#i feel bad for the woman tbh

[quasarifxxy]

Thinking about how Kazuki was about to do the exact same thing Misaki did when it comes to Miri which is sending her off to somewhere "safer" before considering what she'd feel until Rei talked him out of it!!! I am devastated

[inkskinned]

so one of the things that's so horrifying about birth control is that you have to, like, navigate this incredibly personal choice about your body and yet also face the epitome of misogyny. like, someone in the comments will say it wasn't that bad for me, and you'll be utterly silenced. like, everyone treats birth control like something that's super dirty. like, you have no fucking information or control over this thing because certain powerful people find it icky.

first it was the oral contraceptives. you went on those young, mostly for reasons unrelated to birth control - even your dermatologist suggested them to control your acne. the list of side effects was longer than your arm, and you just stared at it, horrified.

it made you so mentally ill, but you just heard that this was adulthood. that, yes, there are of course side effects, what did you expect. one day you looked up yasmin makes me depressed because surely this was far too intense, and you discovered that over 12,000 lawsuits had been successfully filed against the brand. it remains commonly prescribed on the open market. you switched brands a few times before oral contraceptives stopped being in any way effective. your doctor just, like, shrugged and said you could try a different brand again.

and the thing is that you're a feminist. you know from your own experience that birth control can be lifesaving, and that even when used for birth control - it is necessary healthcare. you have seen it save so many people from such bad situations, yourself included. it is critical that any person has access to birth control, and you would never suggest that we just get rid of all of it.

you were a little skeeved out by the implant (heard too many bad stories about it) and figured - okay, iud. it was some of the worst pain you've ever fucking experienced, and you did it with a small number of tylenol in your system (3), like you were getting your bikini line waxed instead of something practically sewn into your body.

and what's wild is that because sometimes it isn't a painful insertion process, it is vanishingly rare to find a doctor that will actually numb the area. while your doctor was talking to you about which brand to choose, you were thinking about the other ways you've been injured in your life. you thought about how you had a suspicious mole frozen off - something so small and easy - and how they'd numbed a huge area. you thought about when you broke your wrist and didn't actually notice, because you'd thought it was a sprain.

your understanding of pain is that how the human body responds to injury doesn't always relate to the actual pain tolerance of the person - it's more about how lucky that person is physically. maybe they broke it in a perfect way. maybe they happened to get hurt in a place without a lot of nerve endings. some people can handle a broken femur but crumble under a sore tooth. there's no true way to predict how "much" something actually hurts.

in no other situation would it be appropriate for doctors to ignore pain. just because someone can break their wrist and not feel it doesn't mean no one should receive pain meds for a broken wrist. it just means that particular person was lucky about it. it should not define treatment.

in the comments of videos about IUDs, literally thousands of people report agony. blinding, nauseating, soul-crushing agony. they say things like i had 2 kids and this was the worst thing i ever experienced or i literally have a tattoo on my ribs and it felt like a tickle. this thing almost killed me or would rather run into traffic than ever feel that again.

so it's either true that every single person who reports severe pain is exaggerating. or it's true that it's far more likely you will experience pain, rather than "just a pinch." and yet - there's nothing fucking been done about it. it kind of feels like a shrug is layered on top of everything - since technically it's elective, isn't it kind of your fault for agreeing to select it? stop being fearmongering. stop being defensive.

you fucking needed yours. you are almost weirdly protective of it. yours was so important for your physical and mental health. it helped you off hormonal birth control and even started helping some of your symptoms. it still fucking hurt for no fucking reason.

once while recovering from surgery, they offered you like 15 days of vicodin. you only took 2 of them. you've been offered oxy for tonsillitis. you turned down opioids while recovering from your wisdom tooth extraction. everything else has the option. you fucking drove yourself home after it, shocked and quietly weeping, feeling like something very bad had just happened. the nurse that held your hand during the experience looked down at you, tears in her eyes, and said - i know. this is cruelty in action.

and it's fucked up because the conversation is never just "hey, so the way we are doing this is fucking barbaric and doctors should be required to offer serious pain meds" - it's usually something around the lines of "well, it didn't kill you, did it?"

you just found out that removing that little bitch will hurt just as bad. a little pinch like how oral contraceptives have "some" serious symptoms. like your life and pain are expendable or not really important. like maybe we are all hysterical about it?

hysteria comes from the latin word for uterus, which is great!

you stand here at a crossroads. like - this thing is so important. did they really have to make it so fucking dangerous. and why is it that if you make a complaint, you're told - i didn't even want you to have this in the first place. we're told be careful what you wish for. we're told that it's our fault for wanting something so illict; we could simply choose not to need medication. that maybe if we don't like the scraps, we should get ready to starve.

we have been saying for so long - "i'm not asking you to remove the option, i'm asking you to reconsider the risk." this entire time we hear: well, this is what you wanted, isn't it?

[antiyourwokehomophobia2]

The prevalence of male violence means that the chances of a woman telling the truth about a man hurting her is INFINITELY more likely than the chances of her lying, but people will still believe the man over her

[gingermintpepper]

I would love to hear you talk about Kassandra???

