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mad-serotonin · 2 months ago
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FINRAL
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HIM!!!!!!!!!
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fumifooms · 8 months ago
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Falin who cares too much and too little - analysis
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Been stewing on Falin thoughts for a while, I know I have an interpetation on her that differs from many but I’m jumping into the fray. I think there’s a lot to be said about what we do see of Falin. This shorter Falin analysis I made is heavily encouraged prior reading. This analysis mainly explores her complex relationship with caring and so it’s sort of structured in two halves, with Faligon at the crux of it all.
Falin cares too little :
A lot of people assign Falin a people pleasing mindset and I… Don’t agree. We never see her care at all about people in her town or at the academy not liking her.
We do see her worrying about what people think of her… ONCE. And Laios comforted her, told her they didn’t matter and she should be proud of herself. She latched onto that hard. That’s why this scene was so important to be included during the dragon fight, relationship-defining; it’s always been them against the world. She grew to not care what others thought, to only focus on her close loved ones. No one else matters.
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Laios’ words were her world. Her older brother who taught her how to feel comfortable with herself, who told her, you’re great, others are the ones in the wrong to not see that, I’ll always be with you, always be there for you. Older brother who always made great plans, who always knew more, who was better at wrestling to name the dogs, who she has always idolized. Laios who always spoke of traveling the world, to which she always said she wanted to follow. And she would, she’d follow him even if it meant leaving the academy and all she knew behind, she’d follow him to the ends of the world, and that’s what she did.
She didn’t care about showing to her classes or keeping up such appearances, she doesn’t even think of toning down her jumping into bushes when Marcille recoils, etc. She acts like an obedient pawn often, to her parent’s directives and then following Laios around no matter what he decides to do, but I don’t think the motivation is people pleasing, rather it’s being with & caring for her loved ones, and her go-with-the-flow attitude enhances the impression. Not that it’s as simple as that, mind you, but let’s talk about this for now.
Falin is perceived as selfless because we, the audience, have our perspectives revolving around the main people in her life (Laios, Marcille). They’re the ones she’s devoted to and people who care about her back a lot too, but to people like her classmates or the towspeople she probably must have seemed like someone who didn’t care about the people around her or her surroundings a lot, who just went on alone and did her own thing.
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What matters to Falin? From what place does her kindness come from? Is a part of her keeping up appearances? And I think that’s the point, the horror of Faligon as well, that we can’t tell just how in control Falin the person is as the chimera (because we are shown that she’s in there, we just don’t know at what degree), that we don’t know her enough to be able to tell when she’s at her most genuine, her most raw. That even if you do settle on none of her being present as Faligon, we have to at least consider it, consider that she may be able to do something like this and have a part in it, brutal and uncaring. That even the lenses we see her through, the people who love her, may be unreliable.
And this is what’s very interesting about her too, she truly is so idealized by people around her as a saint. She’s so good and kind and caring to everyone etc etc etc. Laios, Toshiro and Marcille all see her as the paragon of goodness in the world. More cynical characters like Namari and Chilchuck have more layered opinions on her, the latter finding her somewhat unnerving because he can’t read her well. But then with that one flashback scene we see that… Her priorities are intensely focused on Laios and Marcille, she doesn’t care all that deeply about anyone other than them (+ maybe her parents). The rest of the party is in the same danger here but only Laios and Marcille who she’s speaking to get the special ,ention, and if they don’t cross her mind then of course she’d be ready to sacrifice strangers through a risky teleportation. That doesn’t make her not kind or caring!! Just that greater good isn’t exactly her priority. Any means is alright if the end result is her loved ones safe, it usually takes the form of healing and caring, but we see she’s ready to fight and make dangerous calls too. To me there’s this aspect to her that she isn’t as pure and magnanimous as everyone thinks she is, both in-world and interestingly enough meta wise as well, and there’s something interesting to that.
People pleasing implies a need to be liked, needs for the motivation to be that. A yes-man, etc. But if we analyze Falin, her general kind, smiling demeanor is more a matter of passivity I yhonk. Conflict avoidance is easier, so she’s friendly and hopefully things’ll be smooth sailing. It’s easy to be kind to classmates even if they act wary and rude if you don’t care about what they think either way. Of course she prefers good things happening to people over bad things, she is genuinely kind, but I think people tend to assign her a very grand altruistic way of life when to her the motivation is pretty self-centered. She doesn’t do what she does because she loves them, but because she loves them.
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One situation that’s interesting to dig into for her way of thinking, and what I’m trying to get at, is Shuro’s proposal to her. I’ve seen people saying she hesitated because she didn’t feel comfortable saying no even though she wanted to, "I can’t say no, I don’t want to hurt him", something that sounds sensible and familiar, but it’s actually canon in the Adventurer’s Bible that the reverse was the case, that she didn’t feel comfortable saying yes. Because the offer was tempting, but it’d have been a loveless agreement on her end. And it makes sense she’d want to say yes too, like we see with the Toudens, marriage is very much a political strategical economical thing in their village, there’s even a bit on it on Laios’ Adventurer’s Bible profile about dowries, and both siblings were engaged very early. They lived poorly for a long time, it’s an enticing idea to marry rich, to have not only yours but your brother’s needs met forevermore easily, which at one point in their careers was their main worry and goal. Why shouldn’t she accept a life of leisure and wealth handed to her by a lovely friend?
So her hesitance was "yeah that’s convenient for me, but where it’s everything to him and heartfelt I’m able to be detached because I don’t care about it that much… Can I do that? I’m not reciprocating, not saying yes in the way that matters. Can I do that to him?" Very caring even though it’s not what you’d expect, isn’t it?
And central to my analysis, where I’m going with this is, I feel like that’s the thing with her character, that she doesn’t feel as strongly as she "should" sometimes, or feels a different way than she "should", or at least that she feels that way and others say she does. She didn’t mind suddenly leaving the academy, leaving Marcille behind and not seeing her for 4 years. She acted like it was no big deal that she sacrificed herself after getting resurrected after the red dragon fight. And in both those cases it upset the people around her greatly that she didn’t seem to get why it was such a big deal, didn’t seem to care about how they’d experienced her choices.
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So it’s a tendency… And it’s not that she doesn’t care, it’s just that the way she measures what’s good for the ones she loves isn’t the same as what they themselves think it is (like Laios and Marcille not wanting to be apart from her). It’s an overt but quiet kind of care, it’s doing things like following them around and making sure they bathe and have a meal, even if that means she has to be dragged into misery too.
So yes she probably would know "not caring enough/the right way" is one of her perceived flaws, and that informs how she tries to handle her response to Shuro’s proposal. Her not wanting to accept like her first gut instinct, is because she’s thinking about reciprocity, about if it’d be right to go into this knowing that they have different priorities and she might not be able to keep up with the type and amount of emotions he wants/expects from her. And that’s a big part of her character isn’t it, having expectations pushed onto her. Her trying her best, but in her own way that may seem odd or even unfeeling. Not unlike when she exorcised the ghost as a kid too, unblinking and matter-of-factly, and not seeming to understand why people stared the way they did.
Even though she answered his proposal only post-canon, she’d been pondering it for a while even pre-canon and the Adventurer’s Bible explanation was released midstory, so I’m hesitant to assign her much growth about her hesitation and what I went on above, since she still didn’t react "right" with Laios after the red dragon fight (even if she apparently doesn’t remember sacrificing herself) and put herself in that situation in the first place. She hasn’t finished her arc on that flaw of hers is what I’m saying, she for sure still has it, but I certainly think her thoughts on Shuro’s proposal shows awareness, both of herself and social.
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And awareness is a big analysis key word with Falin, especially here it can be hard not to conflate not caring with not knowing. How socially aware is she? It’s rather layered, because canonically she wasn’t aware of her ostracization in her hometown at all, and we’re not sure if she knew Shuro was interested in her before he proposed, but she generally seems more socially aware than Laios. She tags along on his caravan job to make sure he isn’t being mistreated (though doesn’t ask he get a salary), she catches social faux-pas more easily like in the genderbend magic mirror omake with Shuro, and interestingly enough she’s very good at empathizing with her parents and understanding their perspective. We see when she’s worried about Marcille coming that she does know about propriety and how appearances shape impressions. Being a chief’s daughter must at least have taught her a thing or two on that front.
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She never stands up for herself, but when it comes to defending others she worries, strategizes and explains.
And this sort of understanding is part of why I think she’d notice the expectations pushed onto her like I was saying earlier, notice how she makes people feel when she’s careless. But if she changes anything about herself in response to noticing is for her to choose, and generally I think it’s a sort of inbetween of yes and no: that she becomes more complacent but also more reserved, complying but by hiding more of herself passively. She’s not sure wether to accept or reject Shuro’s proposal, doesn’t want to lead him on? She’ll just be taking a while to silently consider it, try to keep things as they are for the time being. The third, less conflicting option. She doesn’t feel heard by Marcille who keeps infantilizing her? Just bear with it. Retract yourself emotionally. Settle for it.
We see that when she was young she had a tendency to not read a room, and I think that’s here too. She doesn’t get why her nonchalance upset others but that doesn’t change that she doesn’t want them upset or hurt, so she tries, albeit in maybe a roundabout way. She always had a hard time deeply connecting with people, often keeping herself some amount of emotionally distant: erasing herself from the equation, from the two-way trade that relationships are and making it a onesided thing instead, where all their needs and emotions are directed towards her but she only lets out a bit of her own show. She takes everything upon her and deals with it and tries not to give others this same burden, though not on a conscious level, it’s just that she’s learned growing up that she doesn’t have much agency.
