#for their own selfish desires

[ladsofsorrow24]

okay i got it

glass onion is SO FUCKING GREAT.

[imsosleepyofyourbull]

I firmly believe that Kabru is autistic but masks so hard that he’s convinced himself and (almost) everyone around him that he’s neurotypical.

That man’s special interest is people and how they work, but he just thinks it’s him Being So Good At Socializing — like he doesn’t spend 95% of his time people watching and adjusting his personality in response to the traits he witnesses and obsessing over the intricacies of human interaction while mapping an ever growing relationship chart in his head. For fun. He even admits it in the manga!

Like, look at him!!!

It’s such a shame that — because he’s the narrative foil to Laios and his interest is generally considered more “socially acceptable” in both their world and our own — more people don’t realize this about him. He’s constantly misinterpreted as a horribly manipulative person who only acts the way he does to use the people around him, when that’s explicitly shown to not be the case at all. Kabru is naturally empathetic and is almost always thinking about other people, regardless of whether or not they’re right there with him or a thousand miles away.

I mean, his most defining motivation is his desire to do everything he can to avoid another tragedy like the one at Utaya. Someone who doesn’t care wouldn’t have a goal like that, and they most certainly wouldn’t go about it the way he does. He’s constantly working to help people who can help everyone else and tries so hard to make sure that anyone who seems like a threat is actually someone he needs to worry about before doing anything about it. His supposed aversion to Laios is only because of the ridiculous trolley problem he’s set up in his own head.

Outside of that, he (rather justifiably) hates monsters but is desperate to understand Laios’ love for them and his apparently most selfish goal in getting close to the guy was literally just to become friends with him.

When he’s interacting with the canaries and they imply that they’re going to take him and all of his friends to the West, his first thought is of Rin and how much she’d hate to be stuck in the place that gave her so many bad memories.

He helps Kuro learn Common when Mickbell is asleep and firmly looks forward to the day that the half-foot and Kuro can communicate properly so that their relationship can get properly started without any miscommunication.

And he understands Mithrun with only a handful of weeks AT BEST interacting with him, getting enraged when the elf seems to give up and immediately trying to help him find a new motivation for life.

I’m excited just thinking about the day that Kabru starts unmasking more and more around his friends — both new and old — because if being with my current friend group has taught me anything, it’s that hanging out with anyone so unabashedly themselves is bound to make you more comfortable with yourself too. It’s part of the reason why I like Labru so much! There’s something nice about imagining them hanging out in the throne room or laying in the grass outside and talking for hours on end about their special interests. They might not strictly understand what the other finds so fascinating about monsters or people, but they can grasp that shared feeling of love.

They probably influence each other in really good ways too, with Kabru helping Laios figure out what people are thinking even when it doesn’t make sense or Laios helping Kabru understand that not everyone and everything needs to be analyzed a thousand times over. They both get to learn that there are people like them and people who will love them without them ever having to change a thing about themselves. They deserve to know that they’re fine the way they are.

[mearchy]

Maximus is so fun as a character to me for two reasons:

He's a slave to his most selfish desires at his core, and that selfishness allows him to do cold, evil, ruthless things over and over again. And that's not something that he becomes and it's not some crazy plot twist that gets revealed to us, as though his normal personality is a veil. His personality is genuine, it's just driven by the deeper motives that get more revealed throughout the show. And then you start to reinterpret all of his other actions in a different light and go oh.

This set of character traits gives him the funniest ability to repeatedly be like "I will kill people, I will commit violence, because I have strooong values/opinions related to this!" and then somebody gives him some friendly company or, like, a bathrobe. And he's like "ohh :) Nevermind, I would trust you with my life if it meant I could have more of this. Would you like my social security number."

[chaossmith2]

Don't mind me just thinking about the two times Jim reached out to a father in his life

and the first time was completely left behind

and the second time was actually reached back for and grabbed onto

[tea-cat-arts]

Since we're getting closer to the release of the next Madoka Magica movie, I'd like to gently remind you guys that Rebellion doesn't have a single reliable narrator, and you really can't take anything the girls say as fact.

