOD FOR YOU, YOU PIECE OF SHIT

let’s just wait for him to explain what he feels. you know he likes to drag it out

is that Dabi crouched down there next to Spinner? looks like they got him out of the marble after all. but why has his hair changed colors again lol what

anyways. your turn to what??

:’) excuse me what

hahahaha are you fucking kidding me. and that’s where we’re going to end the chapter then. lol okay

so let’s recap. Midnight died. we spent ten hours watching Ochako dig people out of rubble for no apparent reason and were then introduced to my new least favorite character, and because Ochako is so nice she didn’t even punch him in the face even though she really should have. we did not get any Kacchan or Shouto. we got one panel of Deku, who is Finally Asleep. and the chapter ended with AFO ordering his Noumus to go set free, AND I QUOTE, HIS “MAIN BODY.” and now I gotta wait an entire week for Caleb’s translation to confirm that last part. omg

but it sounds like a prison break is imminent, which is very, very interesting. ...and actually, is it weird that I’m actually rooting for it to be a success? I have no idea what this guy is planning, but I do know that as long as the main part of his soul is still residing in Tomura’s body, Tomura’s chance of surviving the series is close to zero. and villain though he may be, I’m still rooting for his redemption (nice to have Deku on my side now too), and so yeah. so like if AFO feels like using some latent Exorcism Quirk or something that he’s been saving for just such an occasion, be my guest lol

meanwhile this doesn’t bode well for All Might though. or anyone else aside from Tomura, really. shiiiit

anyway. [slaps roof of chapter] this baby can fit so much bullshit in it

[abeautifulblog]

Ideas for Jaskier's music in the Warlord AU

i.e., what Jaskier gets up to as Geralt's one-man propaganda machine

(Most of these didn’t make it into For the Asking, but imagine they’re there in the background.)

Sir Swears-a-Lot

A song about Lambert that (ironically) does not have a single bad word in it. It does that thing—I don't know what you call it—where it sets up a rhyme and then yanks out the bad word at the last minute and substitutes something inoffensive that doesn't rhyme. (Making it very clear what was *supposed* to be there.)

He'll give you lip, he'll give you sass,

But when push comes to shove

He's there to save your sorry ........hide.

Or--

And when the battle's over

and All's been put aright

You try to say, “Sir, thank you!” and get--

“I ain't no f...flipping knight!”

(I expect he also rhymes “witching” with “bitching” at some point.)

Not really propaganda, except in the sense that it's humanizing witchers—the message being that Lambert is foul-mouthed and grumpy, but a genuinely Good Dude underneath it.

I expect this one is popular with kids, because it has the titillation of saying swears!! but they can't actually get in trouble for it.

*

My Lover is a Witcher

Does what it says on the tin—an incredibly raunchy song that frames itself as a woman extolling to her friend all the myriad benefits of fucking a witcher, including but not limited to:

Can't get you pregnant

Can't give you the clap

Isn't gonna make you marry him

Muscles for days

Incredible stamina

Huge dick

Decades of experience

Did I mention the stamina?

Because Jaskier is a bro and a true wingman and has turned his talents to helping witchers get laid on the Path. It works exceedingly well—too well, say the witchers who aren't trying to hook up but are now being plagued by hordes of extremely persistent admirers.

(Gweld: Jaskier. For the love of all that’s holy. Serrit has nearly stabbed four different women because they wouldn't stop hitting on me. You are a menace.)

Meanwhile everyone in Kaer Morhen is like, Buttercup, that is way more than I ever wanted to know about how Geralt fucks.

Jaskier: ...I didn't say I was writing from personal experience!

Geralt: [hides face]

Jaskier: I'm just saying it's very accurate.

*

Beneath the Linden Tree

An explicitly anti-war song. It's framed as a young woman singing to her sweetheart, who's been conscripted to fight against the Wolf; she's urging him to keep his head down and surrender the first chance he gets—that there's nothing cool or heroic about war, and everyone knows (hah) that the Wolf treats POWs honorably, so her lover will be safe there until the fighting is over.

I care not for the deeds of war,

I'd have you home with me

And feel your lips on mine again

Beneath the linden tree.

(The linden tree being a repeated motif in the song symbolizing home and love and peace. And you get 1 internet point if you can guess what song I was referencing when I made it a linden tree. ;D)

This is one that I think Jaskier would not claim authorship of—instead, Yen's agents seed it throughout neighboring territories to make it appear a grassroots movement rather than a top-down propaganda push.

As a propaganda song, it's notable in that it doesn't directly try to sing the praises of the Wolf—instead its message is, I don't care who sits on the throne, that has nothing to do with us, I just want you home safe. It's a subtle attempt to erode popular support for wars against the Wolf, by painting them as pointless and unnecessary, with a cost that falls disproportionately heavy on the common people.

(Because it wouldn't surprise me if the overtly pro-Wolf songs become a hanging offense in rival countries—so Jaskier has to come up with songs that push their message but slip the censors.)

Does it work? Hard to say, but Geralt likes it.

*

Miscellaneous educational songs—that a lot of his songs about the (mis)adventures of various witchers are doing double-duty, not only introducing that person to the public, but also packed with information about the identifying characteristics of whatever the monster-of-the-week was, and (if possible) telling the audience what is and isn't effective when it comes to protecting themselves from it.

He has a lot of these, there's practically a formula for them:

Monster appears in village. (Description of monster and what it does)

A local attempts to kill it, or drive it off, or sneak past it into the woods for a midnight rendezvous, or whatever, something that gets them killed or nearly-killed. (The cautionary tale.)

Witcher arrives on scene. (Heroic introduction. This is the part that the witcher's buddies will regale him with mercilessly from now until the end of time.)

Witcher tells the people what kind of monster they have (opportunity to give more information about it, if necessary) and tells them how to keep safe while he kills it (defensive measures).

HEROIC BATTLE! (Emphasize that you should not try this at home, kids.)

Village thanks witcher, witcher leaves. Whatever emotional hook Jaskier had used for the song (justice being done, rescuing someone, reuniting a pair of lovers, etc) gets resolved. The end.

Because the faster people can (correctly) identify a threat, the faster they can get a properly-equipped witcher out there to deal with it—and if protecting themselves in the mean time is as simple as “don't go out after dark” or “put salt on your doorsteps and windowsills,” the fewer people will get hurt while they're waiting for help to arrive.

These are the equivalent of catchy pop songs, not epics, and Jaskier makes sure to put the most salient information into the most ear-wormy part of the chorus, so if people remember nothing else, they'll remember that.

[whitehotharlots]

CRT and the sad state of educational politics

If our culture is studied 100 years from now, the predominant theme of the research will be a sense of perplexed revulsion toward how we did nothing to address the climate crisis in spite of having decades of forewarning. If there is a second theme, it will be a profound confusion regarding our immense and unearned sense of self-certainty. A retrospective of the early twenty first century would be titled something like Who the Fuck Did These People Think They Were? 

The latter theme is illustrated in the debacle surrounding a recent slew of municipal and statewide bills that seek to ban the teaching of Critical Race Theory (CRT) in public schools. For the record, I am strongly against these bans. But I’m also self-aware enough to know my opinion matters very little, and therefore realize that an analysis of the discussion surrounding the bills will yield much more worthwhile observations than a simple delimitation of their pros and cons. Regardless of your personal opinion, I hope you’ll humor me.

I am, in some regards, a moral absolutist. But I also realize that abstract morality has very little bearing on material and political realities. In my ideal world, classrooms are free from political meddling. Teachers teach to the best of their ability, presenting students with truths that are confidently unvarnished due to the thorough amount of work that was required to reach them. I don’t cotton any of that socratic bullshit. Students are there to learn, not to engage in weird Gotchas with some perverted elder. The teacher’s job is to teach. The material they teach needs to be subjected to some graspable and standardized mechanism of truth adjudication before it is worthy of being taught. Teaching is not therapy. Teaching is not poetry. Teaching is not love, nor is it religion, nor is it a means of social or political indoctrination. There are plenty of other avenues available to accomplish all of those other things. Teaching is teaching. 

That’s the ideal. But ideals are just ideals. They never come true. The art of teaching, regardless of setting--from overpacked classrooms to face-to-face instruction to curricular design to nationwide pedagogical initiatives--boils down to a teacher’s ability to reconcile the need to convey truths with social and political pressures that are heavily invested in the suppression of truth. 

I have formally studied and practiced education for nearly two decades. In that time, the prevailing political thrust toward education has been a desire to casualize the practice of teaching, to render educators as cheap and fungible as iphones. The thrust takes different shapes depending on the political affiliation of whomever happens to be in charge of the state and federal governments that fund education, but the ultimate desire is always the same. The goal is always to attempt to make teaching rote and algorithmic, something akin to running a google search for How to do math? or What is morality?. The framing is always just windowdressing, empty culture war bullshit. 

Maybe it’s the inescapability of this thrust that’s rendered so many educators so blind to it? We only have nominal political choice, after all. The discourse gets more blinkered and vicious as the stakes decrease. At any rate, this is the undeniable reality, and anyone who doesn’t see that isn’t worth listening to. 

Non-administrative per-pupil spending as been on a steady decline since George W. Bush was president. Administrative bloat and meddling are becoming as common in k-12 as they are in higher education. The will of parasitic NGOs are implemented as common sense pedagogy without anyone even bothering to ask for any proof that they work. The so-called Education Reform movement is sputtering out due both to its manifest failures and rare, bipartisan backlash. But it will be replaced with something just as idiotic and pernicious. The thrust of causalization will not abate. 

And so what do we decide to do? What’s the next big thing on the education policy horizon? Critical Race Theory. 

Okay, this makes sense. In 2021, a local paper can’t run a news story about a lost cat without explicitly mentioning the race of every human involved and possibly also nodding toward the implied cisnormativity of pet ownership. So it makes sense that this broad rhetorical mandate would come to dominate the transitional period between Bush-Obama Education Reform and whatever bleak future awaits us. The controversy is so perfectly inefficacious that its adoption was inevitable. Because, seriously, it doesn’t matter. Regardless of the outcome of this kerfuffle, no problems will be solved. The real shortcomings of public education will not be addressed. Larger social problems that are typically blamed on public education in spite of having little to do with public education will especially not be addressed. Maybe white kids will have to do struggle sessions in lieu of the Pledge of Allegiance. Maybe black kids will get full credit for drawing the Slayer logo in the part of the test where their geometric proof is supposed to go. Or maybe it won’t happen. Maybe instead these practices will be banned, and in turn liberals will begin to embrace homeschooling, the charter movement will be given new life as a refuge against the terrors of white supremacist behaviors such as, uhh, teaching kids to show their work. Whatever.

Within the context of public education, the outcome will not matter. It cannot matter. There will be broader social impacts, sure. It will continue to drive Democrats more rightward, providing their party’s newly woke corporate wing with progressive-sounding rationales for austerity. But so far as teachers and students are concerned, it won’t matter.

Why do I give a shit about this, then? To put it bluntly, I’m struck by the utter fucking inartfulness of CRT’s proponents. At no point has any advocate of CRT presented a case for their approach to education that was at all concerned with persuading people who aren’t already 100% in their camp. There’s been no demonstration of positive impacts, or even an explanation of how the impacts could hypothetically be positive. In fact, so much as asking for such a rationale is considered proof of racism. Advocates posit an image of existing educational policies that is absolutely fantastical, suggesting that kids never learn about slavery or racism or civil rights. But then... then they don’t even stick with the kayfabe. They’ll say “kids never learn about racism.” In response, people--mostly well-meaning--say “wait, umm, I’m pretty sure they do learn about racism.” The response is “we never said they don’t learn about racism.” You’ll see this shift from one paragraph to the next. It’s insane. Absolutely insane. 

Or take this talk from a pro-CRT workshop in Oregon. The speaker freely admits that proto-CRT leanings like anti-bias education, multiculturalism, and centering race in historical discussions have been the norm since the late 1980s. The speaker admits that these practices have been commonplace for 30+ years, as anyone my age or younger will attest. Then, seconds later, the speaker discusses the results of this shift: it failed. Unequivocally:

We had this huge, huge, huge focus on culturally relevant teaching and research. [ ... ] So you would think that with 40+ years of research and really focusing and a lot of lip service and a lot of policies and, you know, a lot of rhetoric about cultural relevancy and about equity and about anti-bias that we would see trends that are significantly different, [but] that’s not what we’re finding. What we’re finding that you see [is] that some cases, particularly black and brown [students] the results, the academic achievement has either stayed the same and gotten worse.

Translation: here’s this approach to teaching. It’s new and vital but also we’ve been doing it for 40 years. It doesn’t work. But we need to keep doing it. Anyone who is in any way confused by this is a dangerous racist. 

Even in the darkest days of the Bush-era culture war, I never saw such a complete and open disregard for honesty. This isn’t to say that Bush-era conservatives weren’t shit-eating liars. They were. But they had enough savvy to realize that self-righteousness alone is not an effective way of doing politics. You need to at least pretend to be engaging with issues in good faith. 

This is what happens when a movement has its head so far up its own ass that it cannot comprehend the notion of good-faith criticism. These people do not believe that there can exist anyone who shares their basic goals but has concerns that their methods might not work. Their self-certainty is so absolute and unshakeable that they can proffer data demonstrating the complete ineffectiveness of their methods as proof of the necessity of their methods.

For decades, the most effective inoculation against pernicious meddling in education has been to lean upon the ideal form of teaching I described earlier in this post. We claimed that teaching is apolitical and that no one is trying to indoctrinate anybody. Regardless of the abstract impossibility of this claim, it has immense and lasting appeal, and it was upheld by a system of pedagogical standards that allowed teachers to evoke a sense of neutrality. The prevailing thrust in liberal education is to explicitly reject any such notions, and no one--not a single goddamn person--has proffered a convincing replacement for it. We still say, laughably, that we’re eschewing indoctrination. But people aren’t that stupid. If you find it beneath yourself to make your lies digestible, people will be able to tell when you’re lying to them. 

This, my friends, bodes very poorly for the future of education, regardless of whatever happens in the coming months. A movement that cannot articulate its own worth is not one that is long for this world. Teachers themselves are the only force that can resit the slow press toward the eventual elimination of public education, and they have embraced a worldview and comportment style that renders them absolutely unable to mount any worthwhile resistance. 

[duhragonball]

Chi-Chi

I think I’m gonna wrap these up today so I can get back to work on my fanfic.    For the record, I got Buu, Frieza, Jolyne Kujo, Father Pucci, and Jobin Higashikata left to go, and then I’m done.  

But I hate to call it here, because this has been fun.   Maybe I’ll bring this back some time.  

Give me a character and I will answer:

Why I like them: I started watching DBZ back in the fall of 1998, and I didn’t get very serious about it until 2000.   Chi-Chi didn’t have a very big role in the Saiyans or Frieza arcs, and I wasn’t making a point of watching every episode, so it took a while for her character to be fully revealed.   Starting out, she was basically popping in every so often to remind us that she wanted Gohan to study.   She stood up to Garlic’s henchmen in Movie 1, but didn’t really get a chance to do anything.    In the Garlic Junior Saga, it’s stated that Chi-Chi is the strongest woman in the world, which sounds pretty impressive as long as you don’t think too hard about how many women are on the show.  

I don’t think I really understood Chi-Chi well until I got to the part where Goten spars with Gohan, and he reveals that Chi-Chi had been training him while Gohan was studying.   That was where it became clear to me that she only emphasized book-learnin’ over ass-whoopin’ because she knew Goku had that side of things covered.    With Goten, Chi-Chi had to be both mother and father to him, and she didn’t shirk from that.   

I guess what I’m trying to say is that Chi-Chi’s a great supporting character.   She maintains a presence in the story whether she’s on-screen or not, and you learn about her gradually through these short appearances.    And when she does show up, it’s just a treat to see.   She’s always got something to say, and she’s cute and she can beat your ass.    What’s not to like?  

Why I don’t:  Yeah right.   Look, the biggest gripe people have with Chi-Chi is that she makes her son do homework, which is dumb.    She explains this a number of times: There’s more to life than fighting, and she wants that for her son.   And Gohan’s not exactly worse off for her style of parenting.  

I think the disconnect here is that people watch this show and they want to see Goku and Gohan screw around and go on adventures, and they feel like Chi-Chi is here to kill their buzz.   I guess it’d be like watching a football game, and every so often some guy wanders out onto the field and scolds everyone for playing football.    But that guy would be right, because football is dangerous, yo.   Everybody keeps telling Chi-Chi that the only hope for the world involves her little boy getting his ass kicked by aliens, and she’s like “no, that’s bullshit,” and she’s absolutely right.   She’s a saint for tolerating it as much as she does, but I think a lot of fans refuse to look at it from her point of view.    They just want the fighting.  

I remember Lanipator observing that he used to hate Mr. Satan when he was younger, but the older he got, the more and more he appreciated the character.    I can’t relate to that, because I was old enough to drink when I started watching this show, so for me, there is no “when I was a kid” perspective on Dragon Ball.    I thought Mr. Satan was awesome from the start, and I never had much of a problem with Chi-Chi either.  

They did tend to overexpose both characters in the anime, cutting to them when they needed a filler moment to pad out an episode or five.   So maybe that’s got something to do with it.   But that’s not the fault of the characters.    But yeah, if I was watching the Cell Games at age 10 I’d probably get really sick of them constantly cutting to Mr. Satan or Chi-Chi for analysis.    

Favorite episode (scene if movie):  It’s probably hard to top the one where she fought Goku.   That was one of the last Chi-Chi moments I got to see, because I didn’t get caught up on OG Dragon Ball until 2004.   It’s an excellent use of the character and her lengthy absence from the show.   By the time she reappears, no one recognizes her, and she’s upset about being forgotten.  

Favorite season/movie:  I think I’d have to go with the Buu Saga, on the grounds that she got more time to shine, mainly due to so many other characters being unavailable.    It was a real roller coaster ride for her too.    Her husband’s dead and she’s raising two kids on her own, then he comes back, then he leaves again, and maybe Gohan’s dead too, and now Goten has to fight, and then she’s dead, and then they’re all back together in the end.     Wild.

Favorite line:  In the Cell Games Saga, there’s a TV show where Mr. Satan drags three buses onto the set, cuts a scathing promo on Cell, and then punches one of the buses to put an exclamation point on the whole thing.   Wait, I take it back, I’m pretty sure 10yo me would have loved Mr. Satan.  

Anyway the live audience is marking the fuck out for Mr. Satan, but at Kame House Yamcha and Krillin are unimpressed, because they punch holes in like fifty buses every morning as a warm-up.   But in the dub of that episode, Roshi remarks that Mr. Satan’s theatrics are “sad”, and Chi-Chi goes “It sure is.   Somebody could have used that bus.” Classic, total classic.