Like I went into with my analysis linked at the beginning, I think Falin is used to just taking what she can get and not asking for more, when it comes to social bonds. She’ll take spending time with her mother no matter what it is they do, she’ll follow Laios to the graveyards and stick by him even when he’s pushing her away (because he doesn’t want her borrowing his book or "No copying!" or such). Her father was always distant, cold and uncommunicative, her mother was considered sick from anxiety and the exorcism attempts were the main way they spent time together, at dinner tables there were only her and Laios. The dogs picked on her too even if she loved them— And so did the townspeople, maybe that being normal to her at home is why she didn’t notice the ostracization she suffered.
She’s always been the last to be asked about decisions or what she wants, never asked to play with at recess, neither her father or Laios asked before sending her to the academy or leaving the village. At home, in the hierarchy she was considered to be below the dogs by the dogs themselves, as someone they can disrespect. Dogs learn from example and behavior, so this means Falin must have been pushed around a lot, and that the family didn’t try hard to rectify the dogs’ misconception, likely worsened by Laios regularly wrestling with her as a competition.
So for example when Falin showed Marcille food, it was her way to implicitly ask to have lunch with her without voicing that question, without daring to take up space. Someone’s presence isn’t something you ask for, it’s something that’s bestowed upon you, you can follow them around but you can’t ask them to stay or to come with.
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She’s used to her needs and wants not being listened to, so she’s learned to have less wants. Caring less about herself, caring less about other people beyond her safe zone, was a defense mechanism in part. She has a sense of learned helplessness too, like how when Marcille came to take her away from Laios, even though she didn’t want to leave with Marcille it felt so determined and unshakable to her that whatever Marcille decided Falin would have to comply with.
And still, it’s the "marrying you would be awfully convenient if it wasn’t that I’d feel guilty for not loving you back, the way you wanted me to when you proposed to me" and the "I don’t regret leaving the academy and leaving you behind without goodbyes but I’m sorry that you’re so much more upset about it than me". It’s the guilt of not loving people back the way they want to be, with the same intensity or fervor.
It’s the autism it’s the aroace of it all, it’s the emotional stunting and confusion but the pit in your stomach telling you you did something wrong again. The no object permanence even for people you love even for 4 years, it’s the feeling like you’re somehow at fault for someone having fallen for you and not knowing what to do with any of it. I’m not joking btw it isn’t uncommon for autistic people to not see their close friends for a long while, not having missed them all that much and for that to be really hurtful for the other if they notice/ask about it. "Hiii bestie! Oh umm you’re uh more emotional about this than I expected, hopefully you won’t feel alienated by me not feeling as intensely about it…"
So… Yeah. I think she thinks of things and relationships in a different way than most people, and beyond "good things happening to people is good" I don’t think she actually cares about people all that much. I’d argue that Laios shows more desire to connect with others and make relationships. And just like with Laios and his own issues with humans, that doesn’t mean her kindness is a lie or ungenuine or worthless! It just means that like, well it’s pretty straightforward really, she’s not all that social and doesn’t see casual bonds as meaning all that much and whatnot. She does want to see people happy, but it’s not as much like… A conviction or goal. She’s too laser focused on a select few people. "It’s not that they’re bad people, they just aren’t interested in humans."
And sometimes it feels like people get defensive about Falin in a meta way too, like if you ever so much as imply Marcille isn’t her whole world or that she isn’t the kindest soul out there then you’re saying she doesn’t care at all or she’s evil. And that’s actualy exactly the sort of vibe I wanted to get through with my analysis above here actually haha, that she does care and she is kind but it’s not in a way that’s quantified or understood in a way that makes people feel comfortable. In a way, that makes people feel insecure because they don’t have the same logic as her, don’t show love the same. And I think this is another stellar depiction of autism, of parts of it that feels unpalatable to many, if I’m making sense. The fandom idealizes her as well, which isn’t uncommon or surprising for the character embodying the trope of the perfect beloved to rescue.
And disclaimer, as I said in the tags I feel like the details of Falin are pretty vibe based when it comes to analysis, there’s absolutely a valid angle where she does super care about everyone always, feel free to disagree with me on the overarching angle of my analysis. There’s enough supporting evidence to tip the balance either way I think, and the reason I’ve chosen this angle is I feel it’s more compelling for the themes in Dunmeshi of idealization and being different, of desires vs wants, and because I think it neatly ties up Falin’s character arc as I’ll go over throughout the next section…
So.
Not feeling as much as she should. And……. Is this not Faligon pushed to the max?
You can’t tie down a dragon. As the chimera, she gets to just not care about everyone else and be on her merry way.
Part of it I think is finding comfort and freedom in the mindlessness, in not having the burden of feelings and connections and a consciousness (despite still ending up seeking those in a stranger, Thistle). Like when she’s dead in the purgatory as well, she gets to just… Hang around and do whatever. Similarly to when she played in the forest instead of going to class in her academy days. That’s what freedom and peace of mind looks like to her. Why she decides to roam post-canon, if only now with the goal to find herself instead, with her mind in tow and somewhere to go back home to.
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There’s excellent analytic framing out there about how of course, Dungeon Meshi has a big theme of grief and letting go, and… Falin was always a symbol narratively, idealized by characters and often underconsidered by them despite their love. It was Falin’s choice to sacrifice herself for Laios, she thought it was worth it, knowing that it would be her end. Her resurrection and the process of it intertwining her soul with a dragon’s wasn’t done with her consent, and the subsequent opening it gave her to become a chimera puppet. She’s stripped of her agency consistently, and so… It’s very noteworthy that the final choice, of wether to go back to life or to stay dead, in that purgatory scene, was up to her. And she chooses life, but I do think about her in those fields and how at home she seemed there. Peaceful, by herself in a vast calm expanse she could explore, free.
Personally, I think freedom is Falin’s own subconscious selfish desire. And though to us becoming the chimera is obviously a shackle, I think it felt like freedom to her somewhat, too.
And if you think I’m going wildly off the rails here I want to talk about Laios’ wish of becoming a monster. And to be clear before getting into it, being mentally a monster is absolutely a big part of the appeal for Laios, it’s something that’s consistently referred to, something especially pointed out in the werewolf monster tidbit with Lycion. Right panel is from that, but left panel is from the extra with Izutsumi where Lycion talks about suppressing souls in a beastkin body, the human or the beast soul.
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Finding comfort and freedom in being mindless, less sentient, less aware? While being unaware in her hometown might have saved Falin a lot of heartache although perhaps stunted her emotional growth, it’s always been Laios’ curse.
Actively, through his choices, he seeks to grow closer to people, to form deeper bonds, to understand and be undertood, but… On a deep seated level, what he desires is to leave humanity and civilization behind. He has an irrational hatred for humans, born from the trauma of ostracization, being different, being beaten up and rejected consistently through his life. Running away from problems is easier. He wants to be free from being a social animal from a social species who has deemed him the black sheep, he thinks it’d be simpler to just leave it all behind, people and his own humanity. At its core, to Laios becoming a monster is a power fantasy, a coping daydream of "if only I could be strong enough to never be hurt again, the power to destroy anything I want, the power to go somewhere better, if only it was possible for me to never feel hurt again. If only I could be someone, something, that can never be hurt". "If there’s someone you don’t like, you can gobble ‘em up in one bite. If you could fly, you’d be able to leave this village right now." It’s a childhood fantasy, from a deep sense of being misplaced and a desire to be able to stand fearless, thinly covering up resentment that Laios represses.
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But you’ll notice, when the Winged Lion is enticing him in the last page, even now with his lifelong wish of becoming a monster on a silver plate, he still cares about his friends. He still has that sense of responsibility to his friends, doesn’t want to leave knowing they’ll be in danger and alone. The offer that his friends may be left unharmed is already good, but Laios also visibly flinches when the Winged Lion offers to specifically care after Marcille and rid her of her biggest fear. Laios’ care runs that deep. Not unlike with the succubus, he resists temptation until he gets reassured that everyone will be okay. But see, what he desires isn’t to stand alongside Marcille until her last days, it isn’t to stay and see how well his friends will live, it’s to go. It’s to leave. It’s to fly away, a monster both in body and mind. He wants to be free from caring here, wants to not have to worry about his friends, wants to just go do his own thing, but for that he needs to feel safe in the belief that said friends will be safe even without him being there to see it, because despite everything else he cares, he does. It’s again that dichotomy about caring and wishing you didn’t, or not caring and wishing you did.
In the end, it’s Falin who achieves that wish. Both by becoming a chimera during canon, and by going traveling post-canon. In the latter, being both free of human relationships as something chaining you while still being uplifted by them, by the knowledge that there are people out there you love and that love you. It’s a theme that can also be connected with Marcille, because she gets anxious over people she loves getting out of her sight, worrying they’ll get themselves killed, that time is passing while they’re away from her. But before she can get to the point where she can both have her freedom and being uplifted by her social bonds, regaining both her individuality and her connections, she has to get a taste of just one at a time. Before they can find balance in her life, she has to see what it’s like to have what she’s never had on its own. Unapologetic freedom, and power.
No one can blame you for not caring enough or caring right if you’re a fricking dragon!!!! You make the rules when you’re a beast and you can just… Fly away. From anywhere, from anything. And if a dog bites you you can just crush it. Instead of being pushed around by the dogs because you’re at the bottom of the hierarchy, you’re now at the top, the one with the power to be heard and do what you want without consequences.
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I think she’s on autopilot. I think she’s on autopilot a lot of the time, even before being a chimera, and it’s partly why her will is so weak compared to regular dragons. (Again, read my shorter analysis.) It’s familiar to slip back into the role of following someone around unquestioningly. And that’s what is weaponized when she’s a chimera, that instinct she’s been nursing all her life to unconditionally support, defend and follow someone. Only now, that someone doesn’t matter in itself, only the symbol of it. She doesn’t mind, either way is fine. Her will is weak after all, because she’s trained it to take as little place as it could.
Falin cares too much
She spends all her time caring for Laios and Marcille alternating that none of her care and emotional energy is left for others, including herself. So she had to get relieved of all of that for a bit, becoming the chimera so she could reset and recenter and remember that she, too, indeed, is there and an important part of her own life.
