#how have i not been stabbed yet

[impulsivedecisionsat3am]

i need to stop using sharp objects in my bed and then FORGETTING TO PUT THEM AWAY. i am a very lucky man

[arsenicflame]

stede is 'oh this place has something related to my interest i must go in immediately' autistic and izzy is 'if we deviate one inch from my plan for today i will murder someone' autistic

[nellasbookplanet]

I just caught up with ep 63 and I'm fucking vibrating. The difference of the Bor'dor reveal and the Dusk reveal! Dusk spending their entire time with the party stirring up drama, once caught out still openly provoking and trying to find an angle to straight up kill Fearne's parents, and the party still struggling to find every reason to let them go, let them live. And Dusk never gave a shit. Why would they! They were a fey assassin! And still the Hells fought and argued for them and let them walk away despite openly remaining a threat.

And then we get Bor'dor, wet paper tissue of a man, tragic backstory up to the gills, genuinely spending time to bond with them, having his little practice session with them being his proudest moment, sharing vulnerabilities. And though he drew first blood, he did it trying to run away, not kill! He did it having seen these people murder his friends and drag their dead bodies out of the hole! He was helpless on the ground, all but begging them to end him because he saw no reason to keep going! There was enough turmoil and doubt in him that he could probably have been deradicalized! He hated them but he loved them too!

And had this been early campaign, in all likelihood they would have let him live. But this is a Bell's Hells who have already been betrayed once by an ally, who lost Eshteross to the Ruby Vanguard, who lost half the fucking party to the Ruby Vanguard, who went on a grueling journey to get Laudna back, who struggled and struggled and still failed to stop Ludinus and ended up separated and scared and not knowing whether the world is about to end or not, whether their friends are alive or not.

And they were done. They did not fight for him. This is war. Were Dusk to show back up now, I doubt they’d survive the encounter.

[yellobb]

I just love that I can think about something a little too hard and it suddenly feels like it’s real.

I’m sobbing uncontrollably over my grandma dying when she’s literally fine. Girl let’s not do this yet please

[orcelito]

Haven't been able to watch too much naruto recently. Been watching Maybe an episode a day ish. I just finished ep 419 tho and WHAT an episode to have ahead of me for grand number 420. Can't watch it rn tho bc I need to sleep and also I'm too tired to give it the full attention that I want to. Bc when I watch it, I will be embracing !!!!THE!!!! legendary Guy vs Madara fight in its FULL FORM!!!!!!

So exciting. God they're laying some major death flags lol, between the flashbacks stuff and the gate of death and well the saying he's gonna die 😂😂😂 I know he does survive it tho. But I'm also embracing this part with the Possibility of him dying. Bc that's what the others are reacting to too. And I wanna experience the full depth of emotion....

Excited for watching this next episode!!! It just cannot be right now.

[problemswithbooks]

It all feels like a retcon starting from the first look at toga’s backstory because it doesn’t sync up when you put all her actions together. I thought maybe hori was trying to say toga’s quirk became unfortunately linked to arousal after years of suppressing it and it being triggered by her feeling of admiration for her crushes. But yeah that would have been too mature to tackle for my hero though I could maybe see it with chainsaw man. So I don’t know get what’s going on right now except toga’s mentally ill because of her parents and society and he keeps trying to make last minute parallels between toga and touya.

I think the issue is that Hori never spent as much time or effort on Toga as he did with Shigaraki and Touya. Even now her backstory is rather limited in comparison. We got full chapters worth to explore what happened to Touya and Tenko but Toga's is a couple pages or panels here or there with everything being rather vague.

Hori likes using her for sexy pictures and drawing suggestive stuff with Ochako, but she ultimately isn't given as much thought as her male counter parts. Which given the already bad implications of her character has only made her even worse.

Take this latest chapter. We get this page for Quirk counseling.

It's just 2 panels that are honestly really vague. It also comes after her drinking blood from a bird her parents think she killed. Toga says it fell on the ground but that doesn't mean she didn't kill it (baby birds are often on the ground until they fully can fly, or it could have been injured), so that's not helpful either. On top of that it makes sense her parents would find the behavior bad regardless because it either means she killed an animal or picked up an already dead one and proceeded to eat it. Neither of those are great and both are harmful to her.