Favorite outfit: It’s hard to pick, honestly.   I like the Buu Saga yellow, but I prefer the way her hair looked in the Saiyans Saga.  And that outfit she wore near the end of DBZ was pretty great too.

OTP:  Goku. come on.

Brotp: I think Bulma sort of stepped into that role after Trunks was born, but Chi-Chi seems like a loner to me.   She basically rolled in, got Goku to marry her, and then retreated deep into the mountains to interact with as few people as possible.   I need me a freak like that.  

Head Canon: I think she’s genuinely proud of Goku and the boys being so great at super-karate-laser wars.   She doesn’t talk about it much, because there’s plenty of other people to congratulate them on that sort of thing, and I think they sort of look to her for as someone who grounds their family.  

To put it another way, I don’t think Goku wants Chi-Chi to talk a lot about the androids or the Saiyans or whatever.   I think he wants someone to bother him with household matters and chores and ordinary stuff.   And Gohan and Goten just want a regular mom to balance out their alien monomyth dad.    And she plays that role well, because that’s who she is.   But she’s still proud of them for saving the world and so forth. 

Unpopular opinion: Chi-Chi was right. 

Look, how was Gohan going to make a life for himself as a fighter, in a world where Goku and Vegeta have that market cornered?   

Where’s he live?  In a big-ass mansion.    Why?  Because he married a rich man’s daughter.   Where’d he meet her?   In the school Chi-Chi made him go to.  How’d he get in to said school?   He aced their entrance exams.    How’d he do that?   Chi-Chi made him study.

What does Goku do all day when he isn’t training?  He drives a tractor?  Why?  Because his wife has a thing for farmer aesthetics.   Why does he just do whatever his wife tells him?   Because he didn’t study.

A wish:  I wish all the Chi-Chi haters would stay out of my soup, because it’s salty enough as it is.   (Heyoooo!)

An oh-god-please-dont-ever-happen: I’ve been seeing Manalorian spoilers lately, and I don’t want to give anything away, but it seems like every time something happens on Mando, all the chuds come out of the woodwork to complain about Episode VIII and/or IX.     They’re like “thank you, Disney, for giving us the [Star Wars thing] that Disney refused to give us.” 

My fear is that Star Wars has become balkanized into this thing where people praise half of it as fixing or undoing the damage caused by the other half.   Used to be, people would either like the Ewoks or hate them, but they couldn’t ignore the fact that they were there.   Now it’s like any movie that doesn’t feature Ewoks is done to cater to the anti-Ewok crowd, and any movie that does is solely for the purpose of keeping the pro-Ewok side engaged.   

My point is that I worry that this will happen to all media franchises, and Dragon Ball Q will feature a Chi-Chi that gets turned into a hateful she-hag to satisfy the haters, and then Ultra Dragon Ball Deluxe will feature a more nuanced version of Chi-Chi as a make-good, thereby pissing off the haters.   And they’ll go back and forth trying to please everyone while the character ends up becoming an incomprehensible mess from it.  

5 words to best describe them: Adorable tiger mom/bus advocate.

My nickname for them: Cheech. 

[diyunho]

The Joker x Reader - “Trapped” Part 4

Almost one year ago, someone tried to kill The Joker in a speeding car and Y/N pushed him out of the way, getting hit instead. With a fractured skull and broken bones, she was out of business for 6 months; when she finally recovered, The Queen of Gotham wasn’t the same anymore. Trapped inside her own mind and exhibiting severe cognitive impairment, Y/N’s life switched upside down without any hope of ever returning to normal.

Part 1       Part 2      Part 3      Part 5

Next Morning

“We’re done here, OK?” The Joker shouts and you stomp away, furious at his behavior.

“Of course we are done, who the hell would put up with you?!! You’re horrible!!!”

“It finally clicked? Good!!!! Come on, speed it up and disappear!!!!” he points at the top of the hill where your car is parked.

You walk faster and J is increasingly frustrated with each step you take.

“So what you said was a lie?!” he yells before he can stop himself. “You assured me I’ll get used with being loved and here you are running from me! Hypocrite! Who’s the liar now, huh?”

You turn around, stunned.

How dare he twist your most intimate confessions in such a manner?

Y/N and The Joker glare at each other for a few moments before you voice all the bitterness and resentment building up in your heart loud enough for him to hear:

“I hate you!”

“Oh yeah?” he smirks. “Perfect! I’m used to it!”

You reprise your stroll, determined not to fall into his little traps anymore: this time is over and you have to put as much distance in between the two of you in the next few seconds before he attempts one of his tricks.

Not that you would fall for it again, but you never know…

One last glare while you try to open the car door and you see him flair his arms around loudly screaming at his phone; your fingers keep missing the lock and you kick the metal frame, irritated. Another glance and you spot a vehicle driving in the parking lane towards where The Joker is.

“J?...” you hesitantly call out to him yet The Joker probably has the earbuds in so he can’t hear you. “J!!!” you wave to get his attention without success. “Oh my God!” you rush back in his direction when you realize that SUV will hit him if it continues the present trajectory. “J!!! J!!!!”

The King is too absorbed in his business conversation thus he finally sees Y/N next to him as she violently pushes him out of harm’s way.

The strong impact wakes you up and you gasp for air, panicked. Your troubled mind has difficulty catching up with reality: a damaged brain can’t possibly render any type of comfort in this situation.

“Why are you crying?” J mumbles half asleep. “Did you have a bad dream?”

You seem confused and unresponsive to his questions, no other choice besides waking up to check on you.

“Calm down. You had a nightmare, ok?” he pulls the agitated Y/N in his arms. “ Hey, it’s me!”

You whimper at the pain paralyzing your body and don’t complain when he drags you on top of him; it actually feels soothing having someone close that understands what’s happening to you.

“Don’t hold me so tight, I can’t breathe,” J pecks your forehead where the blood clot pressing on your frontal lobe should be. “Better?” he asks a tearful girlfriend that ultimately begins to understand she wasn’t hit by a car minutes ago: it’s an ordeal she already went through months ago despite the aftermath of the accident still creating problems. “Such an early bird,” The Clown yawns since he won’t be able to doze off after your episode. “Only 7 am Princess…” the grumbled noises make you receptive to his complaint. “What about you give me some sugar in exchange for my services?” J suggests, quite puzzled when you roll off him and stumble out of the bedroom. “Where are you going?!”

You don’t answer because you’re concentrating just on what your neurons were able to translate in such a short notice: your man wants sugar. That’s why you’re in a big hurry to bring him a bag containing the sweet product, happily offering the item to his majesty The King of Gotham.

“For God’s sake, Pumpkin!” he accepts the gift nevertheless and places it on the covers. “That’s not what I meant,” he snatches Y/N in his arms and kisses her.

“No…sugar?...” you inquire out of genuine curiosity.

“I already got it,” he mischievously smirks at your bafflement, deciding to exercise your skills at once. “Say Princess: if I give you two kisses and then I give you two more, how many kisses do you get?”

“Ummm…” you debate on the question,”… not enough?”

“Due to your high standards, certainly,” The Joker huffs at the genuine reply. “Your solution is not wrong, but I’m looking for a number. Two plus two? Come on, you already know this one!”

“Mmmm… Four?...” you blur out and get groped as reward.

“Good girl!” J proudly applauds your abilities at crack of dawn. “Enough algebra for this morning,” he changes topic. “Your doctor appointment is at 10; you should take a shower soon,” and he rambles on until something is clear: the blank expression on your face hints at the outcome.

“You’re not listening, are you?” he suspiciously inquires.

“No.”

Why would you? Your brain’s self-defense mechanism prevailed at all the information flooding your deteriorated synapses and the result was blocking the outpour of sentences.

“That was a 10 minutes speech, Pumpkin!” The Joker grouchily admonishes the carefree Y/N.

“11,” you gesture at the clock on the wall.

“11 what?”

“11 minutes, not 10,” you nonchalantly conclude.

“Oh, so you have the audacity to time me while you don’t bother keeping up?!”

“Yes,” you giggle and hide your face under the pillow.

“That’s preposterous!”

“Hm?...” your nose emerges from under the cushion at the fascinating word you can’t recollect being in your current vocabulary.

“Preposterous, Princess!” J repeats.”… Stop laughing, would you?” he forcefully hijacks your pillow and you snicker because whatever-the-heck- it-means Preposterous Princess sounds like a hilarious nickname. “You wanna play games?” The Clown Prince of Crime sucks on his silver teeth willing to bring a final showdown to this magical day. “Fine, remember you made me with your abominable behavior!” he reaches for the nightstand in order to grab his favorite deck of cards. “Pick a card, any card; I won’t peak,” J watches the captivated woman pluck her choice from the mound. “Now put it in the stack,” he urges and you follow the instructions.

The Joker vigorously shuffles the cards then searches for yours.

“Is this it?” he triumphantly flicks the Joker card out of the bunch.

You nod a yes completely smitten he guessed again and your terrible half steals a kiss, triumphantly growling to himself:

“Who’s  laughing now, huh?”

*************

After Your Doctor’s Appointment

J slides the screen on his phone and before he can utter anything you announce:

“Hi, this is Pre… Pro… Mmm… W-wait,” you stammer and gather your thoughts. “This is Preposterous Princess.”

The Joker sighs, definitely unamused at your 5th call in a row to tell him what’s going on at your routine consultation: he barely finished counting the ammo boxes he received with the shipment after you left and going over the heist scheme for next week it’s made impossible by Y/N.

“Pumpkin, I will remind you that’s not what I meant when I said that word. It was Preposterous COMA Princess!! Two separate entities, alright? We need to have a serious discussion after you get home.”

“I have to go, Pro… Ummm… Preposterous Princess is at…at the gates,” you say it very fast and hang up, excited to share news with him.

Yet The Clown is already acquainted with the whole development on your condition: the doctor’s office contacted him after your departure in order to brief him on Y/N health. The blood clot is a bit smaller since it keeps reabsorbing; the cognitive issues are there, tests ended up pretty much within normal range except one, thus it’s necessary for the two of you to have the dialogue he mentioned about.

Five more minutes and you barge in his office holding your yellow teddy bear and for the first time in his life The Joker can’t help regretting he’s about to burst someone’s bubble.

You approach the desk and set the ultrasound picture in front of him waiting for his reaction; your bright smile doesn’t go well with how gloomy he appears, literally an understatement anyway.

“Baby,” you tap the image just in case he didn’t realize what he’s staring at.

“I know, Pumpkin. We can’t keep it.”

“Hm…?” your smile gradually dies out as you comprehend he’s not on the same page with your wishes.

“We can’t keep the baby, it’s very dangerous given you merely survived a severe trauma. I was told it’s nearly impossible for you to have kids, that’s why I didn’t use… Anyway… I admit this one’s on me and the conclusion is… … we can’t keep the baby.”

“No baby?” you sniffle.

“Nope, it would be too harsh on your body. Plus, you won’t be able to use your anti-inflammatory medication if you’re pregnant.”

“I want baby!”

“Are you deaf??!” J slams the desk with his fist, annoyed. “You can’t have a child, it could kill you. Do you want to perish?!” he rises from his chair.

“No… I want you and baby.”

“No way in hell!” he snarls at your defiance.

“Why can’t I h-have baby? Because… because I’m stupid?” you cuddle with your plush toy, heartbroken at his approach.

“You’re not stupid, but I’m beginning to have doubts if what I told you doesn’t make sense!”

“I want baby!” you whisper on the verge of crying.

“I want baby,” The Joker mocks and watches your demeanor change: it doesn’t take a genius to detangle the mystery of how hurt you seem.

“Are…are you making fun of me?!”

The King is a jerk, no doubt about it. Despite his obvious flaws he never ridiculed someone’s disability; it’s simply beneath him. One could say this is a new low for him and he cannot erase it: Y/N’s cognitive impairment is clearly sacred ground he trespassed on a whim when he shouldn’t have.

“If…if you were like me… I wouldn’t laugh at… at you,” you wipe your tears, sobbing. “I’m not smart… anymore but I can m-make decisions, ok? I want baby!”

“I said no!” J yells, fired up you won’t listen to reason.

“I don… I don’t care!” you storm out of the office and trip on the carpet, almost falling to the ground. “It’s my baby!”

“It’s mine also unless you have another boyfriend!!”

**************

You’ve been gone for the last hour; it’s a big place yet it shouldn’t be so difficult to find one’s partner.

The Joker dials your number and inquires as soon as you blow your nose on the other side of the line.

“Is this The Preposterous Princess?”

Dead air again; Y/N isn’t in the mood to speak to the man she can’t forgive for his transgression. In addition to him disregarding her intention of keeping the offspring, he made her feel dumb and that’s unforgivable.

“Y/N, where are you?!” J descends the steps leading to the basement, the last area he didn’t searched for his missing woman. He opens the boiler room, nothing. The pantry reveals zero clues either. The janitorial supplies closet is a different story; a box of sponges flies by his ear, immediately accompanied by a hateful tone:

“Go away!”

“You almost broke my nose,” he over exaggerates. “What are you doing here anyway? I’ve been looking all over the house!” “I’m hiding baby from you,” you clearly enunciate without stammering.

“Give me a break,” he drops on his knees in front of you. “I don’t want you to kick the bucket, why is that a bad thing?”

“I want baby!”

“Stubborn mule, you sound like a scratched CD that skips and skips and skips,” he barks at your persistence.

“Hm?” you crinkle your nose.

“Scratched CD!” he brings his face close to yours, pleased an opportunity for his plan has arisen. “First of all, if you want to keep the kid you have to promise not to die; second, I have no desire to become a father and third of all pick a card!” he shoves them in your fingers, perfectly aware that if you can’t process all the stuff he’s yapping at an amazing speed, you’ll get distracted and forget you’re mad at him; including one of your favorite games to the equation should seal the outcome.

“Hm?”

“Chop, chop, pick a card Pumpkin!”

You suspiciously pluck your item and then shove it back in the bundle.

The Joker steals a kiss while figuring out your card and you protest:

“I don’t… I don’t want your four kisses!”

“That’s too bad, I do come with four kisses, it’s a bundle deal!” J dismisses your logic connected to this morning’s algebra lesson. “Is this your card?” he shows you the Jester card and your mouth opens in amazement.

“A-ha!”

He fights with himself if he should disclose the secret: you don’t seem totally diverted and his plot could misfire due to inaction.

It’s not worth it.

“Do you know how I select the correct card?”

“No.”

“Each single time Pumpkin you invariably pick The Joker card.”

You sulk at the revelation since it’s true: you don’t recall sorting another card from the deck.

“I do… I always choose you…”

He doesn’t have a response and the chat is taking a strange turn, not precisely what he was aiming for.

“Yeah, well… good for you, Princess…” he stands and offers his hand to help you up.

Another smooch as bonus for his assistance whilst The Queen pouts at his impertinence: he has such a nerve!

Perhaps because he comes with four kisses.

It’s a bundle deal.

 Also read: MASTERLIST

You can also follow me on Ao3 and Wattpad under the same blog name: DiYunho.

[ihatetaxes99]

THE YAKUZA AND THE PHOENIX - A BOKU NO HERO ACADEMIA FANFICTION

"See, the problem with people like you," Commented the cool, sanitised yet utterly terrifying voice of Kai Chisaki as he kneeled down just in the very corner of the hero's peripheral vision. "Is that you relied far too much on that disgusting disease that plagues every last vein in your Godforsaken body. Maybe if you had just thought ahead a little… Has this illness robbed you of your senses, too? Left you as useless as a newborn? Not that it matters. It's far too late by now for any part of you to begin thinking about what could have been. I mean, just take a look around." He raised one hand to adjust his mask, while using the other to gesture to the scene around the two, one filled with flame and destruction. "If you had thought to bring police, tried to corner me with rifles, well you might have had some sort of success. I'm not stupid enough to resist against live bullets. But no. Your sickening Quirk has left you with such delusions that you thought you could stand to take me on alone."

The young woman's eyes filled with nothing but pure steel as she looked up at him. There was no fear to be found in the glare she delivered the man known as Overhaul, in spite of the terror bubbling in the pits of her stomach, constantly threatening to rise to the top. But she would not let it. Not in front of this Chisaki bastard, she wouldn't give him the satisfaction of knowing he had won.

"No words?" The man sighed, poking her lightly in the head as if to provoke a reaction. "Like a kid who doesn't get their way. Stubborn to the end. What a pain you are. The worst kinds of people are the ones who don't realize they're infected. They have no true redemption in their future. It's kind of weird when you think about it. What a shame… Not that it's any of my concern. I'm more interested in just why you and your ridiculous headgear have been following me around all day. Do you have an answer for that?" He grabbed her by the back of the hair, and pulled her face up to look at his. "I'd prefer an answer as soon as possible, so I can minimise the amount of contact made with your disgusting body."

There was only one way the woman knew she could respond to this and that way landed directly on the suspected Yakuza's forehead. "Why would I tell you anything, asshole? You won't get anything out of the Phoenix."

The man actually audibly growled, like a feral wolf, as he slammed her head into the asphalt. She felt her nose break as blood streamed from it onto the road. It was probably one of the lesser injuries she had incurred that day. Chisaki got to his feet and produced a spotless handkerchief from his pocket, wiping his face of the hero's saliva. "How childish." His voice was full of pure, deep contempt. "How filthy. Were you never taught manners? Are you mentally deficient? Hmph. Not that I should expect any more from a hero who calls themselves the Phoenix. How cliché." With that, he returned to his kneeling position over her limp body, she practically felt his shadow drop over her as the smell of burning embers filled her nose. Were those sirens she heard? They were faint, but what else could they be? Were they coming in her direction? One ear was completely busted up, so she couldn't tell. Looking up to the man who supposedly went by Overhaul, her peripheral vision severely limited by her complete and total lack of a right eye, she found her mind drifting away to the beginning of the day. When things had seemed oh so simple. When she still had all her limbs and when life had generally been more preferable when contrasted against her current predicament.

When had it all gone so wrong?

---------------------

"So, all I have to do is follow the bugger?" Twenty-three year old Misa Kawajiri enquired into her phone as she took small, meticulous sips from her large Coke, sitting atop a rooftop in the very heart of the city, occasionally reaching into the bag next to her to dig out a fry or two and jam them into her mouth. This was the life, no doubt about it. The young woman, who went by the heroic moniker of the Phoenix, was elated whenever she was sent on surveillance patrols by her agency. Most other pro heroes would consider such work to be beneath them, it mostly consisted of hounding tax evaders, low-rent rank-and-file grunts and conmen, there was almost certainly never a tang of excitement to be found. This was the reason most heroes preferred more interesting work and it was the reason why Kawajiri adored such jobs. For her, it was a chance to slow down, chill out and enjoy life at a bit of a slower pace than usual. She definitely was not above having time to unwind and take things at a more reasonable pace. Of course, today's surveillance was already beginning to sound more interesting. It had started out with monitoring some basement-dwelling Otaku who shared anti-hero sentiments on internet forums, so not exactly a thrill ride there, as evidenced by the fact that Misa had left halfway through to get herself a McDonald's. But her new target, as assigned to her by her employers at the agency…

"His name's Kai Chisaki." Rang the cool, clerical voice of Phoenix's supervisor. "Mid to late twenties, germaphobe. He isn't often seen out and about, instead residing largely in the Shie Hassaikai's compound."