So you’re probably seeing the duality I’m talking about here, Falin is very self-sacrificial but for specific people in ways that they often don’t recognize or appreciate. She cares but selectively, both in people, putting all her eggs in the same baskets, and in the ways she cares after them. She doesn’t care a lot, but when she does she cares a lot. Falin doesn't have a lot of earthly attachments, but when she does, they're her world.
In canon her arc, especially post-canon, is to grow beyond Marcille and Laios. Her caring for her close loved ones held her back from looking after her own self-fulfillment needs. And this is what I mean when I say she cares too much; she could gain from caring more about the world besides Laios and Marcille, both lands wise and people wise. She cares too little, but her arc centers her flaw around caring too much instead. Her pitfalls that Kui highlight over the course of the story, while of course her selflessness is appreciated for how she saved Laios and everyone, on a personal level is shown to be self-effacing and damaging. She’s undermined by Marcille, without the courage to voice her thoughts and wants, she would dedicate her whole life to Laios. And I mean, it’s text, in the response to Shuro’s proposal extra no less. And she’s so laser focused on her most loved people that she’s fine with being callous and risking others’ lives, even.
Post-canon, she needs to leave to find herself, away from them.
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Herself. What if she wants to just be with herself for a while.
And this is me reaching but I feel like, not unlike Izutsumi who learns to feel this sense of never being alone, always having someone on your side what with having two souls, the dragon in her would make her consider herself more. She finds it easier to care after other people after all, and in the purgatory fields sequence she takes care to bring the bit of dragon left with her… Not unlike with Izutsumi, having two souls forces you to think about your identity and figure yourself out. Besides being this sort of duo now, where if she wants to care after herself she can channel it to that other side of her too… In meta dragons are symbols of greed, and I think the bit of dragon would push her to want more and listen more to her desires, primal and self-serving as they might be. The dragon soul which warped her human body with feathers and draconic features, her image of perfection marred, her weirdness externalized in a way that’s not palatable. But she doesn’t care, about if her appearance is palatable for most people, she hasn’t for a while now, and that’s great.
Notes & nuance
I’m struggling with the structure of this post, making my points organized, concise and strong at once. It’s difficult to make any statement without going "things are generally like this, but there’s this time that this contradicting thing happened too" or "it’s ambiguous enough that you should just follow my interpretation for the time of this analysis" haha, so this is the pit where I put all the stuff that wouldn’t fit well in other places but are interesting for Falin’s character. This section is pretty separate from the main thesis of the post, it’s just more Falin observations. The post has reached the 30 pics limit so I can’t just pull it up whenever it’s relevant but I really encourage scrolling up to read the stuff I highlighted in her Adventurer’s Bible profile if you haven’t already.
I think with the shy-looking loner type autistic kid archetype, and knowing she didn’t seem to mind others ostracizing her, it’s easy to lose sight of how she was by no means an unemotional child. In all the bits we see of her as a kid she’s bursting with energy and emotions. Canon confirms Laios leaving the village did affect her and make her lonely and she cried a lot, too. She may not be social in the traditional sense, but she was clingy with her brother, and she also never was all that shy about who she was, wearing her heart on her sleeve.And okay. Okay okay okay. Speaking of appearances. About what I said of her not caring about what people think of her, even seeming defiant with the caravan leader… There’s one istanxe of her caring actually, and it’s about how her face blushes easily. I remembered it as being because Laios’ said it and as I rambled Laios’ words are her world, but actually it’s ambiguous. It’s only Marcille imagining up this scenario where Laios says Falin looks weird because of it, there’s no evidence Laios said or thought that at any point. And on the other hand…
Her Adventurer’s Bible says: "5, Lovely Skin. She isn't particularly careful with it, but Falin's skin is fair and beautiful. Possibly as a result, her cheeks seem to flush easily. Marcille's always saying she's cute, and she secretly has a sizable complex about it." The phrasing makes me think the complex she has over her blushing might have developed because of Marcille more than Laios. "Marcille's always saying she's cute, and she secretly has a sizable complex about it." It could be related to how Marcille gets swept away and infantilizes her, calling her cute wanting her to wear cute feminine outfits etc. Again this feels like it relates to Falin’s struggle to be seen for who she is and what she wants to be seen as, her struggle to be recognized, having ideals and perspectives pushed onto her. Here Falin is insecure over her blushing implicitly because she doesn’t like being called cute over it, but that’s not how she wants people to see her. She doesn’t want Marcille to always see her as her 10 years old adorable friend. Like if your friend said you had puppy energy, it can be flattering, but it can also make you insecure.
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Here’s a link to what I mentioned about her being uncomfortable wearing feminine outfits. It does seem to be more about comfort than the aesthetic perse, to me. Interestingly the shirt & shorts don’t seem like they show much more skin than her beach outfit, so maybe it’s more about the shirt and shorts being tight-fitting. Like the skirts and heels they feel stifling. Again a bit with themes of freedom and not wanting an aesthetic pushed onto her. So yes just to reiterate, I think this is more about self-affirmation and how her identity and self-image gets shown to others, rather than wishing to hide parts of her body like her blushing etc for people pleasing reasons. Makeup was a way for her to appear how she wants to and feel more confident. It was a way to take control over her own image. She didn’t keep doing it, the narrator stating the process to be ‘troublesome’. Ultimately she still prioritizes her comfort, and it was a lot of recurring efforts to go through.
And on the topic of appearances… A friend once asked me: "Does she really hide herself or not? I keep thinking about "falin is herself first and foremost" (in her Adventurer’s Bible profile) it’s just so. Hmmmmmmmm... I just keep seeing people say she hides her real self from people when I feel like the issue is more about her charitable traits straying too far into becoming flaws but people around her dont realize that..."
Imo the thing is, I don’t think she hides her identity, but I do think she suppresses her individuality for others’ sakes if that makes sense. In the way that only post-canon does she allows herself to go see what the world is like, but that’s not personality wise it’s needs and wants wise. And I do feel like that’s the closest interpretation of canon, she says it herself she doesn’t know what she wants because everything she’s done was always about Laios or Marcille, but she doesn’t change her demeanor or personality for others. But she *will*, like, not ask for things she wants directly, like sharing lunches with Marcille at the academy, she suppresses her wants, doesn’t ask things from people and doesn’t hope for more, hope for better. I don’t think we ever see her actively repress her personality, except like what, being more laidback than enthusiastic but I do feel like unlike Laios with her it’s less ‘appearing stoic to fit in more’ and more ‘yeah i’ll just chill until I’m needed or something activates my enthusiasm’. To which said friend quoted: "to feel like you belong you need to be useful. when you can’t be useful the next best thing is being convenient."
And speaking of passivity… I want to speculate about Shuro’s proposal some more. Shuro and her got along well though we don’t know how much, or how often they hung out, she even saved him from a nightmare. Why did she take so long answering Shuro’s proposal? Was it an effort to preserve or was she really just that conflicted? Procrastination probably yes, but what is the core motivation of itl Considering she ended up saying no to travel the world instead, I don’t think it was as simple as ‘she wanted to say yes for convenience’. Logically it’s what would have been best, but it’s not what she wanted for herself, but it was and still is hard for her to even know what she wants. Probably, since like she states it was a great offer and she doesn’t think she’ll get proposed to again, it’s that self-effacing tendency that yes it’d be convenient and logical, and that makes her want to say yes even if her spirit isn’t in it, because if it’s convenient then that’s more important than her feelings on the matter. Man also… Obviously Marcille is very vocal about how she shouldn’t get with Shuro, but imagine how Falin’s whole perspective on marriage must have felt when her only friend ever is a Romantic with a capital R who gushes about idealized romances and grand gestures and True Love and doing things with fully pure feelings all the time.
AND speaking of passivity!!! How much Falin is "there" as the chimera, just how much she’s master of her actions, is left ambiguous and intentionally so imo, but she’s for sure there & influencing the dragon’s action to some degree. Having a dragon’s foot on her in purgatory that keeps her from moving for sure visualizes how it must have been like, but there’s Falin calling out to her brother Laios, there’s the kind attentions towards Thistle that are so Falin-like, and most explicitly there’s the Adventurer’s Bible stating "Even after becoming a chimera, she has a soul that's as kind as ever", which I honestly dislike, a fantranslation puts it as "Even as the chimera, her caring nature remains" and either way to me it feels like confirmation that it’s her giving those berries to Thistle. Now, wether or not she has the mental capacity of a chicken or something closer to human Falin, no clue, there has to at least be some kind of mind bond between monsters and the dungeon lord, compelling or forcing them to go along with orders, or calling her to him in distress like with the fight on the first floor. But yes, it’s interesting to wonder what it is that a Falin, with her kind soul but without her human mind, would willingly do. On her profile, she’s described as Thistle’s guardian and servant. The power dynamic between the two are very interesting, I already went into how it might have felt like freedom to her while being fake so I’ll reign myself in and just mention it again. She’s still at the heel of someone, only now it’s someone who doesn’t care about her back. Going from being cared for so strongly that it’s suffocating and they would defy death and the world for you, to being devoted to someone who has not one feeling about you besides your utility as a paw . She has all this care to give and to focus onto others and he has none to send back to her and I think that’s part of it. In a way, being left with only her own feelings and a void, without expectations or feelings or ideals pushed onto her, it might have been soothing in itself, and eye opening. But yes the way I think of it, her care for Thistle isn’t unlike the care she gives the ghosts.
Interestingly, the care she extends for the ghosts is sending their soul to a peaceful death, freeing them, of life and any earthly attachment. Take that as you will with the themes of freedom and burden of life and mind, immortality and becoming a warped version of who you were, and such and such.
