#i KNOW those vets were not being malicious and were trying to help. but like. it sucked. | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

doraambrose · 6 months ago

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When it comes to the Victim Blaming Grief coping one of the big things that makes it an issue is that he actually did it to Jason's face (in Hush as it was retconned to be Jason he said that too).

And, when Jason comes back it stops being grief for the dead, it becomes grief for the wounded. And people victim blame people who were hurt too. This is how they cope, however this coping mechanism always hurts the victim and is a genuinely bad coping mechanism that shouldn't be used. It's harmful. It's harmful to the victim and it is harmful for the other people who might be grieving. It's probably one of the most selfish coping mechanisms.

I've experienced people using this method in real life and it's rough. And it's toxic. Saying you can't criticize the way someone grieves is flawed because you are rarely the only one grieving and I personally have been harmed during a period of shared grief. And I am sure other people have been too because grief brings out the bad in people but that doesn't mean all is forgiven.

Like, imagine if Jason was just comatose and all the victim blaming happened and then Jason just woke up and found out all Bruce had been saying about him? Would Jason's feelings be justified then?

Also, saying the deceased person doesn't matter when they die disregards a lot of religious and spiritual beliefs around honoring the dead.

I feel like Jason is as justified as any other person harmed when someone copes with toxic way in being upset. Jason's death is also a traumatic thing that happened to him. Centering Bruce's feelings while disregarding Jason's as unjustified doesn't feel fair. Especially considering the incident where Bruce took Jason to Ethiopia to try to trigger Jason's memories of what brought him back without his consent.

(Sorry if this was a bit much, I've experienced a decent amount of the bad sides of grief in my life and feel strongly about it)

Okay, so I feel like I need to re answer my previous post because I was struggling to find the right words and also at work, but I think I've figured it out.

One thing to keep in mind is when we talk about feelings, grief, and emotions, there's not a set right or wrong. I also mentioned that I don't like the word justified in this case because it sounds like right or wrong. I did use it at the end, but I'll get into that here. This is a very gray area subject matter and that makes it tricky and you're never gonna find an answer that everyone agrees with because it's not really as fact based as if I said "batman wears a cape sometimes" or "dick grayson is nightwing".

The first thing that comes to mind for me is what my therapist tells me when I feel guilt over feelings. She would tell me "anything you're feeling is valid, you're allowed to be upset, angry, sad, jealous, etc. It's how you act on those feelings.. something I can't remember atm lol". So when I say jason isn't justified, I'm saying that he's allowed to be upset and angry and his feelings are valid, it's not right to actively take it out on the family and hold it against them and be sort of malicious or harmful. And i know theyve done that plus some towards him, but its important to remember that you can only control your own actions and even if someone is being toxic and harmful, that doesnt mean you should too. I think I didn't explain that right and there was some miscommunication. I also wanted to explain why I felt that jason would be angry.

As for this comment, both of these asks were right. Grief can be harmful and toxic. And before I say what I'm going to say next, keep in mind that I'm discussing grief alone and not any of the stuff post utrh that Bruce has done to jason that's harmful and abusive. This toxic kind of grief doesn't make the person a bad person. They can't help it. It's your brain going crazy to try and cope with something traumatic. When my dog died, I wanted to sue my vet, even though they didn't really so anything wrong. It's easier to have someone in front of you to blame. I'm not saying it's right or okay, but it does happen and it can be harmful, but you're not a bad person for it. (In Bruce's case, he's a bad person for all the other shit he's pulled outside of this)

I think these two asks are like at the opposite ends of this topic and I think it's something that you can meet in the middle with. So basically

Yes, grief can be toxic and harmful, but it's also very much a subconscious phenomenon and it's extremely personal and different for everyone and alot of times, people are unaware of what they're doing.

Because of that, jason can be hurt by it, he can be angry,etc. His feelings are valid, But it's not fair to activey hold that over Bruce forever, which he doesn't, this seems more like a fanon thing btw. But it also doesn't hurt to apologize afterwards.

I think when you say that the idea of not critiquing the way someone grieves is flawed, it comes off as unempathetic. Because as someone who has had to grieve alot of the past few years, it's the worst feeling. And your brain is literally scrambling to cope with it so you don't actively lose your shit and sometimes it ends up with some unhealthy Coping mechanisms. And you're usually unaware of what you're doing. I feel like you're not thinking of how the other person is feeling or what they're going through. And fair is fair, they need to see what you're feeling too and actively try to remedy things at some point, there just needs to be more patience and empathy all around and trying to remember that this person is not always intentionally being malicious.

I'm a religious person. So I see where youre coming from, but nobody said the deceased doesn't matter. I think the point was more that you don't have to worry as much about how that person is feeling or thinking because they've moved on to a better place, you should focus on self care and doing what's best for your mental health.

I am also 100% not trying to center around Bruce's feelings and discredit jasons, in fact, the last post was 100% about jasons feelings.

In summary, there's not "justified" or "right" or "wrong". It's super complicated, varies from person to person, and is a tricky subject matter. Everyone's feelings are valid and there definitely needs to be more empathy and patience on all sides, but there are still actions that have been made on both sides that aren't the best and can be hurtful or toxic. I hope this all makes sense and I worded it right :)

#batfam #dc comics #jason todd #red hood #batman #dc universe #dcu #bruce wayne #dick grayson #nightwing

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ani-tolaat-bli-toelet · 2 months ago

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I cannot stress enough how bad the "vetting" thing is. We're on the internet, a place where if people are sort of smart they can be completely anonymous or pretend to be someone else entirely. This can range from totally harmless (like my 10 year old cousin pretending to be 13 to open a Facebook account to play one of those Farmville-esque games), dubious (confirming you're old enough to read fanfiction that, let's be real, you shouldn't have read when you were <insert too young age here>) or life-threatening (pedophile pretending to be a cool surfer or whatever to get kids online to think "oh he's so cool, and he talks to me like we're on the same level unlike other adults who treat me like a child" and agree to meet him in person)

If you're familiar with the scam-baiting community you may recognize a two-personas scam dynamic: one email account messages you saying they're a sick dying widow who wants to give you all your money, then when you reply to that email you get one from a different address introducing themselves as Dying Widow's lawyer or something like that, which makes the whole thing seem more legitimate in the eyes of someone vulnerable to that sort of scam. Whether the emails come from a team (like a new scammer who gets victims on the hook and senior scammers who take care of the hard part - stealing your money or information) or just one scammer with two email accounts who tries to make his scam seem more serious and believable, the point is many scammers will try to use more than one persona to scam you.

It's why we had internet safety rules shoved in our faces all the time in the early 2000s - don't meet with people on the internet, you don't know who they really are; don't share personal details on the internet, you don't know who could find and use it against you; don't purchase from illegitimate websites/don't reply with your credit card details to emails asking for money, you might give a malicious person direct access to all your money.

So if you look up a legitimate organization like the Red Crescent and hit the "donate" button on their website, your 5$ actually get to their intended destination. Or if you have a friend in real life who has been visiting, say, a Palestinian from the West Bank for years now, and they come to you and say "hey man, remember my buddy Hisham? His cousins live in Khan Younis, they really need help. I'm going around campus asking for money so I can send it to him, can you spare 5$?" then yeah, Hisham's cousins are real and your friend (whom you know) has met Hisham in person and knows Hisham is an actual person from Hebron with family in Gaza Strip so it's okay to give him 5$.

These "vetting" accounts? They're strangers on the internet! You don't know who they are, you don't know how they're connected to the other stranger who says they're from Gaza, you don't even know if they're a person or a bot. And when so many clearly-templated posts from new blogs appear on my dashboard and so many of them are "vetted" by the same user, that should at the very least make you go "hmm, that's odd."

Remember scams prey on vulnerability. Scam victims are not stupid, or naive, they're people who have been approached in a time or manner that made their guard down - for example someone with crippling debt being approached with an offer of a huge sum of money, or an activist who's terrified of seeing a war unfold somewhere far away so they're also feeling pretty helpless.

If you want to educate yourself further on scam awareness I highly recommend getting familiar with scam-baiting folks like Atomic Shrimp, who go over various scams to keep you in the loop and alert, and are sometimes able to interfere with active scams. Here Shrimp goes over some factors that might make people vulnerable to scams (in general I recommend him because of his compassionate attitude towards victims of scams.)

Sooooo ummmmmmm this is something that's probably going to piss a lot of people off, but I feel like I really need to say it.

If you get a message from an account claiming to be a Palestinian fundraiser, it is a bot. It is a scam. You need to report & delete the message and encourage others to do the same.

I know because I get messages on this account DAILY. I have a very high follower count and I'm pretty active and I interact with my followers a lot, and apparently that all adds up to one big bot magnet.

Bots following and messaging this account was a MASSIVE problem before Tumblr fixed its new account policies. I used to spend literally hours blocking and reporting the hundreds of bots that I would get following me each day.

I learned a lot about bots and how to identify them. The easiest way is with no avatar, "untitled" in the blog description (BTW if your avatar is still set to default PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD change it because you run a substantial risk of being accidentally blocked & reported as a bot).

One of the dead give aways of a bot was what I call "word salad" names. Three seemingly random words strung together making no sense, always adjective, adjective or noun, noun. If you reported a lot of these bots, you'd notice the same words kept showing up.

Nowadays, I am bombarded with fundraiser requests and sometimes, they don't even bother to hide the fact that they're a bot. The avatar is default, the blog title is "untitled," and the blog name is a classic randomly-generated word salad.

However MOST of the requests I get come from at least semi-legit looking accounts. There are pictures, a name, a story. Never mind that I've gotten that message three times from different accounts.

Sometimes, they claim to be vetted, but the whole vetting system essentially adds up to "trust me bro." There is no way of guaranteeing that this account isn't just lying about being vetted, claiming to be vetted by a false person, or are using the identity of a real Palestinian to scam people.

Previously, I've seen a lot of people getting attacked for raising questions about these fundraisers and getting attacked for being racist or for harming Palestinian families in danger, like Tumblr isn't a website famous for its scams and the words "The Arkh Project" "All or Nothing" or "Miss Officer and Mr. Truffles" mean nothing to you.

I personally have been scammed by people claiming to be charities on Tumblr before, specifically, The Leelah Project which used the name of a trans teenager who died by suicide to swindle people out of their money.

Luckily, there are actual, respected charities out there you can give money to if you want to help the cause:

Palestinian Children's Relief Fund

Palestine Red Crescent Society

United Nations Relief Works Agency

Islamic Relief

World Central Kitchen

Médecins Sans Frontièrs

One of the hardest things to accept about the situation in Palestine is that realistically, there is very little that your average outsider can do to change it. However, these large, well-respected and trustworthy charities are out there doing the hard work to keep people alive, and should be where the donation money is going

These scam bots feed on people's naïvety and need to believe that they are making a difference, and even worse, feed on the fear that by ignoring them, it somehow makes you a racist doing direct harm to a refugee family, when in fact they are using the suffering of Palestinians to take away money from those in need.

As far as fundraisers that don't send out random asks for donations, I honestly don't know. You'll have to do the work yourself and approach with much caution.

Be careful out there.

#gaza #palestine #donation scam #scam awareness #gaza scam #scam alert #scam warning #online scams #scammers #scam #internet safety

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luna-rainbow · 3 years ago

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Hey, running the risk of sounding like an anti Sam I am going to do a comment, I don't like where they are going with Cap!Sam, I think that the creators are relaying too much in Cap!Steve when trying to create this new Cap, you know? When you introduced me to Sam I loved him, you know he was the level haded guy, the guy that had his shit together, and the guy to defuse a a escalating situation, and that was the guy that I liked, and I think that in the TFATWS writers are trying to relay too much on Steve, and Steve character as CA instead of trying to make the character stand on his own, they are just saying Sam is black and he doesn't have the serum ergo he is not Steve instead of relaying on what was created to Sam, and I know that part of the reason is because of the irregular writing of the series, I just kind of pisses me of. I want the Sam of the conversation with Karli instead of the guy of the rest of the series. Hope your doing okay! Sorry if this was offensive in anyway!

Thanks for the ask! Sorry I got completely derailed because I was trying to find an interview where Spellman discussed Sam outside of just “Sam is a Black man in America”…and that didn't go far. I’d love to be corrected but there’s very little indication that the creators considered Sam outside of “Black Captain America” or Bucky outside of “worked for Hydra”. I haven’t seen any interview where the creators described what kind of person Sam and Bucky were, anything that suggests they tried to get into these characters’ minds and think about their specific experiences.

Compare this to what I RB’ed yesterday about Feige insisting that CATFA be rewritten so that the focus is on who Steve Rogers is and not “Captain America”. I would have loved to see Sam...as himself. We are all formed by our backgrounds, but we are also individual in our experiences.

What I'm trying to say is that Sam's experience as an African-American is undoubtedly going to shape his world view but it shouldn’t be the entirety of his story, just as Steve isn’t defined by the fact that he’s a poor Irish immigrant (although I think the writers just forgot his upbringing). There are things that are emblematic of the group that Sam belongs to - not just as an African American from the Deep South, but as a man, as a Gen X, as a military vet. There are also experiences that makes Sam unique -- how many pararescues turned VA therapists do you know? What about a vet who had to step out after losing his best man but still chose a job that helps people? How many have gone up against malicious government agencies twice and got labelled an international fugitive for doing the right thing? These are all character-forming experiences unique to Sam that made him compelling, but all of these canon histories were sorely missing from the story.

If we look at Black Panther and Shang Chi, both these movies also acknowledged that their respective cultures shaped the choices and viewpoints their characters made, but the difference is their respective characters were given much richer inner worlds. T'Challa was hardly just an "African King", he was a brother and a son and a friend who was trying to balance compassion with security. Shang Chi was hardly just an Asian immigrant, he was also a brother and a son and a friend, and each of those roles came with love and conflict and an obstacle to surmount. Both their stories also examined universal human struggles of kinship and obligation - approached in a way that is in line with their respective cultural heritages - without making the "otherness" of their heritage being the entire story.