"Hassaiaki?" The hero of the sky's ears perked up at that. "He's Yakuza?"

"As far as we know, yes. We can't trace back any records of a family, except for Kazama Chisaki, his uncle, who was also associated with the organization before his death, although not as a full member."

"Interesting…" The girl pondered. "So, why are we following him, then? The Hassaikai have a good reputation, right?" Her words were slightly muffled as she jammed more fries in her mouth at that moment than was probably reasonable.

"That they do, Phoenix. They're underground. There have been search warrants on the premises before, but nothing suspicious was turned up. They're a Yakuza group in name only right now, nothing worth worrying about. But Chisaki? He's different. You're going to be following him for reasons unrelated to his activity within the clan."

"Oh?" Misa cupped her free ear with her hand so that she could better hear the man on the other end of the phone.

"In short, we have reasons to believe he's been peddling Trigger behind the backs of his bosses. Obviously, I don't need to tell you about that."

She nodded, although that was a tad redundant, considering the voice on the other end could not see her. The experimental drug known for its Quirk-bolstering properties was nothing to trifle with, and it had only grown more popular in recent time. "Why do you think he's doing so?"

"Money, probably. Who knows with these criminal types? The point remains that we have reason to believe he's out and about today. I've sent you an image of him on your phone. Follow him, see what he's up to. When a hermit like him comes out of the woodwork, it can never be good. Not for anybody." And with that, her superior hung up, leaving Misa to her own thoughts. In being left this way, she dug her knees up tucked under her chin and sulked for a bit, confident that nobody could see her act in such a childish manner, taking the odd glance at the image. He was a shockingly handsome young fellow, with sharp yellow eyes, ruffled brown hair and a suit, he looked the part of any well-meaning businessman. The only weird aspect was the steampunk-esque plague doctor mask clamped around his mouth. She shrugged it off as probably having something to do with his Quirk, whatever that was.

"This sucks." She groaned as she reached for her helmet, which mostly served as a fancy shell to hold the visor that shielded her eyes from the wind. "I don't wanna have to pursue Yakuza drug dealers, it's just no good. Give me a fat, tinfoil hat loser ranting about conspiracies any day. Surveillance is supposed to be a break from the hard stuff. But nooo, it just has to be more of it, doesn't it?" She sighed, the air whistling over her lips, as she tossed aside her empty bag. Stretching upwards, allowing her skintight suit to hug her body, she felt her wings extend from her body. It was always a glorious sensation to be felt, the pure rush of it all. She adored it beyond belief, the best part of the job. With a cheeky grin, the young hero spread her arms…

… And let herself fall from the building's roof.

---------------------

Filthy. The very lot of them, surrounded by filth and dirt and all manner of unpleasantries. It was enough to break young Kai Chisaki out in hives, it truly was. Absolutely repulsive. How horrendous to have to walk amongst the common people, all of them no doubt inflicted with that despicable illness. As he made his way down the crowded high street, bumping into the occasional commuter, he felt the irresistible urge to lift up the sleeve of his green coat and scratch at the lumps on his arm. Urgh. The very lot of them, disgusting. He was rapidly remembering why he vastly preferred to remain indoors. And yet, he had to do this. He couldn't entrust mere goons with carrying out the mission, not even the Eight Precepts of Death. This had to be done by him and him alone. He felt the cold metal rub against his stomach from the inside pocket of his coat. What depraved things that guns were. Alas, they were a necessary evil, and still far better than Quirks. As he walked, he had no clue of the eyes following him as he did so. Misa Kawajiri worked fast and had found him in mere minutes. Was he aware of this, he would almost have applauded her.

Key word: Almost.

"He's carrying some sort of briefcase..." The girl noted to herself as she watched him. Luckily, his mask made him very distinctive for anyone who may be looking for him, so she had not had much trouble. "Is that relevant to whatever he's up to?" The questions were racing through her head in spite of her better judgement. She couldn't help but wonder about the good-looking, well-dressed young fellow with Yakuza ties. It was all so odd to her, and new. She didn't often run into anything so… exciting, was probably the word. And normally, Phoenix abhorred exciting. But something about it just seemed alluring. Maybe it was more the man than the danger, who really knew? Certainly not her.

…

DAMN.

Wrapped up in her own little thoughts, Kawajiri had lost Chisaki. He had seeped into the crowd. That wasn't good, not good at all. Not even wasting a second, Misa once again extended her wings and took off into the air, in search of the fellow she was shadowing. Stupid Misa, she cursed herself. How had she been so stupid? She really needed to focus more. Her eyes scanned the surroundings as she flew over an alleyway that served as a gap between two buildings.

And in that very alleyway, Kai Chisaki now stood, facing a triage. They were common street thugs, Overhaul had done his research. Nothing big, they were unheard of, just worthless druggies with not a thing to their names and a whole heap of desperation for power, power that they had no clue what to do with. In other words, the perfect suckers to lure in.

"Gentlemen." The distinguished Yakuza bowed. The goons showed no such respect in return. Was it really so hard to show the baseline politeness required of a person? These kinds of people pissed him off the most. Fortunately, the mask obstructed his grimace as he set the silver case on the ground and entered in a combination. A few seconds passed and then it clicked open. "Here's your bloody Trigger. Ten vials, enough to give the three of you a bolster in your path- In your Quirks for up to forty-eight hours. If you have any questions, I would advise you ask now."

The thugs all shared looks with one another. They appeared satisfied at the very least, yet the one in the middle, a big guy with muscles to rival All Might- Well, the former All Might- seemed incredulous to some degree. 

"So, what yer tellin' us, Chisaki-"

"I would prefer if you called me Overhaul."

"-Right. Sorry." His accent was just thick enough to get under the Yakuza's skin. "Yer sayin' that we don' hafta pay for any of this?"

To this, Kai shrugged. "Consider it a first-time buyer's guarantee. If you want more later down the line, that's when you'll have to start paying me. Otherwise, take it." He kicked the briefcase, sending it sliding towards the men. "It's all yours." For a moment, it seemed like the huge guy was about to protest, but at looking at the vials, his greed got the better of him, and he allowed a wide grin to overcome his face, no doubt imagining what his improved Quirk would be like. Disgusting animal.

"Pleasure doin' business with ya, Mr. Overhaul." He gloated as he picked up the case, his cronies hovering around him as they sneaked looks at the drug. Now was probably the best time to strike, while they were blinded by their own pathetic delusions of grandeur.

"Likewise." Chisaki responded, reaching into his coat, as if trying to find a cigarette. "Say, you three, have you ever wondered what society would be like without Quirks? How far we could have advanced by now if we hadn't had to restart everything to accommodate the idea of superpowers?" The men stared at him like he was mad, which was to be expected. "It's just something I've been thinking about." He admitted as he pulled the gun from his coat and aimed it squarely at the large man's head. "Let's test it out. You'll survive, of course."

"What the fuck?" The scumbag growled as he dropped the case in shock. "You pullin' a gun on us? Guess what, you skinny prick? It's three on one. Shoulda thought about that before pullin' a betrayal!"

"Probably." Kai noted nonchalantly as he took aim and fired.

The bullet ricocheted up against a wall in the alley as the metallic weapon was knocked from his hand by a kick. And not a kick from one of the steroided-up goons. No, one aimed from above.

"Looks like I caught you boys in the act." Phoenix grinned as she stood, legs firmly apart, eying up Kai. "Trying to betray the dudes you're selling drugs to really isn't a great idea, I must add." 

…

Filthy…

Sickening….

"WHO THE FUCK DO YOU THINK YOU ARE??!!" Kai Chisaki screamed, his voice carrying high up into the sky as he stared down the hero, his pupils small and mad in their sockets. "HOW DARE YOU TOUCH ME??!! HOW FUCKING DARE YOU??!!" He was completely enraged, sweat pouring from his forehead as he grasped at his hair. "DISGUSTING, DISGUSTING, DISGUSTING!!" He appeared to be on the receiving end of a full-on breakdown. All this over being kicked in the hand? No, it couldn't just be that. Already, the receivers of the Trigger had fled, stolen briefcase in hand. It really had been their lucky day.

"Woah, calm down, Chisaki-"

"Who gave you the right to call me that?!" He demanded, his voice slightly softer now. "And do you have any idea how difficult those bullets were to manufacture? I simply cannot afford to waste them!" Turning his back on Kawajiri, he picked up the gun, examining it for damages, and then wiped it clean with his white surgical gloves.

"Hey, creep! Stay right where you are!" Misa was petrified. She truly was. Something about this guy just was not right at all. She had been told he was a major germaphobe, but was it this bad? Enough to push him into insanity at a moment's touch? "You're under arrest for possession distribution of illegal narcotics." She was basically reading off the rulebook, saying what she was supposed to say in such situations. But nothing about this felt normal. Why was he so focused on the gun? "Stand down and await for police transport."

"You think I would heed such commands from a filthy piece of scum like yourself?" Suddenly, Kai was cool, clinical, yet again as he calmly pointed the gun in her direction. Phoenix nearly felt her heart stop. "Maybe you'll make a better test subject." His finger tightened on the trigger of the handgun. Misa had no time to think, no time to plan.

She simply ran forwards, charging the villain as he steadied his aim. Another loud bang echoed from the gun. She felt it tear her suit as it whizzed past her, but she managed to just barely evade it. Now, she was too full of adrenaline to stop, as she ploughed towards Chisaki. As she drew closer, she reached out, grabbing for his arm… She had to restrain him and fast.

"DON'T LAY YOUR FILTH-ENCRUSTED FINGERS ON ME FOR EVEN A SECOND!!" Overhaul yelled, back to unconcealed rage, as he slammed his hand down onto the ground. From nowhere, burst large columns of rock from beneath the concrete, sending the heroine flying back a few inches and separating the two. 

"Woah..." Was this his Quirk? She hadn't seen anything like it before. The rock wall stretched all the way up, totally shielding the Yakuza from her. It twisted up into the blue sky, as far as the eye could see. And then, she heard his voice, once again calm, from the other side.

"You made me use my Quirk." The man stated. "I hate this thing, but you left me with no other option. For that, I truly do feel some sort of hatred for you. So, I suppose I really feel no guilt in using you as my little guinea pig." Then, he fell silent again, as Phoenix paced around, trying to look for some sort of opening in the wall. Suddenly, she heard a rush of wind behind her and snapped around her head just fast enough to see Overhaul rushing at her. Now, Kawajiri had no clue just what his Quirk did yet, but she figured letting him touch her was a bad idea, so she took off into the air, hovering out of his reach.

"So, a flight Quirk, eh?" Chisaki sighed. His hair was ruffled, the purple fur on his coat torn in places and his bleach white tie flicking wildly with the motion from his rapid movements. "I must admit, I've never been great with moving targets." Once again, the pistol was out, pointed at her. No, she shouldn't panic. Judging from earlier, whatever bullets he loaded the thing with were very precious and so, he wouldn't waste them unless he knew there was a guaranteed chance of hitting her. She was safe for now.

She realized she had been foolish to think that even as the spiked column of rock dug itself up from the ground and impaled her right through the stomach, sending her back, right out of the alley and into the streets outside. She heard a scream as she slammed into a car, feeling the metal crunch behind her. Her vision was hazy, like that of a drunk, but she could still make out the suited villain walking slowly towards her as civilians fled the area. Well, all except for one man, who clearly realized that Kai was up to no good and tried to charge him. Without even looking in his direction, his gaze fixed on Misa, Overhaul's arm made contact with the brave man's chest and he exploded into nothingness.

"What the hell?!" Phoenix yelled. She felt like throwing up at the man's remains splattered the asphalt So this Quirk… It could erect pillars of rock, reduce humans to nothing, what was it exactly? She couldn't even think straight in her current state to try to decipher the answer.

"Isn't it kind of weird how people always try to act the hero? I've noticed that. I swear, this world has been poisoned beyond belief. Can I even cure it? Is that possible?" She felt cold metal as the bastard jammed the gun into her gaping mouth. "All I know is that I can try my very best. Starting here. You'll be my first patient, my girl. The first to be cured."

"Bite me." She hissed as she aimed a kick at his side, which somehow connected, winding the Yakuza just long enough for Misa to stagger to her feet. It felt like she had multiple broken ribs. Those could wait. "I think I get your shtick now. You think Quirks are disgusting or something, right? Yeah, just like any of those Creature Rejection Clan nutjobs. But you think you can bring an end to them, right?" She coughed up some blood onto her fist as she held Chisaki's gaze. "Well, think again, dickwad. You really think that you're some great saviour. I dunno what you have planned, but it sure as hell won't be anything that won't see you crushed like the pathetic little man you are!" And with that, she took flight again, aiming a kick at his head.

Before she even knew it, another column had travelled right through her left eye with a fleshy squealtch, blood coating the rock as she hurtled backwards, her fall stopped by a large vehicle that the rock pinned her to.

"Jesus… That it?" She spat, as Kai approached her yet again, his eyebrows raised in amusement. Then, he stepped backwards. Then again. Then, he spun around and started walking away. Misa was completely taken aback. "What?! You just leaving, you limp-dicked bastard? That ain't how a saviour acts, is it? Running away from a fight?" Her attempts at provocation did nothing to stop him and when the young woman tilted her head just a little, she saw why.

"Ah-" She started, before the oil tanker she had been pinned to exploded. The shockwave could be felt for blocks to come, glass shattered from the skyscrapers above as the world was thrown upside down. Everything went white for Misa Kawajiri, then black.

---------------------

Damn. That really had escalated quickly. And now, the pro hero lay, amongst the rubble, with one eye, a busted ear, no legs and a stump of an arm. The Yakuza stood above her. 

"I'll be willing to overlook your blatant lack of manners." Overhaul growled as he resumed his kneeling position. "In fact, I'll let you be saved. I'll be the one to save you. Isn't that something? A sickening power-infected freak like you, given a second chance by a humble Yakuza. And after everything you've done to me. You have been one hell of an annoyance. But, I guess you'll have started to make it up to me if Eri's little bullets end up working." The girl felt metal press into her side. Why was he so eager to shoot her? It must have something to do with whatever he was planning. The last thing Misa Kawajiri heard was the crack of a gunshot, the last thing she felt was the pain of the bullet entering her body, and then, she fell still. A second or two passed before Kai hovered his hand over her head.

"All going well, you have been deprived of your filthy Quirk." He noted, more to himself as the hero was now deeply unconscious. "Now, just to fix you up." He pushed his hand down on her and the woman's body blew apart in a spectacular show of blood and gore. Just a few seconds later, it reassembled, all limbs, eyes and anything else re-attached. With a satisfied nod, the man got to his feet.

"You'll live peacefully for the rest of your days." He told her, turning his back on her and walking away from the destruction that lay sprawled out like the play area of a particularly deranged and angry child, as if it had just been another day at the office, adjusting his tie. "No Quirk, no heroics, no excitement. I hope you're cut out for a desk job, Phoenix. It's all you have in your future. You're welcome."

[arlingtonpark]

SNK 131/132 Review

Hello, my name is ArlingtonPark, and I write SNK meta.

I’ve been doing this every month for three years now.

And I’ve never skipped a month.

Nope.

No siree.

Uh-uh.

(My punishment is that I have to write at least 4,000 words on both chapters now.)

So, we’ve come a long way, haven’t we.

In chapter 1, humanity had given up on itself. Humanity had barely survived the titan apocalypse and everyone was just happy to be alive.

Humanity had to crowd into the walls, but it was better than being outside.

It was better than being dead.

They could have everything they’d ever need. Friends, family, children, food, a place to live. All of it was inside the walls.

Everything you’d need to live a fulfilling life, and many saw it that way.

The Survey Corps would explore the outside world, but they were unpopular and no one took outside exploration seriously.

In chapter 1, humanity was willing to settle.

Then in comes our hero, Eren Yeager.

People in the walls had a job, family, friends, and their needs were generally met, but Eren told them they should want even more than that.

That’s how the story began.

If Attack on Titan had ended with the basement reveal, I would have said the series was obviously written by someone who watches too much Fox News.

Attack on Titan, before the basement, was a story about paranoia. It was a story about outsiders threatening to invade and destroy everything our heroes loved.

The heroes in this narrative are the patriotic members of the military. They devote their heart to humanity, are willing to die for their country, and are put upon by their slovenly compatriots.

And in between the outsiders and the patriots are the fence-sitters. These are people like the general public, and some named characters.

They’re not the enemy per se, but they’re mindset is still regarded as wrong-headed by the story.

Specifically because they are not devoted enough to the cause.

The wall’s denizens are able to live lives no worse than they would otherwise, and they’re satisfied with that, yet the story regards that thinking as insular and complacent.

People like Jean, Sasha, and Hannes are shown to be in the wrong throughout the story, and they only come around to the good side when they learn to devote their hearts.

Jean wanted to live safely in the interior, away from the action. He started off bad because he was only fighting for himself; he became good when he started fighting for his country.

Sasha also wasn’t a team player at the start. She hated that people were moving into her area, even though they were refugees looking for a new place to live. She only straightens out when she learns that she’s part of a larger group and the needs of the group are more important than her own.

Hannes was a lazy soldier who shapes up later in the story. He still died, but the point remains: he got gud only when he learned to be a patriot.

All of the bad guys are the ones who don’t fight hard enough.

The series had a lot of Donald Trump energy to it, with so much talk about People Who Look Like Us But Really They’re Different infiltrating society, and a complacent populace that doesn’t respect the military not caring about a vaguely tangible threat.

Worse than that, honestly. Trump just wanted to build a wall to keep the titans out; for a time, Eren was the hero specifically because he wanted to go beyond that wall and kill all the Mexicans.

Things started going in heavy on the satire in the Uprising arc. Unfortunately Isayama is no Jon Swift.

Japan is constitutionally committed to pacifism and formally renounces war as a solution to conflict.

In Attack on Titan, King Fritz forbids the Eldians from defending themselves because he’s a pacifist who renounces war.

You just know Isayama thinks this is hot shit he’s writing.

But wait, it’s worse!

The King Fritz character is a caricature for the conservative’s boogeyman du jure: the woke progressive.

He obsesses over the sins of the past.

He self-flagellates over it.