But going back on the topic of connections and bonds for a bit, I think academy days Falin & Marcille is super interesting bc we’ve never really see Falin form a connection besides with Marcille and even that is kept pretty ambiguous. When was the point that Falin started seeing Marcille as a friend and seeking her out? When was the "I’ll lay down my life for you" point? I’m so fascinated by how she wanted to share lunches with Marcille but never truly asked, only made little "hey want this? I found it isn’t it cool?" gestures of showing things to her… It’s the only way she knows to ask, or maybe it’s the only way she feels comfortable to. In all the scenes of young Falin and Marcille Falin seems comfortable in her friendship with Marcille, but at the same time… I think we see Falin at her most insecure around Marcille, because she really does care about Marcille and what she thinks of her so much, and while Marcille is a bit of an unstoppable force tornado style (affectionate) Falin is something of a doormat. I’d usually say showing her berries was her earnest way to connect and be like "Hey bestie look at this! :]" , but there’s a real possibility that she was self-conscious and holding herself back.
Friendship and Marcille! Involving Laios into this too but, again with the autism thing of not showing you care in ways that others understand, Marcille being very overtly affectionate and clingy was so so soo important… Marcille keeping on hanging out with Falin and caring after her, and being undeterred/unbothered by Falin not always seeming like she cares all that much back in the conventional way, as in Falin acts nonchalant and a bit like she didn’t mind wether she was there with her or not during her outings to the cave dungeon. Caring and being clingy and so affectionate despite that in such a classic Marcille way is soo needed, because so often people will get discouraged by say, their friend not keeping in contact regularly/well, seeming disaffected or as happy-go-lucky as ever even if you haven’t seen each other in a while or when they’re alone, and yes there’s potential for a strong friendship there but someone like Falin won’t be committed enough to reciprocating attention the same way… I hope I’m making sense but yes this angle in particular strongly correlates to autism. And the way Marcille always initiates physical affection, both Toudens being awkward about initiating touch because they don’t know if that’s allowed, if they’re going about the social interaction the right way, if they’re allowed to ask that out of someone…
Another fun observation to make is about the 4 years Falin and Marcille spent apart. Marcille despite being of a long-lived race treated these 4 years of separation with more gravity than Falin did. Falin brushed it off very dismissively to say the least. But then you remember that the amount of time Falin and Laios didn’t see each other after he left the village was 8 years. Double the years, double the time. And that reminder makes Falin’s actions so starkingly understandable. Of course she wouldn’t see 4 years of separation as a long time if 8 years of separation with her beloved brother is her point of comparison. Of course she’d see it as worth it to leave Marcille for 4 years if it meant ending those 8 years instead, especially if she was worried about him (the reason why she followed him into his caravan job).
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A friend always says that while Falin is the center of Marcille’s world, Laios’ is at the center of Falin’s, and I tend to agree.
It’s fun to think of how her career dreams had always been shaped by Laios, even when they were kids. Of course there’s how traveling the world began as a dream they talked about and shared, but there’s how he reassures her by listing cool jobs she could do like traveling exorcist, etc. And then of course, she gave up on her magic academy and career path to follow him and do odd jobs, etc etc.
I should go into the violence of Faligon more tbh, because I think there’s an interesting parallel to how she has no problem wacking things with a mace, wether a ghost when she was a kid or a walking mushroom as an adult. Something that often surprises fans when they remember, I don’t really want to get into the whole " Falin hates violence and hates seeing people in pain to an intense degree. ‘If you die do it somewhere where I can’t see’ style’ interpretation, it has some weight but on the whole I don’t vibe with the theory she has a particular aversion to violence, she seems to be fine resorting to it as much as any other adventurer as long as it isn’t needlessly against ghosts. And Falin’s sudden mace hits are fun to me too because it’s not her becoming a berserker when the need arises as much as her becoming active because something she cares about is threatened, and that brings her out of her passivity from 99% of the rest of the time. Thistle included. Falin always could be violent, she just dislikes senseless carnage. The Shuro party vs chimera fight is a bit ambiguous on it, because you can argue she only attached after being provoked, presumably offscreen as well while the ninjas went off to fight the harpies. Falin becomes the most active when she needs to protect someone, she has no qualms doing whatever’s needed for that, wether it be leaving the academy & Marcille without notice no matter the consequences or what her parents think, or teleporting the party, etc.
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I’m working on a post specifically pointing out all the differences between Falin and Laios, but yes I think both of them selfishly desire freedom in different yet similar ways. Falin’s dark secret is "Ethics and risks are optional if it means I can protect those I love" like the teleportation, and Laios’ is "Ethics and risks are optional if I can be free of all this bullshit" aka humanity aka his wish with the winged lion.
Conclusion
Flighted birds have hollow bones. With freedom and wings there comes risks and sacrifices.
Tldr: Falin doesn’t care all that much, she’s very go with the flow. For example if someone hates her she doesn’t really care because that’d require her caring about what they think of her in the first place, and she only cares about her loved ones. She smiles, but it’s more a state of being rather than out of active goodness: she’s canonically very genuinely kind, but it’s more out of a general want for pleasantness than active care itself. She’s passive, and softspoken because that’s just how she seems, but she has no problem hopping into bushes or getting heated if something calls to her enthusiasm or calls for action and a hit of the ol’ mace. Her loved ones needing tending or protective is what makes her go from passive to active. That familiar autopilot mode of making someone the center of her world and following their every move is what made her so easy to be controlled as the chimera, even ferociously defending him with her life. Faligon is most interesting to me with the theme of freedom. She’s shackled to Thistle and out of her mind, but there’s also a sense of empowerment and freedom from expectations and society. She spends all her time caring for Laios and Marcille alternating that none of her care and emotional energy is left for others, including herself. So she had to get relieved of all of that for a bit, becoming the chimera so she could reset and recenter and remember that she, too, indeed, is there and an important part of her own life. There’s a way of caring after others that can be selfish, not unlike Marcille being overly coddling and not listening to Falin. In Falin’s case, I think it was so selfless that it ended up looping back around to erasing her sense of self. In losing sight of herself, that devotion becoming neither quite selfish or selfless but a fact of life and a state of nature, muddled by its lack of direction.
She’s sooo used to never being able to ask things out of others, you get the crumbs of affection and approval that others offer to you unprompted and that’s it don’t hope for more don’t ask for more. (Also reflected in how she follows her loved ones around without complain or personal opinions and how she’s not willing to rock the boat and affirm herself in her relationships like with Marcille during canon)
Falin cares so much, so much and so laser focused on her few loved ones that it blinds her and she loses sight of everything else, she ends up neglecting herself and the rest of the world. As Kui puts it, Falin is herself first and foremost. She just had to remember the importance of that.
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I see her as an enneagram 9, which can be surprisingly accurate and fun to research through the lense of Falin. Excerpt below from this book, but like my god, good way to put it
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That’s it, ty for reading. Even if it’s a bit of a mess, hopefully you’ll have gained a thing or two from it. Falin is a character hard to pin down, but it is very gratifying when you find the way that the puzzle pieces fit together right for your own understanding of the story. Fantranslation of the shuro proposal comic by @/thatsmimi here.
Here’s my spotify playlist for her if you’d like
Sometimes love is about letting go, a lesson a lot of the cast needed to learn. Self-love’s important too, and just like with diets we need a healthy balance.
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#I find it hard to express myself right on the topic of Falin. Both because the issue is pretty vibe based and because we don’t#get that many moments with her. So there’s ambiguous scenes up to interpretation addressing a layered topic and like. Save me. Save me#As always falling down the rabbithole of starting an analysis about a specific facet and then needing to explain everything else around it#I’m doomed. I’m getting lost in the sauce.#dungeon meshi#delicious in dungeon#falin touden#analysis#character analysis#meta#autistic reading#aroace reading as well. Sort of. It’s mentioned#The aroace autistic guilt of not caring back in the way/with the intensity you’re expected to#As always this is just my interpretation blablabla#Spoilers#dungeon meshi manga spoilers#She loves like a dog aka unconditionally and happy with eating scraps of affection and attention off the floor#Laios touden#he’s here too bc they are an unit#If you’re not capitalizing on the uncanny vibe autistic effect for Falin’s character u are missing an opportunity imo#Fairy’s child is written all over her. Her cryptic-ness is the point so why am I surprised she’s hard to fully pin down#Even with the graveyard scene it was Falin following Laios… Sob. Laios could feel responsible her powers were found out#I’d like to rework this at some point if i get better at structuring. I’m not satisfied by the level of clarity#Will 90% for sure edit stuff in if i find more to say.#Fumi rambles#Crazy style#I give a TLDR at the end if you’d prefer. It doesn’t have the like evidence/explanations alongside but it makes the main points i think
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fatehbaz · 11 days ago
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patience being tested. being forced by a bizarre unfortunate situation to adhere to university requirement technicality by taking this simple basic elementary "introduction to environmental history" class.
this class is from facilitators/program which do, like, "history of the American frontier" or "history of fishing and hunting" and still basically subscribe to that old-school twentieth-century idealization and celebration of characters like Teddy Roosevelt and reverence for a mythical arc-of-history-bent-towards-justice narrative of the often-clumsy but ultimately-benevolent US federal government and its mission to "save nature" through the miracle of "sustained yield," while heroic federal land management agencies and "heritage" institutions lead to way, staffed by exceptional individuals (appeals to nostalgia for the frontier and an imagined landscape of the American West; ego-stroking appeals to flattering self-image that center the environmentalist or academic). where they invoke, y'know, ideas like "ecology is important because don't you enjoy cross-country skiing in The Woods with your niece and nephew? don't you like hunting and fishing?" which makes it feel like a time capsule of appeals and discourses from the 1970s. and it invokes concept of "untouched wilderness" (while eliding scale of historical Indigenous environmental relationships and current ongoing colonial violence/extractivism). but just ever-so-slightly updated with a little bit of chic twenty-first-century flair like a superficial land acknowledgement or a reference to "labor histories" or "history from below," which is extra aggravating when the old ideologies/institutions are still in power but they're muddying the water and diluting the language/frameworks (it's been strange, watching words like "multispecies" and "Anthropocene" over the years slowly but surely show-up on the posters, fliers, course descriptions, by now even appearing adjacent to the agri-business and resource extraction feeder programs, like a recuperation or appropriation.) even from a humanities angle, it's still, they're talking at me like "You probably didn't know this, but environmental history is actually pretty entangled with political and social events. In fact, we can synthesize sources and glean environmental info from wacky places like workers' rolls in factories, ship's logs, and poetry from the era." and i'm nodding like YEP.
the first homework assignment is respond to this: "Define and describe 'the Anthropocene'. Do you think 'the Anthropocene' is a useful concept? Why or why not?" Respond in 300 words.
so for fun, right now in class, going to see how fast i can pull up discussion of Anthropocene-as-concept solely from my old posts on this microblogging site.