And that was always my issue with the way Sam’s story is written. Of course a story about a Black Captain America needs to address the ramifications of racial injustice, but where is Sam outside of that? His pararescue background was so rich for mining but doesn’t even feature, his therapist background gets one mention and only when the plot required it. His path to accepting the mantle is pushed aside by a storyline about super soldiers that did nothing to highlight Sam’s strengths without the serum, or Bucky’s (and Isaiah’s) strengths despite the serum. The only protagonists of that super soldier storyline were Walker, Zemo and Karli. The Captain America storyline, the one Skogland called “the most important of the century” doesn’t even have a clear turning point for us to recognise why and how Sam decided to accept the shield despite the struggles he can foresee.

I loved the Sam we saw in episode 5 rallying his town together. That’s what we needed more of — and I don’t mean Sam needs to be joyful and charitable, but rather letting Sam be the protagonist enacting change and inspiring others with his spirit, i.e. the superhero story that Sam deserved to have.

#asks #tfatws critical #sam deserves better #sam wilson meta

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queenlua · 3 years ago

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Last week you mentioned GPG has really serious problems. Could you tell me more about them? I can't find much of anything online.

first, thanks for your patience with this appallingly late reply! september hit me like a truck :P

second: huh, wow, okay, a cursory google search really failed to turn up much stuff, huh. depressing!

i'm-a talk about the summer 2019 keyserver attack, not because that's the only issue / security vuln / fuck-up the project has ever had, but because it's (1) a hilariously bad fuck-up, and (2) generally reflective of how the project deals with security concerns, and thus demonstrates that the project is fundamentally pretty unserious

so.

this gist, by one of GnuPG's maintainers, does an okay job of summarizing the problem. a brief summary:

* one of the putative purposes of OpenPGP is to provide a "web of trust" via keyservers. i know Jane Doe, i meet her in person, i verify she is who she says she is, and i sign her key; that signature gets reflected in some keyserver, which acts like a big phone book. now, in the future, if you can't personally go verify Jane Doe's trustworthiness, but you do trust me, you can trust communications from Jane Doe, and you looked all this info up in the keyserver

* "what if a malicious actor tried to overload the keyserver?!?!" e.g. what if i spam ~150k signatures on some dude's key just to fuck with the network

* the answer, in the case of GnuPG, is, "this software is shitty and bad and can't deal with that volume so it just grinds to a fucking halt"

* ...and also most the keyservers try to copy their data from each other so you can have a ~web of trust~ throughout the network, which means, these malicious keys quickly perpetuate through the entire nnetwork

* which means anyone who receives the Forbidden Key Data TM, in practical terms, has broken their fucking GnuPG install, and that whole ~web of trust~ thing we built up is now unusable

technically speaking, this is not a security lapse per se! no cryptography has been broken; no secret data has been leaked. it is, however, a fairly straightforward denial of service attack, and is probably kind of disappointing if you wanted your security software to, you know, do software things

and look, anyone can be bitten by a nasty bug. you'll never see me being like "WOW WHAT DUMBFUCKS, HOW COULD ANYONE WRITE SUCH A STUPID BUG," because, y'know, there but for the grace of god i go, and all that. if anyone tells you they're smart enough to never write a bug, they're a fucking liar. (my full-time job for a while was literally proving those people liars, and i never fucking failed, not because i am brilliant, but because all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of god. [sorry for all the god stuff; my long-abandoned southern baptist heritage comes through when i'm talking security for some reason])

however! the manner in which you respond to such a vulnerability matters:

* let's say i had discovered this bug in GnuPG. the industry standard, if i'm kind and polite, is: i disclose the bug privately to the maintainers, and they have a 90-day window during which to fix it. if they still haven't fixed the problem at the end of the 90 days, that's fine, that's their prerogative, but *i* also get to announce to the world "hey there's this bad bug, here's how i found it, and here's how to exploit it."

this is done to keep The World In General TM safer. see, i'm just some rando. if *i'm* able to find a bug in your shitty software, then it's guaranteed the NSA or Unit 8200 or some-other-super-secret-government-agency absolutely has the resources and wherewithal to find the same bug. and also, some slimy just-in-it-for-the-money hacker gang probably also has the resources to find it. by telling the company "hey, i will go public with this in 90 days," i'm lighting a fire under their ass to actually fix the problem, rather than just letting them pretend security by obscurity will save them, and if they don't fix it by then, then at least users have a prayer of finding out, hey, these dudes do not take security problems seriously, and making informed choices based on that.

there is some wiggle room in this. for instance, the fuck are cloud vendors supposed to do about something like Spectre/Meltdown? there were some shitty, not-100%-effective mitigations that could be done in software, but fundamentally the only real fix was getting new hardware, and tragically, we cannot redesign, manufacture, and ship brand new CPUs to everybody who might be affected within a 90-day timeframe. ergo, Google Project Zero pushed their disclosure deadline way out on that. but, crucially: they still went public at some point, and Intel did not cry "wah" or "no fair" or anything like that. they worked with researchers as best as they could, and once the cat was out of the bag, they offered public resources to help developers understand how their software might be affected. that's the rules of the game.

compare this to, uh, GnuPG's outrageously shitty response (from the previously-linked gist), which can basically be summarized as:

* "wah ocaml is complicated and we don't know how to maintain our own fucking software wah"

* "ten years [?!?!?!] wasn't enough time for us to fix the problem wah"

* "whoever did this attack is a hater :((((("

which. what. what the actual fuck. those are not actual reasons to not fix your sofwtare.

also, the way in which you present your software matters:

* i've thrown up shitty hobby projects on github before. if someone came to me all earnest with a CVE against them, i'd laugh, append the README to say "yo i threw this together on a weekend while i was buzzed, you should absolutely not be relying on this for anything that matters, xoxo lua." that is 100% fine! advertising THIS SOFTWARE IS NOT NECESSARILY SECURE and thus electing not to give a shit about security problems is fine.

* i've been a part of things that are... somewhere between a hobby project and Real Software TM. e.g., research prototypes that you're hoping will be widely used so you can get a better sense of desired use cases and unexpected constraints, but which you hope will be used primarily by "power users" or others who are interested in that project's specific goals.

such a project may not be able to offer the same kinds of security guarantees as Fancy Corporate Software, and that's fine, so long as they're open and honest about stuff like: what the goals of the project are, what we're sure of and what we're less sure of, how we're vetting our stuff, what our policies are when someone does report a security issue, stuff like that. there's plenty of stuff maintained on a volunteer basis that i'd generally trust because, i expect they'll notify me if there is a serious security concern to be worried about, or they have a long track record of excellence in a narrowly-tailored space, etc. that's all good.

* what you cannot, cannot, cannot do, is: claim to offer some kind of robust security solution to people in actually-precarious situations, and then not actually act like a steward of those person's interests. if you're, oh, telling Venezeulan dissidents "our [shitty hobby] software [with gaping, well-known vulnerabilities that haven't been exploited yet ONLY because no major nation-state entity has felt threatened by our code yet, but if they were so threatened, they could trivially wreck the entire project using a well-documented years-old vulnerability we can't be assed to fix because ocaml is hard i guess] is safe and reliable to use!"

...if you're telling political dissidents that? and then you get over-the-top pissed off at someone pointing out the fucking problem you refuse to fix? and somehow make it all about mememe? then fuck you, sincerely. the threat those dissidents face is not someone breaking the fucking key network. the threat is you, you personally, because you are fucking lying to them about what your software is able to do.

GOD. sorry, just. i reread that link and got so pissed again. fuck that attitude entirely. if you let people down, fucking just sit with that for a bit, okay? sit and think and do better next time. christ.

anyway.

this is a particularly gratuitous example of GnuPG maintainers being little shits, but in general they've been lackadaisical and dismissive some other times in the past when people have brought them real security problems, and then act all pissy if, y'know, people go public with said security problems. i haven't kept up with their work lately (i think maybe the community got kind of annihilated by this keyserver thing?) & i have other bones to pick with any project of that type (it's kind of taking the wrong tack entirely imho), but like, yeah, in general if a software community's response to security bugs is "oh gosh that's hard maybe we'll get to it someday," you should not be trusting that software lol

#filthy hacker shit #LONG post #honestly it took me like three times to keep this from spiraling into a fucking novel so #here's the shortest version i could manage.#hit me up for pissy computer security rants: if you really want to know #also this tone is like... probably more pissy than necessary sorry #there is some more nuance that could be had here but i just get kinda miffed when people claim to do A Security and then do the opposite

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sebastianshaw · 3 years ago

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Whittled down some drafts at last, so now I’m going to post a Munday and go for a walk! For new followers, on Monday (Mun Monday/Munday) I sometimes just dump a bunch of OOC in one post so I get it out in one go and aren’t clogging your dash with it the rest of the week. It’s just completely random stuff.

- Watched “Cryptozoo” today which was why I didn’t start posts earlier! It’s a movie you really have to pay attention to. It’s very artistically interesting, and not to spoil but I really like the commentary in it too. Like it gets more complicated than bad guys who want to exploit them and good guys who save them and I enjoyed that angle. Warning, it’s got explicit sex/nudity and some very graphic violence, and one of the first things that happens is a unicorn getting its head brutally bashed in with a rock. So, if I kept watching after that, you know I *had* to be interested! - When we brought Georgina to the vet, we passed a family holding a rabbit on the way out. When we got in the car, I immediately answered “it looks like a bad case of ear mites” because I had noticed the ears had severe crusting which is a sign of ear mites for rabbits. I was then instantly amused that not only did my dad assume I would know, at a glance, what was wrong with a small creature, but also that I (maybe) did! - I got the best Christmas gift, which is that I got to go spend time with my grandmother. She’s my last living grandparent and I really want to make the most of the time we have left. And I got to tell her about how Michael Rockefeller was most likely eaten by the Asmat tribe, which is a REALLY interesting topic btw! - According to one daemon analysis site, I can add “Atlantic ghost crab” to my list of potential daemons for myself (I’m pretty sure I’m a chinchilla or dormouse, but I always like to keep my options open) - Speaking of animals---you know how a really common trope is that aliens or gods or elves or whatever come to this planet/world/plane/etc and they may have nefarious intentions or at least feel they’re superior to humans, but by the end of the movie they come to the conclusion humans are super special? Like that was the entire thing in Eternals, that we’re just SO SPECIAL we’re worth the Eternals rejecting their mission and creator? What if that idea, but instead of the being in question deciding that this planet is worth preserving and protecting not for the humans, but the ANIMALS. Like, I know if I it were me, I’d be like, shit, we have to save this place, it has POTOROOS!!! - Really, I’m just having a lot of feels about extinct and endangered animals, especially those that aren’t glamorous and well-known enough for most people to know or care about them. Very few mourned the loss of the Bramble Cay melomys, for instance. It just makes me sad when a species is wiped out not through an organic natural selection, but the careless or even malicious actions of human beings. Especially when it's something most people won't care about or even know about. I didn't even hear of the bramble cay melomys until it went extinct in 2018. And it was just a little brown rat, but even the smallest, most humble, most unglamorous species have a place in the ecosystem, and have value beyond whether they're pretty or useful to humans, and should be preserved. I try to focus on the potoroos as my animal passion project of choice, but I wish there was a way to help them all. - I wrote on a previous Munday post that a lot of the assumptions and questions I encounter from people about lesbians seems fixated on thinking we hate me or wondering why we hate men, etc. And while I’ve never been a gay man, I’ve just never seen people act as if all gay men hate women and being a gay man means you must hate women or been hurt by them, etc. I’m sure that attitude exists somewhere to some degree (I think there’s actually a Japanese term for gay men that translates for “women-hater”?) but there really seems to be no equivalent trope here for the man-hating lesbian; at worst gay men are depicted as grossed-out by women’s bodies/sex with them, but never as hating women themselves (even tho irl they’re perfectly capable of being horribly misogynist) And my theory for a long time for this has been because patriarchy positions women as being All About Men, and our sexuality must be All About Men. The idea it’s not is so BAFFLING that people, especially men, especially but not exclusively cishet men, believe that we still must be OBSESSED with them in SOME way, even if it’s negative. The idea we hate them is more comfortable to them than the notion we just simply don’t care and aren’t interested. But it occurred to me recently, I think there’s another reason too. And it’s that patriarchy trains people---and I mean everyone---to hate women that aren’t considered “attractive” to men. Women who aren’t skinny enough, young enough, pale enough, this enough, that enough---they are the focus of ire and disgust in media and real life, from men and other women. It’s why men can look like total slobs or just NORMAL and it’s fine, but women have to be dressed up and made up and look twenty years under our real age and twenty pounds underweight just to avoid insult, in real life and even more so in media. So I think the assumption from some men is. . . given the way that some men will treat and view women they don’t find attractive, maybe they assume that women who don’t find men attractive, view men the same way. Like garbage. Like if you’re not fuckable to them, you’re not worth basic respect. That’s how a lot of shitty dudes are, and I’ve noticed that shitty people IN GENERAL tend to assume everyone else is shitty in the same way they are, whatever that is, so maybe that’s the case here too. It’s probably, like many problems in society, a lot of different reason. - I just really unironically love the Brides in "Van Helsing" and always have since I saw it in theaters when I was like. ..14, lol - Feels about Mommy Fortuna. Also, I posted on FB about how the fact that the same woman (Angel Lansburgy) voiced both Mrs. Potts in “Beauty & the Beast” and Mommy Fortuna in “The Last Unicorn” just BLOWS MY CHILDHOOD SELF’S MIND as those were my fave movies as a wee one and SUCH DIFFERENT CHARACTERS and a friend replies “That’s my immortality, eh?” and I just fsjgfjhjfdjhdgfj it is!! IT IS!! - Which reminds me, I totally need to watch Bedknobs & Broomsticks - Really interested in Hurrem Sultan and Lucrezia Borgia this week. I’m just really interested in women who are stereotyped by history and media as cunning manipulative scheming Lady Macbeths but in reality were people in a bad situation making the best of things they could, which rarely allows them to behave like angels---and even if they do, they’re remembered as wicked sluts anyway regardless of facts. It just seems no matter what era we’re in, women get backed into corners by men and society, and then blamed when they do anything they can to get out of it, or even just work within it, as in the case of Hurrem, or are used as pawns by those men, as in the case of Lucrezia. It’s not that I think women are always angels, but we do get cast as demons whenever we’re NOT angels, it’s one or the other. It’s like how when I read historical fiction, the female characters who want to marry rich are all cast as absolutely horrible people for it (unlike our heroine, who of course wants to marry for love!) and like. . .looking at the situation for women in those times, that was the most sensible thing for a woman to do. Basically, women are considered evil if they ever have self-interest like Hurrem, what a shocker. Or, if they are good girls and do what daddy wants like Lucrezia, still get cast as evil by everyone else after the fact even with no evidence. - History video: Pope Alexander VI loved his illegitimate children, all historians agree on that History video: He used his only daughter as a pawn and married her off to to a stranger twice her age when she was 13 - By the way, Hurrem gave birth to many sons, but just one daughter, Mihrimah. Allegedly she was upset by this, as she’d vowed only to have sons, but apparently Mihrimah became the Sultan’s favorite child. And it doesn’t surprise me, given that his sons were all scheming on the throne and he even took out two or three of them himself. But Mihrimah outlived all her brothers, married a Croatian noble, and did charity work for the rest of her life after she was widowed. I think she wound up ok and idk why but that means something to me. - I've noticed, Duggan seems to have a REALLY bad case of Protagonist Centered Morality. PCM is when the protagonist doesn't do things because they're good, they're good because the protagonist does them. Basically, if the hero kicks a puppy for no reason, somehow this is a heroic and justified act. This isn't to say protags can never do shitty or just morally questionable things, but the vibe with PCM is that these things AREN'T shitty or questionable at all. It judges morality, and tells us who to root for, not by the act itself but who's doing it. If Shaw had somehow done the EXACT same thing to Laura that Lorna did under the EXACT same circumstances, I think it's a fair bet that Laura would be written reacting far more negatively. Because Shaw is a bad guy and Duggan doesn't like him. But since Lorna is a protag and Duggan likes her, she can do the exact same thing and it's not portrayed as "bad" to the reader, nor will other characters treat it as such (and will be portrayed as in the wrong if they do) PCM is like, one of my PET PEEVES in fiction, big time.