He talks endlessly about needing to atone, but also that they can never atone for what happened.

He abhors war even with a gun to his head.

He’s Tucker Carlson’s straw man punching bag. The AOC of SNK.

It’s like Trump wrote this.

Dummy-head King Fritz is practically screaming that modern eldians are guilty of genocide! But I know sins of father should not be visited on the son. Covfefe?

It goes from weird to *eww* when the story associates the wokeheads with barbaric, cult-like rituals. They pass down the Founding Titan by having one person ritualistically titanize and devour the other.

……okay.

So.

You could write a biting satire of left-wing politics, it just wouldn’t look like this. Attack on Titan is always at its worst when it tries to be better than it is.

Real life progressives emphasize past atrocities only because they feel those atrocities haven’t been properly acknowledged. And they talk about atonement because, naturally, if they haven’t been acknowledged, proper penance almost certainly hasn’t been given.

Satire works best when you take something and judge it on terms everyone, regardless of political persuasion, can agree on, thus demonstrating its shortcomings.

Everyone generally agrees on whether a stupid thing is stupid, so if you can successfully take the basic tenants of a position and cast them in a silly light, you’ve successfully made a valid point about that position’s failings. And maybe you’ve won some people over to boot.

SNK isn’t going to convince anyone, and I doubt Isayama was aiming for that anyway. It all reads like catnip for the people who already drank the kool-aid.

SNK’s attempt at skewering wokism is to say that with their mindset, the terrorists win. No nuance or exploration, just labeling people who disagree with you lazy, greedy, unpatriotic.

All the invective of Juvenal but actually juvenile.

I think the undercurrent of unironic nationalism peaks in the Uprising Arc, where the greedy elites are overthrown by the military in a populist coup.

It’s a classic nationalist narrative.

Greedy businessmen who don’t truly care about the country are a common boogeyman in right-wing circles.

And of course the military, being a symbol of national strength and sacrifice, is often valorized by right-wingers.

After the basement reveal, though, there’s been a notable shift in perspective.

SNK definitely takes a more critical view of nationalism now.

Turns out Grisha was part of a nationalist gang, and he was so caught up in nationalistic fervor he dehumanized his own son and only saw him as a stepping stone to racial dominance.

The people of Paradis have whipped themselves into a nationalistic frenzy. The people were calling for genocide against the marleyans.

When the government refused to commit to that, the government that had overthrown its predecessor in a nationalist coup was itself overthrown in a nationalist coup.

Don’t forget the last we saw of Paradis before leaving it: people celebrating Eren’s genocide. While the Alliance is giving their lives to save humanity, Paradis is partying like there’s no tomorrow.

SNK has almost become a metacommentary on itself; a story about how nationalist narratives backfire and only lead to more conflict.

I’m still not prepared to say SNK is fully anti-nationalist, though.

This reads to me like Isayama trying to have his cake and eat it. He wants to send a broadly pro-nationalist message while warning of the excesses of his own ideology.

There are good and bad points to be made about this.

It’s great that the series is covering all its bases.

Whatever its faults, SNK is a series that discusses its themes from multiple angles.

When the series talks about freedom, it talks about it in all its permutations.

Negative freedom, as when Eren wants humanity to be able to live beyond the walls.

Positive freedom, as when Historia builds an orphanage so the kids can build better lives for themselves.

Political freedom, as when King Fritz’s regime is toppled and society is liberalized.

Freedom from external forces, as when the Eldians struggle to be free from discrimination.

Freedom from internal inhibitions, as when Historia overcomes her self-doubt and lives for herself.

False freedom, as when the mainland Eldians delude themselves and think freedom comes by serving their Marleyan masters.

I appreciate that Isayama is willing to put in the effort to showcase his themes in all their variations.

…

Ok, so here’s the bad stuff.

I think the series harps on nationalism a lot because it’s part of a larger theme of self-determination.

SNK is, ofc, a series about self-determination. I’ve already talked about how it’s about freedom; freedom necessarily implies self-determination.

But there are two levels to this theme: the individual and the collective.

On the level of individual self-determination, there is Historia and her arc. She was a slave to other people’s expectations, and she chose to disregard those expectations and live for herself.

This theme is repeated again with individual Eldians like Reiner and Gabi, as well as Armin. These are people who’s ability to lead their best lives is limited by various circumstances.

They are unfree.

Reiner and Gabi are Eldians in a Marleyan dominated society. They want to live their lives and build a better life for their friends and family, but they can’t because of racism.

Armin wants to explore the outside world, but can’t because of the titans.

The theme of the story is that people have a right to control their own course, and they very much have a right to defend, even kill, in the name of preserving that right.

However lily-livered our heroes are, it is always drilled into them that they have to kill to enjoy the freedom they want.

I think Isayama harps on nationalism a lot because he believes that individual rights can be safely applied to groups; that groups have a right to self-determination just as much as individuals.

There is an individual level to freedom and there is a collective level.

In chapter 1, it’s not just Eren or Armin who are unfree, it is humanity that is unfree.

The titans took humanity’s land and humanity is entitled to take that land back.

Eren’s dream was for humanity to stand up for itself, not any one human.

That is a seriously flawed way of thinking.

Individuals are fundamentally different from groups of individuals. You can get away with it up to a certain point, but individual rights and group rights don’t always align. That contradiction is something the series has hinted at, but has never fully dealt with.

Historia’s pregnancy is the prime example. She’s a person with rights, but also possibly the key to her people’s survival.

Erwin’s death was also an example. Erwin devoted his heart to humanity and led them well, but when the time came to resurrect him, the choice was made to let him rest in peace. Erwin was a big asset to humanity, but it was decided to leave him be.

SNK seems to believe that when this contradiction arises, individual rights should prevail. That’s good, because most people would argue that.

But to think of group rights in this way, as being an outgrowth of a general right to self-determination, alongside individual rights, is questionable.

The central conflict of the story is over the rights of Eldians, not as individuals, but as a group. Victory for the good guys is framed as a matter of winning Eldian self-determination.

That is a distinctly nationalist framework, and I object to that.  

This is very tricky to write about because it’s natural to think about it in terms of groups.

Eldians as a group are hated, so naturally a solution would be thought of in terms of Eldians as a group.

It’s not wrong per se, but it cannot also be seen outside the light of SNK’s prior nationalist undertones.

I don’t think I’m conveying my thoughts very well, but…it’s just…

People say that SNK completely changed after the basement, but that’s wrong.

SNK is the same series it’s always been at heart.

It is because of this that moralizing about collective self-determination is something that raises eyebrows.

It is almost certainly part and parcel with the series’ prior nationalist urgings.

…

……

(Word count: 2077)

Fuck.

Uh.

Er.

Eren!

Shithead! What are you doing, Yeager?

Eren is a monster.

Literally.

So the truth comes out, and it’s exactly what I expected it would be.

People can disagree about Eren being a nationalist, but no one can deny that he is clearly an avatar for the ideology.

Eren loves his friends. He loves his family. He loves his people.

But just as the archetypical nationalist’s love becomes twisted to justify all sorts of atrocities, so too has Eren’s love become a hellish monstrosity.

Like the archetypical nationalist, Eren can only see the world in zero-sum terms.

“If we lose, we die. If we win, we live. And you can’t win if you don’t fight.”

That is his motto. It’s Paradis or the world. One or the other, but not both. There can be no peace, no coexistence, no compromise.

People have said that Eren has changed, but that’s wrong. This is just the logical conclusion of his exclusionary, nationalist mindset. The mindset he’s had from the very beginning.

Eren describes life behind the walls as undignified. He describes humanity’s comeback as a reclamation of that dignity.

Dignity not in the sense of his personal dignity, but in terms of humanity’s collective dignity.

That is to say he was thinking as a nationalist does even as a kid.

In some contexts, it makes sense to think of humanity as a singular entity. Administrative purposes, for example, or even just to foster a sense of community, but to think of humanity the way Eren does demonstrates a nationalist mindset and all that implies.

For Eren, humanity isn’t just a singular entity, humanity is almost like a living organism. He talks about humanity as an organism that can have indignity visited upon it, as an organism that needs to stand up for itself, that needs to fight.

(By the way, another example of Isayama’s hack writing: the Eldian people are a nation. A group of people bound together by a shared culture and history.

And wouldn’t you know it: the Eldians are bound together by P A T H S, a metaphysical bond through which Eldians can experience the shared history of their race.

This is such hack writing!)

Talking about humanity in this way in this context is very revealing about Eren’s worldview.

In the nationalist’s eyes, the nation is a singular organism whose survival is paramount; the individuals who compose the nation are not as important.

That’s why nationalism tends to lead to so many awful outcomes. The ideology is inherently dehumanizing even for the people the nationalist views as on his side.

But what I like about this depiction is how the series shows the contradictions inherent to that.

Eren may view the survival of humanity, and now Eldians, as paramount, as more important than any one life, even his own, but he’s still a human being who can form connections with others.

I think this is why Eren’s turned on his friends the way he has.

“To fight monsters, we have to abandon our humanity.”

Eren has taken Armin’s words to their logical conclusion: to survive, we have to dehumanize ourselves.

Thus, we end up with Eren pushing his friends away. He knows he has to separate himself from his humanity to be able to do the ghastly things he was planning.

This is the contradiction inherent to nationalism. It takes human emotions and twists it towards inhuman actions.

Not just questionable actions (which aren’t actually questionable, but are framed as such by the story) like Erwin’s strategies, but genuinely inhuman stuff.

SNK may be sympathetic to the ideology, but it’s heartening that the series is willing to be so critical of nationalist excesses.

(Setting aside for a second that nationalism of any degree is in itself arguably excessive.)

With Eren, SNK has taken maxims and morals it previously championed and picked them apart. The series wants us to fight, but now it’s showing us what happens when you fight too hard. The story is almost like a deconstruction of itself.

As far as free will is concerned, I think Eren’s right. He is in fact committing this genocide.

I don’t want Eren to be a puppet to the Attack Titan, or for him to somehow be absolved of this crime he’s committed.

When Eren confronted Reiner in the basement in Liberio, Eren was the one who offered excuses for why Reiner wasn’t to blame for the Grim Reminder. Reiner was the one who shot them down.

I don’t actually think this is correct, but the story frames things like “you were a child,” or “you were brainwashed,” as insufficient to absolve Reiner.

SNK’s morals seem to dictate that Reiner gets no get out of jail free card.

He may have just been a kid. He may have been under duress, but he still broke the walls, so it’s all his fault.

Eren seconded that notion. Reiner said as much, and Eren agreed.

Reiner is indeed a half-assed piece of shit, and so is Eren.

Regardless of the circumstances or other extraneous factors at play, Eren is doing this, and that’s it.

One of the themes of SNK is that we own our actions. What we do has consequences and those consequences, in turn, are reflective of us. They illuminate our character.

Eren owns this.

There is no Attack Titan Svengali to scapegoat or excuses to be made.

Eren is killing billions of people for his race because that is who he is.

It’s who he always was.

Speaking of the series hopefully not reneging on its themes, I really hope Hange is dead and there is no afterlife.

That would be a really, *really* stupid idea.

SNK does not romanticize death.

When Erwin died, he was taken from Levi.

When Ymir died, she was taken from Historia.

When Floch died, he was taken from Eren.

Hange’s death was a tragedy. I understand Isayama wanted to send them off on a poetic note, and I hope that’s all this was.

It’s fine to symbolize a character making peace in death with what they did in life.

I do not want this to be the hint of an afterlife people are making it out to be.

Death in SNK has consequences.

When you die, your ability to contribute to this mortal world is done.

They could have brought Erwin back to fight for them, but they chose to let him die. His death was framed as an honorable discharge from duty.

When you die, the hopes, dreams, and beauty that was your life is extinguished. Everything you’ve worked for and built is out of your hands and in the control of your posterity.

Death is fundamentally a bad thing. The bad guys in SNK are the people who relish in mass genocide.

Marley.

Zeke.

Eren.

Death is momentous to the heroes of SNK, but to the villains, death is but a stepping stone to another, usually self-serving, goal.

Marley wishes death on Paradis so they can solidify their dominance over the world.

Zeke wishes death on the Eldians because he’s bent on taking his self-hatred out on his own people.

Eren wishes death on humanity because he’s been spat on his whole life, and now that he’s big and strong, he wants to flex on them.

Death is a bad thing, but if death means you get to live it up with all your friends and have a happy existence in the afterlife…is death really a bad thing?

I do not want this. No thanks.

…I actually like Hange’s death, btw.

I interpret the “afterlife” as just a poetic send off for their character, and on that level, it’s a good death.

So, I already talked about Eren’s role in the story, I guess I should pad things out with some talk about him as a character.

All throughout the story Eren has been focused on one goal: achieving freedom.

“freedom” is pretty vague though. You can be free in some ways, but unfree in others, and many people would still say you’re free overall.

What does freedom mean to Eren Yeager?

Eren has judged his freedom throughout the story by referencing his circumstances.

Titans right outside the door? Unfree.

Unable to go where he wishes? Unfree.

Victim of racist oppression? Definitely unfree.

Defining something in terms of what it’s not isn’t very ideal though.

So really, what is freedom to Eren?

Freedom for Eren meant being able to see the world.

Flaming water, frozen plains, sandy snowfields.

A lot of people misread this as meaning Eren’s goal was to see the world, but in truth that was just a means to an end.

Seeing the world was a gauge to Eren. It was a way to measure how free he was.

But that still doesn’t answer the question: what does freedom mean to Eren?

Well, in hindsight it was always obvious, but now we know for sure.

“Ever since I was born, there, before my eyes stood those miserable walls. Flaming water, frozen plains, snowfields on sand. I’m sure that the outside world is way bigger than the one inside of these walls. Anyone who saw those things would be the freest person in the world.”

Absolute power.

The power to break down any wall that stands in his way.

Marleyans, warriors, even his friends. Eren is free because he answers to no one. No one can stop him. No one can beat him. He is the god of this world.  

Freedom for Historia meant having her autonomy. The power to live for herself.

Freedom for Eren, in stark contrast, meant absolute domination.

Historia was fine with knowing that the whole world hates her guts and wants her dead, but not Eren. Historia would work to survive as best as she could, but she doesn’t pretend that those people aren’t human beings who deserve to live.

Not Eren.

His thought process is if you’re barreling towards conflict and you have the power to wipe them away easily, then why the fuck not?

We have nukes. We have the power to wipe out North Korea. Why the fuck not?

Eren’s solution to the cycle of violence is to be the last man standing in the end.

That’s the type of person Eren is.

Simple and ruthless.

It all comes back to power with him.

Want to end the cycle of violence?

Be stronger than anyone else.

Want to protect your friends?

Be strong enough to do it.

Want to be free?

Be strong enough to claim it for yourself.

And don’t be afraid to step on people to get it.

And that’s Eren in a nutshell.

What about Mikasa?

Let me say that at first I actually hated Mikasa.

She lost her family at a young age and she wants to protect her new one. That’s really sweet, but what really grated me was how utterly incapable she was at compartmentalizing that.

Protecting Eren was her only goal. She didn’t care about anything else.

She joined the military just to protect Eren, and it showed. There was always some friction whenever her orders conflicted with being able to protect Eren.

Her single-minded desire to protect Eren has consistently held her back. Strength isn’t a problem for her; her character flaw is that she cares too much for someone else.

Mikasa has to constantly be kept from flying off the handle whenever Eren is in trouble. When Eren needs rescuing, her brain turns off and she moves without thinking.

Usually someone manages to restrain her, but when that doesn’t happen, she usually does stupid shit.

Levi can tell you all about that.

My point is that Eren is someone prone to not thinking, and when that bites him, Mikasa starts not thinking too, and while that usually doesn’t bite her since she’s Mikasa, it still illustrates a bad dynamic.

The ultimate culmination of this toxic relationship is this story arc.

In 132, Mikasa refuses to say she’ll kill Eren. Instead she’s going to bring the old Eren back.

Like, fucking really?

“That man isn’t Ehreh, the man I love, he’s Eren, the Bad Guy!”

Mikasa is every abuse victim who keeps crawling back to their abuser.

Eren verbally abused Mikasa until she cried.

But instead of standing up for herself, she makes excuses for him.

First she was desperately trying to find some explanation for why he abused her, and now that it’s undeniable that Eren’s a lunatic, she’s settled on the old “I’m going to fix him” excuse.

Strength isn’t a problem for Mikasa; her character flaw is that she cares too much about Eren.

No one can deny that Eren and Mikasa’s relationship has devolved into an abusive one.

Don’t even try it.

I don’t think Mikasa’s confrontation with Eren will be as straightforward as people think.

Everyone expects Mikasa to overcome her unwillingness to kill Eren and do it.

I don’t know if that will happen or not, but I think it’s important not to lose sight of the fact that Eren is the main character and this is his story.

If we really are in a place where the main character is waiting to be killed off so the story can end…that’s pretty lame.

When Eren touched Historia’s hand, he saw the future.

Everything.

His attack on Marley, the Yeagerist rebellion, Falco.

Everything.

Are we really supposed to believe he didn’t see the Alliance coming for him?

That all this time, Eren knew he’d have to kill Mikasa to succeed?

That’s probably why Eren’s POV has been shrouded so much. Obviously this is something he’d be dwelling on a lot.

That’d fuel some good character drama going into the climax.

I think Mikasa will be the one who dies.

Eren is the main character, and it’s his story.

After everything he’s done, he can’t get off easy.

Being killed my Mikasa is too good for him. He’s going to die anyway, and while dying now means he failed, he won’t be able to experience that failure.

Eren doesn’t deserve to die.

No, he deserves to fail, and he deserves to live with that failure.

Eren is ostensibly doing all this to protect his friends, so the only way to truly punish him is to take those friends away from him.

Maybe throw in Historia too while we’re at it.

…That’s a dark note to end this on.

Uhm.

Hey, look!

4486 words!

