#he believes very strongly

[rahuratna]

"You're starting a what now?"

"You heard me, Gojo. Now, join us."

"Hey now, hold on."

"What's the need for delay?"

"Nanami, I don't know how to say this, but ... how would this even work? We die in the line of duty on a regular basis, so what good would - "

"All the more reason to take preventative measures and plan for the future. Why should jujutsu society continue to function without a representative for sorcerers? Are we mere cannon fodder, to be thrown at hordes of - "

"I mean, yeah, I get what you're saying, but this - "

"It will be to our benefit if you join. As much as I hate to admit it, your word carries weight. And so does your signature. Now, if you'd just sign here - "

"Damn, I'm beginning to see how lethal you were in sales."

"I was an investment broker."

"Even worse."

"And, as a former salaryman, I can visualise the significance of this endeavour with more clarity than anyone else. You can take my word for it."

"And what would be the function of an organisation like this?"

"Protecting the interests of sorcerers is of paramount importance. We need access to a wider variety of medical practitioners who specialise in sorcery-related injuries. Free psychological assessments every three months and advanced funeral cover, inclusive of a reconstructive procedure in case of gruesome death. Families deserve to see their sorcerer loved ones looking their best, even if they've been chewed on by a cursed spirit. I am also personally advocating for vacation subsidies for destinations of our choice that cover hotel, airfare, transport and day-to-day expenses."

"You ... you've really thought this out, huh?"

"Along with our slogan. 'United we matter, divided we splatter.'"

"Uhhhh ... moving on. I need to ask a few questions before I commit to your ... union."

"Naturally."

"What's in it for me?"

"I thought we might hit this little snag."

"Riiight. Because ... you know. Strongest sorcerer. Practically invincible ... "

" ... Look, Gojo. This pen is sparkly and expensive. You like such things, yes?"

" ... Yes."

"I'll give it to you if you sign on the dotted line here."

"Just how low is your opinion of me?"

"I'll also buy you a milkshake."

"Oh! Why didn't you say so?"

Welcome, new member, to the Jujutsu Sorcerer's Guild. A place for equality, representation and freedom of expression. A place where your clan can no longer invite you to those abusive family dinners. A place for those who would like to be seen as more than a loose cannon, a vessel or an animated suit.

Find your kindred spirits here; those who long for a voice, an occasional vacation and something better than a plywood coffin or a bit of gristle dug out from between a cursed spirit's teeth. Together, we shall reverse the status quo and

UNIONISE. WEAPONISE. LOBOTOMISE.

Herewith find attached the minutes of our first meeting:

A little crack, inspired by my very own union meeting.

[relicsongmel]

Something I've always found fascinating about Raymond Shields is that despite seemingly having altruistic reasons for being a defense attorney, his reasons for trying to convince Miles to be one are anything but.

It seems understandable enough on the surface. After Ray comes around and agrees to work with Miles in The Imprisoned Turnabout, he sees remnants of Gregory shining through him despite von Karma's influence. Whether or not he recognizes that Miles' decision to become a prosecutor wasn't just born from that alone—that it was in tandem with wanting to distance himself from anything that reminded him of his father to alleviate the burden on his heart—is up for debate, but regardless: he acknowledges Miles as Gregory's son through and through and wants to capitalize on his dedication for pursuing justice in a way that he knows would make his father proud. He wants to let Miles in on the life he was robbed of at 9 years old—the life he once dreamed of living, where he follows in the footsteps of his father by giving everything he has to save people, by fighting like hell for the vulnerable and the condemned.

That said, as much as Ray dresses up his proposition by making it out to be as if he's looking out for Miles' best interests (and the best interests of society, even)...his motives for trying to get Miles to switch sides are almost entirely selfish. Ray's efforts (and most of his actions in general, really) are ultimately a product of his desperate attempt to cling on to anything related to Gregory out of an inability to move on from his death. Wearing his hat and coat, leaving the name of his office unchanged...and now, requesting that his son literally change jobs just because he can't bear the weight of his own loneliness anymore. Because he can't bear to think that the damage done by DL-6 is irreversible and Miles has moved on while he has stagnated for the past 17 years. Because he has an idealized vision of what he thinks Gregory would want and fails to realize that his son's occupation wouldn't matter to him as long as it brings him happiness and fulfillment. In his mind, letting Miles go means accepting the circumstances that brought him where he is and allowing both of them to move on. And that terrifies him.