#out of shirt #mun monday #munday

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flightfoot · 5 years ago

Text

Divergent Points - Feast

AO3/FFN

Previous installment: Divergent Points - Weredad

Turning Points

Inspired partly by this conversation I had with @fearlessinger

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Plagg curled up against Adrien, purring. It’d taken a long time for Adrien to fall asleep.

He didn’t blame him. He’d be having nightmares himself for a long time after this.

Plagg had been separated from a lot of his cats. Most of the time, it was bittersweet. On the one hand, it’s hard to be around a person a lot who wasn’t COMPLETELY despicable and not grow to care about them, at least a little.

On the other hand…

Tikki got the “nice” wielders and the “nice” powers. Sugarcube got paired with idealistic, inventive users who would quickly become fast friends with her. At worst, they’d see her mostly as a tool.

But at least she wasn’t usually considered a THREAT.

Plagg’s wielders tended to fall into two categories; the cautious wielders and the unrestrained wielders.

The cautious wielders were usually wielders he was assigned to by some outside force. The Order of the Guardians, for example. He might get to pick among a few different candidates if the person in charge was extremely generous, but this was a rare privilege.

The most dangerous kwami were rarely allowed that kind of freedom.

And he was considered the most dangerous of them all.

Those cautious wielders were chosen for their ability to temper both their destructive impulses and his own, keeping him on a tight leash. They were rarely outright malicious about it, and if he really, truly wanted to he could probably leave… well, most of the time.

But then he’d have to leave his friends behind. And if the person was mistreating him badly enough that he was at the end of his rope and WANTED to leave…

The monk who had created the Miraculous in the first place in order to allow Kwamis to physically manifest, had also built a safeguard into every Miraculous, just in case the spirits he was trying to pull into the physical plane turned out to be malicious.

Not a totally unreasonable precaution, but it screwed him and all the other kwamis over. They’d never figured out a way to undo the compulsion, and he suspected that most of his wielders hadn’t really wanted to, either.

If his wielder was terrible enough that he wanted to bolt? It was very rare he’d be able to.

He sympathized with poor Nooroo. He’d been in that position often enough.

In those cases, he was lucky if he just wanted to leave because he felt stifled or ignored or unwanted, and his wielder was just enough of a jackass that they wouldn’t let him go or listen to him.

The unrestrained wielders were often far worse.

If he ended up with one of them, it was usually due to something going horribly wrong. His ring falling out of the Miracle box and getting lost, for instance, like what happened to Duusu and Nooroo. Or more commonly, being stolen from one of his other wielders.

With the wielder being either random or an outright thief, he’d rarely had a good time with those wielders, at least not for long. Some of them could be okay at first, giving him more freedom than he’d normally have and not treating him like he was about to launch a cataclysm at any moment.

But they were often the worst ones, because unlike the cautious wielders, they often became corrupted, if they weren’t already. The power to destroy ANYTHING, very, very easily, was a heady power, especially in the wrong hands.

He was often glad to go back to a cautious wielder after his miraculous was inevitably removed from the offender. The cautious wielders wouldn’t make him kill anyone.

Over time he’d just… tried to stop caring. Make light of destroying the dinosaurs, of sinking Atlantis, of any mistake he’d ever made, and it wouldn’t hurt as much to have it thrown back in his face.

Then he was given to Adrien.

At first, he thought this would be just like the other cases where he was assigned; given to a cautious wielder who’d be nice enough, but was ultimately there to control him. Yeah this kid was a lot younger than his usual wielders – while some of the other kwami were assigned to kids for bonding purposes, the Order of the Guardians usually assigned him to adults, who wouldn’t be influenced or persuaded by him as much – and he hadn’t been raised as a monk or even really been vetted much, but Fu had chosen him. Considering how cautious and fearful Fu was of Plagg going out of control, he doubted that the monk would’ve chosen any sort of loose cannon or free spirit as his wielder.

He’d underestimated Fu’s desperation and lack of vetting.

When Fu’d said that he’d found the right wielder for him, he’d known that Fu wouldn’t have been able to look deeply into the wielder’s background or get to know them – they were operating on only a few hours of notice. It’d made him pretty nervous about the type of person he might get, honestly. He’d seen even people who appeared nice and kind slowly become corrupted and dangerous over time.

With only having a few hours to research? There was no telling whether the wielder would be decent even at the outset.

Turns out, Fu’s actual vetting process wasn’t even THAT extensive. Wayzz had told him later that Fu had just randomly tried to walk into the middle of a busy street to see whether anyone would help him, and decided that the first person to help should be Tikki’s wielder. For finding Chat Noir, he just randomly acted like he was super frail, dropping his cane and pretending he couldn’t get up, and waited to see who’d help him. Adrien did, so Fu decided that he’d be Plagg’s wielder.

Honestly he was lucky that Adrien was as famous as he was, otherwise Fu wouldn’t have been able to find out where he lived. At least with Marinette, he’d been able to see her leaving her house beforehand.

…Okay, maybe he was being a little harsh on Fu’s vetting. He genuinely had almost no time to work with, and his tests at least established whether that person cared about the APPEARANCE of being a kind, helpful person.

Plagg shuddered. It was a good thing Lila hadn’t been around at that point. She probably would’ve passed the tests. She at least knew it was a good idea to appear helpful and kind. Made it easier to manipulate people later.

But it hadn’t been Lila.

It had been Adrien.

Even the first time he met Adrien, he liked him.

The kid was bright-eyed and thrilled to see him. Still, just because he was thrilled right off the bat didn’t mean much. Plagg had wanted to make a good first impression – they’d probably be working together for awhile after all – but also test him a bit. Feel out where the boundaries were and how controlling Adrien would be. So he gave a little test. Flying around the room trying to eat everything sounded like a great way to test his patience and his new wielder’s problem-solving capabilities.

Also it was just plain fun. He’d never have been able to get away with this in the temple!

Adrien had gotten annoyed, but nothing worse than that. Had to compliment the kid’s acrobatic skills too. The leap off his climbing wall was impressive, to say the least.

He’d given Adrien the usual spiel about not telling anyone about him, keeping his identity secret, his powers, etc. Well, maybe wasn’t fast enough on explaining his powers. Kid jumped the gun a bit on that one.

After he’d told Adrien some basics about the Miraculous, he’d gone and spread toilet paper all over his room. To his surprise, Adrien didn’t seem to care much. Around that time he’d realized that while Fu may have thought that he’d given Plagg to a cautious wielder, that definitely wasn’t the case. A cautious wielder would’ve lectured him about making a mess, probably in that calm, authoritative voice they often had. Better than the yelling he’d gotten from some of his unrestrained wielders at least.

And then…

“But I'm stuck here! I'm not even allowed to go to school! What good is a superhero who's imprisoned in his own house!”

That was the first glimpse he’d gotten of Adrien’s frustrations.

The first glimpse of the similarities between the two of them.

Their imprisonment, their caution, were for different reasons. People feared Plagg and tried to, if not imprison him, control and restrict him at least. Adrien’s father (and Plagg used that term in a loose sense) at least claimed that he was imprisoning and controlling his son to try to keep him safe. Considering how he acted whenever Adrien did something that was perfectly safe, but that didn’t benefit Gabriel and ESPECIALLY when it threatened his control? He had his doubts. Plagg had had enough wielders justify enslaving him as “keeping everyone else safe from destruction” that he knew the type.

At least Adrien had the Dupain-Chengs now. He may not have been willing to run away to stay with them permanently – yet – but they were there for him. He had a safe place to go with adults who cared about him as a person rather than what he could do for them.

Sadly, he couldn’t say that about any other adults in Adrien’s life. Gorilla came closest, but even then the most he’d really been able to do was look the other way when Adrien needed a bit more freedom than he was technically allowed. He wasn’t really able to give him the support he needed.

Plagg winced a little. While he’d given Adrien some support even early on, he tried not to give too much. Get too attached. The kid was nice and a lot more fun than most of his other wielders, but… well, he’d been burned a lot.

But Adrien had a way of worming his way into even Plagg’s cheese-obsessed heart.

He’d get annoyed with Plagg, but never in a way that suggested he was a burden or unwanted.

He genuinely enjoyed spending time with Plagg, even if most of it was just Plagg sitting around eating cheese.

Most importantly, Adrien NEEDED him. Not just for his abilities – though for that too – but as a person.

Adrien was lonely. Even when he did get to hang out with his friends – which wasn’t as often as he liked, and was prone to changing at a moment’s notice – he still didn’t feel comfortable showing all of him. He had a lot of feelings he kept repressed, that he felt like he HAD to keep repressed, because that’s what he’d been taught to do. And if he stepped out of line where his father could see… well, it wouldn’t be the first time that Gabriel had threatened to pull him from school.

Plagg had been the first person who was always there for him. Who couldn’t be taken away. Who he could express all sides of himself around. Anger, frustration, adoration… everything. Even as Chat, he mostly just let out the part of him he didn’t feel safe showing normally. He still didn’t really show every side of his personality.

Plagg had always been the one who people felt like they needed to teach and lecture.

He’d never needed to be the one to teach and provide support instead.

It made him feel needed. Wanted. In a way he’d never been before.

And this kid…

He looked at Adrien’s sleeping face as he twitched, making small distressed noises.

Plagg snuggled up against him harder. “Don’t worry, kitten,” he whispered. “I won’t leave you. Not forever. I’ll always come back.”

Somewhere along the way, Adrien had turned from just a kid, to being HIS kitten.

He couldn’t pinpoint exactly when the change had occurred. It just kind of… was. But he knew when he first suspected it.

Adrien hated being left in the dark. Feeling like he wasn’t trusted. Wasn’t wanted.

But it wasn’t Plagg’s place to bring him to Fu without a very good reason. Not when Fu could’ve gone to Adrien at any time and chosen not to.

Plus – well, there was a more selfish reason.

He was afraid that Fu would interfere in the bond he had with his kitten. Teach him about how uncontrollable and dangerous destruction was, how out of control Plagg’s powers could get, and that he should keep him on a tight leash.

Even as Adrien’s frustration grew, Plagg still didn’t give in, though he was tempted. And not just by exotic stinky cheeses, though those WERE tempting.

Then Adrien reached the end of his rope. He took off his Miraculous and detransformed, believing that it genuinely didn’t matter whether he was around or not. That he wasn’t needed, that no one would notice or care if Chat just… didn’t show up.

That’s when Plagg realized just how much he cared about Adrien. And how much his kitten needed to hear that. That HE would care if Adrien wasn’t Chat Noir. If he didn’t see him again.

I will!

Why? Because you won't have anyone to give you Camembert?

Oh, I'm sure there'll be another Chat Noir to give me cheese... but he won't be you.

That’s what Adrien needed. People who genuinely trusted and respected him as a person, and not as a tool. Who valued his feelings and opinions.

As nervous as Plagg had been about how Fu’s interference could affect his bond with Adrien, he was glad he’d showed up right then. That Marinette had cared about her partner’s distress over the seeming lack of trust – of not even having enough information to know WHY he was being left in the dark – to push Fu into talking to Adrien directly. To showing Adrien that it wasn’t that Ladybug didn’t trust him or believe they were equals, but that it was just Fu’s commands, and it wasn’t her secret to tell.

Even if it meant that Adrien might put him on a tighter leash, if meeting with Fu helped Adrien… well, he’d survived being restricted before.

But that hadn’t happened. In either sense.

Sure, Fu had met with Adrien ONCE – but that was it. Only once. And only after being pressured first.

Plagg kept on waiting for Fu to contact Adrien again. He might not be able to hand out his address – with Marinette visiting regularly, there was too much chance of them bumping into each other – but he could still drop by and visit Adrien. Or even ask Ladybug to arrange a private meeting between him and Chat Noir, if he couldn’t get to Adrien without being spotted.