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ok, found some
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I think that the danger in any universal narrative or epoch or principle is exactly that it can itself become a colonizing force. [...] I’m suspicious of the Anthropocene as concept for the very reason that it subsumes so many peoples, nations, histories, geographies, political orders. For that reason, I think ideas like the Anthropocene can be a useful short-hand for a cluster of tangible things going on with the Earth at the moment, but we have to be very careful about how fluid and dynamic ideas become concretized into hegemonic principles in the hands of researchers, policymakers, and politicians. There’s so much diversity in histories and experiences and environmental realities even between relatively linked geographies here in Canada [...]. Imagine what happens when we try to do that on a global scale - and a lot of euro-western Anthropocene, climate change and resilience research risks doing that - eliding local specificities and appropriating knowledge to serve a broader euro-western narrative without attending to the inherent colonial and imperial realities of science and policy processes, or even attending to the ways that colonial capitalist expansion has created these environmental crises to begin with. While we, as a collective humanity, are struggling with the realities of the Anthropocene, it is dangerous to erase the specific histories, power-relations, political orders that created the crisis to begin with. So, I’m glad that a robust critique of the Anthropocene as a concept is emerging.
Text by: Words of Zoe Todd, as interviewed and transcribed by Caroline Picard. “The Future is Elastic (But it Depends): An Interview with Zoe Todd.” 23 August 2016.
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The Great Acceleration is the latest in a series of human-driven planetary changes that constitute what a rising chorus of scientists, social scientists, and humanists have labeled the Anthropocene - a new Age of Humans. [...] But what the Anthropocene label masks, and what the litany of graphs documenting the Great Acceleration hide, is a history of racial oppression and violence, along with wealth inequality, that has built and sustained engines of economic growth and consumption over the last four centuries. [...] The plantation, Sidney Mintz long ago observed, was a “synthesis of field and factory,” an agro-industrial system of enterprise [...]. Plantation legacies, along with accompanying strategies of survival and resistance, dwell in the racialized geographies of the United States’ and Brazil’s prison systems. They surface in the inequitable toxic burdens experienced by impoverished communities of color in places like Cancer Alley, an industrial corridor of petrochemical plants running along the Mississippi River from New Orleans to Baton Rouge, where cotton was once king. And they appear in patterns of foreign direct investment and debt servitude that structure many land deals in the Caribbean, Brazil, and sub-Saharan Africa [...]. [C]limatologists and global change scientists from the University of London, propose instead 1610 as a date for the golden spike of the Anthropocene. The date marked a detectable global dip in carbon dioxide concentrations, precipitated, they argue, by the death of nearly 50 million indigenous human inhabitants [...]. The degradation of soils in the tobacco and cotton-growing regions in the American South, or in the sugarcane growing fields of many Caribbean islands, for example, was a consequence of an economic and social system that inflicted violence upon the land and the people enslaved to work it. Such violent histories are not so readily evident in genealogies that date the Anthropocene’s emergence to the Neolithic Revolution 12,000 years ago, the onset of Europe’s industrial revolution circa 1800, or the Trinity nuclear test of 1945. Sugarcane plantations were already prevalent throughout the Mediterranean basin during the late middle ages. But it was during the early modern era, and specifically in the Caribbean, where the intersection of emerging proto-capitalist economic models based on migratory forced labor (first indentured servitude, and later slavery), intensive land usage, globalized commerce, and colonial regimes sustained on the basis of relentless racialized violence, gave rise to the transformative models of plantations that reshaped the lives and livelihoods of human and non-human beings on a planetary scale. [...] We might, following the lead of science studies scholar Donna Haraway and anthropologist Anna Tsing, more aptly designate this era the Plantationocene. [...] It is also an invitation to see, in the words of geographer Laura Pulido, “the Anthropocene as a racial process,” one that has and will continue to produce “racially uneven vulnerability and death." [...] And how have such material transformations sustained global flows of knowledge and capital that continue to reproduce the plantation in enduring ways?
Text by: Sophie Sapp Moore, Monique Allewaert, Pablo F. Gomez, and Gregg Mitman. "Plantation Legacies." Edge Effects. 22 January 2019. Updated 15 May 2021. [Bold emphasis added by me.]
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Geologists and other scientists will fight over [the definition of the beginning start-date of the Anthropocene] in scientific language, seeking traces of carbon dioxide that index the worst offenses of European empire which rent and violated the flesh, bodies, and governance structures of Indigenous and other sovereign peoples in the name of gold, lumber, trade, land, and power. [...] The stories we tell about the origins of the Anthropocene implicate how we understand the relations we have with our surrounds. In other words, the naming of the Anthropocene epoch and its start date have implications not just for how we understand the world, but this understanding will have material consequences, consequences that affect body and land.
Text by: Heather Davis and Zoe Todd. On the Importance of a Date, or Decolonizing the Anthropocene. ACME An International Journal for Critical Geographies. December 2017. [Bold emphasis added by me.]
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From Aime and Suzanne Cesaire, C. L. R. James, Claudia Jones, Eduoard Glissant, through Sylvia Wynter, Christina Sharpe, and so many others, critical anticolonial and race theory has been written from the specific histories that marked the Black Atlantic. [...] Glissant also reminds us, secondly, of how cunning the absorptive powers of [...] liberal capitalism are - how quickly specific relations are remade as relations-erasing universal abstractions. [...] This absorptive, relations-erasing universalism is especially apparent in some contemporary discourses of […] liberalism and climate collapse - what some call the Anthropocene - especially those that anchor the crisis in a general Human calamity which, as Sylvia Wynter has noted, is merely the name of an overdetermined and specific [White] European man. […] [T]he condition of creating this new common European world was the destruction of a multitude of existing black and brown worlds. The tsunami of colonialism was not seen as affecting humanity, but [...] these specific people. They were specific - what happened to them may have been necessary, regrettable, intentional, accidental - but it is always them. It is only when these ancestral histories became present for some, for those who had long benefitted from the dispossession [...], that suddenly the problem is all of us, as human catastrophe.
Text by: Elizabeth Povinelli. “The Ancestral Present of Oceanic Illusions: Connected and Differentiated in Late Toxic Liberalism.” e-flux Journal Issue #112. October 2020.
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The narrative arc [of White "liberal humanism"] [...] is often told as a kind of European coming-of-age story. […] The Anthropocene discourse follows the same coming-of-age [...] script, searching for a material origin story that would explain the newly identified trajectory of the Anthropos […]. Sylvia Wynter, W.E.B. DuBois, and Achille Mbembe all showed how that genealogy of [White subjecthood] was [...] articulated through sixteenth- through nineteenth-century [historiographies and discourses] in the context of colonialism, [...] as well as forming the material praxis of their rearrangement (through mining, ecological rearrangements and extractions, and forms of geologic displacements such as plantations, dams, fertilizers, crops, and introduction of “alien” animals). […] As Wynter (2000) commented, “The degradation of concrete humans, that was/is the price of empire, of the kind of [Eurocentric epistemology] that underlies it” (154).
Text by: Kathryn Yusoff. “The Inhumanities.” Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Volume 11, Issue 3. November 2020.
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As Yarimar Bonilla suggests in regard to post-Irma-and-Maria Puerto Rico, “vulnerability is not simply a product of natural conditions; it is a political state and a colonial condition.” Many in the Caribbean therefore speak about the coloniality of disaster, and the unnaturalness of these “natural” disasters [...]. Others describe this temporality by shifting [...] toward an idea of the Plantationocene [...]. As Moore and her colleagues write, “Plantation worlds, both past and present, offer a powerful reminder that environmental problems cannot be decoupled from histories of colonialism, capitalism, and racism that have made some human beings more vulnerable [...].” [W]e see that contemporary uneven socioecologies associated with the rise of the industrial world ["the Anthropocene"] are based [...] also on the racialized denial and foreshortening of life for the sacrificial majority of black, brown, and Indigenous people and their relegation to the “sacrifice zones” of extractive industry. [...] [A]ny appropriate response to the contemporary climate emergency must first appreciate its foundations in the past history of the violent, coercive, transatlantic system of plantation slavery; in the present global uneven development, antiblackness, and border regimes that shape human vulnerability [...] that continues to influence who has access to resources, safety, and preferable ecologies [...] and who will be relegated to the “plantation archipelagoes” (as Sylvia Wynter called them) [...].
Text by: Mimi Sheller. “Thinking Beyond Coloniality: Toward Radical Caribbean Futures.” Small Axe (2021), 25 (2 (65)), pages 169-170. Published 1 July 2021. [Bold emphasis added by me.]
