I don’t like minimizing the importance and gravity of Laios and Toshiro’s fight into just being a childish squabble, even if to a degree it is framed that way, because to both of them it has a lot of personal significance and emotional weight and runs very deep to their characters… The fight isn’t nothing it’s a LOT, they made up but it’s not something easy to express and to get over for either of them which makes it all the more meaningful! I’m on both sides but there very much are sides, there’s no "they’re both having a ball, Toshiro and Laios hand in hand yay" side to the fight, that comes after
The fight with Toshiro WAS very scary to Laios, almost existentially so, but it’s moreso the "I thought I’d made a friend!!" bit and my god. My god actually
Like it’s not "just" about oh his friend liking him less than he thought, THAT IS SO MUCH. It’s a bond he thought he had being a lie it’s all the time and moments spent together either being a lie from his perspective or marred now looking back. It’s not only being upset at Toshiro for lying but upset at himself that he’s so easy to fool, it’s being upset that there’s something so wrong with you that you can’t even tell if your "close buddy" even actually likes you or not, it’s like. Holding my head. He can’t trust his own vision of events that happened do you see. There’s always this film of distrust that it could be a lie that should be there when he interacts with people there’s always this sense of cloak and dagger to expect backstabs out of nowhere because you CAN’T see it coming you CAN’T you CAN’T there’s something about you which makes it impossible so you CAN’T-
He’s so scared of not being able to read people. He knows it’s a weak spot he has, he’s always known. All of these bits are centered around social expectations and betrayals, the assumption that he doesn’t belong either in society or with other humans.
And Laios’ level of awareness is actually sort of complex to analyze, but it’s there, there’s how out of him and Falin he was the one sensitive to the ~aura of hatred~ he felt from the townspeople, there’s of course his nightmares whispering to him about the mocking looks, and how yeah actually he realizes that his gold stripper coworker was taking advantage of him. There’s of course the Winged Lion speech about his trauma and how he fundamentally mistrusts/dislikes humans to some deep seated degree, this distrust that he still keeps under control always. There’s how pre-canon he often wanted to suggest eating monsters but never worked up the courage to bring it up with the others. There’s how he gets across as stoic when he isn’t being enthusiastic…… We don’t know how aware and wary he is exactly in the moment but we do know he has some anxiety around social stuff, and looking back he does notice and aughh augh, the sense you have to hide yourself to not get hurt and be on your guard and shit and.
When you don’t know what to look out for and when to look out for it, the general ‘common sense’ of not always trusting people or noticing when someone’s messing with you becomes hypervigilance in social settings
"Man they really know what you hate huh". Being socially unaware literally plagues him, he knows, he knows it so well.
It’s so quick that it’s almost hard to digest how literal and blatant Laios summoning his monster to crush all the people who’ve hurt him is. His literal go-to coping mechanism for comfort in his literal monster-induced emotionally intense nightmares, saving him by taking away the upsetting element (the humans)
"Monsters are his coping fantasy, where they can whisk him away from humanity, all the hurt it’s caused him and its arbitrary rules" with the subtlety of a brick. Monsters are his comfort safe zone "because they kill humans" yes but no it’s because he pits them as the guardians against humans who to him are in the role of the agressors. To him they represent freedom from the shackles of what it means to be part of humanity, a fundamentally social species
Who wants to bet Peerless Cucumber has an entire fan base within the pidw’s fandom? Potentially even bringing in a portion of pidw’s readers who just want to enjoy shen yuan just loosing it in the comments.
Like sure, some of the fandom’s definitely there for the toxic masculinity and papapa, but I guarantee you there’s an entire section dedicated to gleefully watching the fandom sewer rat being feral.
the 1996 doctor who movie contains a perfect textbook example of fridging, wherein an established longtime character is killed off unceremoniously, with very little agency or time spent on their own perspective when they’re literally being killed, usually as a means to provide shock value, raise the stakes, or make the main character feel bad for thirty seconds before moving on
what sets it apart from every other loving wife and children in every superhero backstory ever, though, is that the person they fridged was THEIR OWN MAIN CHARACTER
the bucktommy haters baffle me tbh sjsjsj how are you gonna have such faith in buddie but believe a three to five episode arc with another man is gonna override the six seasons of buildup, parallels and obvious soulmate dynamic? let buck enjoy for a sec damn
I hate it when people don’t take aromanticism seriously. I hate it when they say “oh it’s just a phase I also thought I was aromantic but then I got a partner.” It doesn’t apply to everyone.
Respect aromanticism as you would respect any other identity
I know I just got done with ranting about tfp/rid2015 starscream’s character but, if you couldn’t tell by my other rid2015 posts, I’m obsessed with rid2015 bumblebee and when I tell you I love this scene of bumblebee making fun of starscream I’m not exaggerating it’s so cathartic to me
“But bumblebee is a good/hero character, why is he being so mean—” did you forget how much starscream hurt bumblebee in tfp?
He killed cliffjumper who, while probably not as close to bee as he was to arcee, was still close friends with bee
He stole the omega keys from the autobots’ base and handed them over to megatron, practically dooming Cybertron at the time to be remade in megatron’s image — of course the autobots get them back last minute, but that doesn’t change how much that loss effected all of them (evidence: optimus shouting in anger for the first and to my memory only time in the series) — including bumblebee
And his greatest offense towards bumblebee in my opinion—
DESTROYING BUMBLEBEE’S T-COG
“But it was silas and M.E.C.H. that took it in the first place—” HE DIDN’T NEED TO HELP SILAS USE IT AFTERWARDS “but Ratchet was able to fix it—” THAT DOESN’T GET RID OF THE TRAUMA THAT WHOLE EXPERIENCE CAUSED HIM
It’s also incredibly fucked once you think about it more because the t-cog is literally a cybertronian organ — while silas is at least mostly detached from how screwed this is since it’s more like taking parts from a robot than surgery to humans, starscream shouldn’t be since he’s also a cybertronian
Instead of being freaked out and recognizing how messed up silas’ actions are like any rational bot would, he helps silas make his fake-bot-that’s-using-another-bot’s-stolen-organ work by providing him with energon (the [at the time] incredibly scarce resource that helps all bots survive) and — after that plan falls through because of bumblebee finding them — he destroys the bot’s organ for no reason other than he wanted to escape and thought that was a good way to distract him
I just—I’m sorry?? I feel like bumblebee is incredibly justified for clowning on this cringefailure of a bot for what he’s done to him
And this isn’t even mentioning what he’s done against the autobots as a whole (both on and off screen) that has probably hurt bumblebee by proxy
I feel like it’d be justified if bee also killed starscream — he already got to kill the bot that destroyed his voice box, I think bee deserves another murder as a treat <3
/joking but also what if—*gets shot by tfp/rid2015 starscream fans*
anytime jason has a day off and not have to go on patrol you guys spend all day in bed only getting up when you need to eat but something you particularly enjoy is when jason reads to you his soft calming voice his fingers running through your hair and he gently rubs your back as he’s reading jane austen words you lay your head on his bare muscular chest you get comfortable listening to his calming heartbeat as his soft gentle voice reads to you and makes you fall asleep when jason starts hearing soft snores from you he smiles and kisses your head as he says sweet things to you pulling the blanket over you to make sure your not cold