But he just… hadn’t.

Plagg had entertained the idea of asking him on one of the occasions he himself went back over there, but he doubted he’d get a satisfying answer. It hadn’t seemed worth having a confrontation about at the time.

Even at that point though, he still wasn’t quite ready to tell Adrien everything. He trusted Adrien, he really did, but… well, old habits die hard. He was terrified that this would all end, and Adrien would turn cold and controlling, like some of his other wielders.

Which was why for Nooroo’s birthday, he created a stand-in and didn’t tell Adrien that he was leaving. They were already going behind Fu’s back to do this. Going behind his wielder’s back just seemed normal. Natural.

When Tikki had told him that she’d just told her own wielder exactly what she was doing, he wasn’t surprised. Tikki rarely got the controlling ones. Telling the truth rarely had negative repercussions for her.

Then the akuma happened.

And Plagg hadn’t been there.

When Adrien had needed him most, he WASN’T THERE.

And Adrien didn’t even know what’d happened to him.

He’d flown back to Adrien as quickly as he could.

Finding him imprisoned in his room, alone, desperately pulling on bars he KNEW wouldn’t bend - he’d known that Adrien feared being imprisoned. That he lived in a gilded cage, one that Gabriel would open the door of occasionally, but that Adrien always had to return to lest he lose that right.

And worse than being imprisoned? Being alone.

Without even knowing why the person he’d cared for, the person who’d cared for HIM, had vanished.

He’d felt pretty guilty after that, especially seeing Tikki and Marinette affirm how much they trusted each other.

Because honestly?

He trusted Adrien too.

He might have hang-ups about his previous wielders, but taking that out on Adrien was unfair. And that day, it had hurt him. Badly.

So when Adrien had told him that he knew what it was like to have his freedom restricted, that he didn’t need to sneak around to leave – that was when he’d decided.

His previous wielders were his previous wielders. They were NOT Adrien.

And it was high time he returned the trust that Adrien had placed in him.

Because Adrien placed a LOT of trust in him. He didn’t even fear his powers! Everyone else was always worried about Plagg going out of control and destroying everything, even his fellow kwamis.

Adrien had never doubted him.

On Heroes Day, he showed no fear or trepidation about Plagg causing a little destruction in the street to let Adrien escape from Gorizilla and transform. He KNEW he could do it. And when he did? When he managed to keep his powers in check himself, only causing as much destruction as was needed? Adrien had patted him on the head and called him his hero.

Now it was time to be Adrien’s hero again.

Carefully, he extricated himself from Adrien’s side. Now would be the WORST time to wake him. Seeing Plagg gone after what he’d just been through? Would be his worst nightmare.

But at least Adrien still had the ring this time. He’d know that Plagg hadn’t been stolen. And he trusted that Plagg would come back.

Still, best to be back before Adrien noticed he was gone.

He looked back at Adrien – his wielder, his best friend, his kitten – and flew off into the night.

Fu was sound asleep when he arrived.

Unsurprising. Feast being around wouldn’t have been conducive to sleep, even if Fu HADN’T pulled his little escapade during the middle of the night.

He was probably exhausted after the kind of day he’d had.

Unfortunately for Fu, Plagg, frankly, didn’t give a crap about that.

If he didn’t want to do this now? Tough luck.

“WAKE UP!”

Fu startled awake, flailing wildly.

“WHA-?”

Wayzz appeared at his side. “Plagg, what are you doing here? Master needs his sleep.”

Plagg growled. “Well, he should’ve THOUGHT of that before KIDNAPPING ME IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT!”

“I had to,” Fu mumbled groggily, blinking the sleep out of his eyes. “Feast would’ve eaten Adrien and Marinette otherwise.”

Plagg glared at Fu, then took a deep breath. “You were willing to put your own life in danger from Feast, but not theirs. You believed that taking their Miraculous was the only way to keep them safe. Fine. I can respect that.”

“What I CAN’T respect is everything you did surrounding that.”

Fu looked puzzled. “What do you mean?”

“You gave me and Tikki to Marinette and Adrien with almost no explanation, no training, and no support. And I was fine with that at first! Just sink or swim, either they’d manage or they wouldn’t.”

“But then I got to know them better. And I got to CARE about them. Fu, Marinette is drowning in her responsibilities. I don’t get to see as much of her as I do Adrien, but- well, she’s not subtle about it, and Chat’s one of the few people she can open up to about it. It’s gotten better recently since she can talk to Alya and Nino about it as well –“

Fu’s head shot up. “What! Alya and Nino know her identity?”

Oops. He didn’t mean to let that little fact slip.

“For how long?! Marinette knows the rule-“

Oh HELL no.

“THAT IS A STUPID-ASS RULE!” Plagg shouted. The shop shook slightly, his destructive energy leaking out – though thankfully not enough to actually cause permanent damage.

Still, he needed to reign himself in. Destroying Fu – or the rest of Paris – was not on his agenda.

He wanted to shake Fu and make him understand what he was doing wrong, not make him go the way of the dinosaurs.

Once everything stopped shaking, he took another deep breath and continued. “I understand the reason you don’t want anyone else to know their identities. If Hawkmoth akumatized or just had the right mind control akuma take control of that person, their identities could be jeopardized, putting them, as well as Tikki and I, in danger.”

“But you know what? NOT having anyone else know their identities is ALSO dangerous.”

“They’ve both been suffocating, Fu. Marinette in her responsibilities and the pressure to maintain her double life, and Adrien with not being able to really show all sides of himself, and of having very little stable support.”

Fu frowned. “Marinette is a bright young woman who has handled the Ladybug Miraculous admirably, and Adrien seems to have managed well enough before now.”

Plagg bit back some nasty curses. Best not to destroy the shop. Or Fu, he guessed. “Yes, they’ve MANAGED. Which is more of a testament to how resilient they are than anything you’ve done. But the point is, just because they’ve MANAGED doesn’t mean that they should be expected to! They’re only FOURTEEN. They need more support and help than you’ve given them – than you can provide. Alya and Nino give them that. They were able to take babysitting off Marinette’s shoulders, help them sneak out when they need to transform, and just generally have their backs!”

“Wait, so they know not only Marinette’s, but also Adrien’s-“

Plagg flew up to Fu’s face, an inch from his nose. “If you even THINK about taking me away from Adrien again, I will cataclysm you where you stand.”

“Plagg!” Wayzz shouted, dismayed. “How could you threaten-“

“How could I? HOW COULD I?!” Plagg screamed. Vases started to rattle.

Deep breaths, Plagg. Think of cheese. Lovely, delicious, stinky cheese.

After getting a handle on himself, he spoke, struggling to keep his voice level. “You have no idea what waking up to find me gone DID to Adrien. What that’s like for him.”

Fu frowned. “I know he’s your friend, but he survived before I gave you to him-“

Plagg growled, quivering with rage. “SURVI-“

He cut himself off as the shop started to shake again.

“PLAGG, GET CONTROL OF YOURSELF!” Wayzz yelled, positioning himself in front of Fu.

As much as Plagg hated to admit it, Wayzz was right. He needed to calm down.

Mmmm… Adrien with Camembert… Camembert bread straight from the Dupain-Cheng Bakery (seriously why couldn’t they just live there, human laws were stupid)… Marinette and Adrien kissin-

Nope. Nopenopenope. He’d seen enough of that. Those two were gross together, why would that even come up when thinking of calming things?

(He steadfastly ignored the warmth that filled his chest when he saw the two of them finally able to be together and happy. It was warmth from eating tons of cheese bread, that was all).

Ok. Back to yelling at Fu. He NEEDED to understand this.

“Do you know what his life was like before he met me?” Plagg hissed.

Fu blinked. “He’s grown up wealthy, so he’s never wanted for anything – except going to school. He models a lot, though he only started doing that in the past year, after-“

Fu’s eyes widened, realization dawning. “After his mother went missing…” he ended softly.

“Do you get it now? At least that small part of it?” Plagg asked.

“He probably had flashbacks to when his mother disappeared,” Fu murmured. “Thinking that he was losing someone else he cared about, so soon after losing a parent.”

“Yeah.” Plagg deflated slightly. “That hit him pretty hard, but he’s persevered and done REALLY well despite that. Especially considering – well, you know what you said regarding him ‘never wanting for anything’? That’s not true. At all. Him not getting to go to school? That’s the tip of the iceberg. Gabriel – that man does NOT deserve the title of ‘father’ – has kept him isolated from people for basically his whole life. Maybe his mother too, I’m not sure, I’ve been afraid to pry too much. She’s a sensitive topic, and even I know better than to stick my paw in that.”

“Anyway, Adrien’s only friend growing up was little miss cause-of-half-the-akumas-in-Paris CHLOE, and even THAT was mostly because Gabriel saw some value in having his kid be friends with the mayor’s daughter! And once Emilie went missing, he didn’t even allow Adrien to see HER! He was stuck all alone in his room with no one to talk to or support him right after losing his mother. And by ‘stuck’ I mean actually imprisoned, because yeah, Gabriel’s a DICK, and worse than that, he’s a RICH dick who can afford a security system that seals all entrances and exits in his house!

“Oh, and remember when I said Adrien was ‘alone’? Well I MEANT that. His father’s only left his house a handful of times since Emilie went missing, but does he spend any time with his son, who just lost his MOTHER? NO! He constantly makes Adrien cancel or just prevent him from making plans so they can eat together at least, but he only shows up maybe a fifth of the time! No apology, no nothing. Adrien has to drop everything to accede to his wishes, but he doesn’t even CARE enough to apologize on the few occasions when they DO see each other in person! He treats Adrien as an employee at best and an object at worst. He only holds value as long as he does EXACTLY what Gabriel says, and if he ‘fails’ him in any way – doesn’t do quite as well at a photoshoot, isn’t as perfect at piano-playing as Gabriel would like – he’s punished severely, often by taking away his ability to spend time with his friends, some of the only people who DO care about him as a person!”

“I care about Adrien!” Fu interjected, affronted.

“Do you?” Plagg growled. “You’ve only visited him ONCE, after Marinette asked you to. You’ve never asked me what his life was like or how he was feeling or doing, even though I’ve visited here a few times! So tell me, how have you showed that you care?!”

“Master was willing to let himself die to keep BOTH Adrien and Marinette safe,” Wayzz cut in. “Yes, Fu may have made some mistakes, but he DOES care.”

Plagg breathed out. “Ok, yeah. I’ll give him that. He was ready to sacrifice his life for them. But the way he did it – that didn’t exactly scream ‘I know and care about them as people’. He had you KIDNAP me ad Tikki, and he didn’t even give Adrien the luxury of knowing what was going on beyond a quick letter! The only reason he wasn’t completely lost on that was because Marinette texted him with details after talking to Fu, because she was TIRED of leaving her partner in the dark when he didn’t need to be.”

“Fu never gave me or Adrien the chance to protest or argue, present alternative plans or arguments. He never gave us the chance to decide. He just decided that that would be the best course of action, and that was that. No one else’s opinion mattered, because HE’D made a decision. If anyone protested? He shut them up.”

“Well…” Wayzz looked uncomfortable now.

“Oh.” Plagg’s voice lowered, his ears pinning back. Softly, he said, “He did it to you too, didn’t he? Shut you up when you started poking holes in his plan? When you said things that went against his decision?”

Wayzz squirmed, not looking Plagg in the eyes.

“..Yes,” Fu admitted, taking over from Wayzz. He walked over to the turtle kwami, cupping his hands, allowing him to rest in the bowl shape they formed. “I’m sorry, Wayzz. I should never have done that. I truly believed at the time that taking the Miraculous was the best move to protect them, but at the very least, I should never have tried to stop you from talking. To renounce you so I didn’t have to listen to your arguments.”

Wayzz just gave a small nod.

“You see the problem?” Plagg asked. “You care about other people’s lives – I’ll agree with that much – but you keep on forgetting that they’re people, and that they have the right to know information that affects them, to give their input, and to make their own decisions. Yes, Marinette and Adrien are young, but they’re the ones out on the field, not you. They have the right to know whatever they need to in order to make informed decisions – BOTH of them, not just Marinette. She normally takes the lead, and she’s damn good at it too, but don’t dump everything on her shoulders. Let her have support, let her lean on other people. And give other people the ability to provide that support. Yeah, you can’t tell both of them everything – there are some things even we kwami can’t be allowed to know, in case we’re compromised – but you can sure tell them more than you have. Like for instance, what happens when a Guardian renounces their Guardianship?

Fu flinched. “I don’t know how much longer I have before Hawkmoth catches up with me. I don’t want her to worry before then.”

Plagg’s tail lashed. “Oh sure, and you don’t think she might worry AT THE TIME?! I know she’s a superhero, but she’s still HUMAN! And she’s just a kid! I understand not wanting to worry her, but when you plan to dump the guardianship on her lap, she has a right to know what it comes with!”

“And that’s another thing – did you ever bother to really ASK her whether she was okay with being Guardian? Or did you just decide she would be?”

Fu looked at the ground, mumbling. “That’s how it’s always been done…”

“Yeah, and ‘how it’s always been done’ is STUPID,” Plagg said. “Look. Honestly? You’re a decent Guardian compared to some of the others I’ve had to put up with. But that’s not saying much, and Adrien and Marinette deserve better.”

As Fu opened his mouth, Plagg hastily added, “And by that I do NOT mean shove the Miracle Box onto Marinette and skip out of their lives! –well, let’s be honest, out of HER life, you’ve never done squat with Adrien.”

“The sad thing is? I’m not sure who has it worse – Marinette for being the one you shove everything onto, or Adrien for being left in the dark.”

Fu was quiet for a moment.

After a few tense moments, he spoke. “I knew I had failed as a Guardian – that I was never even really a Guardian in the first place – but I’d never realized I’d failed these young people so badly.”

Plagg nodded. “Yeah. You have. But that doesn’t mean you can just skip out because you did poorly. You made this mess. Now, you need to fix it as best you can.”

