#he has literally never done anything wrong in his life

[britishneonjello]

i know boris is like. basically an attack animal but i also strongly believe hes done nothing wrong ever. yes he bit and fed off of heavys arm but was it really his fault? of course not hes a busy mama

Boris is LITERALLY just a momma. Just a littol papa. He feeds his family, and has never done anything wrong ever in his life.

[caughtafishie]

saw art yesterday that pmo so bad. im not trying to put anyone on blast or anything but i need to rant about this bc it truly rubbed me the wrong way.

i'll just start by saying that i dont mean any malice toward this artist nor do i want ppl jumping down their throat but i do think we need to have a conversation about why ed is being interpreted like this. (also sorry if someone has made a similar post, i saw this art for the first time yesterday)

...like where do i begin. the racial implications? the izzy victimization? sorry but why are we portraying a brown man as this crazed, red eyed beast whose totally inevitable violence has to be taken on by some white martyr who "takes it for the team"? i kind of can't even begin to understand where this line of thinking comes from when we literally never see ed in a state like this in the show.

its like literally kind of a huge plot point that ed isn't murderous, and is only violent to those extremes when he is pushed. and izzy is usually the one pushing him, so yeah he faced the brunt of the violence ed inflicted. but we honestly really only see ed physically harm izzy, not the rest of the crew, during blackbeard 2.0 era.

like lets think about it. ed harms the rest of the crew in very indirect ways i.e. making them fight each other or sailing them into a storm. he doesn't ever pull a knife or gun nor does he throw a punch. the most he really does is push lucius off the ship, which is bad of course, but not something i'd call a super violent attempt on someone's life. even though he did think he killed him, it's still passive, letting the sea take care of it. the only other people we really see ed beat or kill are colonizers and his abusive father.

and then there's izzy. i wrote a post before about izzy and ed's dynamic during this era, and oh boy am i not done. people have a hard time understanding that their cycle of abuse and retaliation is perpetuated by izzy, not ed. ed isn't this feral wild animal going around harming everyone he sees. he's not an inherently violent person. i feel like the show does so much to make that clear. izzy, however, thrives on violence, specifically blackbeard's violence. which is why he pushes ed, he's a sadist and a masochist. he is putting ed through suffering to gain his own suffering, and that's what he wants. and he wants to keep ed right there with him, even though he acknowledges that ed has moved on.

as for the racial implications, i think maybe we steer clear of drawing poc as big scary monsters who you are inherently unsafe around? so much so that a white man feels the need to take on his rampant violence so no one else has to? sorry but we did not watch the same show if that's how you view ed.

like i said, ed is not a violent person. ed is an emotional person. he doesnt get any more angry than he does sad or happy, he just feels his emotions intensely. and if a mentally ill brown man having emotions screams "danger" to you, especially when he is otherwise shown to pose no physical threat to those around him, im gonna need you to think about why. why would he be any more dangerous than izzy, who has put the crew in more precarious situations than ed did? who has killed more people? the only person on the ship ed ever tried to actively kill during this era is himself, everything else was collateral. but no yeah, lets demonize him and make his abuser the white savior here..

[lorbanery]

This is what I find so fascinating and baffling about Smallville.

I watched the first couple of seasons when they originally aired, came back to it many years later, never quite managed to get past season 5 or 6 out of frustration.

I and, it would seem, the vast majority of the fandom, came out of however far we got in the series thinking, "Wow Lex was trying to be so good and he was treated so badly, Jonathan Kent is an asshole actually and turned his son into a jerk and I can't believe this show wants me to think Clark and Jonathan are such good people and Lex is inherently evil."

It wasn't until just this past year that I found out that, actually, the intention was that the way Jonathan treated Lex and the way he influenced Clark were, in part, why Lex turned out the way he did. That a little compassion from the Kent men could have saved him.

I find this interesting because they so clearly failed at delivering that message.

I'm sure someone could analyze the actually storytelling to explain why it failed so spectacularly, but I believe the main problem was the medium.

"Lex Luthor could have been turned from the path to supervillainy if he'd just experienced the love and respect of a father figure" and "Maybe Jonathan Kent wasn't the saint that Clark paints him to be" is the kind of What If story that would have been PERFECT for a comic book storyline. A handful of issues of a limited Jonathan Kent title that focuses on Jonathan, explores this idea of a man so scared of losing his child that he occasionally veers off into paranoia and reactionary thinking that makes him treat other people as enemies or less important than his family. Bringing a young Lex to Smallville briefly and juxtaposing the way he interacts with Clark with the way he interacts with Lex and directly foreshadowing the way those treatments will shape the men Clark and Lex will grow up to be. Maybe even making a really fine point about the fact that, even though they occasionally clash, Clark still has a loving, supportive, protective parent in his father, while Lex is so desperate for one because he has no one. Directly comparing the blind distrust Jonathan has for Lex's motivations to the lack of trust Lionel has for Lex's capabilities even by just mirroring dialogue — maybe even having Clark mirror it too near the end.