\o/

[surveys-at-your-service]

Survey #292

“dear god, let’s make this fucking clear: dear god, there’s nothing that i fear”

What internet browser do you use? Chrome. What brand water do you drink? (Smart Water, Dasani, etc) Mom just grabs the Great Value jugs. Do you have a job? No. Are you full-time or part-time? N/A Are you watching TV right now? No. Or are you listening to music? Yeah, "Mr. Crowley" by Ozzy. Such a great song. Would you go to jail for 3 years for $1,000,000? No. I would NOT survive in jail. When's your birthday? February 5th. I cannot fucking believe I'm almost 25. Thoughts on kids? Too impressionable for me. Even with my niece and nephew, I feel like every single word I say just like... stamps into their brains, and what if I say something that negatively affects them? I feel like it's my responsibility as an aunt to be a fountain of wisdom when I'm definitely not. I just get nervous around kids. Worst punishment you've ever received by your parents? I wouldn't call it a "punishment," but when I skinned the everliving fuck out of my knees and Mom was patching me up while I was just sobbing away, my dad literally roared "SHUT UP!" from my parents' bedroom, and it's stuck with me forever. Honestly, I think it may be a root in my extreme fear of men yelling. Worst punishment from Mom, probably this time where she smacked the shit outta my arm as a kid and left a clear handprint for a while. Are you the type who is completely against abortion? Why? No, I am firmly pro-choice, despite being pro-life most of my life. I don't feel like writing a moral essay, but basically, I absolutely cannot agree with forcing a woman to carry a human they don't want for whatever reason for nine fucking months, endure one of the most traumatically painful things known to man, and then properly and adequately care for that child. That is such a huge fucking responsibility that should be forced upon *nobody*. "But adoption!" Yeah, go tell that to the thousands of children waiting on you. This is leaning on exactly what I said I wouldn't do, so moving along. Have you ever read a book that actually changed your outlook on life? "I’ve read some books that were phenomenal, but I wouldn’t necessarily go so far as to say that they 'changed my outlook on life'." <<<< This was Johnny Got His Gun for me. Does your favorite flower hold any meaning to you? No. What would you do if your favorite animal became endangered? I would fucking freak. Have you ever owned an expensive eyeshadow palette? No, but I honestly do want at least one, primarily with a deep black and then some nice grays and neutral colors. Do you own a tripod for your camera? Yes. Are your nails always painted? Quite the opposite. What's one thing you've had a toxic reaction to? A breakup. Which holiday is your favorite to decorate for? I honestly don't really decorate because I just don't have the motivation, but Halloween is the best. Were you popular in school? Nope. Are there any foods that often give you heartburn or indigestion? BANANAS, dark sodas (like Coke or Dr. Pepper), peanut butter can... It's hard for me to tell much now because I have chronic heartburn and am medicated for it. Works great, so I don't experience this much. Is there something you intend to buy in the near future? Yes. Once my tattoo is done (I'm setting the appointment the next time we leave the house, AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH), what I have left is going towards Venus' new terrarium. She really needs a 40 gallon. Is anyone in your family artistically talented? What about musically? I was the art kid, and family still insist I should be an artist. What cute behaviors or characteristics does/do your pet(s) have? Omg, Roman has so many. He nuzzles me all the time, will collapse into my hand to pet him, he insists on being the little spoon at bedtime (no, really), he literally tries to groom me with his teeth, licks my face... He is just a doll. My little buddy for sure. Now onto Venus. She loves to chill next to me in bed or find a cozy place under the covers, and omgggg does she love to slither around the bed doing the periscope thing. So curious. What's the screensaver on your computer? I don't have one. What’s the sexiest thing about a guy? I am WEAK for nice shoulderblades/muscular shoulders ok. What’s the sexiest thing about a girl? I am an ass bitch and I will not hesitate to admit it ayyyyyeeeee. Who were you with at midnight on January 1, 2021? Nobody. Who was the last person to send you a message on social media? My sister Misty. She's planning to surprise Mom (her stepmom, anyway) by showing up in a few weeks with her fiance and all her kids she's never met but desperately wants to. My mom is the only "real mom" she's ever had, and she just feels so bad that she has a by now teenage daughter (among three other younger ones) that has never met her "grandmother." It's just an expensive and long trip, but Misty's finally called it enough and is just driving down here with everyone. Mom is going to fucking sob. ^ What qualities does this person have, that you appreciate? Nice timing for this, since her fiercely anti-mask bullshit is all I can focus on about her lately... but there are good things about her. She truly is a very loving, passionate woman that, just like me, feels deeply and expresses it. What was the last thing that caused you to scowl, or frown? Does grimacing count from a sudden bodily pain? Have you smiled at any point during the last hour? Yeah. I'm watching the VOD of Arin Hanson playing Kingdom Hearts 2 for charity, and he went on a total fucking laughing fit. His laugh is so precious, so I just couldn't stop grinning. What was the last thing you consulted Google for? Ensuring "grimace" was the right word for my former expression, even though I was pretty positive it was correct... I don't know if anyone's noticed, but my English skills are degrading, particularly in spelling. It's concerning me. I was an English whiz my whole life up to now. My only guess is it's related to how godawful my memory is also declining. So, did anyone send you a "Happy New Year" message when midnight hit? No. When was the last time you were on a carousel? Probably not since I was a teenager being goofy with Jason or somebody. What is the closest you have ever been to an elephant? I have a picture on my dA of a beautiful elephant walking RIGHT by its fence at the zoo. It was pretty amazing, considering just how incredibly immense their enclosure is. Have you ever played Halo? No, it's not my kinda game. Have you ever read a National Geographic magazine? Oh, I'm positive I've read sections while in waiting rooms of various places. When was the last time you had a pillow fight? I have no idea. Realistically it was probably w/ Jason since that sounds like some cute playfighting thing we'd do, but I don't remember a particular instance. Name somebody who you think deserves more respect: "Retail works. The horror stories my mom has on the daily is absolutely ridiculous. People can be so incredibly rude." <<<< I absolutely agree with this; what friends and strangers alike rant about is just depressing. Nobody, especially those working through a goddamn pandemic that's killing thousands, deserves the disrespect that comes their way. Have some goddamn decency and know half the issues you bring up to retail workers isn't even their damn fault. Ohhhh, I could rant about this. In your own words, define what the word sexy means. So you mean like, what I think is considered sexy, not just the general definition? If that's the case, uhhh. Self-confidence (but absolutely not arrogance) is very attractive to me as a bitch who lacks it entirely, as well as good manners, being outgoing, and just... charm. I don't quite know how to describe that "charm" other than I'm really drawn to people who are unique and happy with it and just seem to have an aura about them that feels good to be in. What is the most popular tourist attraction where you live? I'm going to look at this question as if you're asking about my state and not general location because 1.) there ain't shit here and 2.) I'd prefer to keep relatively where I live quiet on the Internet. Looked it up and apparently NC's biggest tourist bait is the Biltmore Estate. Never been there myself, but it'd be pretty dope. Without looking - do you know what brand your underwear is? I'm in my own home and pjs, who the fuck wears underwear with that criteria lmao. Are you any good at volleyball? NOOOOOOOOO. I went to a volleyball camp thing once when I was younger and that shit hurts the hell outta your hands. I didn't stay long. Have you ever had a water balloon fight? Why of course. Do you think some babies are ugly? Quite honestly, probably most, especially newborns. Don’t you miss Chuck E. Cheese? I do; going there was one of the most exciting possible things to me as a kiddo. Do you think Fall Out Boy is gonna be a classic band, like Queen or AC/DC? Possibly. I mean they sure are pretty successful and well-known. Do you love stuff-crusted pizza? Eh, it's not my preference, but I'll eat it. Do you apply lotion after you bathe? No, but I really should, given how dry my skin is. What’s your favorite color? Pastel pink. Who did you have your most amazing kiss with? I'd like to not think about this. Has a YouTube video of yours ever gotten over 10,000 views? Lol definitely not. I think at least one on my older channel hit 1k somehow???? It was a birthday gift I made for someone. Would you ever get a tattoo on your collar bone? lol I already have one there. At some point I'm getting it covered, though. Do you like Robert Frost poems? I do! Do you go to church every Sunday? I never do. Have you ever been in a relationship on-and-off for more than a year? No, I don't play that game. You want me or you don't, so I'm not wasting my time on your uncertainty or just our lack of stability for whatever reason. If you had to get famous for one of the following, which would you choose: music, acting, writing, modeling? Absolutely writing. What do you think of girls with huge boobs that don’t wear bras in public? ?????????????????? i don't?????????????? care???????????????? they're not my tits??????????????? What is the last thing you tried on in a store? I don't know. I avoid trying shit on like the plague. And then it ends up being too big/small. I wonder why. Is sleeping naked more comfortable than in clothes? I've only ever fallen asleep naked once, and accidentally at that, so I really don't remember how I felt about it? Consciously though, I would feel very, very vulnerable so don't have plans to when I have my own place. Have you ever had a dream in which you were making out, or more, with someone? HAHAHA Y'AAAAAALLLLLLL THIS WAS DEADASS THE ONLY LUCID DREAM I'VE EVER HAD LMAOOOOO Do you feel as though you have a good memory, or are you forgetful at times? Do you feel that your short-term memory or long-term memory is better? My short-term memory is absolutely atrocious, like to the point it seriously affects my ability to get shit done. You can give me something that needs to be done and I will forget in a heartbeat. Now, my long-term memory is astonishing. I can remember many things from my childhood in incredible detail. Have you ever had a concussion or some other sort of brain injury before? Did you need to have surgery for it? I've had a concussion or two. I can't remember which. I didn't need surgery. Do you have any sort of mental illnesses or disorders? What do they involve? Yeah: chronic depression, crippling social anxiety, generalized anxiety, avoidant personality disorder (AvPD), obsessive compulsive disorder, PTSD, bipolar II, and I think that's it. My head's a mess and a half. What’s the longest that your hair has ever been? How about the shortest? When is the last time that you got it cut? About to the small of my back; how it is now, which is pretty much shaved on the left and fades to near my chin on the right. I actually got it cut last month; we've gone to a family friend for years whose shop is just an extra building by her house and very rarely has more than two clients in it. We had masks on, of course. At what age did you start getting gray hairs, if you happen to have any? I don't have any. Somehow, given my stress level at all times, haha. What are some ways that you style your hair? Do you use any sorts of products in it? It's too short to style. I don't use any products in it but obviously shampoo. Who was the last person to truly get on your nerves? What do you think caused you to feel that way? Probably my mom. I think she was in a rotten mood for one reason or another and just being snappy and generally rude. Do you recycle? Is this through choice or do you live somewhere where it’s compulsory? We do; it's by choice, and it'd be immensely ignorant not to where we live considering it literally gets picked up with the other garbage. Do you prefer plain, carbonated, or flavored water? Do you think you drink enough water throughout the day? I've never tried carbonated water, and flavored water rarely works for me due to artificial sweeteners giving me beastly headaches. So I'll just take really cold, filtered water. Have you ever needed to call the police, ambulance, or fire department? I had to call the ambulance for my mom right before her cancer was discovered because she was literally immobile and in ungodly pain. When was the last time you visited the library? What was the purpose of your visit? At my old college, as the newspaper photographer, I took some artsy pics up there. I will probably forever worry that leaving school resulted in the biggest career opportunity slipping through my fingers through that newspaper. Do you see a lot of wild animals where you live? Are any of them dangerous? I guess about the normal amount you'd see in the country. Some dangerous animals live here, sure, that's probably everywhere, but you very rarely see any. Aside from when you were born, have you ever had to stay the night in the hospital? For suicidal thoughts and one attempt, yes. Have you ever experienced a panic attack? Ahhhh, do I know those well. Thankfully, it's been a long time since I had an all-out panic attack. Would you ever want to go into the medical profession? Was your answer different pre-COVID? Nope. Well, besides being a vet, which I haven't wanted to be since I was a kid. Where you live, are people paying attention to whatever restrictions are in place to help control COVID? Many? No. Because it's apparently a fuckin hoax or not as bad as the government wants us to think. Fucking cretins. Do you get a real or artificial Christmas tree? Artificial. Real ones aren't worth the money nor mess. What’s your favourite type/flavor of popcorn? Caramel corn. Do you drink oat milk? No, but I'm interested in at least trying it. The dairy industry is absolutely repulsive if you look into it, and I'd love to do what I can to take as little part in it as possible... even though I am a dairy fiend. I seriously wish I could go vegan, I am just WAY too picky for it. Do you love thrifting? Oh fuck yes. I've been very few times in my life, but I'mm all about it. Do you consider using only lowercase letters your aesthetic? I do find it visually appealing; I like the flow of similar letter height. I never do it for "serious" things, but on places where it's "for the aesthetic," it's likely that's how I'll write something. Do you say “mood?” Way too much lmao. Do you own fairy lights? No, though I would like them if it wouldn't look stupid in my room. Do you own glass straws because the metal ones kind of gross you out because you can’t tell if they are clean or not? ... I didn't know glass straws were a thing. I have a handful of metal ones though, but I always forget I have one in my purse when I go out... Have you made a TikTok? No. Do you own airpods? No. Are you afraid of Mercury in retrograde? I don't believe in a planet's position or whatever having any effect on people. Do you make life choices based on astrology? Definitely not, considering I don't believe in it to begin with. How many pairs of converse shoes do you own? Maybe like, five? Number of jeans in your closet: Zero. What accent do you have? Not really any, but sometimes I sound kinda southern with specific words. Do you have a big butt? Yo I got a Hank Hill ass, so no. Do you count how long you and your gf/bf have been together? In my past relationships, yes, I assigned our anniversary to memory. I don't really... know why, like it doesn't really matter how long you've been together, I just do. Have you graduated? From HS, yes. I dropped out of college three times lmao. Rihanna or Lady GaGa? Ohhh, not sure. Maybe GaGa, but both ladies have songs I love. "Disturbia" doess beat all of her songs, tho. The fuckin BEAT. Do you use fake eyelashes? Never tried 'em. Which was the last book that really captivated you? The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood. What makeup brands do you use? I'm not loyal to any, really. I would be if I could afford expensive shit, but yeah, that ain't my life.

[reading-writing-revolution]

Was thinking about the coronavirus yesterday - aren't we always thinking about it at some point during the day? - and I remembered something that happened a long time ago when I was deployed to a submarine that reminds me of what we are going through right now with our anti-maskers.

Our team was deploying on a submarine for an op, and one of the guys, last name "Black", turned up sick a day or two before we were to leave the hotel and get on the boat. (In the Navy, you call a destroyer or an aircraft carrier a "ship", but you call a submarine a "boat".) So, I told the guy to stay in the hotel because we were only going to be gone for two weeks, and we'd see him when we got back. It wasn't a good idea for him to come along because it looked like he had the flu and we risked getting everyone sick.

He refused to stay behind, and the LT just went along with it, so he came along. I don't have to tell you that within a few days everyone on that fucking submarine had the flu. We called it the "Black Plague". I didn't get sick, and I'm sure others didn't get sick either, but the whole damned submarine was awash in sick sailors and the flu. It didn't kill anyone, but if you've ever had the flu, you know how life is. Life on submarines, like any naval vessel, is inherently dangerous. And everyone must work as a team because you have to depend on the next guy to do their part to make sure everything works, all the maintenance is completed, all the checks checked, all the machinery - the whole damned thing is machinery, including the nuclear reactor - is working well or being fixed. No one has time for everyone to shit the bed and lay in their racks and be sick. A submarine in a 24/7 operation, and Mr. Black put everyone at risk. Our mission didn't fail because of him, but it very well could have.

But the point is that even if the virus won't kill you, it can nearly kill everything else. It can wreck your life, your workplace, your coworkers, your family, your home. It can endanger you and everything and everyone around you. It doesn't have to literally kill you to wreck your world. How much of your work can you miss and still have a paycheck? How many payments can you miss and still have a credit score that won't crush you for a decade? That won't get your car repossessed? That won't get you evicted? That won't affect your family and your kids? And what happens when your whole workcenter goes down for the count for a week or two? What happens to your business and then your job? What happens to everyone you know? 

All Black had to do was stay in the hotel. But he wouldn't do it. Instead, he got everyone sick. I got sick after we got off the boat; I resisted the plague for two weeks, so I was able to keep things going while everyone else could barely keep themselves upright.

That's where America is today. A bunch of people who are just going to do whatever they want to do rather than smartly taking precautions and taking care of themselves and those around them. This is about pride and selfishness. This is about an inability to function as a responsible adult. This is about no valuing other human beings. Seems a bit over the top, but when you break it all down to fundamentals, all of this anti-masker bullshit and people who are putting their personal "liberty" before everyone else's are just demonstrating that they don't give a damn about the people around them. Ironic since it comes from this political ideology that claims that "all lives matter" and claims they are "pro life". Their action reflect their values, and their actions show that they don't value anyone but themselves.

Now, I'm not saying Black was a selfish asshole like the people I've just described. He went because he didn't want to get in trouble with his parent command, and he went out of a sense of duty, but he should have listened and stayed in the hotel. It was unfortunate what happened, but it makes for a good sea story, and it makes for a good lesson, I think. What you decide for yourself can affect other people. We live in a society of individuals negotiating a peaceful coexistence, and that requires everyone to be aware of everyone else and for us all to work together. But no one's liberty is more important that anyone else's. It seems a lot of unAmerican assholes out there have forgotten this.

[brightblueinky]

Long winded ramblings about a Bronycon video

So I’ve seen some hubbub about a YouTube essay going over the history of the Brony fandom up until the last Bronycon. (You can see it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fVOF2PiHnc ) I just got around to watching it today and I was...somewhat confused by some of the stronger negative takes I was seeing floating around Twitter, and I’ve been in a “fandom discourse” mood lately so, hey, I thought...why not talk about it. The first part of this was originally going to be a Twitter thread until I realized Twitter wasn’t going to let me keep going on the thread so I gave up and decided to put it here instead (lol) so it’s probably going to be a bit choppy since I was trying to keep it readable for that format.