Fu nodded, determination shining in his eyes. “What do you recommend? Beyond what you’ve already said.”

“Well for one thing, actually try to get to KNOW Adrien. Talk to him, treat him as a person, not just a tool. Let Marinette and Adrien know that the secret identity rule is rescinded, reassure them that you won’t take their Miraculous, and that you’re ok with Alya and Nino knowing.”

Plagg hesitated a moment, but then plowed on. “And… this one really IS more of a suggestion, not an order. But. Maybe observe Alya and Nino and get to know them as well? I think they might also be good candidates for permanent Miraculous, and Nino might be a better Guardian candidate than Marinette. Not because she’s not perfectly capable – she’d make an awesome Guardian I’m sure – but because that’s really too much to dump on her, and to prevent hers and Chat’s relationship from becoming too imbalanced again. Divide the responsibility, so it’s not all resting on a single person’s shoulders – especially when they haven’t agreed to it, and don’t know what all it entails.”

Fu closed his eyes, contemplating. “If you think that’s best, then I’ll follow your suggestions. If there’s one thing this incident with Feast has taught me, it’s to listen to others seriously. And honestly – you’re right. About everything. And… I’m sorry.”

“Apologize to Marinette and Adrien, and try to fix this mess. THAT, will be a sufficient apology,” Plagg said.

Fu smiled. “I will.”

As Plagg flew towards the window, Fu called out, “Oh, and Plagg?”

Plagg stopped, turning around. “What?”

“Thank you.”

Plagg grinned. “Hey, I’ll give you a kick in the butt whenever you need it. Just – don’t need it again, alright?”

He flew off into the night, back towards his kitten.

It looked like things would change for the better.

#divergent points #ml fanfic #miraculous ladybug #feast #fix-it fic #Plagg #Master Fu #adrien agreste

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nattikay · 5 years ago

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Just trying to sort out some thoughts, came here cuz not sure where else to do it. Might delete later.

So we’ve had Maisie for almost a week now an honestly, it’s...caused me a lot more stress than I’d expected it to. Don’t get me wrong, I like her, and I don’t plan to give her back to the shelter or anything, good gracious, no--but tbh I feel a little guilty for not being ~euphoric~ over the whole scenario, and I’m just trying to work out why.

Don’t worry she is being well taken care of! This is an emotional issue, not an ability-to-care-for issue.

I think some of it may have its roots in our old cat, Harry Pawter. We got Harry when I was around 9 years old and I loved him. However, being a child when we got him, I was never really super good at taking care of him; most of the animal care wound up falling on my parents.

Harry, for the most part, was a pretty good cat most of his life, but he started developing health problems around his last two years or so. By this point I was in high school, and for all intents and purposes should’ve been old enough and responsible enough to step in and help take proper care of him. But by that point, I hadn’t really formed those habits and...I never really did. Not as much as I should have. And looking back...tbh I feel really bad about it, and wonder if I didn’t love him as much as I should have, or as much as I thought I did. My dad would certainly imply at much when he got frustrated with the cat, and that...kinda sunk its way into my brain, I guess.

I’ve mentioned before that we lost Harry my freshman year of college, my very first semester. But I haven’t told the whole story, because well...I feel really bad about it. But maybe it’ll be good to get it off my chest.

See, Harry’s health had been declining for a while at that point (he was now 9 years old btw). He was struggling to keep himself clean and having more and more accidents outside the litterbox. My dad took him to the vet, and the vet suspected he may have had a brain tumor. All this was happening recently after I started my first semester of college, so I wasn’t home at the time, only getting this info via phone calls.

My dad didn’t want to pay for expensive tests and surgeries for a cat, so was considering putting him down. I was obviously not in favor of that idea, so we decided that we’d wait until I came home for Christmas and then discuss what to do about the Harry situation.

But we never got the chance. Around November, there was some sort of leak under the fridge or something (I don’t remember the details; again I wasn’t home at the time) and we had to get a lot of work done in there to fix it, which included having all the tiles completely removed and huge fans placed in the kitchen to blow away the ensuing dust. In order to keep Harry out of the way of the construction, we wound up regulating him to the screened-in back patio (and for further context: Harry had always been an indoor-only cat, and never showed much interest in going outside). Needless to say, on top of his health concerns, this construction and jarring change in environment was probably really stressful for him. One day, he found his way out of the patio...and never came back.

We...don’t really know for sure what happened to him after that. I like to say that he passed away rather than ran away, partly because he didn’t really have great survival skills and between that and his already-present health issues, well...I don’t think he would’ve survived long as a stray, and I prefer to imagine that his suffering ended as quickly and painlessly as possible. Even if he did manage to survive for a while then, he’s almost certainly gone now, given that he’d be nearly 15 by this point...but I digress.

All that said...idk, I guess I never really got any proper closure with Harry. And the more I learn about how to properly care for a cat, especially doing all the research I’ve been doing for Maisie...well, the worse I feel for him.

It’s not that we were bad owners, per se, and we certainly weren’t malicious in any way...but man, we could’ve done so much better. Harry was definitely overfed and undergroomed and we didn’t really know how to deal with his issues later in life...again, we weren’t malicious, but I think we were ignorant. I can’t really blame myself in the early years given that I was a literal child but by the time I reached high school and the like...idk I just feel like I could have and should have done so much better. I wonder how many issues could’ve been resolved if we’d been more attentive, more vigilant. Had been willing to put in more effort than just “meh fill up his food bowl twice a day and have Dad change the litter once in a while”.

And with all that considered, well...let’s just say I have doubts as to my prowess as a cat guardian. I want to make sure what went wrong with Harry goes right with Maisie and I just...idk. It’s just been a lot more emotional pressure than I expected it to be, even more so considering I haven’t yet quite formed the emotional bond with Maisie that I felt with Harry (not that I necessarily should have expected to at this point, given that we’ve only had Maisie for less than a week whereas we had Harry for nine years). But still.

And I mean, it’s not like taking care of Maisie has been difficult from an objective standpoint. It boils down to just feeding her (and making sure it’s the right amount of food), cleaning her litterbox, and playing with her, all of which are pretty simple and straightforward (well actually trying to figure out the right amount of food for her age and size has been a bit of a chore but I digress).

Again, it’s not the tasks themselves that are an issue...it’s, I guess, the emotional baggage, or something. Knowing that as my cat the responsibility rests squarely on my shoulders (as opposed to having Harry where my parents took up most of the tasks) probably contributes as well.

Probably doesn’t help that this was a rather sudden development as well. It was only a week ago that we even seriously entertained the possibility of getting a new cat, and now here we are. It all happened so fast, it...almost doesn’t seem real.

Then again, not much has been feeling “real” to me lately. But that’s a separate issue and one for my therapist. :P

I also, despite all objective evidence to the contrary, feel almost like I’m being a burden my bringing Maisie into the house. I know that I shouldn’t...it wasn’t even my idea. My brother made the suggestion, my mom endorsed it, my dad ultimately agreed. The whole family seems to like her, even my dad who is by far the least of a cat-person out of all of us has pet her and talked soft to her (I expected him to mostly ignore her).

But...well, ok, another (shorter) storytime. My parents, while they don’t dislike pets, have had enough of them to last their lives, especially after Harry’s troubled final years, which we kids (regrettably) did not do much to help with despite being older by then. About a year or two after we lost Harry, a family in our church was giving away a bunny for adoption after their two dogs didn’t take well to it. My sister, who has always loved bunnies, begged and begged and begged to adopt it, and after promising and promising to take care of it, my parents finally relented. Alas, the bunny did not wind up being as friendly and cuddly as my sister expected, and after a few weeks she lost interest in it, leaving the bulk of the care responsibilities to our youngest brother (who, to his credit, did pretty well...honestly he’s just pretty good with animals in general, of all types...dogs are his top preference but he’ll happily work with just about anything). Not long later, the poor bunny injured itself, and upon doing some research my parents found that bunnies rarely heal properly from that type of injury (I forget what it was exactly, again I was away in college at the time so don’t recall all the details) and that the most humane option was to put it down. We only had that bunny for a few months.

After that, my dad was (understandably) hesitant to bring another pet into the house, however hard we promise to care for it, cuz last time he relented he got burned and a poor bunny had to suffer. When he agreed to let us get a new cat, he included the (reasonable) stipulation that if it ever seems like we’re not taking proper care of kitty, he’s allowed to make the call to give her up back to the shelter.

Now, I have absolutely zero intentions of pulling a sister-and-the-bunny on Maisie, and I very much plan to take as good care of her as possible. But...you can see how there’s some emotional pressure there, yeah? ^^;

I feel like I have to be an absolutely flawless owner else I’ve let everyone down and proven that my promises to care for her were just talk. I’m afraid people will get mad at Maisie for doing Cat Things and I’ll take the fall and it’ll be assumed I’m not taking proper care of her because I can’t train her well enough. I’m afraid any inconvenience that naturally comes from owning and animal will by default get pinned on me, that I’ll be at fault because I’m the one who technically owns her, I brought her into the house, were it not for me we wouldn’t be dealing with Animal Inconvenience.

And yes I know that’s irrational...I know my brain is exaggerating and none of them really expect an 8 month old kitten to have flawless behavior or blame me for it and as long as I’m keeping her happy and healthy it’s fine...and yet...

I don't know.

Pressure, I guess. A big life change that happened pretty suddenly and it’s gonna take a little while for it to become the new normal...I’ve just gotta hang on until it does, I guess...

anyways...

R.I.P. Harry Pawter, 2005-2014

(last picture we ever got of him)

Maisie, I will do my best ;_;

(first picture I ever got of her...which, I am just now realizing, is similar to the last pic of Harry ;n;)

#vent #of sorts #just trying to sort out some thoughts mostly

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popculturebuffet · 4 years ago

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Star Vs: Lava Lake Beach or Happy Birthday, Marco Diaz

Tomtrospective is back baby! It’s been almost two months, which is better than last time but still not great. As you can probably tell if you check this space i’ve been busy with comissions (5 dollars an episode if you were curious and had another star vs episode you wanted me to check out or any animated series really), which now includes a sizeable project, regular coverage of ducktales every monday, loud house whenever it comes around becuase nick’s scheduling is a nightmare, and because I apparently didn’t have enough going on The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck. Part 2 coming before the end of the month hopefully. So this project, which sadly dosen’t get a lot of eyeballs on it, kinda just slid on back. Thankfully though I have a second before I get back to my rather sizeable and mostly self inflicted to do list, so with that in mind, let’s take a trip to the beach in the dead of winter. This is Lava Lake Beach.

PREVIOUSLY ON STAR VS:

Yeah I skipped over Lint Catcher.. which is ironic given I just decided to cover the meteora and eclipsa centric episodes post monster bash.. but I have good reason for that. And it’s not just “This is my blog and unless i’m getting paid for it I can do what I want”. That’s a valid reason but it’s not THE reason. No it’s because Tom has a sizeable roll in the finale episodes for season 3, and thus the climax to Season 3′s arc overall, and honestly Divide and Conquer are just TOO good to simply skip over Star’s parts of them. I choose to switch to covering full episodes for this retrospective which means i’m doing it right. It means more work for me, but frankly this stuff’s too good to not to cover properly. So i’ll be mixing the meteora arc in with tom, like a finely blended cocktail, after this review and the next one.. which aired after monster party but takes place before so i’m doing it in time for christmas.

And I WILL be covering the two episodes I skipped over eventually, I just feel the first goes into another possible arc down the line, and the other is just really terrible. Not the worst episode of the series, that would be Marco Jr, but a close second or third for sure. But I will have to summarize them to get to this point so: When last we left off Tom and Star were getting close again, but you might of noticed someone was conspciously absent. Marco went back to earth after his two weeks on Mewni, and as to what he was up to we found out LITERALLY the episode after “Demonicism”: Sophmore Slump. Marco basically spent the rest of his summer not shutting up about Mewni like an obnoxious jackass. Yeah Sophmore Slumb begins the character’s downward spiral and basically coming off like two diffrent characters: He’ll either be.. exactly what he was in the first two seasons, an awkard but well meaning voice of reason or a needy jackass pining after someone elses girlfriend and not caring about anyone else but himself and star. There.. there isn’t an inbetween. So yeah it’s just 11 minutes of Marco being insufferable, and only snapping out of it in realizing he’s neglected his girlfriend Jackie. We do get a GENUINELy great scene when she breaks up with him, realizing that while Marco’s willing to try for her.. his heart’s just not in it and his head’s.. with someone else. He’s not even malicious about it: While he wore his cape, he had a cape, under his clothes he genuinely tried to make things work and go out with her. Conciously he genuinely loves her, subconciously he has feeling sfor someone else and it’s showring. While this isn’t hte best episode it’s not a TERRIBLE one on the grounds that this one end sequence makes it work. Marco then decides to go to mewni and become a knight, and everyone sees him off in a good moment. It’s an annoying episode, but not a bad one the more I think about it. Lint Catcher is. Basically everyone’s a jackass but Tom and Eclipsa, which really sums up the last few seasons nicely. Not basically Marco dind’t you know, call star to vet any of this, and just expects to be welcomed back. Star, rather than you know admit her feelings for marco while she’s now dating tom, more on that in a moment, tries to shove him off on whoever. And it turns out River wasn’t serious with his offer of knighthood that marco came to take him up on, despite sounding serious and just gave marco a meat blanket because again, everyone’s a jackass.. except maybe moon who tries to make it work. It’s just an aggrivating 11 minutes and unlike the above none of it’s intentoinal. But how does this relate to tom? and wait star’s dating tom? Well Tom shows up early on as Star is singing a burrito song, only for him to burst out of the bathroom and then warmly greet Marco before the guards show up. Star also later admits to Marco yup she and Tom are dating since last episode. Which i’m fine with: we don’t need to see everything and it was pretty obvious that’s where it was headed. At the time I was aggrivated because “another blockadef or starco reallY” but i’ve warmed up with time. So yeah I really didn’t need to bang my head into the door for 11 minutes and whatever hours it took to write this to tell you tom and marco have upgraded from kinda friends to best bros who want to make out with each other and Star and Tom are dating. I will probably cover both episodes eventually, but for now, I have enough to cover especially with my realizing I needded to cover the eclipsa and meteora stuff, without getting a head injury from stupdiity. As for Marco’s knight status, he can’t start there, and Star eventualy realized that awkard sexual tension or not, he’s her best friend and made him her squire. So Marco’s now on mewni, Tom and star are together.