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Indigenous genocide and removal from land and enslavement are prerequisites for power becoming operationalized in premodernity [...]; it was/is a means to operationalize extraction (therefore race should be considered as foundational rather than as periphery to the production of those structures and of global space). [...] Wynter suggests that we […] consider 1452 as the beginning of the New World, as African slaves are put to work on the first plantations on the Portuguese island of Madeira, initiating the “sugar-slave” complex - a massive replantation of ecologies and forced relocation of people […]. Wynter argues that the invention of the figure of Man in 1492 as the Portuguese [and Spanish] travel to the Americas instigates at the same time “a refiguring of humanness” in the idea of race. [...] The natal moment of the 1800 Industrial Revolution, […] [apparently] locates Anthropocene origination in […] the "new" metabolisms of technology and matter enabled by the combination of fossil fuels, new engines, and the world as market. […] The racialization of epistemologies of life and nonlife is important to note here […]. While [this industrialization in the nineteenth century] […] undoubtedly transformed the atmosphere with […] coal, the creation of another kind of weather had already established its salient forms in the mine and on the plantation. Paying attention to the prehistory of capital and its bodily labor, both within coal cultures and on plantations that literally put “sugar in the bowl” (as Nina Simone sings) […]. The new modes of material accumulation and production in the Industrial Revolution are relational to and dependent on their preproductive forms in slavery […]. In 1833, Parliament finally abolished slavery in the British Caribbean, and the taxpayer payout of £20 million in “compensation” [paid by the government to slave owners for their lost "property"] built the material, geophysical (railways, mines, factories), and imperial infrastructures of Britain and its colonial enterprises and empire. [...] A significant proportion of funds were invested in the railway system connecting London and Birmingham (home of cotton production and […] manufacturing for plantations), Cambridge and Oxford, and Wales and the Midlands (for coal). Insurance companies flourished [...]. The slave-sugar-coal nexus both substantially enriched Britain and made it possible for it to transition into a colonial industrialized power […]. The slave trade […] fashioned the economic conditions (and institutions, such as the insurance and finance industries) for industrialization.
Text by: Kathryn Yusoff. "White Utopia/Black Inferno: Life on a Geologic Spike". e-flux Journal Issue #97. February 2019. [Bold emphasis added by me.]
#sorry for being mean#instructor makes podcasts about cowboys HELP ME#and he recently won a New Business award for his startup magazine covering Democrat party politics in local area HELP#so hes constantly performing this like dance between new hip beerfest winebar coolness and oldfashioned masculinity#but hes in charge of the certificate program so i have to just shut up and keep my head down for approximately one year#his email address is almost identical to mine and invokes enviro history terms but i made mine long before when i was ten years old#so i could log in to fieldherpforum dot com to talk about enviro history of distribution range changes in local reptiles and amphibians#sir if you read my blog then i apologize ive had a long year#and i cant do anything to escape i am disabled i am constantly sick im working fulltime i have NO family i have NO resources#i took all of this schools graduate level enviro history courses and seminars years ago and ran the geography and enviro hist club#but then left in final semester because sudden hospitalization and crippled and disabled which led to homelessness#which means that as far as any profession or school is concerned im nobody im a retail employee#i was doing conference paper revisions while sleeping on concrete vomiting walking around on my cane to find outdoor wifi#and im not kidding the MONTH i got back into a house and was like ok going back to finish the semester the school had#put my whole degree program and department in moratorium from lack of funding#and so required starting some stuff from scratch and now feel like a hostage with debt or worsening health that could pounce any moment#to even get back in current program i was working sixteen hours a day to pay old library fines and had to delicately back out of workplace#where manager was straight up violently physically abusive to her vulnerable employees and threatened retaliation#like an emotional torturer the likes of which i thought existed only in cartoons#and the week i filed for student aid a massive storm had knocked out electricity for days and i was clearing fallen tree debris#and then sitting in the dark in my room between job shifts no music no phone no food with my fingers crossed and i consider it a miracle#sorry dont mean to dramatize or draw attention to myself#so actually im happy you and i are alive
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yurki-posts · 7 months ago
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Food bowling
original picture
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autisticrosewilson · 5 months ago
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So do you guys actually think that Jason's entire story, relationship to the others, and philosophy amounts to him being a rebellious teen who wants his dad's attention? Like are you 100% serious? I thought you were joking about that but too many of you are saying it with your whole chest.
And what the fuck is this "Bruce antagonizing Jason is fanon!" Shit I've been seeing? You guys are aware that a parent can love their kid and still be a shit parent right? I know you guys don't want to fathom the thought that maybe your blorbo might also occasionally have to face responsibility for consistently endangering children but let's not start being delusional now.
Bruce does love his kids, that doesn't mean that he hasn't hurt them. And I'd also argue that for the most part he feels in the right for it, and he's said multiple times that he believes it's for their own good, so you can't even argue that he's sorry about it. It's okay for you guys to admit that your PERSONAL INTERPRETATION of the character wouldn't do that but don't sit here and pretend that it's not a facet of the source.
#you can argue meta until you're blue in the face#but I can't ignore the ingerent abuse of Batman and Robin because DC is always drawing attention to it#Stephanie and Jason directly died because of Robin#Stephanie wanted to impress Bruce to live up to his idea of a sidekick and prove her worth#Sheila only sold Jason out when she found out he was Robin#Damians life certainly got worse when he became Robin/moved with Bruce#if you bring up racist retcons I'll kill you btw#how are we supposed to read children dying and being tortured and traumatized constantly#and just ignore that these are children#I can ignore the reality of child sidekicks in campy light hearted early comics#but if DC wants to deal with serious topic they're going to have to deal with some serious implications too#Also that post that's going around about “Bruce loves Jason and it's Jason who's causing all the animosity” is such bullshit#what the fuck are you even talking about#and let's not act like Jason is the ONLY one at fault and Bruce is just a poor loving father#is Bruce spreading that utter bullshit about Jason's death and who he was not an act of violence?#was he not the one to cast the first stone by disgracing Jason's legacy and using a version of him that never existed as a cautionary tale#and I know some of you are going to argue that with most of the kids there's nothing Bruce could have done to stop them#and this is the one time in which I will ignore all the very real ways that he could have#but I still think that in universe the characters have a right to be angry about it#Jason always since his debut as red hood been a vehicle for calling out Bruce#he's so heavily steeped in meta narrative because his run is when they started dealing with the real BAD cases#The Cult Garzonas onscreen murders were getting more common#AND NO ONE CAN CONVINCE ME THAT BEING ROBIN DIDN'T MAKE JASON'S LIFE WORSE#THERE WAS NO REASON TO MAKE HIM ROBIN HE COULD HAVE BEEN VERY HAPPY AS JUST A NORMAL KID#But Bruce made having a place in his home synonymous with being Robin because the narrative dictated it had to be#what was homeless orphan Jason going to do? say no?#it was basically coercion and it doomed him and he has every right to blame the adult that put him in that position#dc#bruce wayne critical#bat family
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pastafossa · 4 months ago
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"You’re who I want." (Michael Kinsella x F!Reader)
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Time for Day 3 of the Tuna-Tober prompt challenge! For Day Three, I chose to combine the fluff and angst prompts ("I feel real when I'm with you" and 'Broken'), and I also decided to try my hand at one of Charlie Cox's other characters for once, that being our favorite sad, tragic, sweetheart of a mobster Michael Kinsella! You can see the rest of the prompts I've chosen here if you'd like to know what's coming this month from me. Also, if you'd like notifications when I post a new story, drabble, or chapter, you can follow my sideblog @pastaxandria and set it for notifications! And off we go!
Ship: Michael Kinsella x F!Reader
Wordcount: 2k
Warnings for this fic: mentions of blood, kiss at the end, angst (but with a happy ending obvs)
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It was Birdy that called you right as you were getting ready to settle in for the night, the heavy downpour a drumbeat against your windows that you’d hoped would lull you into a peaceful sleep. But that wasn’t in your cards tonight, it seemed. 
“He’s headed yer way. Things… didn’t go well tonight.” 
Not for the first time, you quietly cursed the way the Kinsellas had dragged Michael back into their business as you dug out the first aid kit, setting it beside a change of clothes and a few clean towels to help Michael dry off from the rain when he arrived. You didn’t care what the Kinsellas got up to on their own time, who they sold to and what their family business was. What you cared about was whether Michael had actually wanted this. You knew he'd had different plans when he'd finally gotten out of prison, plans of a quieter, more peaceful life. But he was a loyal man, one who was endlessly devoted to his family, and that loyalty, that devotion was something Amanda was all too happy to take advantage of. 
You had thoughts on her, too, but much like your night's rest, it would also have to wait. 
 “We lost a few o’ ours. He managed ta turn it around at the last second, but… Well, the family argued after. Things were said to him, and…”
Some nights, nights much like these, you wondered just how long Michael had left before he broke beneath the weight of expectation and grim responsibility. It was a burden he shouldered without complaint, even as it became clear he was destined to crumble beneath it. In the two years since you’d met that beautiful, quiet man in a small coffee shop, you’d watched those brittle cracks form, line by line. Over time, as he'd gradually begun to let you in, you’d discovered far deeper fissures that lay buried beneath his fractured armor. Your lack of fear, your absence of judgement over what he’d done in the past, had only pried open that door further until he sought you out with regularity, just as you did him. Time passed, and your orbits revolved closer and closer together, spiraling planets caught inescapably in the pull of each other’s gravity.   
Neither of you had named what this was between you. But if he could find comfort here, safety here, then you’d happily give it. 
 “Just… be gentle with him, dear.” 
Somehow, even the quiet knock at your door sounded exhausted. You hurried out of the kitchen where you’d been filling up the kettle—you’d learned very quickly how important it was to have it ready at all hours when you’d moved to Ireland—and headed down the warm hall to the front door. You unlocked the door and tugged it open, letting in the roaring sound of the pouring rain and a gust of chilled, bitter wind. 
“Oh, Michael,” you whispered. 
He was soaked down to the bone, his dark hair plastered against his skin as he leaned tiredly against the doorframe, his body wracked with shivers from the cold. What was worse: even with the rain, you could still see traces of blood on his shirt and his hands, with more of it leaking steadily from a ragged split on his lip. Fortunately, only the blood on his mouth seemed to belong to him. He tried to throw you a small smile, but it was far too crooked, too brittle to be real, and you had a feeling his eyes weren’t red because of the rain. The moment he realized you didn’t buy the act, that shield fell away, and you were left with just Michael at his most exposed, empty and limp on your doorstep. 