But the reason that would work so well in comic form is because this is the kind of storyline you do when you're playing around with canon. Which you can only do when you have a canon to play around with.

I mean think about it. If they had done an entire series that was just Lana and Clark's adventures tooling around Metropolis while under the influence of the red kryptonite, but without establishing anything about the kryptonite at all, people would have also gotten the wrong idea. They'd just be like "wow Lana and Clark are assholes, they just party all the time and start fights with people for no reason, it's like these people don't even understand these characters."

That's basically what happened here. Smallville was a completely new canon, the only things most people knew about it going in were that Clark would eventually become Superman, the goodest superhero in the world, who loves his perfect sainted parents, and Lex eventually becomes his arch-nemesis.

With just that framework, it's no wonder that we all watched Jonathan shout over and over again about how Lex is a Luthor, you can't trust him! when Lex had done literally nothing and thought, "I can't believe this show wants me to think this asshole is the goodguy."

And going even further, the result is an implication that the actual reasons Lex became evil were:

Extreme child abuse

Psychosis

Being susceptible to bullying and manipulation

Using what money, power, and influence he has to fuck over objectively terrible people to protect the good people in his life, even when those good people treat him like shit half the time

Having unhealthy coping mechanisms for being treated like shit

Not liking being lied to

Was it the show's intention to imply that any of these were contributing factors? I couldn't say. But when I watch Smallville? That's the message I get. And that's, from what I've seen, why so much of the fandom comes out of it as full-fledged members of the Lex Didn't Deserve That and Jonathan Kent Hate Clubs.

I write this with the full acknowledgement that I'm only about a third of the way through the series, but the thing that is so frustrating about the direction Smallville has taken Lex is that there was so much potential (and likely even the intention) to take Smallville Lex's story in one of two pretty interesting directions: either he and Clark broadly have the same goal (help humanity) but fundamentally disagree on how to accomplish it to the point that it leads to a complete breakdown in their relationship (the Magneto storyline); or he has good intentions but compromises a little here and a little there, until he takes so many steps down a path he didn't intend to tread that he's eventually so many miles from the moral ground he started on that he's completely crossed to the other side (the Anakin storyline). Both of these are interesting, complex character journeys that would allow the audience to sympathize with Lex up to a point, while also empathizing with Clark's emotional turmoil at having to let go of his former friend who has slowly morphed into someone unrecognizable.

But bewilderingly, they threw both of those out and went in a third direction: Lex is a fundamentally good, decent, compassionate person who has been pushing back against and even outright rejecting his father's cruel and corrupt methods since childhood, and is driven by a genuine desire to help those around him and make the world a fairer place, and it doesn't affect how people view or treat him at all. Everyone is determined to ascribe nefarious ulterior motives to everything he does simply because he's a Luther. He was always going to be Clark's enemy because from day one the Kents decided he could only be Clark's enemy*. Of course he's going to end up adopting the ways of his father because that's what everyone thinks he is anyway. In other words, he got the Elphaba storyline.

And I find that baffling because that storyline is extremely sympathetic. Again, I have two-thirds of this series to go, so it very well could surprise me, but I honestly don't know what it could do at this point to make me lose sympathy for Lex or feel like whatever he does is something Clark didn't bring on himself. Clark constantly openly doubts Lex's motives, and continually harangues him for his mistakes (real or imagined) even after Lex owns them, apologizes for them, and attempts to make amends for them. But Clark is the one I'm supposed to be rooting for? He's supposed to be the good guy?

I guess I just don't understand why you would set up two perfectly good villain origin storylines, and then abandon them for one that makes your so-called hero look like a total asshole.

*There's a whole other essay I won't get into here about Jonathan Kent's paranoia in particular, and the way it destroys Clark's ability to trust by assigning nefarious intentions to innocuous actions, and the way it damages Clark's fundamental goodness by teaching him that using his powers to help and protect people is a secondary goal to his primary purpose, which is to protect himself and his secret at all costs. That man is not the moral or ethical north star Smallville seems to think he is.

[brenna]

Would love for this work day to be over

[noodles-and-tea]

MY BBG POOKIE PIE!!!

[cranberrymoons]

all i’m saying is, if MY man was mummy-cursed with hideous plague boils and also mad at me about it for some reason after i sat by his hospital bed and translated his pumpkin guts shoulder dislocation story into Normal Human Person speak for his visiting boyfriend? i too would make fun of him to his face about that.