So first of all, my background, so I can be completely honest about where I'm coming from and try not to portray what I'm saying as like...an end-all-be-all take here, because I don't wanna do that. I was never really an MLP fan. I watched the first season of FiM and really enjoyed it, but I didn't really engage with the fandom because by that point I'd gotten to where I didn't spend much time in huge fandoms. So I can't come at this from the perspective of an MLP fan. When I’m addressing the fandom here, I’m coming at it as an outsider in the sense that I am not a MLP fan/brony. What I AM going to do is come at this from the perspective of something of a "native" to fandom. I've always been a geek. I've engaged in online fandom in some form or another since I was about 8, which was in the mid 90s. I've been around the fandom block. Actually, I can even say that I used to lurk on 4chan a lot and I saw a lot of the early Brony discussions there. I also watch @JennyENicholson's videos, and yeah, there's been times where I've been bugged because we had a disagreement of opinions and felt like it was a little harsh. She's got a dry sense of humor and sometimes it's hard to read when she's joking and when she's being genuine. So like, I wasn't surprised when I saw some hubbub from some people online about her doing the video about Bronies. Not at all. But I gotta say...I am really surprised by some of the more INTENSE takes on the video after watching it?? The LARGE majority of the video is @JennyENicholson covering this fandom from an INSIDER'S perspective. She was an MLP fan before FiM, she was active enough in the fandom to be a BNF. A huge, huge amount of the video is positive and nostalgic. In fact I now wish I HAD been in the fandom! It seems like it was a lot of fun! The only thing I felt was maybe harsh in the video is I think she gave the impression that being "furry" is exclusively a sex thing, but by the end she talks about furries being a community that's a very inclusive, kind community with a lot of queer people, so even then I think if you're really paying attention to the whole video you're not going to come away with the idea that the furry community is bad. Just maybe could've had more nuance earlier in the video?  So from glancing through mentions of her in a Twitter search (which is definitely not going to be a perfect sample) from what I can tell there's like two things that people seem to be upset about with the video: 1, the idea that the fandom is "dead" and 2...just...Body Pillows. So let's talk about the dead fandom thing first. As I mention, I have been in fandom a long, long time. Although I (usually) shy away from big active fandoms now, I started off in bigger ones--Sonic, Pokemon, Digimon, LOTR, etc. The two fandoms I currently care about the most, though, are definitely fandoms that tend to be called "dead" and were never HUGE to begin with (Princess Tutu and Chrono Crusade). I think I can count on my hands the number of ppl who actively discuss or create fanwork for CC.   So I guess what I'm trying to say is, I've been on both sides of the coin here. And let me reassure Bronies: "Dead", while maybe too strong of a label for what it actually means, does not have to be a negative thing and you don't need to defend your fandom from it, IMO. I think the "dead" label simply means that interest in the fandom has cooled, the number of active participants is significantly down from the heydays of the fandom, etc. And I don't think that's an unfair label for brony fandom from what I know.   If there was a large scale replacement for Bronycon then maybe it'd be unfair, but...yeah, if you're losing your large hubs for the fandom community, if the flow of fanwork and discussion has slowed, I think "dead", as it's used, isn't an unfair label.   But again, I don't think this is a bad thing! I'd imagine that even the current state of the brony fandom is larger and more active than the Princess Tutu fandom at its greatest heights. It's a pretty relative term. It doesn't mean nobody cares, or that you can't still enjoy it! All the "dead" label really means is acknowledging the change in a fandom. It's not a bad thing. I might be 1 of ~30 writers for Chrono Crusade on AO3 but I still have fun writing fic and I still get hits and occasional positive comments. It's not bad. Just different. Okay so now let's talk about the body pillow thing and oh man, is this going to be a minefield, lol. Let's first talk about my personal lens I'm going to come at here... I've created NSFW fanwork. Some of it taboo. I'm also (somewhat) a part of the "proship" discourse on Twitter which is basically a community of people that push back against another community of "anti"-shippers who feel that some ships are problematic (because of character age, power dynamics, etc) and shouldn't be shipped. (I think that simplifies a lot of the discussion on both sides but it’ll do for the purpose of what I’m getting at here, I think.) At its worse this debate has lead death threats and suicide attempts. I have seen people get treated abusively for fanwork (sometimes NSFW but not always). (And I also want to add that while I think the major component of the pro-ship discussions on Twitter are anti-harassment, there’s been some ‘edgy’ types who think that it’s fun to harass antis with NSFW fanwork and the like and I want to make it clear that is ALSO ABUSIVE AND NOT OKAY.) Basically, I want to say I'm sympathetic to a knee jerk defensive reaction over NSFW fanart. Okay? I can get why people might want to push against criticism of stuff they enjoy/create, and that there’s an element of possibly being harassed for fanwork you create. But the thing is, I don't think this is really the attitude Jenny is taking in the video. She lightly mocks NSFW stuff and body pillows, but often describes it as "harmless" and "fine". The only time she's critical of it is when she notes that sometimes body pillows with suggestive poses could be on display at conventions where young kids were present--at a con celebrating a show MEANT for young kids--and that probably shouldn't have been allowed. She's not saying you can't buy a body pillow, or create one. She didn't even say that while discussing body pillows of characters who were 10! She expressed personal discomfort, but the only restriction she really suggested was "keep this out of the sight of minors." And I don't know why that would be a controversial take. I read lemons when I was younger so I'm not going to sit here and act like it's going to completely ruin kids lives or anything. But I ALSO think it's appropriate to have boundaries for sexual materials for kids (or anyone who doesn't want to engage for whatever reason). I want my stuff to be clearly labeled as NSFW, with tags being clear about the content, so people know what they're getting into. I’ve grown to care about this even more as I’ve gotten older. I don’t really want to know about minors reading my nsfw fanfic or anything. I’m not going to, like, parent them and shame them if they do, but I don’t want to engage with it, I want my stuff to be labeled, and I am DEFINITELY not going to put it on public display at a place where I know kids are allowed, ESPECIALLY not when it’s work based on stuff MEANT for children! I mean, I grew up in a fundamentalist Evangelical household and I will rant at you for hours about how damaging I feel that environment was, and that I don’t think kids and teens should be completely shielded from sex, etc. But that doesn’t mean that having boundaries in place is a bad idea, especially when minors are involved. I also think that boundaries are good just for the sake of consent, too? I’m not saying that someone accidentally seeing suggestive art is the same as them being raped, please don’t conflate it like that, but if people don’t want to see it for whatever reason they should be given the opportunity to make that choice as much as possible. The stuff that Jenny mentioned brony conventions would do (requiring stuff to be sold under the table, or having late night hours for the dealer’s room where 18+ merch could be displayed and sold) seem like really good policies and pretty similar to what I’ve seen at anime conventions I’ve attended (although occasionally some stuff that was maybe a biiit more suggestive than I’d be comfortable displaying in public...but hey, my local con allows kids but also makes it clear in their rules that it’s mostly geared for 13+ attendees and that it’s up to parents to decide what’s appropriate for their kids, and I think that’s fair). And yeah, I know, nothing that Jenny showed in the video being displayed at Bronycon was 100% explicit, just suggestive. She notes this in the video herself, saying that yeah, it doesn’t show genitalia, etc...and as I’m writing this I think I’ve maybe rambled too much about NSFW fanart when most of the stuff we’re talking about here is more “suggestive” than straight-up porn, since that’s probably muddying the waters a bit. But I gotta, gotta, GOTTA address the sentiment I saw multiple times on Twitter in response to her video: “Dakimakura/body pillows aren’t sexual and to say that is orientalist.” I...what? What the fuck? Okay, again, I’m going to make it perfectly clear what my background is here so that I’m not claiming to have some expertise that I don’t have: I am white. I am VERY white. My parents did the DNA test thing and the most “exotic” thing that came up is that my dad is 3% Spanish. Not latin american, I mean from Spain spanish. I am sooooo fucking white. I’ve studied a LITTLE of Japanese culture in college classes but that wasn’t even my field of study (Communication major on a Broadcasing track, minor in Theatre) so I’m not going to tell you I’m an expert on Japanese culture. I’m just a weeby geek that grew up in anime fandoms and never really stopped consuming Japanese pop culture. I have a very limited experience with Japanese culture. I am NOT an expert on what is and isn’t orientalist. I know I’m really hammering in this point here but I think it’s really, really important that I make it clear that I shouldn’t be used as an expert on this subject. But what I DO have a background in is someone who has engaged in Western fandom of stuff from Japan from a young age, I did spend a lot of time on 4chan, this is NOT the first time that I’ve seen some form of an “this isn’t sexual at all and you’re just a PERVERT” discussion about fanservice and...okay first of all, I highly doubt anyone saying this is any more qualified to define what is and isn’t orientalist than I am. I think this is bullshit and it feels like an attempt to make your opinions more legitimate by implying people that disagree with you are some form of bigot. (And look, I was a sheltered, insecure, stuck-up teenager in fandom, part of the reason I feel like I can recognize this is I totally pulled the same shit. I am not going to act like I have never tried to pull this and that I’m a pure innocent woke intellectual who’s never said something foolish, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to let it slide, either.)

While writing this I googled ‘dakimakura’ to make sure I was spelling it right and noticed that Wikipedia does note that the origins of this style of pillow are sometimes used by Japanese kids as something like a security blanket, which I’m guessing is where the justification for the argument is coming from, but let’s be intellectually honest here--body pillow covers being sold at a convention aren’t primarily meant to be a security blanket for kids. And, okay, maybe you have a body pillow cover with a character on it that isn’t exactly in a sexual pose, just laying fully clothed on what looks like a bedsheet background. But I don’t think it’s an unfair argument to say that even THEN it implies a sort of intimacy, right, possibly a desire for a romantic attachment? Like, sharing a bed with someone doesn’t have to be sexual or romantic, I used to share a bed with my brother in hotel rooms when we were kids, but I’m also not going to share a bed with my brother and then hug him closely to my body no matter how he’s posed or what he’s wearing??? And look, maybe a body pillow isn’t ALWAYS sexual but to say it’s NOT sexual, which kinda implies NEVER, is so disingenuous. The top result I got when I searched for “anime body pillow” is a shop that includes categories like “18+ body pillow” and “sexy body pillow” and also SELLS FAKE BREAST INSERTS FOR SOME OF THE PILLOWS SO YOU CAN SQUEEZE THEIR BOOBS (obviously, NSFW link: https://www.dakimakura.us/ ) Like, COME ON, I don’t think it’s orientalist to say that something is sexual when Japanese people are actually selling body pillows they label as 18+. The second result even has a second for pillows you can insert sex toys into. And yeah I saw the guy saying “masturbation isn’t sex!” and sir at BEST you have a very narrow and incorrect definition of sex as simply being intercourse and, again, at worst you’re just being straight up dishonest. In fact, I’ll straight up call myself out for this. There’s a fanart body pillow of a fictional character I’ve considered buying several times! (Not porn but still probably NSFW link: https://www.etsy.com/listing/701912275/dakimakura-hypnosismic-doppo?ga_order=most_relevant&ga_search_type=all&ga_view_type=gallery&ga_search_query=hypnosis+mic&ref=sr_gallery-1-4&organic_search_click=1 ) Is this porn? No. You can’t see much. But on one side of the pillow he’s got his shirt untucked, you can see a bit of his stomach, and his fly is undone and you can see the band of his underwear peeking out. This is sexual. I’m not wanting it to like, get off on it, exactly...honestly it’s maybe a bit ironic, and a lot of wanting a body pillow in general is I like sleeping hugging onto something but I have a different sleep schedule from my husband I find him too big to hold all night and too warm in the summer anyway. But I’m not going to tell you that me wanting this PARTICULAR pillow case isn’t at all sexual, I know what I’m doing, I like the character and think the drawing is hot. I’m not saying don’t buy body pillows, okay? I’m not saying don’t sell them. I don’t think Jenny is either (she literally OWNS ONE that she shows in the video!!!). But don’t act like there isn’t ever anything sexual about it existing to try to defend their existence, okay? You don’t need to be a fucking coward about it, and you especially don’t need to say it’s racist if people call out something as being suggestive when, well, it fucking is. And I think it’s totally 100% reasonable for someone to say “hey I don’t think it’s a good idea to display suggestive art around kids, especially if it’s depicting young characters.” TL;DR -- Chill, guys. CHILL. Your fandom is getting smaller and the term people use for this is “dead” but that’s not a bad thing, you’ve still got the fandom, you can still enjoy it, there’s definitely no need to take personal offense over it. And enjoy your body pillows, but don’t be disingenuous about the fact that they can be suggestive and try to act like anyone that calls it such is racist, that is such bullshit. Like what you like, other people’s opinions of it is not automatically a personal attack on you, there’s no need to jump to being defensive every time someone says something vaguely negative about it. Chill, fandom friends. Fandom ain’t bad but it also doesn’t need to be the center of your identity and you don’t need to lash out against people for daring to have opinions about a thing you like. You especially don’t need to act like other people are perverts for noting something being suggestive. Chiiiiiiiiiill.

[obeymematches]

Hi! I hope you don’t mind if I ask for a matchup. Just don’t push yourself, okay? You seem to have a lot to handle. I’ll try not to overload you with too much, but I apologize ahead of time if I write a whole book or get too personal. I just wanted to make sure I added a good chunk for a good comparison! I’ll try not to get too into it, though. Sorry again if I put too much!

Basics : I’m a 5’6, 19 y/o, chubby/curvy female who is a bit of an anti-social shut-in. I come across as very shy, quiet to the point of how I usually never say a word otherwise unless I’m asked a question, though can also be seen as ‘lazy’ and someone who is too addicted to technology. I’m also rarely affectionate, though not against being given affection as long as I’m asked. I’m not a touchy feely person.

Layer 1 (Flaws, problems, etc) : My behavior stems from social anxiety and from bullying experiences that have traumatized me growing up, as I had to deal with it up until maybe a year ago. Some of it was from my own family, and some from the school. I ended up with a fear of expressing myself to strangers, especially around boys. I found my way of coping was to dive into video games and anime, alongside art. Outside of this, I’m a mess. I usually suffer from many health problems (that I don’t feel comfortable sharing, but can mention it makes my efforts to find a way to get comfortable in my body with a new Workout routine very difficult) due to my body being extremely weak. It has been ever since conditions related to my birth, and my medications Needed to keep me around cause me to be big boned. I’m physically strong enough to fight for myself if I needed to, but when it comes to illness and the like, I’m the loser here. I also have a hard time keeping eye contact. I also tend to apologize a lot for everything. I can’t handle crowds, or I’ll likely pass out after a while. My body is hard to take care of despite my best efforts. However, I do have sensitive ears and tend to be jumpy when someone raises their voice. It’s not too difficult to scare me, which in the past is what usually managed to convince me to go along with things like the bullying. To this day I still can’t handle being yelled at, since I also tend to yell at myself later for messing up for whatever caused someone to yell at me. I’m extremely hard on myself. I also tend to take things to heart. My ‘laziness’ also is because I have my own fight with depression to deal with that adds a factor into this too. Consider it a double edged sword, but despite that I tend to destroy myself trying to put others first before me.

Layer 2 (Opening up) : if I do open up to someone, I’m more prone to have my ‘quirks’ show, such as bouncing in place when I’m excited. I occasionally ramble about my interests (and apologize after). I may not be the best at showing how I care, but I try to do the best I can with what little skills I have. But I do become a bit more social with a person the more I know them. However, it doesn’t change that one might have to message/approach me first, since at times it takes me ages to send a message for fear I’m bothering someone. I’ll be more willing to head out with someone if I’m closer to them, though I’m still insecure about my appearance.

Layer 3 (Pro’s?) : I’m not against trying new things, within reason. I’m not difficult to please. I would be fine sitting in a room watching critical role for the next 10 hours with someone just being quiet and consider that a bonding moment. I don’t mind over the top, but I don’t usually favor it due to my insecurities telling me that this wasn’t deserved. (Not that it isn’t appreciated, but it’s hard to fight ones inner demons, ya know what I mean?) From what my few friends say, however, they would trust me to be a leader to my friend group should the need arise, and I’m usually serious, mature, calm and collected. That doesn’t mean I don’t have my own sense of humor (usually dark humor, with the occasional laugh from a joke I didn’t expect to hear). Due to a bit of my background, I know a lot on self defense due to being in a former military family (All retired) who thought I should know how to fight due to how the world can be. This is also why I’m usually trusted to make decisions for my friend group, even if it’s in games where survival is key. I’m usually the last one standing, while being cautious enough. I also can be a hard worker when I can put my mind to it- reading a whole manga series in one day or finishing an anime? Finishing art? You name it. Though a double edged sword trait I know I have (Since it can be both a blessing and a curse) is my perfectionism. Everything has to be perfect. The decorations? Yes. Everything has to match? Yes. I have to make the most detailed building in Minecraft? On it. My fashion sense also plays a part in this too, as I try to make it work with my task too. (I can tend to overdo it and sometimes don’t give myself breaks when I’m in this mood though.) I’m usually good on saving money, and I try to see the best in people despite my experiences. I’m not easily persuaded by looks, as I usually don’t care for them much. I am a creative person as someone who strives to be good at art, but also as someone related to a medic, I also have been learning what to do when the need arises for someone to need a medic. I can be motherly at points, considering some of my other friends to be like my kids. I fret over them constantly. There are times where the tables end up turned. I love acquiring new knowledge that’s something I’m not used to. Oh, you’re a witch? Cool I’m a (religion I’m not sharing due to it being a touchy subject to most). Can you tell me all about it? I’m really curious.

Layer 4 (Hobbies and everything else?) : I do like swimming, drawing, creating characters for my own stories (as a dungeon master in dnd), reading (mostly manga), collecting gemstones and anime merch, playing video games, and cooking on occasion. I also love my pets (currently a rabbit and a puppy) and enjoy cuddling with them. Despite finding cats to be cute, I happen to be allergic to them (as in my skin will break out mostly- it’s not severe but annoying nonetheless). I also have a fear of bugs. Despite only losing myself maybe 3 times in my whole life, I do have a nasty temper if someone gets on my nerves too much. I usually end up punished for it, hence my bottling up of emotions. So otherwise, it’s hard to get me truly angry to the point of where I’m raising my voice unless someone crosses a line. I’m slowly learning to speak up for myself more.

Alright, that’s the end! Again, I’m so sorry if this is too much information! I have never done one of these before. ^w^’

------

Hi!!!!

I put a keep reading button because it’s a long text and sometimes it gets very personal, so yeah

Sorry for the wait, and I hope you like the result!

Tbh I was thinking and I had several ideas while reading it, for example I can see you with Levi and maybe Belphie. I decided to go with Levi. Your sense of humour is a good match with Belphie but he can be so sassy and can have such an attitude that I think Levi works better, as you said you tend to take things to heart. I know you said it’s hard to actually upset you but I think Levi occassionally calling you a normie is so much less stressing than Belphie and I think you really deserve someone who doesn’t give you a hard time. (No offense to Belphie hes cool and as a friends thats alright but yeah)

So I think Levi is good with someone who’s not too affectionate, like he can get so flustered, it’s easier for him with someone like you!

He also has a quite severe social anxiety so he really gets you when you say you’d rather stay at home than go to a convention or party.

My hyphothesis is that he has online classes because of that. Like I don’t think he was bullied, he really just can’t stand being around people that much

He is also accepted in his family, like everybody is chill with him being an otaku. (I guess sometimes he gets teased but it’s mostly just him talking down on himself) So the point is that at home he can be himself! I think he would reassure you that liking what you like is totally fine.

At first he will 100% call you a normie until you prove yourself otherwise but that shouldn’t really be an issue - especially if you open up to him about it. I think he is the best candidate to understand your feelings. Not just “oh that sucks babe, iloveyou” but like really get you, you know what I mean. Even if he is not always great at expressing himself, you’d just know he means well.

I think he would also accept you the way you are. Of course your well-being is going to concern him sometimes but he knows you can take care of yourelf. Although if you need help he will do whatever you need. He can be pretty determined when it comes to something/someone he loves

I think he would be very surprised by the fact that you are physically strong in a good way! Like wow babe you can really do that...🥺

He would definitely see a part of himself in you and he would make sure to remind you that you don’t have to apologize for everything you do. Even if he does so himself, that doesn’t mean that you have to be insecure like him! 😠

He’s not really the one to shout at you since you can probably accept him, and he can accept you even if at first he thinks you a boring normie

I think after you two actually spend time together and open up and really get to know the other he will see that you are soo hard on yourself because of your past and he will definitely try his best to cheer you up and have you loosen a bit.