We just don't really get a good look at how the Quirk counseling worked. They say that they'll make her 'normal' but that doesn't mean they abused her. They could have just explained why it was wrong for her drink blood, like the health issues it could cause. On top of that Hori drops the 'it happens all the time in our current society' line, but we have never seen anyone else like Toga. Not even Stain was ever hinted at being like Toga despite their similar blood based powers.

This is like if we reduced the Touya chapters to a black screen with Enji commenting that he can't train him anymore and we didn't get to see how much Touya struggled with what he perceived as rejection, or how Enji completely ignored him afterwards. Or if we cut Shigaraki's father's abuse to just him yelling at him in black panels before he accidentally killed his family.

Then we get this. This honestly makes Toga look worse, not better in my opinion. We see that she drank blood from someone before she snapped at school. She says they got hurt so she kissed it better, but if you look at her, she is covered in quite a bit of blood. Maybe her friend did get hurt but they were either really badly hurt and bleeding a lot and Toga did not help them and instead started licking them, or she might have even made their injuries worse to get the blood she wants.

If Hori cared more about her character he would have been shown what happened here. Or in the very least put less blood if any on Toga, which would show she didn't hurt this person or ignore helping them with a serious injury because she can't think of anything but blood.

As it is we have no idea if her friend got really badly injured and Toga ignored helping to just feast on them, or if her friend told her to stop, or if she made the person's injures worse. Yes, her parents are wrong for saying Toga's not human, but if she's attacking injured friends that's a huge problem.

One of the biggest issues with Toga is that she is both portrayed as so obsessed and desperate for blood she can't comprehend why anyone might not like her shoving a straw in their neck, but at the same time she was and is at times able to be perfectly fine. She can't understand why Ochako or Izuku, in desperate situations caused in part by her might not be happy with her, but can also turn around and comfort Twice and understand that he feels responsible for the death of a team mate.

It's impossible for me to feel bad for her because when I read her chapters I just see a drawing of an offensive stereotype that does what ever the author wants them to do. Toga just doesn't feel like a person at all. She's nothing but the sexy shell of a teenage girl that Hori doesn't seem all that invested in past her being cute and giving him an excuse to have two girls being all touchy and hot.

[konfizry]

echoes of wisdom was alright!

[vvitchy-succubus]

.

[dolokhoded]

simon zealotes you are in my thoughts

[mycological-mariner]

I wish someone would stab me

[woodlandscab1n]

something something ptsd swag

[plantknife]

i like 98 knives more than stampede knives because he feels like. more deliberately cruel? like a real person, almost. as opposed to stampede's whole... born wrong thing. i dont like it! i think something vital about the twins is that they both CHOOSE their paths, be it good or bad.

[lwieserce]

At this point I feel like even adhd is possible. Like sure why the fuck not

[wisteryuu]

vent in tags don't mind me

[orcelito]

My knife slipped while I was cutting an apple, but it did not hurt me. It just wanted to give a gentle little kiss to my palm. No pain...! Honestly it could've been much worse lol

[inbabylontheywept]

The Motherfucking Lizard King

No one at work trusts my boss. 

He's smart. He works hard. He's not trustworthy. He hasn't actually fucked anyone at work over, but he's ruined his last two marriages with affairs, and got dumped by his third fiance when he wouldn't sign a prenup. The fact that we all know this is just a hazard of working in a small town. 

Anyway: The thought process of the people in the lab is that if he screwed over his first wife, and his second wife, and was probably planning on screwing over his third wife, it would be insane for him not to screw us over. After all, what kind of idiot treats their employees better than their spouse? 

I dunno. His kind, I guess? He's had a few chances to fuck us over, and he hasn't taken them. Opposite really. When our parent company was doing furloughs, he stayed in the office almost a hundred hours, talking and talking and talking his way up the corporate ladder. And in the end, no one at our site got furloughed. 