So, what can I say about Kassandra.

Well, firstly, I've been thinking about how I want to answer this question since I got it however many months ago and I figured I wanted to speak about my own interpretation of things rather than formal stuff - half because I don't want to cite anything since going through Iliad based papers brings me little joy and half because I figure I could treat it a bit more casually this way. So here's like, a very brief selection of thoughts I have about Kassandra, Saintess of Troy.

I view her tale as a microcosm of the wider tale of the Fall of Troy from Apollo's perspective. A human is given a choice and, of their own free-will, they make the most destructive decision ignorant of the way they're sealing their own fate and no matter how much their patron will want to save and help them, they will be unable to so much as lift a meaningful finger because the choice made is one that is sealed in Fate and powers far beyond any one god. The themes of doomed love are also shared; Kassandra loved Apollo just as Apollo loved her but she couldn't be what he wanted of her. She couldn't accept what it was he was offering, no matter how much power, honour and love he tried to tempt her with and in a lot of ways, I think of her devastating visions of doom and death(tm) as a physical parallel to the feelings Helen must be tormented with knowing that she will be cited as the reason of such mass death, destruction and violence. Likewise, I see Apollo's inability to save Kassandra up until the end as representative of his wider inability to save Troy. All his love and blessing were not enough, even though all she had to do was take his hand, it simply wasn't meant to be and so I imagine that must be a fresh hurt for him with each beloved mortal he loses during the campaign.

Kassandra is genuinely so interesting? Both as a character and as a narrative idea; she sits almost in the center of so many fascinating parallels and foils that it gets me so excited whenever she comes up in conversation! I've mentioned it briefly before but she forms a very neat triad with Iphigenia and Troilus which runs parallel to the three dominant male powers in Iliad - Agamemnon, Achilles and Apollo. They're what I somewhat refer to as the sacrifice trio, innocents who must ultimately be abandoned and stripped away for the sake of the desire of their sacrificer, in turn revealing something intrinsic about the nature of the man. For Iphigenia, she reveals that Agamemnon truly values his ambition over all, that his image and status as a leader is more meaningful to him than the love of his family (which, of course, dooms him in the end). Likewise, for Achilles, Troilus' sacrifice reveals that no matter the glamour or glory that crowns Achilles' head, his rage is ultimately his most powerful feeling and it burns bright and hot no matter the circumstance, opponent or arena. For Apollo, Kassandra's sacrifice (which is much more symbolic as he is a god and therefore need not actually physically kill her) reveals his position as the 'loser', one who will be scorned and reviled and lose all the things he loves no matter how closely he cherishes or adorns them. He can't protect the mortals he's blessed, he can't protect his children - he can't even save one woman. She also has that aforementioned triad with Helen and Andromache - the sequestered women; doomed to wait and pray but each, in their own ways working to save and support their own in the conflict. They're all haunted by the promise of what awaits them - Andromache's hopes and future lies with Hector and with her son yet she is the embodiment of a war-wife, solid and stoic in her support when Hector returns but suffering deeply knowing each fight could be his last. Helen, of course, carries with her both the suffering of the greek women and the hatred of their men - if Andromache fears death taking the breath from her beloved fighters then Helen bears the weight of death upon her shoulders, all grief and scorn is bore like a crown upon her head and she must bear it. It is her duty to bear it. Kassandra then becomes the suffering of the young women - they who are surrounding on all sides by throngs of death and do not know why it has come, they whose screams intermix with that of the dead upon them. There is no avatar for Kassandra to experience the war through, no reason for her to be stoic or strong or upright. She tears her hair, hysterical at the suffering that is poured into her mind day in and day out, wild and unrestrained where her elders must hold their grief and tame it. In this way, she gives voice to the voiceless, she screams for those who cannot and is reviled for it - a young woman surrounded by death yet ordered not to speak a word of its stench or horror. There's many more things I can talk about too such as the whole Kassandra as Apollo's living Palladium thing or the Kassandra-Electra-Clytemnestra trio or even Chryseis as a reflection of Kassandra and how the taking of a priest's daughter could be seen as tantamount to trying to steal away Kassandra (and how this eventually wraps back around to the actual incident of Kassandra being stolen away and ending up right back under Agamemnon's care just as Chryseis before her) but like, we would be here all day.

Y'all maybe this is a hot take but scorned woman Kassandra is like, the most boring interpretation of her ever. She has so much life and passion in her, so much joy, so much despair, so much love - making her jaded and cynical towards both her fate and her god is such a slap in the face to me of what her character could and generally does seem to stand for. Kassandra never stopped loving Apollo - likewise, Apollo (at least to me) never abandoned her. All in Troy suffer heavy, cursed fates - Kassandra is one of the few who at least had some awareness of how hers would turn out. I like that she's a fighter. I like that she screams and cries and spits and is expressive and ugly in her torment and grief when so many of the women around her cannot afford to be. I like that she said no and despite how much she suffered for it, she never begged for her yolk to be taken from her because she knew that the choice she made was the right one for her. She's raw, she's vivid, she's human and more than anything, that's what I love so much about her.