Or if you’re not into that then he can just listen. If you don’t want to talk he can play multiplayer games with you or watch anime, etc, anything to make you feel better!!!!

I think he is also more likely to get into DnD than Belphie, thats also a reason why I decided that Levi is better. I’m personally not into it so I don’t know for sure but if you have an anime/Japan related game/story then you don’t have to say no more, he’s in a 100%!!!

After that he will probably try like...less otaku-friendly DnD games/stories! Just be patient with him. He will learn all the rules and read all the books to a T but actually speaking in front of a group of people he doesn’t know won’t be so easy!!!! 🥺  

After that he will probably convince his brothers to play too and now you have DnD night with the bros, yay! (i let you imagine how the details go!!)

I think he would approach you first with his anime-related topics and I think you could probably answer him! And that would be the beginning of a beautiful friendship!

He can also ramble about the things he likes and he would make sure that after a while you don’t apologize for talking about things you like! He probably likes something similar too, so he could suggest some things!

He said he prefers someone who he can be in the same room with and not really interact that much actually? so like you watching critical role while he watches anime is a good way to spend time!! stay at home dates are dates too!

Hmmmm i think he would definitely like to play a survival multiplayer with you, so be prepared!!!!!!

Hm I think he would take your fashion related suggestions for him, even if he himself isn’t a perfectionist. But I mean if you look at his room he is pretty organized and not too messy, so that’s a bonus I think.

I think he is a good match because you can balance out his reckless money spending tendencies! Not sure if it’s possible to change that completely about him, but at least one of you is responsible with money, so thats a good enough!

Hm I think he could talk a lot about being a demon with you, so thats really nice that you’re interested in his culture! I don’t think he has ever considered that as anything special, but now is the time!

It’s good that you can’t have a kitty because he has a fish and that wouldn’t really be a good combination now, would it?

I think he relly appreciated a responsible and caring partner like you, because he really needs all the extra care he can get to boost his confidence! He is usually rather child-like, so that is also probably a bonus!

Conclusion; definitely he is the one to initiate first interaction, but it’s probably just looking at the other for a while until he gains enough confidence to actually talk to you. This is a very accepting relationship with lots of caring and confidence boosting involved on both sides! Theres also this deeper understanding due to insecurities and social anxiety. I think after a couple years in the relationship both of you change in a good way as you are very mindful of the other’s insecurities. Definitely not a lot of arguing going on, he is a very loyal and caring partner once you earn his trust, so zero lines crossed! Dates are mostly at home, but thats cool! You are the more responsible one while he can be kind of reckless with his impulses, but that just leads to a good balance and he knows he should respect your advice regarding impule buyig stuff for example.

[cartoonessays]

OFF-TOPIC: All the Rage

Dave Chappelle has just released his latest stand-up special on Netflix, Sticks & Stones.  This stand-up special comes after four other comedy specials that have been beleaguered with criticism over Chappelle’s material about the LGBTQ+ community, particularly transgender people, and about the women who accused Louis CK of sexual misconduct.  And Sticks & Stones has attracted just as much controversy as any of Chappelle’s other Netflix specials if not more.

And that’s by design.

The special opens up with this quote from Kendrick Lamar’s “DNA”

Tell me somethin’ / You mothafuckas can’t tell me nothin’ / I’d rather die than to listen to you…

In Sticks & Stones, Dave Chappelle sets himself up as some kind of defiant martyr fighting the good fight against so-called “cancel culture” or any moral busybodies who get offended by any jokes he or any of his other comedian friends might have told at any point.  Many of those who express praise and enthusiasm towards Sticks & Stones defend it on similar grounds, writing off any criticism of it as people being “too sensitive”, “offended”, and “trying to cancel Dave Chappelle”.

Enough dancing around the subject.  I found the special really tired and juvenile.  What he’s doing here is thumbing his nose at any critic who had dared to take issue with anything he has said in his prior Netflix special in a way that eschews the thoughtfulness that Chappelle is capable of for petulance.  That might have been okay if it was funny regardless, but I didn’t think it was.  A better version of what Chappelle tried to do here was more than 30 years ago, in Eddie Murphy: Raw.  Eddie Murphy opened up this special complaining about criticism he got for his last special from Mr. T, Michael Jackson, and the gay community with much funnier jokes.  The crescendo of this bit was his brilliant story of Bill Cosby calling him on the phone to browbeat him about his foul language.

A bunch of the critics praising Sticks & Stones are calling it revelatory and a breath of fresh air in this moment of time.  Really?  All this is is Chappelle’s version of “PC gone mad” in response to criticism, which is not a novel concept.  Carlos Mencia’s whole shtick 15 years ago was to crack jokes using racial stereotypes and then spend the next ten minutes guilt tripping the audience into laughing by expressing faux-martyrdom aggrievement over “political correctness” or “sensitivity”.  This is as cliche a comedy staple as “take my wife, please”.  Other comedians who have gone this exact same angle include Jerry Seinfeld, Roseanne Barr, Larry the Cable Guy, Ricky Gervais, Bill Maher, Chris Rock, Andrew Dice Clay, Lil Duval, Jim Norton, Patrice O’Neal, Nick DaPaolo, Joe Rogan, Doug Stanhope, Rob Schneider, Lisa Lampanelli, Eddie Griffin, John Cleese, George Carlin, Aziz Ansari, Sarah Silverman, DL Hughley, Tracy Morgan, Adam Carolla, Amy Schumer, Tim Allen, Aries Spears, Russell Peters, Redd Foxx, Dennis Miller, Mike Epps, Patton Oswalt, Jeff Dunham, Sam Kinison, and Louis CK just to name a few.

Despite this being a cliche, I think taking the angle Dave Chappelle took here is more expedient for himself than ever.  A part of the reason is because our society has become more politically polarizing than ever.  A lot of the discourse around Sticks & Stones falls along politically partisan lines (yes, I know that includes myself too).  Most of the people defending Dave Chappelle so ardently are right-wing pundits/publications like Breitbart, Dana Loesch, and Gavin McInnes and most of the people criticizing Chappelle are liberal/pro-LGBTQ+ publications.  Chappelle and his defenders are using this special as a denouncing of “cancel culture”.  I hate that term and I hate the framing around it even more because it’s so vaguely defined other than the fact that it’s nakedly partisan.  The screeds against “cancel culture” are not so subtle digs at the left and reinforce a narrative that the left wants to censor everything and that the right are the true defenders of free speech and free expression.  It’s weird that the “cancel culture” designation never applies when the right-wing gets upset about Nike, Gillette, or Keurig coffee makers.

I think a better name for all of this is “outrage culture” and it’s nonpartisan.  So much of our public discourse is handled on social media, particularly Twitter, that rewards shorter and more attention-grabbing hot takes over lengthy, nuanced analysis.  And one of the easiest ways to grab attention is by being outrageous or inflammatory.  In response, online publications of all political stripes write their headlines in inflammatory ways that grab attention in order to be shared on social media.  Even if the actual article has more nuance to it, most people don’t read past the splashy headline anyway.  In regards to politics, it has further defined people, whatever their personal views may be, in reaction to what they aren’t or what they disagree with.  It’s partially why so many people have blamed things like the 2016 Ghostbusters film or Star Wars: The Last Jedi as the reason they voted for Trump or why they’ll vote for Trump again.  It’s also why so many of the people praising Sticks & Stones so zealously have attempted to use it as a rallying cry for Trump and Trumpism.  This also goes for any liberals who expressed a desire to buy Nikes or Gillette razors after the right-wing meltdown over them.

Sticks & Stones was a rallying cry to anybody that has defined themselves or their politics to being anti-politically correct (which isn’t only right-wingers, but largely encompasses right-wingers) to look to Dave Chappelle as a hero to wrap themselves around.  I felt the same way about Louis CK’s stand-up “comeback” where he mocked school shooting survivors, millenials, and non-binary kids.  CK was hugely popular on college campuses and liberal crowds despite never being “politically correct”.  He was also often very thoughtful in the way he towed that fine line when tackling touchy subjects.  But in light of his sexual misconduct scandal, he must have figured that he permanently burned a bridge with that crowd so he pivoted to a crowd that doesn’t care that he sexually harassed multiple women.  This same crowd also tends not to think too highly of the Parkland shooting survivors for their gun control activism or trans and non-binary people.

The thing is, Dave Chappelle and Louis CK don’t give a damn about any of these right-wingers or their pro-Trump causes.  They’re just looking out for number one.  Breitbart wouldn’t write fawning articles about Chappelle if the focus was on him expressing discomfort over a white person’s laughter over a blackface sketch he was doing on his show.  They wouldn’t rally around Louis CK either if he was still telling jokes expressing confusion as to why women would want to date men based off violence against women statistics.  Conversely, Nike and Gillette don’t actually give a damn about putting an end to police brutality or toxic masculinity.  If they were to discover that they could make more money off of using “Blue Lives Matter” sentiment or objectifying women, they would do it in a heartbeat.  This is all this whole shit is.

I suppose that’s ultimately the joke in all of this.  I don’t find it very funny, but I suppose I’m just too sensitive, right?

[fulltimereviewer]

Top 50 Best Transformers Fanfiction Stories 2020

Best Transformers Fanfiction Updates That You Must Read

Since Childhood, I am watching transformers and looking forward to becoming a transformer one day, Grew up by Reading Transformers Fanfiction Stories and was always amazed by the fictions that used to pop out from such inspiring Fanfiction Lovers. Also liking the Transformer Fanfiction Crossover a lot.

If I Start Giving my Opinions about Transformers Fanfiction Lemon and Transformers Crossover fanfiction, I don't think so that I won't end the topic of Transformers Fanfiction Stories even in 24 hours. Lukas Schimik Agreed ! Don't know why everybody hates it, I think it's still my number 1 TF movie! Optimus new look, Lockdown & Galvatron, KsI (bots), Dinobots, cast ( HATED this Sam & Mikeala ) and the TF/human conflict. Still love it. Miguel GC Gamer Age of Extinction is the only film that entertains that I don't skip any parts of the movie and I like all the characters in this film and the transformers designs are great, dino bots are Awsome. Vincent H well....bad taste is also bad taste at the end of the day. I know you younger kids think that everyone is supposed to have an opinion and everything is subjective blah blah blah but if you're a cinephile than the Transformers are objectively bad films. They are cynical cash grabs made to make money in China. Bay and the producers have said as much. I mean you can like whatever you want. If you wanna listen to Teletubbies soundtrack all day that's your right....but that does mean you have shitty taste. It's okay. Not everyone has good taste. urtpro 2 I'm not hating I'm genuinely curious. I certainly like it more than Last Knight but barely lol. I'm curious the reasons why AOE fans consider it one of the better Transformers movies. I will say it was nice to switch up the protagonist and all that since Sam Witwicky had worn out his welcome by the third film. And the actress who played Wahlberg's daughter was smoking hot, so that was a plus too. Oliver Parker I thought the premise of the world hating and hunting the Transformers(regardless of Faction), cuz of what happened in Chicago(in DOTM), was kool, MW was a refreshing Main Hero over Shia tbh, and Lockdown was Badass! Honestly kinda just laughed off the whole Romeo and Juliette law thing as being just a bad movie joke! I’m mean honestly I know there’s no such law, and as such it didn’t really bother me! Just rather thought it was somewhat silly! Yann Labeille Well Lockdown was a pretty good villain for once in the movies. However Galvatron went nowhere after this. Anthony That isn't true. I saw Bumblebee yesterday and I find it Like watching E.T., the movie is just on Charlie, not really much on Bee. The only g1 part is the first 5 minutes of the movie. Too much 80s references. Sometimes is even boring for me. It Was a cute movie but absolutely not my favourite. I still prefere the first one. Aron T-900 I'd rather get vibes from ET and Iron Giant instead of witnessing stupid humor, unnecessary hot shots, dogs humping each other, unrealistic explosions, parents acting like they belong in a cartoon, patriotism and confusing slo-mo action sequences. Cam Rich I preferred the first and third ones as they have so much more action in them making the films actually entertaining, when most of bumblebee is almost like a compilation of ‘cute’ little clips of bumblebee and that annoying girl taking up almost the entirety of the movie. Max Ramirez Personally prefer the 2007 movie because it's just overall more entertaining to me. Also, you can pretty much tell Bumblebee was a movie that was directed towards kids so 2007 wins for me So Sit back and enjoy reading my favorite transformers fanfiction lemon and Transformers fanfiction Crossovers Collection. That I have collected for you guys. I Hope You Guys liked our collection of the best transformers fanfiction stories and updates that we have presented above for all fanfiction lovers out here. Transformers Fanfiction Crossover Stories 2020(Updated) Transformers is America based  Franchise that was first seen in the 1980s globally. So the first five transformers Films was directed by Michael Bay. I really believe that this was the boost up for the Transformers Fanfiction Crossover stories that I really liked about among the whole and sole of the transformers fanfiction stories including the lemon version of the franchise. Minaya Rojas Tony: We have a Hulk! Optimus: We have a Grimlock! Porg King VII Bee is here what would Optimus want with that what would he take her hostage IT SOUNDS LIKE HE HAS BEEN BRAIN WASHED BY DESEPTAGONS Siidimus Prime! Except they transform their aliens they have Real blasters Different Voices blood Etc. arfhanisbest The interesting thing is that transformers would actually make for good marvel villains. dave tasca The original transformers comics were made by marvel and marvel had to do with the original transformers tv show so they really should try to get the rights back jovinprime Poop soc This would've been more awesome if gi joe, rom the spaceknight, M.A.S.K., micronauts and the other properties interfere with the whole marvel universe and the transformers both. That would be, not only a big, giant, massive crossover event, but a... gigantic, space-involving, multiversal collusion as well Darkknight329 yes megatron hack the armor with Soundwave and turn it off then they all just step on them but they will throw hulk to cybertron and leave him to the toxic oxygen Dr. Nobody Celz On they are robots what is a snap gonna do I know buckys arm was turned to dust but still they have weapons that can make thanos cheese agnas yes because they’re alive. They go to the allspark when they die, they are alive just like us, just made of metal. Bee is here Tony: We have thanos Optimus: We have your mom Tony:0_0 ok you win now give me my mom Hoping that you guys liked our collection of the topmost fanfics about the transformers fanfiction crossover flavors that we have published above this. 