It's even more deceitful when you realize that Ray's pitch comes at a very opportune time for Miles given his circumstances at that point: that is, he's under threat of investigation for prosecutorial misconduct and at risk of being stripped of his badge. Ray might fake incompetence, but he's not stupid—and he takes full advantage of Justine's warnings to try to sway Miles when he's in a more vulnerable position in terms of his job. Which is...pretty fucked up, to put it lightly. Despite having a better idea of where he came from compared to most people, through this Ray shows a lack of understanding of who Miles truly is and a lack of respect for what he's come to value, even if his path toward obtaining those values had some bumps along the road. But he's so blinded by his grief that he doesn't even stop to consider how much he's really asking of him, or what Miles is really searching for.

Ray was moved by Gregory. He values saving people. Defending the weak is an undeniably noble endeavor. But to ask that of someone else without consideration for their best interests is decidedly less so.

For all his occupation requires a certain selflessness, Raymond Shields is far more selfish than he lets on. And I for one find that contradiction fascinating to unpack.

[dead-florist]

don’t forget to like and subscribe for more epic fails (gay people)

[cyellolemon]

Silly Alien stage stuff!!! :3

[thefabelmans2022]

did you ever notice how merry doesn't actually volunteer for the quest? pippin is the one who assumes he and merry will go, gandalf vouches for them both, but merry doesn't say a word for the entire encounter. it's a stark difference from his insistence on going with frodo in the conspiracy chapter, and i think it's because he's totally lost his confidence. in the beginning, he's very confident and fully believes he'll be able to lead the group through the old forest to bree with no trouble, and then they all almost die twice basically immediately. notice that when they get to bree, he refuses to go to the prancing pony with the others, deciding instead to stay in their room alone? and then of course he gets attacked by nazgul, which definitely doesn't help matters. i think by the time they get to Rivendell, he no longer believes himself capable of helping frodo. he'll do it, obviously, if frodo or gandalf or elrond or pippin ask him to, but i think he's at a point where he no longer believes he'll be any good.

[pressure-escapee-au]

You can all have this old-ish doodle of Sebastian looking like a rather displeased tortoise while I work today for nourishment while I’m unavailable to doodle responses to ask. Enjoy

[fjordfolk]

i don't even think one has to go as far as to unravel the whole idea of breed, registry and stud books, because i know for a fact that in other animals one has managed to have all of these things without going fckn batshit

[padfootastic]

please say more about jilypad + diverging parenting styles... perhaps even a possible scenario >:) i imagine harry has very cunning tactics for using this to his advantage

helloooooo <3 thank u for this ask bc i love talking about these three and harry. i went looking thru the archives to find this post; my first foray into this side, and really, i’ve never looked back after that.

so i’ve talked ab this a bit before but i fully think that james was a very overprotective ‘mother hen’ type parent. i tend to read his behaviour in lily’s bday letter to sirius as being scared of his child on a broomstick and i fully, fully think he’ll never be able to let go of that as harry grows up. he’ll be anxious and suspicious and paranoid, and his first instant will always be to wrap harry up in cotton wool and hide him away. (i low-key connect this to his childhood as well; going from being spoiled and sheltered to dropped in the middle of a war, black & white thinking, living in extremes etc etc makes it v hard for him to be Normal about his child. as he shouldn’t be, really, but yeah) that’s why he thrives during the initial years; he never minds the hard parts of being a new parent, loves it in fact, and it makes it better that he can keep harry close to him at all times w/o coming off as a helicopter parent (not that the notion bothers him ofc).

it’s good, then, that he has two partners to even the scales, no? i think lily was the most…balanced out of the three. she had a relatively normal childhood, grew up in a working class family/neighbourhood and had to deal w adversity from a young age so she’s developed a nice, thick skin. she also has a sibling with whom she has a v rocky relationship so she knows that kids are, ykno, a bit unhinged. and a little bit of hardship is not a problem. i hc her as needing time to get used to parenthood, unlike james who stepped into it natural as breathing, or even sirius who loved harry on much on first sight that it made up for everything else. ofc lily loved her son, but it didn’t come w the same blinding intensity of her partners and made her feel really shitty in the beginning. but, i think she’d shine during his teen years actually, because she’s not overbearing or intense and becomes the quiet, calm strength that a hormonal, spotty teen boy would probably need.

and sirius <3 our poor baby falls in love with harry, perhaps even more quickly than james, with such startling speed that it shakes his entire foundation. he doesn’t regret it but he’s constantly discombobulated. i also imagine that…it takes him longer to settle into the role of parent, esp bc he’s not biologically one ykno? not like it matters to anyone, ofc, but it takes him a long time to truly accept his authority and place, to believe that he has just as much right as j&l to be there, to parent harry. this has the consequence of him always being more indulgent than the other two; after all, he considered himself a godfather before a parent and a lot of that thinking stayed. he lets harry get away with stuff the others might not (and the little mf figures this out later); some of it also comes from sirius seeing so much shit, and facing so much shit himself, that he rationalises a lot of stuff as ‘well, this isn’t the worst it can be, so what’s the harm’ (because his life has been such a roller coaster that he’s forgotten that not everyone’s like that, if that makes sense?)