“That bad, eh?” he asked tiredly, trying for dark humor and missing by miles.
“Shit, get in here before you freeze.” You caught his sleeve and tugged him forward until you could shut the door behind him. He didn’t fight you on it physically, for which you were grateful, but he couldn’t seem to resist at least a little verbal stubbornness. 
“I’m gettin’ yer floors all wet,” he said distantly. Without the need to pretend, his tone had gone empty and lifeless, drained of all energy as if he’d used up what little he had left on the walk over. He dropped his head slowly, staring down at the growing puddle of rainwater on the floor, his face twisting through an unreadable expression. “‘M sorry, pet. I shouldn’t have—”
“Floors can be dried, Mikey.” You waved the objection away, locking the door before turning back to Michael where he was still standing shivering in the hall, curled into himself as if he were reluctant to take up any further space, as if he feared he were unwelcome. And something about it, about the way he seemed to barely be holding himself together, just… broke your heart. “Come here.”
He shivered again, even as he shook his head, arms wrapped around himself. You could almost see him changing his mind, a wave of regret rearing up inside him, flashing in the dark of his eyes, eyes still looking too damp for just the rain. “I’ll… I’ll get blood on ya.” “I don’t care.”
He clenched his jaw, still refusing to meet your eye, a sign of just how bad things had gone for him. Some of the blood on his clothes and skin had joined the puddle of rainwater at his feet, the pale tile darkening to a tinted, rusty pink. And that only seemed to make him feel worse, as it seeped into the grooves and lines between each tile, staining it. “No, I-I shoulda stopped ‘a home first, cleaned up. And it’s late, yer clearly dressed for bed. We can talk another time—”
You crossed the distance between you both before he could take a single step towards the front door. He went stiff and rigid, closed off the moment you pulled him into you, but you let him work through it as you wound your arms tightly around him, hooking the fingers of one hand in his belt loops. You had to make it clear you weren’t going anywhere. You used the other hand to stroke gently down his back, heedless of the water and blood that began to dampen your clothes, breathing in the scent of warm whiskey and leather, of gun oil and fresh rain and blood. “Stop worrying about my clothes or the floors, you silly man,” you said softly, setting your chin on his shoulder. His breath hitched at your voice, his arms still locked between you, a barrier you knew he needed help to break down. “I don’t care about those. I care about you, Michael. No matter what happens, that won’t change. I’ll stand here all night with you if I have to.”
He choked out a shaking breath against your hair, and you could feel it the moment he began to break, his arms tentatively unwinding so his hands could find their way around your waist. Almost as if he were still convinced his touch, his need for comfort would be rejected. Something far warmer than rain dripped against your neck. “Why?” he whispered. “I don’t understand. I have nothin’ to give ya. To give anyone. I keep tryin’ to be what everyone needs, but I can’t even do tha’ right. Why do ya keep openin’ the door for a broken man, pet?”
“You might be hurt, but you’re far from broken,” you murmured, turning your head to lay it on his shoulder as his hold gradually tightened around you, his hands fisting in the fabric of your shirt. Another shaky breath rattled out of him, more of his tears rolling down your throat until he finally let his head fall to your neck, accepting what you’d offered. “I open the door because I just need you, exactly as you are. You’re who I want. So you can let go, Mikey. There’s nothing here you need to fix, no one else you need to be.” 
That was all it took, and between one breath and the next, he crumbled in your arms, the entire terrible night, terrible year, terrible life tearing its way out of him in choked, ragged sobs, the sounds of someone who hadn't been able to let go for some time. You held him as tightly as you could, soft, comforting whispers in his ears, your hands running gently down his back and back up through his hair as he let fall every last wall he’d put up between him and the outside world. 
It took time for that cresting wave of emotion to ease, time you spent with your head on his shoulder, with your chest to his, until eventually the shaking of his body began to slow, his breath easing against your throat into something slower and gentler. Only then did you guide him to the bathroom, setting him down on the side of the tub so you could clean him up. He accepted the care in silence, his eyes half closed, his form slumped and exhausted, drained after the emotional release. You knew better than to press before he was ready—and besides, people had demanded enough out of him tonight without you adding to it—so you let the quiet have its place as you bandaged him up, cleaning the blood from his hands and drying him off without so much as a hint of judgment. Whenever his breath grew a little shaky again, you’d lift his hand, pressing a kiss to his knuckles to remind him he was safe.
You left him alone just long enough for him to change, and you were grateful you'd both decided he should keep a few changes of clothes here. It was another unspoken intimacy between you both, this knowledge that your home was a retreat for him just as his home sometimes was for you, even if neither of you had said as much. Once he was changed and he stepped out of the bathroom, dark eyes immediately seeking you out, you tipped your head in a request he follow you before heading towards the bedroom.
He hesitated, and you paused in the doorway, waiting.
It wasn’t every time he came here that you both wound up curled up together. So far, it only seemed to happen on those bad nights, those nights when one of you needed the other’s presence to act as a shield against nightmares, against waves of grief or bloodied hurt. Until now, however, those moments had always taken place on the couch, the two of you dozing off together under the excuse that you’d never intended to fall asleep at all and well, it was late, wasn't it? It was expected. Tonight, however, you just… thought he deserved a bed.
That you and he had never taken this step before hung heavy between you, weighted and intimate as he considered you, his gaze shifting over your shoulder to the open doorway in thought. Neither of you had dared offer access to the other’s bed until now. Hell, you hadn’t even kissed yet, though there’d been… moments when you’d both come close, dancing along that edge, driven by adrenaline or alcohol or just a quiet moment when you both seemed to be drawn into it. But there was no alcohol now, no mistaking the shift in the air. There’d be no going back after this, no more pretending, even if no one had believed either of you before now when you’d both sworn you were simply good friends.
After a long moment… the soft padding of his footsteps began to follow. 
The bed came first, soft sheets and the gradually returning warmth of him, one of your arms draped over his waist as he buried his face in your hair, the two of you twined together so closely that there was no space at all between you. 
Then came his voice, the soft lilt of it soothing you as much as your touch seemed to be soothing him. 
“I don’t know what I’d do without ya,” he murmured, his breath slowly easing down into something like peace, like contentment. He nuzzled at you gently, and you tipped your head up to meet his eyes. The warmth in them stole your breath away, filled with tender light and a devotion so deep you knew you could spend the rest of your life searching for the bottom and never find it. “Every time I think I’ve lost who I am again, yer there to bring me back. I just… I feel real when I’m with ya. I…” 
His eyes searched yours for a moment before he seemed to make a decision. He dipped his head down slowly, giving you every chance to pull away. Instead, you tilted your head back, your hand sliding up to tangle in his damp hair as his lips finally met yours. 
Your first kiss with him was a soft, new thing, fragile as spun strands of glass. His lips still tasted a little of copper and whiskey, skin chapped from the cold night air, but his breath was warm, and his mouth moved against yours with a growing confidence as you leaned into him, using your fingers in his hair to pull him in closer, his beard a pleasant scrape against your skin. His name on your lips was a sigh, a gift to him, one he breathed in as if he wanted to draw it down into the very heart of him. When he finally pulled away, he laid his forehead against yours, his eyes fluttering closed as he just... breathed with you. You reached up to stroke your fingers warmly against his cheek, and he smiled, the corners of his eyes crinkling, though he didn't seem ready to open them just yet. “Wanted ta do that for a while, now,” he admitted. “Since not long after we met, if ’m honest.” “I may or may not have wanted the same thing,” you huffed softly, his smile growing wider. 
“Can I take ya to breakfast tomorrow?”
You made a contented noise as you curled into him, and he wound around you, the two of you getting comfortable for the night. It felt… permanent, as if you two had simply been waiting to find your way here, this place you were both meant for. 
“I’d love that.”
And maybe tomorrow... you'd tell him you loved him, too.
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fullmetal-scar-simping · 5 months ago
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Resistance fighter [name unknown], ily
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fisheito · 8 months ago
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emotional support wolf meets too-shy-to-live sneetah
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sanasanakun · 3 months ago
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Jimithon Mouthwashing is such a good representation of untreated, enabled NPD like it makes me want to squeeze the life out of him. I'm endlessly fascinated when watching him interact with his crew, surroundings, and himself because he's so fucking lost in his own sauce. It's insane. If I'm being real, it makes him my favorite character in the game.