Let’s get at er. We open with tom summoning the flames of the dammned.. FOR MARSHMELLLOWWWWSSS. Star, Tom, Marco and Kelly are at the titular Lava Lake Beach roasting marshmellows and getting ready for the annual soulrise. Star likes the beach because it’s so spooky with Marco rightly pointing out.. insn’t that the underworld’s thing? Tom just casually shrugs it off as “Yeah i’ts pretty metal”. Which is both accurate and is part of why we’re here. This is our first, and really only, good look at the underworld. With Blood Moon Ball we just saw a bubble of it and it was entirely controlled by tom, if helping explain his control issues as he probably spent his whole life getting everything and never realizing being a possesive creep isn’t ag ood thing and people aren’t things you can own, but well.. people with their own wants and wills. When everyone around you does what you want, including your sweet well meaning parents, why would you understand someone saying no? And his parents aren’t bad people, they clearly have boundries, they just spoiled him a bit much. We’re not in Doofus Drake terriotiry where Tom’s a terrifying sociopath, he just had some very bad behaviors and when called on them by Marco, genuinely changed for the better and has been working on that since. But this episode gives us a good reason of why the other toxic part of tom, his rage, was never reigned in. Here.. it’s just normal. One scene illustrates this well: A couple casually if rudely challenges marco to a fight when he just wants to find kelly, more on that in a minute. But when he walks away, they just say “he seemed nice. And not EVERYONE is like that.. but most of the demons seen this ep are agressive, competitive and combtiive but not without reason.

We get a great example of this after Smores, where Marco’s fell off, tom and star are cute, and kelly licked all of hers. And after Marco realizes Tom’s outfit is just one of his hoodies but customized.. which for tom means ripping off the sleeves because that’s how he rolls and offering to do the same for marco. Also Star is in an adorable sailor outfit. what i’m saying is I like their outfits this episode and Marco has a lot of copies of that hoodie so in terms of Star’s invasions of his privacy, this is low on the list.

Back on point, a couple challenges the group over their spot and mocks star for not having a third eye.... but the resolution is beach volleball, witht he scoring demon from “Mr Candle Cares’ making an apperance. This shows Underworld culture: their volatile, they can get overly agressive.. but their polite outside of it. It’s why Tom’s anger wasn’t really adressed: Here everyone’ds polite the rest of the time, why does it matter? But it idd because even by these standards his anger was a problem and one he’s .. genuinely dealing with. While he gets devensive of his girlfriend, notice how he jsut gets regular angry and not.. murdery angry. We see his anger wasn’t normal even by underworld standards.. but he’s genuinely trying and has changed almost complelely from the last time we visted this realm.

This is also.. about what we get for tom this episode. Yeah while this is part of the tomtrospective for the above, and for other reasons that we’ll get to, this is a Marco episode. And a Kelly episode, so Kelly, now the food to fill the void inside has run out, I can relate, is suddenly depressed and just.. walks off mid game. And given Star and Tom aren’t the most empathetic people, they really fail to notice with Tom only noticing how it effects him. Tom has grown.. but as we’ll see after “stump Day” with his next two episodes after that, he still has room to grow. But it is nice we get signs of that episodes before it happens. Excellent work.

So yeah I guess for those who forgot, and if so how dare, or those who never got this far int he series who Kelly is. Kelly was introduced in season 2 as a friend of star and ponyheads who, at the end of her episode, after not talking was revealed to not be a giant bush, but a bispeceled teenager who just has a lot of hammerspace when her hair is down, as her hair is massive and whose species has a symbiotic relation ship with their significant others, as her boyfriend tad was in her hair merged with her the whole time. They breifly showed up again in another episode but otherwise haven’t been all that fleshed out till this episode.

And what brings it about.. is their breakup. And they have before only to get back together but this time it’s for real, as Marco finds out when comforting her. He genuinely offers her to talk, but we’re interuppted by her good pal JORBY!. I freaking love Jorby and every second of his screentime here is magic. Sadly he’s only used like.. twice after this. He’s a giant talking wolf guy from Kelly’s dimension, only revealed by the finale, who thinks Marco is her new fighting partner and claims to have killed their mutual aquantince greg. Kelly just responds with an amazingly annoyed and sarcastic “You didn’t kill greg” which he didn’t, and when Marco tries to explain she’s falling apart, Jorby responds with “WE ALL ARE ALL THE TIME, EXESNTIAL WARCRY!”... the amount of great minor characters this series wasted I swear.

But Kelly can’t deal with this and runs off and Jorby.. genuinely apologizes. He didn’t realize his friend was that banged up emotionally, and only dosen’t help because his goose girlfriend needs him. Marco is fine with this though and goes to offer his help after a breif search and two Skelly’s who fall in love over having the same name. Awww.

Kelly and Marco finally talk and Kelly sobs into his arms in a genuinely moving bit, admitting after being with Tad so long she dosen’t know who she is anymore. It’s REALLY great stuff, and really helps us feel for a character we honestly barely knew: Sure we barely saw their relationship.. but it was good... and when a relationship ends that wound dosen’t close easily> Trust me.. I know.

Though the other issue is that Tad.. hasn’t moved out of her head. Literally, he’s still in there and won’t take a hint it’s really really over and he needs to move on. So Marco, being a gentleman.. at least for this episode, agrees to help. IT’s why I like marco when he’s acutally written well: he can be awkward and sometimes a bit too full of himself when it comes to knowing stuff, but he’s a good kid who just wants to help people and I genuinely missed that version most of this season. So marco climbs in and finds Tad munching on vega pizza and refusing to leave, clearly subscribing to the duck method of swallowing your sadness.

Marco tells him he needs to leave, and while Tad is in denial.. Marco gets it to sink in.. that putting himself around someone unavaliable is just going to keep hurting him agains and again and not help him move on. Tad.. .ends up agreeing.. and it’s then the episode has it’s best scene.... Tad says “marco is the expert on that”. Marco of course denies this.. until Tad eventually makes him see the truth: he’s hanging around star the same way tad’s clung to kelly and will sadly continue too as while he agrees to move out.. it takes a bit for it to stick as we’ll see next time. Tad gets him to think about it: He has dimensional sciessors. Anywhere in time and space.. and where doe she want to start? With his unavaliable crush, following her to what he thought would be a couples event with her boyfriend. I mean he didn’t KNOW Tad and Kelly were broken up, so far all he knew he was the fifth wheel. No one would willingly do that for no reason. He’s so obessed with her, he wants to be around her even though it’s never going to happen.. i’ve been there WAY too many times to call and had to eventually learn to let got for their sake and mine. You can still be around them, you just have to let go of romance for everyone’s sake and move on. And Marco hasn’t because he didn’t even realize it. It’s why I tolerate “Sophmore Slump” now.. because with this episode it goes from bad writing to his subconcious scremaing at him to go be with star, and him not listening because conciously he still wants his current girlfriend.. and really he loves both, he just didn’t deal with that or move past either, so he lost both.

Marco.. has a panic attack over it justifably and breaks down gradually, seeing all the happy couples and finally star and tom, sinking in that .. Tad was right. He’s in love with Star.. and it hurts. It hurts a LOTTTTTT. And he has NO idea how to deal with it. And as we’ll see how he tries to.. is pretty damn bad. But that’s for other episodes. Let’s get to the climax of this one.

Kelly finds Marco, like her earlier depressed and lost, and upon realizing this, and thanking him as Tad agreed to finally move out, says “kelly’s driving” and drags him. It’s in these last moments we get to see more of kelly’s personality: we’ve seen her be ssarcastic but now we get to see her be a bit off kilter and adorable, which is her standard mode and what makes me like the character so much and wish she got treated better. But we’ll get to that later in the retrospective as it happens to perfectly zig zag into Tom’s life. Point is we see more of her and find out why she came to see the Soulrise as she and Marco prepare to watch: she and tad used to see it every year.. and even if their broken up.. she dosen’t want that taken away from her. Even if their relationsihp is over.. pieces of it can still be hers to treasure and keep from now on. This can still be hers... and in this case Marcos as marco puts his jacket over her, and Kelly cuddles him. Awwww. If you were wondering, yup I do ship Markelly and Yup how it ends is really bad and we’ll get to it and there will be blood. But for now their just two lonely souls sharing a moment, with Kelly rebuffing getting Tom and Star “They don’t need this’ which is accurate and they have each other and some alone time. Their fine. Plus they you know, didn’t notice either of them are missing so ...

Thank you Jake. Rest in Peace my good friend who shares a name. So we get a nice romantic moment as they watch a bunch of eldtirch skeletial angels with wings rise from the depths of the black and white, and it’s also marco’s birthday! “Happy Birthday Marco Diaz”. And with that we’re out.

Final Thoughts: This is one of my faviorite Star Vs episodes, even with later bullshit, and for good reason. It frames Marco’s previous actions in a better light, has some REALLy stellar acting from Adam McArthur, and is in general just a really soulful ep that really touches on some good stuff and fleshes out Kelly from a background character to a fan faviorite and sets up a new romance for Marco that I genuinely love. IT’s one of the series best moments even if later episodes would tarnish it slightly..but on it’s own.. it’s fantstic. Next time on tom:It’s the...

Christmas Special! Until then there’s always another rainbow and happy thanksgiving!

#star vs the forces of evil #star vs #tomstar #markelly #marco diaz #tom lucitor #kelly #star butterfly #lava lake beach

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girlpi · 4 years ago

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anonymous asked: you mentioned veronica found logan’s progress in therapy “threatening”, can you explain that? i haven’t heard it put that way before.

Hi anon! I can certainly try to explain this without it sounding like a jumble mess.

Veronica, throughout her entire young-adult and adult life is a problem solver - she’s literally a P.I, it’s her job to solve puzzles and ‘crack the case’. This is something that gives her purpose, a piece of her identity that she is extremely comfortable with and an aspect she was magnetized back to when she laid it to rest in search for something more ‘mature’ (i.e. becoming a lawyer and being pulled back to Neptune for the thrill of the hunt). Having something to do, a constant purpose is something that she needs to feel self worth, it’s something she justifies as the “reason” she’s here.

Logan was a problem - season one all the way through season three, he was a problem. He was full of malicious, broken tendencies that stemmed from trauma he had experienced throughout his life. There was ill-intent behind his actions, particularly in season one (an illegal homeless vet fight club, for example), he liked to set fires to watch small parts of the world burn because he was familiar with those flames. Yes - it’s worth recognizing that there were good intentions behind actions as well, but Logan always had something to fix, and Veronica was often the bandaid he’d use to heal old and new wounds. She was his confidant, the light at the end of the tunnel, whatever ‘better half/you complete me’ cliche you want to use, they fit.

When Logan begins to see Jane shortly after season three, he begins to find a fix within himself, and ultimately moves towards progress and development, joining the navy, finding a life’s purpose, all that glam. Real caterpillar to butterfly glow up. And he does this without Veronica - in fact, he does this with the help of someone else. While it’s something she always wanted him to find, she wanted to be the one to help him find it - to fix the problem, and now suddenly, he didn’t need her. This becomes more apparent as they build a life together and she realizes just how big of an impact that therapy has had - he truly is a completely new Logan, and there’s no remnant of the boy she fell in love with, the one that relied on her. His progress threatens, what she deems to be, her purpose and place in his life.

This threat is also a reminder of her own stagnant development - she purposely avoids any type of therapy - and yes she has tried, six weeks post Lilly’s death, and prefers to keep busy with school and then work instead. She’s known for bottling up emotion and dealing with it on her own because she is the only person who can help herself and burdening anyone else means trusting them to assist rather than hinder, which is something she does not do. Veronica, again, finds purpose in being the missing piece of everyone else’s puzzle, but doesn’t know how to be her own despite being adamant she does. Now, when his puzzle is complete, she’s suddenly useless (so she thinks) and again has to wonder if he, among plenty of others, will become yet another person who leaves.

I hope this makes a lick of sense and clarifies the previous statement. I’ll stop here before I ramble on for eight pages.

#a lot of this comes directly from hc and writing with anthrcpcmcrphic #so #take that as you will #tw: abuse #* veronica mars. » development

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saintambrose · 4 years ago

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haha it’s US politics hours

listen, this tumblr has always been a fandom place since its inception and I’ve not really designated it as a space for political discussion because 1) I have several other avenues for that arena of discussion and 2) escapism was the theme here; but I’ve finally watched The Comey Rule and I have some THOUGHTS

and I’m not really sure how active anyone is here anymore anyway, because I’ve not really been around as regularly as I was before the nsfw-ban shitstorm, so. Diving right in.

Probably my favorite thing was how it painted the American right wing as this faux-centrist bastion of impartiality at first, the whole circus with HiLLaRy’S EmAiLs being about how they legitimately believed they could play the angle that the emails were a threat to national security all while they knew damn well it was a huge big nothingburger (with a side of hatred of women) while doing that thing that right wingers have done since the Reagan administration where they malign anything left of fascism as communism (including basic human rights) and then, predictably, you have all these very furrowed-browed old white men sitting around a conference table being VERY CONCERNED that precisely the thing they wanted to happen came true and they are completely unprepared to do damage control on the mess they engineered because WHITE MEN ARE INCAPABLE OF UNDERSTANDING THE CONCEPT OF CONSEQUENCES OF THEIR OWN ACTIONS. 🤣😂🤣😂

In all seriousness. I wasn’t crazy about Hillary either. I don’t like dynasties of any kind, royal or political. I don’t like establishment dems who are really just center-right in the real world while masquerading as left in backwards-ass bizarro-world USA. But I’m an old motherfucker now, I’m well into my 30s, I’m boring and watch CSPAN for leisure and shit. I read the reports coming out of the DOJ. One of my degrees is in political science, though admittedly, that’s the least thing that matters, in the scope of everything else these days. But it’s safe to say Hillary was unfairly maligned while republicans committing atrocities exponentially worse have been treated with kid gloves for decades. A very distinct double standard has been applied here for....longer than I’ve been alive, that even the most educated people on the left have refused to acknowledge for far too long. I watched that entire BeNgHaZi hearing (which is easily accessible on youtube, so there’s literally no excuse not to know the facts on this), and everyone knew -- everyone knew it was a bullshit smear campaign.