Transformers Fanfiction Lemon Version 2020 Funny Part of the Franchise is that the transformer's movies, on one hand, was loved by the fans and on the other hand there were critics about the direction "Worst Director of all Time". Still, there are some dirty minded people who are always in search of the Transformers Fanfiction Lemon and some people also call it Transformers lemon Fanfiction. Night light I really want to be apart of one of micheal bays movie of transformers Flo Parsons see this is why I love transformers, because the actors ACTUALLY seem like they are having fun, and they are such fun films to watch obert Delgad Even though the movie sequels are not that great, but you have to give Michael Bay a lot of Credit for what he does. fake lol Bay is a genius I mean, I wouldn't be able to figure out the scale of you know the explosions Like the layout nig*a LOL, lol or as you typed if, Lol: an acronym for laugh(ing) out loud or lots of laughs, some say it is Lots of love, is a popular element of Internet slang. It was first used almost exclusively on Usenet, but has since become widespread in other forms of computer-mediated communication and even face-to-face communication. Alex Bruh Bumblebee knows how to pick up ladies more than Sam 😂 lala I remember being a kid and having the biggest crush for Megan. Good lord she was so hot Michael ceasar Back than I thought Sam was looking at her belly and so was I saying "Hot belly I guess." hotman 280 Michael Bay while directing: Yeah Megan arch your back, perfect perfect. Get a good shot of her sweat glistening tanned bronze body. Yeah just like that. chief ada Yeah right. That engine is a big block. Fuel injected side draft 8 barrel carburetors. Hell even the headers are up and over side mount. And the damn engine is worth more then the car. As he only paid $4500.00 That damn engine alone cost $20,000.00! Leave the critics aside all I want to know is: How did you people find our transformers fanfiction lemon version? comment down below if you guys liked this collection on some of the best lemon flavors of transformers fanfiction stories. Transformers fanfiction Bumblebee Stories Updated The best part of the Transformers franchise is that bumblebee is the only character that got most of the positive reviews. This can be a reason that people Love Transformers Fanfiction Bumblebee Version a lot. No worries because we have provided some of the best Bumblebee fanfiction stories that you will enjoy reading. Master Yoda "Wasp", "Stinger" or "Hornet" would be appropriate Decepticon sounding names as "Bumble Bee" sounds too friendly. ron 1j2j barricade is a ford mustang and bee is a Chevrolet camero trust me they will not be friends pro gmer yes i do lol they killed ironhide and ratchet and jazz and sideswipe is already missing dnt know if hes alive but hes my favorite hari bhaskar I'm Bumblebee was a Decepticon he'd be dead like the other Decepticons, because boi they sure kill Decepticons like it's nothing. mighty raju Blackout had skills. Shockwave had skills. The Fallen had skills. Yet they all died like they're nothing. Why? Cause they're Decepticons lol. It's simple rlly, they kill off Decepticons like they're nothing that's just how it is lol. habob What about “what if sentinel prime didn’t betray the autobots” I think age of extinction and beyond wouldn’t have happened since sentinel basically destroyed N.E.S.T. And also Rachet and Ironhide wouldn’t have died so the Autobots would have had a great advantage, and then Sam would still be with the autobots since he disappears after DOTMBasically, I’m saying that the Transformers franchise would have dramatically changed if Sentinel didn’t betray the Autobots. ShyGuy 15 In the movies, technically Megatron is an anti-hero. The first movie makes an acception bc he was using the allspark for pure evil, also in Aoe no reason told us what he was trying to accomplish other than detonating the seed. So 2, 3, and 5, he has reasons to his doing Rotf: using the pyramid to kill the sun and repopulate cybertron. Dotm: rebuild cybertron. TLK: kill unicron using cybertron. This is all in my own mind, not sure if anyone else agrees with me Simon Tyson I forget what it was called, but there was a comic book series where Megatron was an Autobot. It basically swapped all the characters so that Optimus, Bumblebee, Iron Hide, etc. were bad guys. Megatron, Starscream, etc. were good guys Dank Starscream If Bayformer Megatron's history is similar to the IDW comics Megatron's history...then that would mean the Autobot government was not all that good, and would be directly responsible for why Megatron turned out the way he did. Because he was a slave to their functionalist system of control, and he would have remained a slave worker miner if he didn't rise up from the lifestyle forced on him and formed the Decepticon faction... Though it seems to me that if this were the case, Bayformers Megatron would still have become a gladiator before forming the Decepticons...and then eventually he found his way into more of the politics of Cybertron after one day meeting with Optimus Prime (Orion Pax at the time) and then they became brothers/friends. In that sense...it would be similar to how the history of the two were from the show TF Prime. They could still keep the part with the whole Optimus being a knight too, somehow... So in short...Megatron really did not start out as a bad guy at all, it was the way in which he reacted to everything that made him turn out a 'bad guy'. She-Venom What if Megatron is a good guy in the movies? Simple answer is right here becuse Optimus accepted become a Prime if he didnt accept Optimus and Megatron wouldnt fight each other and best brothers it was Optimus fault he started the war i think Megatron is a good guy Hoping that you guys liked our collection of the topmost fanfics about the transformers fanfiction crossover flavors that we have published above this. People Love Bumblebee! i love him/her because bumblebee is cool, let me know why do you love Bumblebee and more importantly why do you guys love Transformers fanfiction on Bumblebee. Transformers Fanfiction OC Version  Earning a total amount of $4.3 Billion, transformers became the 13th highest-grossing film series in the world. The Transformers Fanfiction Fans Should be happy to know that the Transformers franchise grossed a total of $1 Billion each from two superhit blockbuster movies. Comment Down the names of those movies if you know them. Jack R I think the first one was more epic just cause the fight scenes were cool and it was the first time we saw something like that. But the writing and characters were absolutely horrific. Bumblebee had much better writing and characters especially the character relationship between Bumblebee and the girl which is much better than the relationship between Sam and bumblebee. Dotm Shockwave Yeah I dont know how he put tlk over revenge and extinction. The last knight is incredibly boring and the only remaining aspect left to enjoy (the action) is incredibly dull in it compared to all the other films. There are no good fight scenes. Which is likely why it bombed so hard Ur mom Gai Ok imo the last knight is my fave AND I ONLY like TF5 is cuz bumblebee new form looks good as hell and Optimus prime vs bumblebee AND there is explosions. EVERYWHERE Boss  I definitely didn't think it was my favorite. It depends on what you are looking for in a movie. If you like character relationships and a girl and her problems trying to find her way, then you'll like it. If you like transformers actions and interactions, you may not like it as much. Even though the Bay movie didn't focus enough on the transformers, this one did even less The Burden of Bordem I'm a decepticon fan and none of the main decepticons were even given a name in the movie. They were just there to be bad. The Burden of Bordem For me I think this film would have worked much better if they just had Starscream as the main villain, and maybe Barricade hunting bumblebee and give them a more personal relation ship as enemies. But like I said, it end up being a movie about a girl and her relation ship with Bumblebee and enemies getting in their way. bandwon he main character is more fleshed out than the others, Bumblebee I guess is as well, but he can't talk so it isn't by much, the story is standard E.T./Iron Giant, the acting is fine, the directing is probably better than the others, the action is good when it happens, but there is far less than the others, and non of the action reached the peak of the Bay movies. and if it wasn't for the fact there were transformers in it I probably wouldn't have really liked it, but it's enough to get you invested and entertained imo. luke jack You really think anyone's gonna take you serious after you typed "Bumble" Haha the 2007 film and DotM were pretty decent films and satisfying in the end. lisa Speaking as a male, it always annoys me, as a child, that certain plot-line of every terribly written sci-fi (mainly Transformers): "main character is a dick=likable guy" "he has 'relatable' problems, that are only explored in the first 15 minutes of the film" "He start having an abusive/creepy relationship (because that's how well written romance works, right...), with the love interest (they barely explore her name)." "1+ hour action scenes" "world is gonna explode (not really)" "Main Character and Love Interest hook up". People always call me "a pussy", because i want equal rights, and then they go make a video about "how everything is now pandering to women, and everything is Woke"... By your perfect logic... most movies are "pandering to males, and straight people only" imo  not like super duper mad, but kinda upset. It was actually kinda funny. But dude, I love what you said about Man of Steel in your DC ranking video. I love that you love Man of Steel. Not many do, and it's seriously awesome! IMO I hope You Guys Like our Collection of the best Transformers fanfiction stories along with transformers fanfiction lemon and transformers fanfiction crossover collection. We know that people will like the Transformers Crossover fanfiction and transformers fanfiction bumblebee version stories.  If you like These Transformers Fanfiction Stories make sure you share this on various social media, and you can also give credits to our website. Thank You  Also, read  Star Wars fanfiction Updates 2020 Read the full article

[prorevenge]

Insult people with mental health issues? Oh, honey...

Not sure if this is pro or petty revenge, but I'll post it here, seems more appropriate.

I will include a TL;DR at the bottom.

First, some quick backstory:

I go to public high school and I generally get along very well with most of my teachers, except for one, let's call her Mrs. F. At first, Mrs. F was chill, but eventually she began to chew out our class and our generation, talking about how we were always on our phones and we were all lazy bums who are going to get nowhere in life. I resented this, but whatever, I put up with it.

The incident:

One day she escalated her rants when, during class, me and a guy found that that a fellow friend's mother had committed suicide. I wasn't too close with either of them, but the news rattled me nonetheless, as I had met and talked with the mother in a number of occasions. I was quietly crying in class, doing my best to not cause as scene, but the other guy who knew the kid was really close friends with him, and he had to leave the class because he couldn't stop crying. He eventually came back and Mrs. F launched into a tirade, denouncing those that took their own lives as "selfish" "unnatural" and "extremely messed up." She basically said "how dare they" and chewed out the deceased mother, in front of both me and the guy who were both crying at this loss. Eventually the guy left to see the counselor because he couldn't put up with this, but I stayed since I didn't know what to do. I made the mistake of expressing my disagreement and highlighted that the mother was a victim in this situation just as much as the people around her. At this point, I should mention that I myself have gone through dark times and have considered suicide before, so this was all affecting me personally as well as emotionally. I asked for her to be sensitive and understand that this was not the conversation we needed to be having at the moment. She said that suicide was preventable and that those that did it were cowards and the people around them were also to blame for not noticing or doing enough. I was pissed. I tried to defend my point but she lost it, screaming at me about how I "had an attitude problem" and how I was inappropriate and I was just trying to be a rebel and look edgy and cool. She chewed me out for speaking out, and proceeded to insult me in front of the class. It has hurtful and humiliating. She claimed that I always interrupted her (which I never had) and that I should shut my mouth and not speak about things I din't know about.

She ranted to other classes about me (WTF?) and called my parents to talk to them about how I was misbehaving in class. Luckily, I had already told them about the incident so the were more mad at her than me, but still, why you gotta try to do me like that? She also talked to the assistant principal and got me a detention. Yep, a DETENTION for asking her to be more sensitive. IDK what she told the assistant principal, but I had to serve it out. I'm a junior and I'm already talking to some colleges. My record has been clean so far and I was afraid this would fuck up my chances of getting into my dream college.

So, it's safe to say I was royally pissed at this point.

I stopped participating in her classes (and since the rest of the kids in my class are all senior who don't give a shit, this made class extremely frustrating for her). I'm (surprisingly) popular in my grade-- we're all nerds-- so I made sure everyone knew my side of the story, meaning she got ample hostility from most of her junior classes, but that wasn't enough for me. This bitch had hurt my feelings and chances of getting into college. I wasn't going to let her off the hook like that.

In comes my petty ass revenge:

Like I mentioned before, I'm close with all of my teachers and they all love me, so I played the poor hurt child card and talked to them about how much of a bitch Mrs. F had been to me and how afraid and hurt i was. Word spread through the teacher grape vine and nearly every teacher in the school hates Mrs. F now.

But that was only the beginning.

I talked to my counselor about how afraid I was the detention would scare off colleges. I told her the full story and she was livid. She talked to the assistant principal who talked to the principal. I heard this part from one of my closest teachers, but apparently the principal had a meeting with her about the whole thing. From what my teacher told me (she's close with the principal) the principal told Mrs. F that what she did was insensitive and a borderline fireable offense (me and the kid had just been informed of a loss and were dealing with grief, what she said and did clearly affected us and our mental health). He chewed her our for chewing me out, and made it clear she was on thin ice.

But I STILL wasn't done.

I went to the principal (Mr. M) and very politely told him I was worried about the current tone of the conversation regarding suicide in our school. Two years ago, we had one of the students in my sister's grade commit suicide by jumping off the balcony of a public mall. I brought this up and talked about how depression and anxiety were rampant in our school (we are teenagers, of course they are and I wasn't making any of this up). I help run a club in our school called the Anti-Defamation League and each month we have students present sensitive topics to classes all over the school. Incidentally ;), I had chosen to make the next month's topic mental health and the stigma against it. I told him I was especially cornered regarding Mrs. F's attitude to this subject and requested he make this presentation mandatory to her classes (normally we let teachers volunteer their class periods if they want us to present). Mr. M looked at me for a second and asked me for my name. I gave it to him and I saw a glint in his eye-- he obvious recognized it from my counselor's complaint-- but said nothing and told me he would look into it.

This all happened around a month ago, and last week was this month's presentations. On Monday we got the list of teachers participating in our presentations. Every single one of Mrs. F's class periods was there. And guess who gets to chose what presenter presents where? Me. And guess who is also a presenter? Me.

Needless to say, I thoroughly enjoyed saying the things she made my life hell for every day to her every class for two days while she just stood there and had to take it. (I want to make clear that I advocated for sensitivity and mindfulness, in no way did I encourage anyone to commit suicide. I often reiterated how horrible and disruptive the act was, but was careful to not demonize those that did it and made sure to encourage the students to seek help if they were feeling depressed).

TL;DR: Crackpot teacher insults a mother who recently committed suicide in front of me and another kid who both knew her and chews me out for protesting her harsh words, calls my parents and gives me a detention. I ruin her relationship with every teacher in the school as well the admin, almost get her fired, and she is forced to hear me advocate sensitivity in the matter of mental health to each one of her classes for two days

(source) story by (/u/BeaTheRodriguez)

[mszegedy]

30 Days of Autism Acceptance 2020: Days 1-10

This is a list of questions by @autie-jake (full list here), where you’re supposed to answer one per day for every day of April. I learned about it a few days into April and intended to start doing it but I forgot, I guess, or maybe decided against it. But I wanna do it now, so here’s the first ten days really quick.

April 1: Introduce yourself. Talk about who you are as a person.

This is kind of a hard question for me. I think my younger sister (by 3¾ years) would say this, if she just made a new friend the same age as her and she asked about me:

“Well, she goes to college, but she’s graduating this semester. She does something with proteins, but honestly she should really be a linguist. I actually really hate discussing linguistics with her, because she gets so annoying and overbearing about it. I don’t understand why she’s doing whatever she is. She’s a pretty weird person. She has all sorts of problems with, like, depression and amnesia and stuff. Oh, but, she’s trans, so, like, that’s a thing, yeah. I don’t like talking about most things with her because she thinks she’s always right. And also, she’s kind of mean to our mom. I don’t know why she does that. But at the same time she’s, like, really sensitive, and will be offended by the stupidest things. Okay, this is making it sound like I don’t like her, but I do, okay? She’s my sister, of course I love her. We’ve bonded a lot. She’s moving to DC in October, so we’ll be able to hang out during the school year, and that’ll be really fun. I think I’m just a little fed up with her right now from having to live with her for a whole month.“

April 2: Post your red instead selfie today! Alternatively, you could talk about why you choose to go redinstead and what it means to you.

I don’t know what “redinstead” is. I googled it and it sounds like you wear differently-themed stuff from what’s recommended by Autism Speaks, to dunk on them. Like a lot of people, I’m stuck inside this April, so there’s no point in me wearing pride clothing, because nobody will see it. But I do disapprove of Autism Speaks, because they don’t treat autistic people like people, and they try to spread that ideology. If you trick them into thinking you’re a person first, they won’t change their mind; instead, they’ll say you’re not autistic. People defend them by recounting the problems that nonverbal autistic people face, as though nonverbal autistic people have an inherently worse neurotype than everyone else, and not just one that’s more difficult to accomodate for society, and as though that justifies the abuses levied against them by Autism Speaks. I could go into details, but I won’t, because it would be emotionally draining for me as a writer, and you as a reader.

Suffice to say, I love being autistic. It has inspired a lot of people to treat me very badly, and probably led to a degree of abuse and neglect in my childhood that resulted in dissociative identity disorder. But all of my autistic traits are things that I love about myself. I like how emotionally expressive my stims make me. I like how I’ve learned to dissect a lot of social stuff and I can explain it. I like how I can just dispense with all of that social stuff around autistic people. Hell, I think it gives the neurotypical people I hang out with some relief, too, when I’m straightforward and explicit all the time. I like how good I am at linguistics, and how I can use it as a way to relate to the world.

April 3: Talk about special interests. Do you have any? What are they? How long have you had them? What does it feel like to have special interests? What does having special interests mean to you? Talk about your past special interests

My special interests are unusually slow burns. I’ve had linguistics-related special interests for the past ten years. They’re peripherally useful for language learning, but mostly I’ve just accumulated academic knowledge. They’ve, however, also led me to reconnect with my Ugric heritage culture, which is very important to me. (It wouldn’t be important to me if language weren’t my primary way of relating to the world; paradox?)

I have a wide variety of other interests, but few of them are really “special”. As a kid, my special interest was marine life. Unfortunately, I haven’t retained much of that, although I do have the privilege of having a diver’s license, which I’ll use again someday when I pass better naked. I also briefly had a special interest in… building computers, or something. I didn’t have the money to make anything particularly powerful (not that I had anything at the time to use computational power for), but I did run some workshops for middle-schoolers.

I think maybe my interest as a kid in Homestuck was special? It ran pretty deep, anyway. It’s hard to say, when you can’t remember most of your life.

April 4: Do you consider your autism to be an important part of your identity?

Because we have DID (or something like it), we don’t have an identity in the traditional sense. We do have a system identity, but that’s built around our mutual goals and guidelines. However, we’d be very sad to lose our autistic traits. Also, it might mess with the standard of consistency we’ve established for ourselves; we might not be able to predict our future actions, because losing our autistic traits may interfere with our ability to follow the aforementioned goals and guidelines, which are what help keep us focused and consistent.

April 5: Talk about your living situation. Do you live with your parents? Do you live on your own? Have roommates? Etc. If you live on your own how hard was it to get used to?

Right now, I’m quarantining with my mom, my sister, and my brother (who is actually my sister’s boyfriend), at my mom’s house. The mess that’s accumulating in the house is slowly causing my mom more and more stress, I think. I’ve never really lived on my own. For a lot of college, I lived with roommates or housemates, but I don’t think I was very good at that. Also, my mom lived nearby, and I stayed at her place on the weekends. The closest I’ve come to living on my own is watching my mom’s house for up to a few weeks at a time, and that wasn’t sustainable. (To be fair, what kind of house has a lawn? When I get a house with a lawn in the future, I will make sure that it’s a wild lawn that I don’t have to mow.)

The third to last time that I house-sitted for my mom, I ended up getting hospitalized for self-harm. It took her a while to let me do it again after that. Although, not a very long while, I guess. That was at the end of last September.

April 6: Are you able to drive? If you can, was it hard for you to learn? If not, what alternatives do you use, if any

I’m not able to drive. Driving is scary and difficult for me. I went through the motions of learning it in high school, but my track was interrupted by a move across state lines (I lived in the US at the time), and I never recovered. I’ve failed the NJ written driver’s exam, which grants you a one-year permit with restrictions, a total of roughly ten times. I’ve never been this bad at a subject; it’s like I have the opposite of a special interest in driving. A special lack-of-interest. My brain won’t retain any information about NJ driving laws whatsoever. It doesn’t help that I had a traumatic car crash when I was very young.

So far, I’ve just gotten my mom and coworkers to drive me places, or taken Ubers or trains. I’ve resigned myself to the fact that if I leave NJ, I’ll probably have to get a driver’s license. Although, I’ve already got a carpool set up at my next job in October.

April 7: Talk about autism in the media. Do you think that autism is typically portayed well? Badly? Is there anything you’d like to see more of when it comes to autistic representation? Who are your favorite autistic characters? Do you have any headcanons?

The media that I consume doesn’t really have autistic characters, so I can’t comment on how autistic people are portrayed, except that I’d like us to be portrayed more, period. I’ve only really seen us in teen dramas. To be fair, one of my favorite webcomics, El Goonish Shive, is a teen drama, and has a great autistic character (Susan). I’d say I identify with her, but not really. It’s very hard for me to identify with people, fictional or nonfictional, because my neurotype is greatly influenced by autism, DID, chronic depression, and gender dysphoria, and you don’t see combinations of traits in media that come even close to that.

Speaking of another teen drama, I wish I were half as cool as Matilda from Everything’s Gonna Be Okay. I guess that makes her my favorite canon autistic character, but that’s pretty easy, because I don’t know any other ones. I can’t say that I wanna hug her, because she doesn’t like that, but her general substitute for hugs is dancing, and I can’t dance. I guess I’d learn how, to show my appreciation for her.

Archer from Archer is probably autistic. I like him a lot.

April 8: What are some misconceptions/stereotypes about autism that you hate?

“Hating” is not something I can really do, even when it’s recommended to do it. I haven’t been open about my autism, so I haven’t been exposed to too many misconceptions or stereotypes about it firsthand, anyway. I guess if I had to pick, it would be whatever made my dad call me autistic as an insult and use a bunch of ableist slurs at me a whole lot. I don’t know how he understands autism, however. He doesn’t seem to realize that he has it himself. (It’s not usually one’s place to diagnose other people like that, but one of the most degrading things that my mom says to me very often is that I’m exactly like my father. He even has some traits that I don’t, like touch-aversion and samefoods.)

April 9: How sensitive are you when it comes to touch? Are you pro hug or anti hug?

I’m hyposensitive. I’m really losing it here under this quarantine. I had a girlfriend who always made me feel so respected whenever she responded to my touch-based needs, by squeezing me, hugging me, or otherwise cuddling me very tight, but then she broke up with me because of my mental health issues, and because her parents hated me and her friends were made very uncomfortable by me.

April 10: Do you have trouble understanding when someone is being sarcastic or joking?

It depends. I think I’m as good at it as I’ll ever be, and my false negative rate is under 0.5 (and my false positive rate is very low, but not 0). But I don’t think the same thing goes on in my head as in neurotypical people’s heads when I determine something to be a joke. I almost explicitly do a Bayesian calculation; “Based on what I know about this person and this context, how well can I imagine them meaning this statement unironically in this context? How well can I imagine them meaning this statement ironically in this context?” It’s pretty automatic now, but sometimes it doesn’t work very well, when I’m not so familiar with the person and/or the context, and occasionally the intended interpretation of the statement.