Madoka, Mami, and Kyoko have all had their memories tampered with by Homura and don't have the full story

Sayaka and Nagisa are both mentally fully there, but they're biased as they benefit from Madoka's system

Homura is being prodded by Kyubey, is in the middle of a mental breakdown, is missing key information, and is locked inside her own head where she is subconsciously filtering out and ejecting things that don't alight with the reality she wants there

This isn't to say that any of these girls are bad people or being intentionally manipulative. Just please keep in mind that all these characters' perspectives are skewed, and you really can't take everything they say at face value.

[t-u-i-t-c]

"Supreme Justice, would your neutrality really waver over just a cup of tea?"

[tofixtheshadows]

Constantly rotating Falin Touden in my head as one of the best examples of "haunting the narrative" I've ever seen. Schrödinger's maiden. Schrödinger's chimera. She's the saintly little sister they have to save and the savage dragon they have to slay and the girl they love that they have to eat.

They literally fridged her and defrosted her.

[thepoisonroom]

'I flirted with the idea that instead of being trans that I was just a cross-dresser (a quirk, I thought, that could be quietly folded into an otherwise average life) and that my dysphoria was sexual in nature, and sexual only. And if my feelings were only sexual, then, I wondered, perhaps I wasn’t actually trans.

I had read about a book called The Man Who Would Be Queen, by a Northwestern University professor who believed that transwomen who were attracted to women were really confused fetishists, they wanted to be women to satisfy an autogynephilia. And though I first read about this book in the context of its debunkment and disparagement, I thought about the electricity of slipping on those tights, zipping up those boots, and a stream of guilt followed. Maybe this professor was right, and maybe I was only a fetishist. Not trans, just a misguided boy.

About a year later, on the Internet, I come across a transwoman who added a unique message to the crowd refuting this professor. Oh, I wish I remember who this woman was, and I wish even more that I could do better than paraphrase her, but I remember her saying something like this: “Well, of course I feel sexy putting on women’s clothing and having a woman’s body. If you feel comfortable in your body for the first time, won’t that probably mean it’ll be the first time you feel comfortable, too, with delighting in your body as a sexual thing?”'

-Casey Plett, Consciousness

[redladydeath]

imo, i prefer the idea that vox went through some pretty intense moral decay during his time in hell. he was never a good or upstanding guy, but he was a very normal man when he first arrived, who, over the decades, has become more and more callous and desensitized.

[hannigramislife]

Can we stop sympathizing with Beast Dazai and start acknowledging the fact that even when the man had been given the chance to rewrite his destiny, he continued to be a manipulative bitch, orchestrating people's lives left and right as if he had any right to, instead of, you know, befriending them and sitting them down for some serious conversations.

Just my take on his supposed tragedy.

[re-colligere]

Sorry didnt see you said unlikely pairs uhhhhhhh envy and fear

OHH it's all good don't worry! :D I can do any pair, I just thought it'd be fun if people got creative with the pairings hehe

IN the meantime...I've thought about Envy and Fear before, because a bunch of my fanfic ideas take some time to focus on their friendship. With that said, I'm still a little unsure how to write Envy even if she's a fascinating character on her own. Alsoooo it's a little bit hard to tell how they'd interact because canon doesn't give us a lot to work with, but it's really fun to think about KDJFHSJKDFH

I do think Envy looks up to Fear (pun intended), in the way that he's smart and quick-thinking. In turn, I think Fear would really appreciate her words. He'd also be the type to carry Envy around and goof off with her (or at least look after her if she's getting rowdy--she's so small, after all). I think Envy would be a good motivator for Fear to try new things their friends are doing, maybe inspire him to get out of his comfort zone! And Fear's there to be careful and temper that desire if things get a little scary or dangerous, and if Envy's going too far.