its obviously not this clear cut but i imagine harry looks at it like this: if he needs unconditional love, he goes to james; rationality and logic, lily; acceptance and calm, sirius. when someone has to be beat up for hurting harry, james steps in. if he needs help burying a body, it’s sirius. dealing with some asshole boss/teacher/classmate’s mother who’s making harry’s life hell? lily. i can keep going but,,,u get the idea, right? this makes sense, i hope lol

i actually think harry’s first birthday is a great example. sirius pushes the boundaries by gifting lil harry a broom; james loses his mind running after him; lily places an industrial sticking charm on harry’s butt, leans back with a glass of wine, and enjoys the show. even as he grows up, lily and james act as the disciplinarian, and sirius is the emotional outlet. all of them fill in each other’s cracks so well, and it’s only when harry grows up that he realises how effortlessly they worked off each other to parent him.

also oh man o man. harry being cunning is,,,,,see, i’ve not considered it this far but it makes perfect sense. i think canon harry actually had so much manipulative energy and it’s often overlooked for his goofier traits but! this is the same dude who used his dead parents to trick slughorn into revealing sensitive info! imagine if that could be channelled into his jilypad interactions 😈

it’s like, it takes him a bit, because his three parents r so smooth, but once he realises that all of them have certain weak spots, he does NOT hesitate to exploit them. (it has the unintended consequence of truly strengthening the jilypad relationship into an unbreakable one bc one thing their kid taught them is to have ironclad communication going at all times so nothing they’ve said, or not said, is used against them). so like, he knows if he wants to sneak out to a party, it has to be sirius and in a specific way—‘i’ll be totally safe, papa, plus i really wanna see what it’s like and idk when it’ll get a chance to again’. if he widens his eyes to pitiful levels, pouts a little, and blinks faster than usual, then james is putty in his arms as long as he’s separated from the other two. divide and conquer becomes the main tool in harry’s arsenal, actually. lily’s the toughest nut to crack, purely bc she doesn’t run on emotions or irreverence, but harry soon learns that if he comes up with a solid, logical case that proves his argument has unbiased merit then he has a good chance of getting her to say yes. (this is good, bc u can arrange words in the correct order, but u can’t always control emotions)

so overall yeah, you’d think one kid + 3 parents would be an easy bet, but harry keeps them on their toes all the fkn time.

[wizardnuke]

thought about professor caleb a little too hard. laying on the floor

[compacflt]

I was wondering if you had thoughts about how Ice and Mav's politics don't fully align with their actions? There was a post where you said Ice's politics are more socially liberal than Mav's but Mav is also the one who goes out to La Jolla to hit on guys before Ice, and later again when he's broken up with Ice, but Ice only goes out with women out of fear for his honor or whatever. Same with their respective thoughts on feminism, with Mav's mild respect for Charlie (telling Ice not all women fit the stereotype) but later Ice is the one who sends Juno to Mav's Top Gun class without telling him she's a woman and Ice has a respectful friendship with Juno. I think you said Ice is vaguely on the ace-aro spectrum (demi-homoromantic) which is a sort of fascinating irony that he doesn't have the words for it whereas Mav is the one with the theories about Ice's sexuality. Though with their hypocrisies and inconsistencies this all just feeds into their characterizations of the fact that they keep divorcing their actions from their spoken words from their identities.

okay going to take this point by point

1. yes i have addressed their politics in relation to their actions before, so maybe read this post and this post before you read this one, just to see where my other thoughts line up

2. gay republicans and conservatives do exist (at the very least certainly republicans and conservatives who have gay sex in secret)

3. before maverick is a political actor he is a human being, and the characterization that we are primarily given for him is that he is impulsive and reckless and doesn’t think through his actions. As ive written about many times before—from a story construction standpoint, his thoughtlessness is his number one most important character trait. He is both thoughtlessly dangerous (his hero’s “fatal flaw;” he can’t stop himself from making bad decisions) and thoughtlessly brilliant (the navy’s best and most daring and heroic pilot). He does what he wants without thinking about it; and he makes excuses and hollow promises whenever that plan doesn’t work out (“I know better than that. It will never ever happen again;” [it happens again] “I’m not gonna let you down. I promise.” [goose dies shortly thereafter]). His thoughtless impulsiveness overrides everything else. Maybe the act of having gay sex (to address your “he gets fucked in La Jolla before ice” point) is politically subversive, but for Maverick’s thoughtless character that we are shown in Top Gun, the most subversive possible thing would be to LABEL the gay sex and think through the consequences of it. To call a spade a spade and call himself gay or bi or queer or whatever. That would be the most subversive (and with mav, entirely unbelievable imo) possible thing. That takes conscious effort of thought, something maverick is near-incapable of doing. As long as he can get away with it without thinking about it, he’s politically in the clear, with regards to his character & character arc. If that makes sense. “Don’t think. Just do.” That’s literally his motto lmfao. He represents thoughtless action as an archetype; his politics come secondary to his desires