He's pulled strings like that before. And it baffles me, right? Because it really does make zero sense. He'll move the heavens and the earth for us, but his wife and kids are afterthoughts. It feels like any moment, he's going to look into the mirror and realize how stupid that is. It feels like I'm betting on him making the same stupid mistake again, and again, and again - like it would be less cynical to believe he was, eventually, going to stab me in the back. But he hasn't yet, and as far as I can tell he's been making that mistake for close to fifteen years, and it's already cost him everything it can. If he was going to learn, he would have by now. 

So my position on him is that if he wanted to date someone I cared about, I'd warn them off. I don't trust him there. But I tentatively trust him to be my boss. Maybe one day he'll stick the knife in and twist, and everyone will say Ah, Babs, we warned you, but for now, I accept that he's doing a very predictable, very irrational thing, and I've made my peace with it. 

---

My job has glue traps. 

No one likes the glue traps, but we don't have a lot of options. Poison's banned by state law, spring traps are banned by company safety, and several non-lethal options tried in the past failed to work. The mouse problem can get pretty bad if it's ignored, and there's some real health hazards in that. Our site has never had a positive hantavirus test, thank God, but the big base about a half hour away has. That guy's gonna be on oxygen the rest of his life. 

If a mouse gets caught, we just euthanize it. But more than mice get stuck. Lizards can wander into those traps too, and the people working there have different feelings about the lizards. They don't pose nearly the same kind of risk mice do. They're chill little guys, and they keep the moths away, and they're just 

You know. They're friendly. There's something to be said about walking into a room, and hitting the light switch, and seeing two little guys on the wall start to do pushups as soon as they see you. 

People used to just euthanize the lizards too, but I had pet leopard geckos as a kid and I couldn't take that so I wound up googling how to free animals from glue traps. Now, when a lizard gets stuck in a trap - which happens once or twice a week - I get some vegetable oil from the breakroom, and a little plastic fork, and I'll spend fifteen to twenty minutes just kind of gently prying the little guys out. 

I have a team of technicians that help me operate one of the larger machines. They're real blue collar guys, ex-airforce, and they make me look like a little kid. Being an engineer means they'll look to me as a leader sometimes, which is a wild experience. And I started helping the lizards for my own conscience, but one of the crazier consequences of it has been that it seriously boosted my leadership cred. Because those guys see me, and they go: Hey. If he's willing to fight for a lizard, he's gotta be willing to fight for me. 

I cannot overstate how nice that is. Most engineers that want to make a change to a maintenance practice, or try an upgrade, they have to work their asses off to get the techs to buy in. But I can just ask. They already trust me to do good. They know I'm new, and they know I'm not the smartest engineer in the building, but they also know I'm the one who gets lizards out of the glue traps. 

And just because of that, they're willing to follow me. 

---

My boss has a meeting every month or two. It's typically basic house cleaning stuff - reminders about routines we've gotten lazy on, and updates on future projects. Maybe some warnings about problems coming from higher up in the company.

People are, in my opinion, a bit too cynical about the meetings. It stems from people not trusting our boss, which again, I understand, because it would make so much more sense if he wasn't trustworthy. It's a testament to the man's incredibly unhealthy priorities that he is. But as we made it to the end of the meeting, one of bullet points was: 

Do NOT mess with animals in the building. 

So I looked at my techs, and they looked at me, and when he got to the point, he was so scathing I actually just wanted to crawl under a rock and die. He said basically that he'd heard some reports about someone in the building handling animals that found their way in and got stuck, and that he just wanted to emphasize how insanely inappropriate that was, not to mention dangerous, and that if he needed to speak to anyone about it again, there would be severe consequences. 

I was willing to just take the shame and move on. I was. But one of my techs is old. Old enough he could've retired two years ago. And his actual literal goal is to one day get angry, yell at someone, and storm out. That's how he wants to retire. So instead of biting his tongue like everyone else, he stood up and said: I hate the glue traps. You hate the glue traps. We all hate glue traps. But we've all sat here for years, ignoring the little things that get stuck in them, watching them die, and then Bab's comes in, and he is the first person in decades to give enough of a shit to start pulling the lizards out. And I don't want him to stop. 