So, this post isn’t so much a review of the miniseries more than it’s an indictment of the corruption of American politics. The most damning aspect being that, on principle, US politics has always had a problem with embracing progressive policy, and basic civil rights in general. That’s not news; people have known this for some time. But the thing that this miniseries really illustrated in a very cartoonish, yet succinct, way is that there are experienced professionals who hold the highest, most powerful seats of authority in this country who won’t bat an eye at dedicating their entire careers to denigrating common decency, basic human rights, and even constitutional law, while being absolutely incapable of conceiving the long-term consequences of these actions, who will then turn around and concern troll over the ashes of the empire they enthusiastically helped to burn down. It’s nauseating. It’s infuriating. It shows a pathological disregard for personal responsibility.

Everyone was so preoccupied with their massive turgid erection for hating the Clintons (and women) that no one saw they were enthusiastically living in a henhouse built by fucking foxes. No one saw the genuine threat.

And, by extension, no one had the balls to acknowledge that age-old instinct of white men willing to engage in a scorched earth campaign simply to satisfy their worst impulses and entitlement complexes.

Can you fit “Who cares if we’re screwing over several generations with corrupt court-packing and a flagrant disregard for checks-and-balances predicated entirely on the honor system; we just don’t feel like doing domestic labor or respecting women and minorities so we’ll continue expediting reprehensible policies that exploit the most vulnerable people in this country because we can’t compete in an authentic meritocracy" onto a campaign slogan banner?

I sounded the alarms on this trend 20 years ago, meanwhile. My parents and I had just gotten US citizenship, luckily months before 9/11 and the patriot act; and as an outsider looking in, as someone who had risked their life escaping a dangerous regime at an incredibly young age, I saw the warning signs in the republican party even back then. Naturally, I was denigrated as an alarmist and a butthurt liberal.

You know, I’ll acknowledge that as a white person, I’m not the average American’s image of what an “immigrant” looks like. My experiences here over the past couple of decades have thrown into sharp relief how “immigrant” is just a dogwhistle for racist bullshit, because people who concern troll about us don’t seem to have many problems with us white ones. But I came out of a communist country. I’m straight outta the eastern bloc. And I don’t think there are any words in any spoken language that can do justice to how insulting it is when americans try to americasplain communism to me. Bitch. Y’all don’t fucking know. You just don’t.

The point is, even back then, I could see the slippery slope republicans were tumbling down, and I can't say I derive any pleasure from being vindicated in such an extreme fashion. Like. I told y’all motherfuckers. TWO DECADES AGO.

People who aren’t familiar with US politics, and even long-term US citizens who for some reason feel like it’s a waste to pay attention to your own shit, seem to spend a lot of time trying to unpack what precisely went wrong. My observations came up with 1) the manipulative aspect of US history in public schools glossing over, and even omitting, the most gruesome aspects of the revolutionary war, the holocaust, and the cold war (and oftentimes, the cold war is NEVER EVEN COVERED, which is especially insulting to me, for obvious reasons); 2) the manipulative aspect of US history in public schools teaching kids that the Declaration of independence and the Constitution are unassailable doctrines of freedom and liberty, and, as such, after independence was won, no further activism to maintain democracy was needed so we can all just smoke a bowl and be complacent because all those authoritarian third world regimes we constantly ridicule and criticize can NeVeR HaPPeN hErE 😒; and 3) how limpdick both-sidesism replaced civil, comprehensive political discussion because the right spent so long abusing, denigrating, and bullying the left that it was just easier to play it safe and take the milquetoast ~centrist~ stance, which always, always, always capitulates to the lowest common denominator, which is always the oppressor.

And generally just this age-old trend of holding the victims of systematic oppression to a higher moral and behavioral standard than the perpetrators of systematic oppression.

Guys, I’m tired. I’m so tired.

I’ve gotten a few questions over the years about why my writing is so angsty, why it always seems to follow the same themes; war crimes, PTSD, gore, torture.

I already escaped one authoritarian regime. The USA promised us one thing, and then once we got here, it started emulating the very tyrants we worked so hard to get away from. A lot of people have no idea what that feels like. How much of a betrayal that is. Especially considering all the financial and legal landmines one has to navigate just to do it, and then we’re punished for that, too.

I write about PTSD because I fucking have it. I write about war crimes because I’ve experienced them firsthand - just as a victim and not the perpetrator. I so often write about soldiers committing them because I want to roleplay what it’s like to not be a victim for once.

tbh writing a fucking Hamilton fanfiction is one of the most cathartic things I’ve ever done, but the extensive research I’ve had to do to be able to write this thing has been low-key traumatic. There’s a lot of historical material I’ve consumed that should have been covered at the most basic level of compulsory education, but conspicuously isn’t. And I know that’s a feature, not a bug. It’s by design.

Democracy - and independence, freedom, liberty, justice, civil rights in general - isn’t just some final xbox achievement that you unlock and then just shelve the game and forget about it for the rest of your life. You have to keep grinding to maintain it, because there will always be selfish, malicious people out there who will dedicate their entire lives playing a long con to ensure you don’t get the same opportunities as them. For the love of god, stop playing the both-sidesism game. From someone coming out of the eastern bloc, I can tell you with great confidence that that was part of the propaganda campaign you were fed to keep you from engaging so they could install a dictatorship under your nose. Do some self-guided historical research, guys. It can be very illuminating.

Anyway. I’ve gone on long enough here, but damn, don’t screw this up again, guys. Today is the first day of early voting in Texas, and I’m going to do my duty. When I first came to this country, after experiencing the rigorous vetting process and labyrinthine legal requirements of US citizenship, I was led to believe that in exchange for that privilege, I was personally responsible for my own civic self-education. It’s so much more important than you've been led to believe.

#uspol #long post #also uhhhh brendan gleeson really needs to win an award #i hope he's ok mentally after playing that role yikes yikes yikes #also 'why do your characters so often have alcohol abuse problems' uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

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minicoopdetat · 5 years ago

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Hey is that [GREGG SULKIN]? No, that’s just [AUGUST COOPER]. They’re [TWENTY-THREE], and have spent [THREE MONTHS] in Dayton. I hear that they’re kind of [OPTIMISTIC], but also [OBNOXIOUS]. Did you hear their vices are [PARTYING & SEXTING]? Can’t wait to see [HE/HIM] at the next party!

full name: august levi cooper

nickname: cooper. mini coop. coop de tat

age: twenty-three

date of birth: april 2

place of birth: dayton, ca

zodiac: aries

gender: cis-male

nationality: american

sexual orientation: heterosexual

romantic orientation: heteromantic

relationship status: single *

PHYSICAL ATTRIBUTES.

height: 5’10

weight: 166 lbs

hair color: brunette

eye color: hazel

need glasses/contacts? yes

tattoos: he has seven ‘dragon balls’ in various places ( 1:inner wrist, 2: inner wrist, 3: shoulder blade, 4: hip , 5: behind his ear, 6: back of neck 7:ass); nightwing symbol (ankle); squirtle squad shades ( coming soon )

distinguishing marks: scar on his right leg from crashing his moped

BACKGROUND INFORMATION.

hometown: salinas, ca

current residence: dayton, ca

past residences: salinas, ca

living arrangement: family home; phaedra’s old place

spoken languages: english, japanese, vulgar words in various languages

financial status: loaded by proxy

education level: high school, college ( BA biological science )

occupation: vet tech

FAMILIAL INFORMATION.

father: maxwell cooper

mother: elizabeth cooper

siblings: maxwell cooper jr (36), summer cooper (34; heartborn), dawn cooper (32), buzz cooper (30; heartborn), willow cooper (28), skye cooper (26; heartborn)

children: none

pets? Satoshi; “foster” dog

other: phaedra cooper; grandmother

PERSONALITY.

positive traits: loyal. optimistic. passionate. outgoing. confident

negative traits: loud. tactless. gullible. dramatic. reckless

likes: nightwing, late nights. martial arts. dbz. music. animals ( all kinds ). parties. soccer. hockey. movies. sex. pokemon. learning new things. tarot. philosophy. sunny days. tiger king ( joe exotic ). social media. tik tok. family gatherings. sexting.

dislikes: waiting. twitter. strategy games. opera. reading. bullies. people who go out of their way to make someone else feel stupid. injustice ( the video game...and the other thing he guesses ). seeing other people treated like shit. sad sacks. clutter. messy landscaping. carol fucking baskin. animal abuse.

quirks: knows karate and aikido. Has a 3rd degree black belt and used to teach in college. owns and drives a moped. loves to record himself ( mtv cribs style ). is really great with kids. surprisingly organized, his place is pretty spotless. doesnt wear shoes unless absolutely necessary. has a skin care regiment.

moral alignment: neutral good

THE RUN DOWN.

CHILDHOOD;

Cooper was born August Levi Cooper to Elizabeth and Maxwell Cooper on April 2nd twenty-three years ago in Salinas, CA.

His siblings like to refer to him as the family’s April fools surprise.

One reason being is he was very much an accident. The plan was always 3 biological and 3 adopted children. A large loving family blended with those born from blood and those from the heart.

While Cooper was unexpected, he never felt it growing up. A family consisting of nine different personalities is bound to have disputes and there have been a lot over the years, but they’ve always loved each other deeply. Family was important, a top priority always, and Coop grew up surrounded by love.

As a kid, he was always going a mile a minute. Always jabbering on, always into something. His mother, Elizabeth, never seemed to mind. If anything she embraced it using a somewhat free range approach to raising her children. She let them do as they pleased as long as they practiced reflection and responsibility after. The consequences were theirs whatever decisions were made.

So if he wanted to take apart the toaster, fine. He had to put it back together. If not? He would be working to pay for a new one. Want to stay up all night watching anime? Fine. If he fell asleep and failed his quiz the next day? The tv was gone.

It was a process for Cooper, who multiple teachers recommended that he take some form of medication for his outbursts and inability to follow directions without being distracted or derailing the entire class. His mother refused, but she did begin to focus on helping him regulate and make better choices.

Did it work? Eh. But he managed to scrape by.

But where he lacked impulse control, Cooper made up in kindness. He always the first to volunteer to help, whether it involved the teacher or another student. He’d give away his lunch money to someone he thought needed it or sit with the kids that seemed alone, talking their heads off about the latest thing he saw on late night tv.

He was the kind of kid you dreaded and loved all at once and if you ask him, he’ll tell you his childhood was a wonderful thing.

Some highlights include, starting Karate at age 5. Martial arts was one, if not the only way, to really get Cooper to slow down and focus. It was and still is a passion for him. He earned his black belt by age 9, his second degree by 11, and his 3rd by 14, making him one of the youngest in the county to have a 3rd degree blackbelt.

Began learning Japanese at age seven. It started as self teaching, but eventually his parents brought in a tutor.

ADOLESCENCE;

As he hit his preteen years, Cooper began to play sports. Soccer was his poison of choice and he was good...but some of the other kids found him to be odd. He was the youngest of seven, so there were always jokes made about the rag tag crew or about how he spent more time talking about japanese cartoons, comics and superheroes than he did the sport or the usual topics. Small, he was picked at, but Cooper? He never really noticed.

He was the butt end of jokes, but always the first to laugh. He was confident, even then, that the things his ‘friends’ did were often in good fun and never to take advantage of him or be malicious. Even when his trips to the principal's office became more frequent and his detentions began to pile up, he insisted things were fine. He was loyal and they just had different ways of showing their friendship to him.

He was sixteen when a new kid moved to town and his friends turned their attention to him. Coop thought they were looking to welcome him into the fold, he was a bit quiet, always reading, kinda awkward, but the more time they spent with him, the more Cooper started to notice the shit way they were treating him. The jokes they had used on Cooper, they were funny to him, but this kid? Not so much. It didn’t take long before he began to see their relationship with this kid and their relationship with him? They weren’t harmless and in one very explosive day, Cooper not only stood up for the kid, but may have broken his best friend’s jaw.

He was ousted from the soccer team. Fine. He needed new friends. Fine. He had one and that was fine with him. He took it all in stride. Stayed confident and though he had a nasty mark on his record, his parents were proud he finally stood up for himself and someone else. In the end, his dad able to make it go away, but still.

That summer, on a mission to be his own man and less of a sheep, he began frequenting the local game shop. He’d play in the pokemon league, try out various boardgames and chill. It became a home away from home and where he met Callum ‘Goodie’ Goodrich, the closest person to a little brother he’s ever had.

They started as rivals, which some might consider odd considering the age difference, but Coop respected the kid and his skill. It was never an angry or aggressive thing. Goodie had a sense of humor and Coop was too easy going and before long they were exchanging tips and just hanging out for the sake of hanging out.

When things began to get rough for Goodie, Cooper didn’t ask. It wasn’t his business, but he began to notice a change...so he began inviting Goodie home for dinners, hang out sessions, etc. His family didn’t mind, if anything they enjoyed having him around and soon Goodie became an honorary Cooper.

In the three years that followed, Cooper juggled a lot of different things. He began helping at his dojo as well as the local animal shelter and his partying streak started up.

At eighteen, he was granted access to the ‘family ranch’, his parents attempting to let their children get whatever they needed out of their system. Rather than sneak around and drink or smoke or fuck, the ranch was available. It was a risk, especially for his father, a judge, but as loving and great as his family was? Their moral code wasn’t quite in line with the rest of society. His father had no qualms as long as they had some common sense. Were there hiccups? Yes. But they managed. There were six before him, so by the time Cooper came around, they knew what guidelines to lay down.