[babydipper]

Tim and Kon aren't speaking.

Well, technically they are speaking because Superboy and Red Robin are, but Red Robin talks to him the way he talks to the Justice League on the handful of times when Young Justice is called in as reinforcements. He talks to him like Kon is fucking stupid and not worth explaining RR's thought process. It's Tim's default setting, distinctively Batman all in all and Kon knows that this is how all the Bats operate; on this insane amount of blind trust and loyalty. He has seen it in each and every one of them, in different configurations: with Batman, with Nightwing, fuck, even sometimes with Red Hood when the Outsiders needed some help and Jason was focused enough to slip into subconscious reponses. It's their default and Kon isn't sure they even understand that this is how they work. It's so obvious for them that they are to be followed and not questioned that Kon doesn't think they understand it could be any other way.

Kon also knows that he is fucking stupid and quite literally made to take orders and not question them. It was a whole issue, back when he was still starting out, when Tim was learning the ropes of leadership. Kon was made to take orders, so he created a personality that would be his, that would never do anything someone told him to do, in this great attempt at freeing himself from CADMUS's phantom hands. Doing the exact opposite of what they made him to do was not a way to free himself, it turned out. It was not following his gut and trusting, it was a futile attempt to escape of a trashing animal. He has moved on from that, learned to ask how high after being told to jump by Tim. It took them hours and hours of talking, multiple life or death situations, to find a careful balance. Tim knows Kon needs to understand. Kon knows Tim needs to feel trusted and capable.

The point, though, is that they are not talking outside of giving and taking orders in the field because Kon is fucking stupid and ran his mouth instead of sticking it where it belonged, which is on Tim's mouth. Kon could apologise, but he doesn't exactly think he's wrong. He was wrong for saying it at all and not for what he said exactly.

Because being poisoned by Kryptonite is worse than getting beaten up.

Kon has done both, he knows what he's talking about. Tim countered that Kryptonians most likely have much lower pain tolerance than humans, especially under the yellow sun, due to being invulnerable. Kon took offence because what the fuck? His best quality is that he's a tank, he can take a beating. It's Tim who's a twig.

So, now they are not talking and Cassie is looking at them as if her parents were fighting and Bart is oblivious, so everybody is pretending that things are okay, so he doesn't find out. It's a whole thing and it's exhausting.

But it's the principle of the thing now. Kon isn't going to cower and neither is Tim.

you know these videos where men are connected to a thing so they can experience period cramps because they say being kicked in the balls is worse than having period? this but it's tim connecting kon because he ran his mouth that whatever the bats have on daily basis is terrible but still better than kryptonite and tim will prove that kryptonians have low pain tolerance even if it kills him (he has been running around with sensors on patrol and getting his ass kicked more than usual to have right data) (they are not talking for two weeks because tim hyperfixates)

[shannonsketches]

Why is the anime so weird, it's not even the same series dude?? It's like,

Anime:

GOKU: I have a great idea to bring peace to the universe, and my leadership and compassion alone will unite us all. I have No Flaws and am A True Relatable Everyman :)

VEGETA: NO! I AM THE BEST AND I WILL CAUSE PROBLEMS UNTIL I AM RECOGNIZED AS SUCH!!!!

Manga:

GOKU: Vegeta what's cornmeal made of? I know it's what the corn eats, but what's it made of? VEGETA: Hey Kakarot let's play the quiet game until one of us dies.

[ghostinthegallery]

Whenever I see someone raving about a 40k character or faction or event or concept that I do not like or just fine incredibly boring, I remind myself that the odds are good we both have entirely different ideas if what those characters/factions/events even are. We may legit not be talking about the same things.

I'm not talking about having different tastes (which also happens). Between the books, codexes, more books, white dwarf, books, and fanfic it's so easy to get wildly different impressions about literally everything in 40k. Half the shit is made up by fans and the official stuff is contradictory. Nothing is canon, everything is true, the only constant is that your blorbo is a war criminal.

[strawberryjampire]

heres the thing. i dont actually hate stanford pines. hes not my favorite, i dont hate him, im fairly neutral on him. i even enjoy him sometimes. my hatered of him is vastly overperformed, largely due to how many people seem to treat him like hes never done wrong. ford fans (love you guys, this is just my singular greivance) not infrequently talk about ford as though he hasnt done bad things. this is a man who let his brother get disowned and kicked out onto the streets, who didnt talk to him for 10 years despite his ability to at any time. this is a man who called stan up after ten years to send him away (and i don't even really blame him for this considering he hadn't slept in days). he did mind control for the government. he endangers dipper and mabel (infinity sided die in a cheap plastic case with his regular dice while playing d&d&md with dipper, giving mabel a crossbow, taking dipper to a spaceship where he didnt know if all of the aliens were dead (which is still a dangerout trip anyway), giving the twins a mind control device to use unsupervised,).