[endofbeginings]

QUEEN OF SPEED: MICHELE MOUTON (2021)

[steeltwigz]

Saw a post abt the Sonic movies that was like "plz filter negativity posts better" which is GOOD AND TRUE you should be doing that. Ok. But then they kept going to imply that the criticisms of the Sonic movies are all entirely Personal and Ignorable and not like. Usually abt the horrific copaganda, misogynistic writing, and Paramount's disgusting zionism.... Guys a lot of ppls problem w the Knuckles show wasn't JUST a bastardization of Knuckles' character or thinking Wade was annoying or whatever, but like was focused on the grotesque Zionist message from that one episode 😭😭😭 you can enjoy something and still recognize that it has intrinsic and huge glaring flaws and talk abt them. I think actually you Should be speaking up abt the misogyny, zionism and propaganda the SCU supports and discusses, ESPECIALLY if you like the movies! Its important to be able to recognize these things in media and admit that even media you personally enjoy can be deeply problematic, instead of hiding it away and pretending those HUGE FLAWS aren't issues actually....

[agirlinthegalaxy]

It's been rolling around in my brain the last few days for some reason, but I still hate the family backstory reveals for Sophie and Eliot. I've seen some of the meta for it, but quite frankly, it still makes no sense. If it had been something actually thought of and intentional in the original, I think it could have been so fascinating. I mean, Sophie's willing abandonment of Astrid to contrast with Nate's loss of Sam or Eliot's adoption in contrast with Hardison's and Parker's? Could have been excellent! But they came out of nowhere in Redemption and don't work with these characters.

Sophie was still actively using the fucking alias that she met Astrid under! She met with someone from her past on the show! Like. Quite frankly, that one is unequivocally bullshit that they made up and threw in and pretended could fit with the established canon. (And I'm sorry, but the idea of Sophie abandoning Astrid and never telling Nate about her just... So much of Nate's trauma was rooted in the loss of Sam, and I think that introducing this element after he's gone and unable to respond to it taints Sophie and Nate's relationship in a way bc I'm not exactly sure how Nate would've responded to learning about this but I think that it's something he'd have needed to know. I don't know how to fully express my thoughts on that but yeah.)

As for Eliot, I don't like the adoption aspect literally at all. The way that he would interact with his family and the memory of his family would be different, and I think that it's flat out ridiculous to think that he'd have never mentioned it to the team in the original show, especially when dealing with the kid cases. (I also dislike the biracial adoption as its own element because if Eliot was actually raised by Black parents in the... idk what 80s/90s? That just. doesn't feel congruent with how they write Eliot interacting with PoC, not necessarily in a bad way, but babe, he's written like a white southern man raised in a specific kind of culture that does not jell with that. It also makes Eliot look... really bad that he was apparently raised with the knowledge of how fucked up the military was and his parents' history and made the choices that he did.) Like the show may not have explicitly stated it but the implication of that relationship was vastly fucking different throughout the original show.

Just. These were not backstories that were congruent with their depiction and characters in the original show, and they're also just moves that I don't particularly like or find interesting directions for those characters. There's also something to be said about how it was apparently unacceptable for a woman to not have kids or someone not reconciling with their biological family when that was something that the original show handled a lot better. Out of all the directions to take Sophie and Eliot's stories, that's just not really one that I think was a good idea.

[sskk-manifesto]

Ep 5!!!

[thewritingpossum]

Also reading her household book does confirm that Isabella of France directly corresponded with Hugh le Despenser the elder during the 1310's...Much to think about...

[plxviophile]

Everyone who not only found the “real Martha” and have gone as far as to harass her - congrats. You’re the real stalkers

[mauv-the-bluest-cat-ever]

i have my benefits of not being out as trans (which is. only one really but it is not being harassed because i dont attract attention) but it fucks with my sense of self

[todayisafridaynight]

Some of it may not be intentional but then you've got Majima "noone is allowed to kill Kiryu but me" *cough cough side eye cough*, likes wearing dresses and being treated as a woman while in one etc etc Goro existing.

i dont think the 'no one can kill kiryu but me' is intended to be queer thats just a natural side affect of. whatever kiryu and majima have going on LMAO

[kismoirailsis]

i have GOT to stop being ashamed of my preference for men but it’s hard to get over something you actively still see people shaming others for (attraction to men at all)

[broodwolf221]

long post sorry not sorry. this isn't all of my ocs, but it's all the ones i've made in either the dai or davg cc

in order:

cyren lavellan - delwyn lavellan - nessa lavellan - jadal cadash (ik i still have to make a post about her but i love her) - daw aldwir - veryl ingevellar - liall talas (au warden dao era)

bonus delwyn as my inky in davg (i tried so hard....)

[feline-evil]

Every algorithm online thinks i'm a 15 year old lesbian, except for spotify which thinks i am someone who listens to nothing but songs who's lyrics are 90% jizz and spunk

[thebloodykarte]

ranting about chronically online shit in the tags for today