Get humane traps or shut up but we are not going back to the old way of just letting things starve. 

And my boss actually froze up. He got all wide eyed and stared at Marc, and then the other techs jumped in, and there was a very small but intense rebellion in the meeting and my boss kept trying to interrupt while getting absolutely bowled over by this gang of angry middle aged air force vets, and eventually he just went 

I will speak with Babylon about this afterwards! After! And then he will speak with everyone else, but I have more points to cover. 

So they went silent, and my boss rushed through the last five minutes, and we all adjounred. The techs really didn't like that I was going in alone - they thought our boss was going to try and shout me into compliance. Marc in particular was like, Look, if he tries bullying you, stand your ground, and if he threatens anything, just come get us, and we'll give him hell. 

So armed with that, I went to my boss's office. I sat in the chair across from him, and he kept his composure for maybe five seconds before just flopping back into his chair. 

I had no idea you were saving lizards, he said, but I'm glad you are. I always hated seeing them die in the glue.  

I wasn't expecting that. I was about to ask him what the comment from the meeting was about then, but he answered that before I even got the chance.

A snake got into the building last week, and - someone picked it up and chased a coworker around. Turns out that coworker was severely afraid of snakes, and now it's a shitshow. We're a small site, and now I can't ask those two to work together anymore, to say nothing about how the snake fared after all that. Being upset about that is a reasonable thing, right? 

And he gave me a look like he actually wanted an answer, so I said Yeah, totally, chasing a coworker around with a snake is a dick move. Especially if that coworker is already afraid of snakes. 

And he said Exactly! and then we sat there a few moments longer. He looked so incredibly tired that I did, actually, feel kind of bad for him. And then he somehow managed to sink even further into his chair, and said

Look, I know I'm not a good guy. But I'm not evil. I'm not some sort of crazy asshole that's going to demand that everyone watch lizards starve to death. When you go back downstairs, could you try to pass that on? That I'm not evil? 

I said Sure because it wasn't a hard request, and he looked relieved. I actually made it halfway out before I realized I had a question. 

Who grabbed the snake? I asked. 

Not supposed to talk about it, he said. But whoever comes to mind first is probably right. 

ThatGuy? I asked. And he looked me in the face, nodded his head yes, and said No. 

---

The techs seemed a little disappointed that they didn't get to storm the boss's office, but were otherwise in good spirits. They were actually a little bit embarrassed to hear about the snake story - apparently, it wasn't much of a secret. It'd just slipped their minds because it happened three weeks ago. 

We did maintenance after that, the same basic repairs we did every week. The meeting had been stressful and it was a relief to work with my hands. When the parts were reinstalled, everything cleaned and smooth and ready to go, Marc found me again. 

You know what the lesson of today is? he asked. And there were quite a few answers to that that I could have taken - from don't assume the worst of people to be careful with how you spend your trust - we all need it more than we think. 

But instead I said what? because I wanted to hear what his answer was going to be. 

That I got your back, he said. Then he clapped one very, very large hand on my shoulder, gave it a good squeeze, and walked back to dosimetry lab.

---

The next day, Marc gave me a package and told me to open it in my office. I was suspicious, but I followed the request.

Cardboard gave way to a small baggie, obviously full of fabric, which opened to reveal a t-shirt that read

"I Am the Motherfucking Lizard King."

I looked at it, I loved it, and then I got an idea. I went to my boss's office and knocked on the door. When he opened it, I asked him if he would be willing to allow something very unprofessional to happen for morale building purposes.

How unprofessional? he asked. I held the shirt up in answer. He gave the shirt a short look over and snorted.

You can wear it on weeks without customers, he said. Which just so happened to include that week.

I'll pass on that it came with your blessing, I replied, and he looked oddly relieved.

Thanks, he said. And then I went downstairs.

---

The techs were very, very happy to see the shirt. And while my boss's reputation remains in tatters, and probably will be until he moves (or dies), the next time there was a meeting, there was quite a bit less complaining about how mere presence. Which is, I guess, a start.

We'll see if he squanders it.