(obviously, i dont think stan has done nothing wrong either. he is s thief, a con artist, a criminal, he uses a false identity, he commits tax fraud, llamacide, he taught a bear to drive, he didnt tell ford what happened when the machine broke, he had dipper and mabel make fake money, ect. but he didnt deserve to be homeless. maybe i was just a closeted teenager who kept emergency clothes and blankets in my car trunk because i was so afraid i would be disowned if my parents found out im trans, and growing up with that fear certainly affects which stan i latched on to, but basically no 17 year old deserves to be homeless (and no, i dont think he is at fault for the portal incident either, that shit just fucking happened by fate or some nonsense. theres no way).

ford isnt faultless. (no, i dont blame him for getting manipulated by bill. i do blame him for being mad at stanley for reactivating the portal when he had been screaming at stanley to help him, which means stan quite literally was doing what ford said, especially considering by the tine he read the warnings in the journal about the portal it had been 30 years of his life working on this. and i blame both of them for not talking about their feelings as teenagers, but it was unfortunately the 60s).

neither of them are faultless, their lives are a comedy of errors, they hurt me to think about, im high while im typing this, i love this show im so normal about it, ford fumbled the bag (fiddleford) so bad man, ect ect

[we-love-morioh-cho]

They're holding hands stop itttttt 🥺🥺🥺

[maxwelljacobfriedman]

[alienfailboy]

being a thor fan is so tough cuase like

yes. he is a literal god. yes. he's my meow meow.

yes. i do like tlat and ragnarok. no. that is not how he would ever act.

and no. marvel will not give us new content,hold your comics close to your heart.

[put-them-thangs-away]

lmao i see we have unearthed the kpts spongebob meme again,,,,,,, how we doin vegaspete nation

(bad, i’m guessing)

[chalkrevelations]

Rolling into part 4/4 of this week's Dangerous Romance, and I have done a superhuman job of maintaining my emotional equilibrium so far, first repeating grimly to myself through gritted teeth that Kanghan is a teenaged boy who has some fear and grief to process when he turned on Sailom immediately after promising that they would get through this together, and only threatening once to reach into the screen to strangle him when he pulled out that completely noxious little speech about "poor people" and what they'll do for money, because yeah, fuck you and the coddled little gremlin that's rearing its ugly head back up again. That's actually something I might be going back to at some later point, because I think it's maybe related to one of the deeper themes of the show, but for right now, just let me tell you, it's not looking good in the preview for 4/4, because no, Kanghan, you don't get to turn him out into the street like an abandoned dog and then have a single. fucking. word. to say about what he does to survive after that. You may be allowed to have his back by rescuing him from dangerous situations, but you do not get to say a single. fucking. thing. about how he ended up in those situations in the first place, particularly if it's in anything even approaching an accusatory tone or a raised voice. (I know what's coming, and I'm breathing. I'm breathing. I'm breathing.)

Three days ago, you wouldn't have given a rat's ass if your dad got shot, and the only reason you do now is because of Sailom. Who was also - let us not forget - the one person out of everybody who didn't want Saifah in the Sukprasert house in the first place.

Also, I'm assuming there's a gigantic puzzle piece we don't know about yet that's going to come to light whenever we get a flashback to the conversation that Name and Saifah had after Name said he'd need Saifah's help for his last job for his hardcase boss. I guess we'll get the flashback when we find out that Grandma Ging was right about Saifah all along. How she can so consistently be right and still manage to raise two perfectly horrible boys in two generations who picked up zero skills from her on how to avoid being a rich prick is something that has me throwing my hands in the air.

Speaking of which, I think this explanation for Kanghan's dad's behavior was ... unsatisfying, Show. First he's Papa Bear, then he's Mama Bear, and Sailom has to come along and play Baby Bear to get Expectations For Kanghan (tm) Just Right? Come on.

Two thumbs up, though, on proving me right to have some faith in you when I said weeks ago that everything was NOT solved and that you were going to circle back around to Kanghan's bad behavior and worst impulses. I have not wanted to put this brat through a wall so bad since Ep 2.

On to 4/4, I guess.

[quietwingsinthesky]

I don’t understand how people can watch the show and hate Sam. Sam? What did he do to you? Was the sexy blood drinking and identity issues and getting chased by the devil not enough for you? You don’t like Sam? Have you seen him? Genuinely someone tell me what people find objectionable about him, I’m coming up blank.