4. Their “respective thoughts on feminism” are divided into two camps: 1. “Professional as required by the law” and 2. “Sex pest mode.” They’re naval officers in the 1980s. Whether republican or democrat, that’s kind of par for the course. How men treat women can be a performance to other men. Any respect i made them show towards women had broader, more metatextual “need to move the conversation/story from A to B” reasoning behind it. See the first post I linked for much more on that.

5. i never said ice was on the ace/aro spectrum, or if i did i DEFINITELY meant it sarcastically. That could not be further from what i believe. This isn’t something I’ve ever discussed on this blog before, but a MASSIVE part of the philosophical discussion I’ve been trying to moderate within this project over the last year is the question— “do labels even work with characters under these very specific and extraordinarily extreme conditions and societal pressures?” It’s a question I took from my time studying early American history—the contexts of certain environments, and I would definitely count the elite officer ranks of the navy in the 90s and 2000s as one of these certain environments, simply Are Not Conducive to the easier (path of least resistance maybe) ways we civilians handle sexuality and friendship and trauma. There are so many variables and external and internal pressures within an environment like the upper ranks of career navy officers that sexual orientation labels lose all nuance and accuracy. I don’t think Ice (as i have written him) is gay. I don’t think he’s straight. I don’t think he’s bi. I think he’s an unlabelable product of too many variables for labels to have any effect on how he is perceived. Which, in our society built around labels and categories, is admittedly difficult to wrestle with. But doesn’t make it any less worth wrestling with.

6. Yes, ice and mav’s hypocrisy is the linchpin of the entire story.

They’re both trying to have their cake (“honor” and moral superiority based on the harmful traditional subjective morals arbitrated by elite navy officership) and eat it too (a fulfilling relationship with the love of their lives). & the point is that they cant. they have to settle for one.

[wuxian-vs-wangji]

The work achievement I am most proud of is "F.U.N.", and you all can have it too!

"We're having F.U.N. This is F.U.N. Everything is F.U.N."

Sounds innocent and innocuous.

Drives the CEO insane.

Because everyone in the building knows F.U.N. means "Fucking Unbelievably Nuts".

[arohuacheng]

as a pei ming sympathizer and apologist i of course believe that he did the best that he could in that situation and is at no real fault. however as a believer in both women's rights and wrongs i also believe that xuan ji is very hot and extremely correct and did nothing wrong and should have been worse. this is called nuance

[yannig]

I'm invested in Mut and Tongrak, don't get me wrong. I like them, I like the show, I will keep watching and enjoying it.

But from an aromantic perspective, it's fucking painful.

I. know. Tongrak doesn't believe in love because his parents' marriage was a tragedy and he's never seen real love, yada yada.

But he reads so, so aromantic to me. Like "love is imaginary and only exists in story" is a pretty common aromantic experience.

I know in this context it's the trauma. And it's a perfectly legit plot.

But seeing his perspective being dismissed so readily by the show... it hurts a bit, to be honest.

[malt-rants-and-stuff]

ALSO posting this as its own thing :)

Working adults au gave me streamer shirahama and expected me, the streaming fiend, not to latch onto that forever??? different text color version and no text version under cut:

[rottiens]

I'm gonna go to sleep and think about these leaks until tomorrow because I can't process it right now. all the theories were real bro

[chaossmagic]

Sometimes I think about how, realistically, the damage Bucky sustained to his body (not just his brain, but his entire body) is probably just as severe if not worse than the damage done to his mind during the years of abuse and torture by Hydra.

The guy should have all the chronic illnesses of an 80-year-old at this point, and of course I know it's ~superhero media~ and we have to suspend disbelief a little bit, but the brain damage he suffered alone should have been enough to permanently disable him, even with the serum acting as a buffer, not to mention everything else that would result from improper medical care, long periods of starvation/inadequate nutrition (almost all liquids, most likely - easier and quicker than getting him to eat solid foods), constant injury, and the effects of being dragged in and out of cryo intermittently for decades.

Not to mention the drugs they probably used to keep him compliant and docile, to not feel any pain, to stop him 'becoming erratic' as they put it (i.e. remembering who he was and trying to fight back).

Of course, we don't see any of that because that's not good superhero TV/movies. But I still think about it and try to incorporate it into the way I view his character.