It's a little scary to say, but watching Jimmy is like seeing a mirrored version of myself two years ago before I truly committed to treatment for my NPD. He's like a shadow. The opening line "I hope this hurts," which I believe comes from Jimmy right before the crash, is such a poignant statement. It's a simple line, but I can tell you from experience that the desire to hurt others when in a narcissistic rage is overwhelming. It's such a good line to sum up Jimmy's character in that moment. Luckily, in the real world, I had my friends and family there to catch me when I hit my lowest, even though I'd hurt them so many times. Jimmy probably could've used friends to force him into therapy (cough cough Curly cough cough)
#also I don't mean we're similar in any way when it comes to rape or SA. Please don't twist it that way at all.#I mean like in terms of the jealously resentment revenge hurting others to feel thrilled not taking responsibility not seeing flaws etc#I'm diagnosed with NPD also but pls know my experience will be different from others. We're all different people obvs.#also Jimmy has like wayyyyyyyyyy more things wrong with him not just untreated NPD lol#I would say that untreated NPD is a hell most can't describe#you barely feel anything except rage boredom and jealousy (in my case)#love is a form of ownership and control because you can't really feel it the right way#so your -person- is an object of intense obsession and also a tool for you#if that makes sense? I see that with Jimmy and Curly for sure#You want to tear others down and hurt them because it makes you feel good to put them below you#there's a constant feeling of insecurity and it drives you crazy fr#kind gestures from friends feel insulting#and oh my god achievements made by friends and family in my case feel like I've been shot like I hate when they achieve things#It's not logical obvs but that's something I instantly noticed in Jimmy so i was like .....oh brother lol#and also if they achieve something my brain needs it to somehow be tied to me or I'll make it tied to me so they can be thankful#they should always center their attention on me and if they don't I immediately resent them#these are just some of my thought processes on the matter so I can show the similarities I feel with Jimmy#the KEY DIFFERENCE is all of these thoughts I have are left in my head and not exhibited in my actions (any more. took a long time)#but he is such a nasty human with ZERO introspection that he prob never even thought about treatment#also doesn't help that the hot blonde he's friends with never did anything to help with that#idk sorry for oversharing but ahhh this game is so well written I gotta yap about it lol#also kind of a funny unrelated story to show how weird the achievement thing can be lol#my friends announced they saved up enough to go to Vietnam (their dream trip) and I was happy for them (I really was)#but of course my delusional ass immediately also took it as a threat#and I booked a month long trip to Europe a few days after so I could also announce it LMAO#that is a kind of innocent incident when compared to Jimmy but it just shows how annoying NPD can be#Jimmy mouthwashing#mouthwashing#mouthwashing game#NPD
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age-of-moonknight · 6 months ago
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“Incarnate,” Vengeance of the Moon Knight (Vol. 2/2024), #7.
Writer: Jed MacKay; Penciler and Inker: Alessandro Cappuccio; Colorist: Rachelle Rosenberg; Letterer: Cory Petit
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Attire mission: Purchase premium attire to get an extended romantic story!
Me: *on Liam's route* Romantic my ass! This is a tragedy
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clover-46 · 2 years ago
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the writers on here making the miguel fics need to remember his fangs inject paralytic venom hes not a real vampire it was just a joke in the movie 😭
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oh but i still want him to bite me don’t get me wrong idgaf if they have venom 🤷🏾‍♀️🤷🏾‍♀️
#the copious amounts of smut i’ve seen with this man and the fangs is crazy#y’all need to tone it DOWN wheres the fluff omg??#there’s like so many smut x reader fics clogging the miguel o’hara tag and people can express their creative liberties or whatever but it’s#getting CRAZY#like why is almost nobody talking about his character and writing an analysis on him#AND WHY ARE SO MANY FICS WRITING HIM TO BE SOME FERAL AND MEAN BEAST#firstly it’s feels racist to write a brown latino man that way.#second it feels fetishiz-y with how people only sexualize the fuck outta him and talk about nothing else when it comes to him#to add onto that people are drawing him with a MUZZLE on#at first all this didn’t really register in my head as bad but after seeing so much i see it 😭#also some spanish speakers have said people are using incorrect spanish when writing dialogue for him and thats kinda funny#don’t use google translate please 💀#miguel o’ hara#spiderman 2099#across the spiderverse#i also saw someone say miguel would not be a good partner or something and i just know you didn’t pay attention#and i wont go into why because its spoilers but we have seen him be soft and happy with someone he cares about it’s just trauma that has#made him mean and depressed#he was obviously projecting onto miles in the movie when he acted like that let’s be fr#why am i writing a novel down here idk i just wanted to talk about it a little#i love the smut (trust me) but pleaaseee don’t start being fetishize-y
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trainerethan · 1 month ago
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I am coming to love leaf too. To me she is also autistic. But instead of having a very blank 😐 face like red she defaults to 🙂 to come off as more friendly. Red isnt Unfriendly he just has the flat affect of all time and doesn't bother/never learned how to mask/force himself to emote 'properly' in social settings. Leaf also technically isn't the best at emoting "normally" she just defaults to the 😃🙂 smile which can be either very sweet and friendly or can make people a little uncomfortable if it's not the type of situation you'd typically smile in. Also I like the idea of her and red being twins. The autism sisters insert that meme of the cats.
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silverselfshippingchaos · 8 days ago
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husband.. I love him
#ash rambles 💚#kissing in the van 💍#k.yohei.. i never have the words for him#i think thats why i dont talk abt him as often as some others#but he's my number 1 guy and i love him with every ounce of my being and I'm so damn grateful i get to be his life and i just love him#so freaking much and being with him makes me feel like the happiest girl ever. being with him makes me feel so happy.#i never doubt myself or hate myself like usual when I'm with him. hes so comforting and warm and perfect and amazing and im just.. so happy#he's everything i could ever want and more#how lucky i am to have him as a husband#coming up on three years.. i adore him so much#i never have the words to describe how he makes me feel. no one really understands me like he does i feel. waking up in his arms every day#is the best. seeing his soft smile and hearing that deep voice... it's my favorite in the whole world. i adore him#he's always so caring and attentive and loving ajdhamdh#he's so gentle and loving with me. he's so supportive too. he really does fuel my s/i's love for nerdy shit and plushies. he's so kind.#and handsome too#sorry this is. really sappy#i just#ajdhajdja#he's so#sjdjsjdjhsjd#my husband... the way i feel towards him is just something else#i adore him. more than that even. he's just everything i never knew i needed. he makes me feel excited to keep going#he makes me feel like maybe i do matter. he makes me feel loved. cared for. he laughs at my stupid jokes.#it's still quite early for me and man.. waking up in his arms.. how nice#k.yohei i love you with all i am!!#ahem. okay I'm done now. back to The Usual Ash#i get teary eyed if i think about him too hard lmao. a lot of my inserts end up marrying their partners at one point but..#for me? there's only one man I'll ever call MY husband
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yuripira4e · 9 months ago
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I want to preface this post by saying that I love the cat king as a character, especially one that has such a major impact on Edwin and his relationship with his queerness and learning to be okay with it; HOWEVER, I also believe that everyone that genuinely believes he should be a love interest for Edwin should read this. (Also if you just like the cat king as a character and want to understand his character better and why his and Edwin’s relationship is not something that would be healthy or “real” for either)
#dead boy detectives#edwin payne#the cat king#i do not ship them but I don’t want to hate on those who do (mostly) I just want to kind of inform people of the creators meaning for their#Relationship because I keep seeing people saying they hope they get together in s2 and it’s really confusing to me#Their relationship stems from the cat kings own narcissism and predatory behavior and Edwin’s need for someone to push him into under#Standing that his queerness doesn’t have to be torture and can be something giddy#even if he doesn’t return those feelings#The cat king does like Edwin but he doesn’t know anything about him. He likes the game and then he likes the kindness he’s shown despite#Knowing the cruelty he’s presented to Edwin#Queerness and preformance always go hand in hand#He’s a older secretly insecure character#Edwin is the younger#genuinely kind character that shows him that projecting his hurt will never get him what he wants#It’s about the isolation of queerness and the walls put up and the coping mechanism used to protect yourself even at the risk of hurting#Those just like you. That kiss from edwin was to say “I’m sorry your loneliness had caused you to be cruel. It’s the easiest way to feel.#And while I cannot and will not give you what you want or need#you deserve to feel happy and not like you have to gain the attention of uninterested people#I can’t even explain all my thoughts about their dynamic it’s just so much it’s just about the predadation from older queers because of#The trauma they’ve endured and the cycle of hurt and the way we can break the cycle with kindness while also protecting our youths by#Healing those traumas#Something the cat king learns and accepts#Off topic but I don’t like people defending their age gap because#Yes; Edwin is 86#but he died with a teenage boy brain and then spent 70 of those years in hell where he certainly was not getting his brain developed while#The cat king has possibly hundreds of years of sentience and experience. The power imbalance is not if y’all. And that part of their dynami#Is actually very clear I think but some people didn’t catch it?? Or didn’t care??? Idk man
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compassmili · 1 month ago
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I kinda really hate how I've been treated throughout my life
#Entire life of abuse and neglect and mistreatment only to always be told none of it happened. To the point where I really struggle with#thinking that I made it all up or that I'm overreacting or faking or playing the victim constantly#I honestly try my best to move forward and I want to be happy. I see absolutely zero point in wallowing. Others can if they wish‚ but I wan#to enjoy my life at some point. I think I've gotten better the past year- In great part of my dearly beloved- but it's still so#deeply difficult. Interactions so commonly feel like a trap and there is the perpetual sense of being watched and monitored#I often feel like a prey animal that is cornered and my only options are to take it in fear and die or to lash out and hurt the other party#I think I'm not as mean as others in this system though LMFAO. I'm not like Roxas who once compared a friend of ours to our parents during#an argument.#<- Not to say Roxas is a bad person. He's a severely hurt and traumatized kid who kinda only knows how to lash out to protect himself#Sighs. It's complicated. I do not wish to be someone angry like Roxas or Lexi. But they actually talk back and stand up for themselves. And#the system as a whole. Whereas I fawn and take it and then wonder why I always want to kill myself 24/7#I don't really know how to speak up for myself because it really feels like every single time I do (Or just voice an opinion confidently in#a group) it goes horribly wrong and people get upset and angry with me#And then people being angry at me causes major fucking spirals because it reminds me of my mother and then I start feeling like I'm going t#be fucking berated and have a metal crate thrown at me again 😭😭😭 Or get kicked out of the car or given the silent treatment etc etc etc#Which is a me problem I need to get over my fear of people being mad at me because it's an inevitable fact of life but. Hashtag severely#traumatized and still actively being traumatized by multiple parties#And also being in my own head and existing is very fucking harmful! Being in a mind that is so aggressive and destructive... It's difficult#to just 'get over' my issues‚ you know? So whenever they come up I try to just isolate so I don't cause any issues#<- Unless it's my histrionic stuff acting up. Then I'm complaining like hell because it feels actually fucking painful to not be receiving#attention during those breakdowns#Anyways! I kinda fucking suck and hate myself right now and want to kms. But that's how I am 24/7 so whatever#tw suicide#⛪️
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