It was wild year, definitely one of the most fun he’d ever had. His grades though? They suffered. School wasn’t exactly top priority and to him, that was fine. Why did a bunch of numbers have to dictate his life?

It wasn’t until he decided he wanted to help animals for a living did he realize good grades were probably a good thing. But by then it was too late to get in anywhere prestigious. Which was fine. He made his bed and he was quick to figure something else out.

He decided on taking a gap year so he doubled down on volunteering and started learning aikido while continuing his partying and hanging with Goodie.

Or at least until he disappeared. One day he just...stopped coming in. Cooper figured he was sick or just rough off, but when he couldn’t get in touch with him, he genuinely began to worry. He even went as far to check the news...and saw the headline. It hit him hard and his dad, despite being in the court system, had no info. That whole summer, he had to just, keep checking out the shop and hope he’d run into him. But as the days went on, it became clear his friend was gone… hopefully to some situation that was much better.

Cooper finished up the summer and went off to school the next August.

TWENTIES;

Not that he went far. He spent four years at a college between his home town and Dayton, CA. Phaedra, his grandmother, and his grandfather helped him pay for his schooling so he began visiting Dayton during the summer. He spent most of it in Salinas but he’d spend a few weeks in Dayton.

His time in Dayton was mostly spent helping Phaedra or working at the local shelter. But by the time he hit 21, partying was added to that roster.

One bachelor’s degree and a certificate later and here he is. Vet school is something he’s thought about but his grandfather passed away last year and Phaedra needed some assistance with the house.

So while she’s off jet setting to ease the pain, Cooper’s taking responsibility for the upkeep of her Dayton home. He has no clue about home repair, but he’s more than happy to squat, make sure she’s not robbed and start work in a town that’s always kept him hype.

#::|| bio ||::#::|| headcanon ||::#reallife.intro

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allhailkingp-a · 6 years ago

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Fun and Games | Porky & Bonely

starter for @pawnshopsouls !

Porky, having never been sensitive PSI or magicks of any kind, has always relished in employing and exploiting those who are. It’s rare, but it’s useful, and so he’s always searching for the best peoples blessed with that gift to utilize to reach his goals. The Commander isn’t enough, nor is his PSI really powerful. Serviceable, really, but there’s much more that could be done. Porky knows how strong these kinds of people can get, just based on his experience with Ness and his friends in the past.

As it stands, most of the people that Porky has since pulled to serve with him on the Nowhere Islands have been markedly un-talented when it came to this. It’s not like he could really tell what kind of skills most of his early inter-dimensional recruits had. He had to trust they could help him before he had people develop technology that made the vetting process much more comprehensive than before (thank God for Dr. Andonuts). It’s improving all the time, and now, Dr. Andonuts had really topped his previous work.

It wasn’t perfect, but they could generally sense who had magic and where. Porky didn’t need very many of these people, but just enough to make his colonizing work a whole lot easier. And so, Porky picked only those who seemed to have a great amount of magic, something very usable but still very controllable. That last thing was the particular caveat that all this work had. If they were too strong, it could ruin everything.

But for now, it seemed like Porky had picked the right person with the right strengths for the job. They’ve pulled enough info from his universe to know that this man they’ve selected to test out should be perfectly exploitable for Porky’s purposes. So, today, Porky crawled down to one of the lower floors of Empire Pork to the brainwashing and testing area in anticipation of meeting this new soon to be Pigmask.

If he proves himself to be good enough, then the man has a very promising future in the army! For... however long the army continues to exist-- not long, really, but no one needed to know that. Porky places himself and his mecha on one side of this big, empty test chamber, and with that modified Saturn-Andonuts time travel tech, their test subject finally makes his appearance. Porky can’t hold back the grin of utter malicious joy when he sees him.

“Welcome, welcome,” Porky purrs. “Thank you for coming today. I’d first like to congratulate you for being selected to join my program, and hope that you will show yourself to be someone very worth keeping around and taking good care of. Today is the first day of a wonderful career and life for you. First things first, though. I’m aware that you’re a magic user, is that correct...? Now, I’d like to see you test it out for me, please. Oh-- and state your name for the record, if you would.”

The room is still empty, except from Porky and the man. He’s almost daring him to try something with Porky’s mech, which remains unmoving with Porky resting comfortably inside.

#pawnshopsouls #Porky's Diary [FUN AND GAMES]#Loyal Subject [BONELY]#timeline; M3 #( here we go! I hope this works! let me know if you need anything changed )

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qqueenofhades · 6 years ago

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Medieval Magic Week: Witchcraft in Early Medieval Europe

Apologies for not getting to this last week, but I will try to be at least semi-reliable about posting these. If you missed it: I’m teaching a class on magic and the supernatural in the Middle Ages this semester, and since the Tumblr people also wanted to be learned, I am here attempting to learn them by giving a sort of virtual seminar.

Last week was the introduction, where we covered overall concepts like the difference between magic, religion, and science (is there one?), who did magic benefit (depends on who you ask), was magic a good or a bad thing in the medieval world (once again, It’s All Relative) and who was practicing it. We also brought in ideas like the gendering of supernatural power (is magic a feminine or a masculine practice, and does this play into larger gendered concepts in society?) and did some basic myth-busting about the medieval era. No, not everybody was super religious and mind-controlled by the church. No, they were not all poor farmers. No, not every woman was Silent, Raped, and Repressed. Magic was a common and folkloric practice on some level, but it was also the concern of educated and literate ‘worldly’ observers. We can’t write magic off as the medieval era simply ‘not knowing any better,’ or having no more sophisticated epistemology than rudimentary superstition. These people navigated thousands of miles without any kind of modern technology, built amazing cathedrals requiring hugely complex mathematical and engineering skill, wrote and translated books, treatises, and texts, and engaged with many different fields of knowledge and areas of interest. They subjected their miracle stories to critical vetting and were concerned with proving the evidentiary truth of their claims. We cannot dismiss magic as them having no alternative explanation or way of thinking about the world, or being sheltered naïve rustics.

This week, we looked at some primary sources discussing ‘witchcraft’ beliefs in early medieval Europe, which for our purposes is about 500—eh we’ll say 1000 C.E. We also thought about some questions to pose to these texts. Where did belief in witchcraft – best known for early modern witch hunts – come from? How did it survive through centuries of cultural Christianisation? Why was it viewed as useful or as threatening? Scholars have tended to argue for a generic mystical ‘shamanism’ in pre-Christian Europe, which isn’t very helpful (basically, it means ‘we don’t have enough evidence, so fuck if we know!’). They have also assumed that these were ‘superstitions’ or ‘relics’ of pagan belief in an otherwise Christian culture, which is likewise not helpful. We don’t have time to get into the whole debate, but yes, you can imagine the kind of narratives and assumptions that Western historiography has produced around this.

At this point, Europe was slowly, but by no means monolithically, becoming Christian, which meant a vast remaking of traditional culture. There was never a point where beliefs and practices stopped point-blank being pagan and became Christian instead; they were always hybrid, and they were always subject to discussion and debate. Obviously, people don’t stop doing things they have done a particular way for centuries overnight. (Once again, this is where we remind people that the medieval church was not the Borg and had absolutely no power to automatically assimilate anyone.) Our first text, the ‘Corrector sive medicus,’ which is the nineteenth chapter of Burchard of Worms’ Decretum, demonstrates this. The Decretum is a collection of ecclesiastical law, dating from early eleventh-century Germany. This is well after Germany was officially ‘Christianised,’ and after the foundation of the Holy Roman Empire as an explicitly Christian polity (usually dated from Charlemagne’s coronation on 25 December 800; this was the major organising political unit for medieval Germany and the Carolingians were intensely obsessed with divine approval). And yet! Burchard is still extremely concerned with the prevalence of ‘magical’ or ‘pagan’ beliefs in his diocese, which means people were still doing them.

The Corrector is a handbook setting out the proper length of penances to do (by fasting on bread and water) for a variety of transgressions. It can seem ridiculously nitpicky and overbearing in its determination to prescribe lengthy penances for magical offenses, which are mixed in among punishments for real crimes: robbery, theft, arson, adultery, etc. This might seem to lend legitimacy to the ‘killjoy medieval church oppressing the people’ narrative, except the punishments for sexual sins are actually much lighter than in earlier Celtic law codes. If you ‘shame a woman’ with your thoughts, it’s five days of penance if you’re married, two if you aren’t, but if you consult an oracle or take part in element worship or use charms or incantations, it could be up to two years.

Overall, the Corrector gives us the impression that eleventh-century German society was a lot more worried about whether you were secretly cursing your neighbour with pagan sorcery, rather than who you’re bonking, even though sexual morality is obviously still a concern, and this reflected the effort of trying to explicitly and completely Christianise a society that remained deeply attached to its traditional beliefs and practices. (There’s also a section about women going out at night and running naked with ‘Diana, Goddess of the Pagans’, which sounds awesome sign me up.) Thus there is here, as there will certainly be later, a gendered element to magic. Women could be witches, enchantresses, sorceresses, or other possible threats, and have to be closely watched. Nonetheless, there’s no organised societal persecution of them. Formal witch hunts and witch trials are decidedly a post-Renaissance phenomenon (cue rant about how terrible the Renaissance was for women). So as much as we stereotype the medieval world as supposedly being intolerant and repressive of women, witch hunts weren’t yet a thing, and many educated women, such as Trota of Salerno, had professional careers in medicine.

The solution to this problem of magical misuse is not to stop or destroy magic, since everyone believes in it, but to change who is legitimately allowed to access it. Valerie Flint’s article, ‘The Early Medieval Medicus, the Saint – and the Enchanter’ discusses the renegotiation of this ability. Essentially, there were three categories of ‘healer’ figure in the early Middle Ages: 1) the saint, whose miraculous power was explicitly Christian; 2) the ‘medicus’ or doctor, who used herbal or medical treatment, and 3) the ‘enchanter’, who used pagan magical power. According to the ecclesiastical authors, the saint is obviously the best option, and believing in/appealing to this figure will give you cures beyond the medicus’ ability, as a reward for your faith. The medicus tries his best and has good intentions, but is limited in his effectiveness and serves in some way as the saint’s ‘fall guy’. Or: Anything the Doctor Can (Or Can’t) Do, The Saint Can Do Better. But the doctor has enough social authority and respected knowledge to make it a significant victory when the saint’s power supersedes him.

On the other hand, the ‘enchanter’ is basically all bad. He (or often, she) makes the same claim to supernatural power as the saint, but the power is misused at best and actively malicious and uncontrollably destructive at worst. You are likely to be far worse off after having consulted the enchanter than if you did nothing at all. Both the saint and the enchanter are purveyors of ‘magical’ power, but only the saint has any legitimate claim (again, according to our church authors, whose views are different from those of the people) to using it. The saint’s power comes from God and Jesus Christ, the privileged or ‘true’ source of supernatural ability, while the enchanter is drawing on destructive and incorrect pagan beliefs and making the situation worse. The medicus is a benign and well-intentioned, if not always effective, option for healing, but the enchanter is No Good Very Bad Terrible.

The fact that ecclesiastical authors have to go so hard against magic, however, is proof of the long-running popularity of its practitioners. The general public is apparently still too prone to consult an enchanter rather than turn to the church to solve their problems. The church doesn’t want to eradicate these practices entirely, but insists that people call upon God/Christ as the authority in doing them, rather than whatever local or folkloric belief has been the case until now. It’s not destroying magic, but repurposing and redefining it. What has previously been the unholy domain of the pagan is now proof of the ultimate authority of Christianity. If you’re doing it right, it’s no longer pagan sorcery, but religious miracles or devotion.

Overall: what role does witchcraft play in early medieval Europe? The answer, of course, is ‘it’s complicated.’ We’re talking about a dynamic, large-scale transformation and hybridising of culture and society, as Christian religion and society became more prevalent over long-rooted pagan or traditional beliefs. However, these beliefs arguably never fully vanished, and were remade, renamed, and allowed to stay, without any apparent sense of contradiction on the part of the people practicing them. Ecclesiastical authorities were extremely concerned to identify and remove these ‘pagan’ elements, of course, but the general public’s relationship with them was always more nuanced. When dealing with medieval texts about magic, we have a tendency to prioritise those that deal with a definably historical person, event, or place, whereas clearly mythological stories referring to supernatural creatures or encounters are viewed as ‘less important’ or as the realm of historical fiction or legend. This is a mistake, since these texts are still encoding and transmitting important cultural referents, depictions of the role of magic in society, and the way in which medieval people saw it as a helpful or hurtful force. We have to work with the sources we have, of course, but we also have to be especially aware of our critical assumptions and prejudices in doing so.

It should be noted that medieval authors were very concerned with proving the veracity of their miracle narratives; they did not expect their audiences to believe them just because they said so. This is displayed for example in the work of two famous early medieval historians, Gregory of Tours (c.538—594) and the Venerable Bede (672/3—735). Both Gregory’s History of the Franks and Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People contain a high proportion of miracle stories, and both of them are at pains to explain to the reader why they have found these narratives reliable: they knew the individual in question personally, or they heard the story from a sober man of good character, or several trusted witnesses attested to it, or so forth. Trying to recover the actual historicity of reported ‘miracle’ healings is close to impossible, and we should resist the cynical modern impulse to say that none of them happened and Gregory and Bede are just exaggerating for religious effect. We’re talking about some kind of experienced or believed-in phenomena, of whatever type, and obviously in a pre-modern society, your options for healthcare are fairly limited. It might be worth appealing to your local saint to do you a solid. So to just dismiss this experience from our modern perspective, with who knows how much evidence lost, in an entirely different cultural context, is not helpful either. There’s a lot of sneering ‘look at these unenlightened religious zealots’ under-and-overtones in popular conceptions of the medieval era, and smugly feeling ourselves intellectually superior to them isn’t going to get us very far.

Next week: Ideas about the afterlife, heaven, hell, the development of purgatory, the kind of creatures that lived in these realms, and their representation in art, culture, and literature.