If they wind up on the same page, though, I feel like they could make a special brand of insecurity. Envy's constant comparisons with others could really enhance Fear's hold on Riley's self-esteem, and maybe even on his own self-esteem. Because as much as Envy loves pointing out the things she likes about others, she's also just as prone to point out the things she likes that aren't there...would it be such a stretch to say that even she doesn't have great self-esteem herself? She's either a yes-man (trying to impress someone/hopefully get respected) or she can convince someone that her motivations are correct and beneficial (and she usually believes she's doing something good). Fear's a solid voice of reason but again, highlighting his (or Riley's) flaws could really get his gears going a mile a minute. This COULD be a good drive for self-improvement, if they don't make Riley so nervous and feel inadequate she couldn't do anything. Whoopsies.

[raayllum]

i think a lot of what keeps a character sympathetic * honestly, is just letting them have good intentions and even better, a genuine lack of awareness. even if they're lying to themselves, and we know they're lying to themselves, they have to earnestly believe that they're not. they have to truly believe that what they're doing is right, even if we know it isn't, and that it's not self motivated, even when it often is.

take, for example, viren, claudia, and rayla. they both make massive mistakes (basically everything viren and claudia have ever done / rayla leaving callum the way they did) and most of those mistakes were self motivated. claudia bought her father's gaslighting because she wanted to believe in a world where her family could stay together, and then overruled viren's reservations about his ressurection when she brought him back; viren does many terrible things in arc 1, but is genuinely motivated by what he believes is ultimately better, long term, for the world at large even over his family, or that he knows better for his family in general, and having that lie stripped away is so much what s5 is about. for rayla, she's so selfless it rounds back into being selfish, where she had the security of knowing callum was safe while he worried over her for two years, leading to her deeply wounding him even when that was the last thing she wanted (and deeply hurting herself). they all thought they were genuinely doing the right thing, often putting themselves on the chopping block for their choices (claudia and rayla in particular) even as it just made everything worse.

but even when we see them being selfish, we know they're still genuinely motivated by their love for other people, and it's coming out in very misguided ways, we can still have sympathy, we can still understand. and that to me is great character writing

* obviously sympathy isn't the most important to feel towards a character, but it can certainly be helpful in having an audience be interested in, at the very least, understanding them even if we don't like them

[seaquestions]

↑ bearer of the curse (guy who always dies and reincarnates before learning the true nature of his life after death, after death, after death (times infinity). also he's a bounty hunter living in a tiny r/malelivingspace studio apartment of a starship.) [alt under cut]

[ID: a fullbody drawing of my honkai star rail oc, aji. he is a broad-shouldered asian man with tan skin & short wavy hair with orange & white streaks. he has one brown eye and one gold eye. he wears a half-down orange pilot jumpsuit, a black sleeveless turtleneck with a metal breastplate over it, knee-high boots & gloves, one of them being metal and clawed. he has a sword in a scabbard on his hip (a keris bahari). to the left is a closeup drawing of his face. on the right is text that reads "aji, also previously known as hu lin, rimau, sunyi, etc." his in-game element and path are also indicated, "imaginary" and "the hunt". End ID]

[uncanny-tranny]

In discussions about mental health, I am so tired of the only voices mattering being other people or other people who do not deal with a condition/disorder or a specific situation.

"Here's how I deal with loved ones with [x] condition!"

"If you do [y] because of [x mental health reason], you're selfish and everybody who loves you is having their lives made harder by you!"

"If your symptoms are [z], you're gross, and you deserve no sympathy for struggling"

I understand to an extent why people do this, but holy hell, as somebody who struggles and struggles often, the last thing any of us need to be told is that we're a burden that others have to carry. And it's terrible how everybody else's feelings but ours matter - even if we are the ones most affected by our condition or situation.

If you are dealing with issues surrounding your mental health and well-being, know that everything above isn't true; you are worthy of patience, understanding, kindness, and love. You are worthy of being listened to without judgment. You don't have to apologize or "make up" for who you are or what you struggle with.

[noscomnias]

"even though we may take different paths, i am... still his little sister."

[thefabulous-mostgroovy]

me reading Harrow dodge a kiss from Ianthe: outta my way gayboy im boutta get it