#i am tired and salty

[marigoldendragon]

Whoever decided bevelled edges on a phone screen was a good idea should be shot in the face

[ma-re-zo]

Feliks wearing a crop top I saw in a store recently doodle :P (Tolys bought it for him)

Plus another sneak peak of that one high school lietpol drawing since I’m still not done with it lmao

[housecow]

i need snack recommendations!!! everything i have is too sweet and i don’t like a lot of salty things either but idk what else to get for snacks 🥲

any recs 🥺

[antiquepearlss]

I’m too tired to post an essay but my girl was just a victim of bad writing and a lack of critical thinking from the audience okay I love her.

[saltynsassy31]

Frye Fest - Final Countdown

<- Previous - Part 14 - Next ->

[14/20]

🎸🍟Team Guitar/Consommé (JP)🍟🎸

Splatfest 23-03-2024

[Master Post - coming soon]

[thatswhatsushesaid]

the timeless question

have i finally reached the point in my fandom journey where i am just too tired to rehash the same arguments about jgy’s morality and motivations for the millionth time with people who won’t grant him a tenth of the grace and understanding that they extend to wwx, or do i just need to have my meds adjusted. am i done with fandom discourse, or am i just burnt out by /gestures @ The Horrors transpiring in the rest of the world

benafflecksmoking.jpeg

[strangestcase]

Actually I would like to shine a spotlight on the role of women in Jekyll and Hyde because in most versions of the story they’re there to be victims, defined by their suffering. Their personality is subsumed by their role: hapless sacrificial lamb, damsel in distress, battered whore, lover that gets a nasty taste of Jekyll’s true nature. Out of all of Hyde’s victims in the original book, the two who die and are named are men (Carew and Lanyon); the trampled little girl and the slapped match seller are but blips on the radar.

Fast forward to almost any 20th century movie adaptation of Jekyll and Hyde and the female characters added to the story so that it isn’t an entirely male cast (and to cudgel a romance into it, be it needed or not) almost always fit into one of two slots: Jekyll’s love interest, who sooner or later is victimized by Hyde… or Hyde’s punching bag. The latter usually is a sex worker he happily abuses, reinforcing both their positions in society— he the wealthy white man, she the un-person no-one would miss. And yes, we’re supposed to pity her, feel bad for her. Cringe when she dislikes Hyde and fear when she’s intrigued by him. There’s something sinister about how Jekyll and Hyde adaptations are morbidly fascinated with the killing of sex workers, the same way there’s something sinister about Stevenson’s refusal to mention women unless one is getting trampled underfoot.

Listen… I love Jekyll and Hyde to bits, I really do, but at the core of the story there is a hatred of women that is projected onto the characters and echoed with each movie, TV episode, and comic, even to this day. Women don’t matter and when they do they’re defined by their tortuous relationship to Jekyll/Hyde. I’m generalizing, of course, but it’s an upsetting trend.

I feel as if the intense homosocialization and hyperfocus on male professionalism in the original novella had been replicated in the worst ways with the way it is envisioned in pop culture, Hyde almost always painted preying on a random woman like he’s a vampire. There’s nothing wrong with gay subtext; there’s nothing wrong with a that focus; but Jekyll and Hyde as a piece of fiction is a fucking sausage party and I’m so tired of women being thrown at it like a bone to a pack of rabid dogs.

And then the fandom has the gall to go, “well the book is about gay men”. Don’t get angry at the (fictional) women getting raped and murdered- get angry at the people who decided all they have to do is get raped and murdered. And then, make the change yourself, since you’re so enlightened.

[unweavinglies]

I’d like to ask a question about Kokichi’s character in Chapter 4, specifically with him seeing the “Truth of the outside world.” Yes, it was a big shift in his character to suddenly want killing, but I’m not entirely convinced that it was because of him losing his mind from seeing the outside world. I think at least some of it was a facade to make others think of him as a bad guy/the mastermind; to make his Chapter 5 character more believable so his plan would work. What do you think?

Well, I'm not here to convince you one way or another.

My theories and personal interpretations are just that--personal interpretations and theories. The narrative is web of interpretations and I only hold a single thread of it.

To me, personally, I think Kokichi's behavioral shift is far too drastic, going from "I'm going to beat this killing game" to "I'm going to become a blackened and kill someone", to plotting with Gonta to mercy kill the whole class. I think this jump has only one true source--the madness of seeing the end of the world you and your fellow classmates have been killing each other over.

I know it's a difficult feeling to imagine--but that's probably why you think differently than me. I cannot fathom what it's like to see the end of the world--and how I personally would react to that, aside from pure devastation. I don't think any human being can truly comprehend what "the end of the world" would look or feel like--which is why the concept often appears in horror plots and the sort. I don't think our brains can truly comprehend becoming an endangered species, the world we knew to be suddenly inhabitable, to be on the brink of death and demise and know that everything you once loved has already left you behind.

So I ask you this as my answer: Do you really think that any human being on this earth could handle the end of the world?

My answer to my own question is: No. I don't think any human could mentally handle seeing what Kokichi saw--and that's why I don't think his "I am the Mastermind" plot is the cause of his personality shift during chapter 4.

It just doesn't make sense to me.

I'm sorry if this comes off as curt or rude--but the amount of asks I've gotten specifically about Chapter 4, and about my Mercy Kill Theory, with the sentiment of "Oh your theory must be incorrect, somehow", is far too grating on me. Never the mind asks that go and try to find loop holes to prove the theory wrong, but I digress--that is neither here nor there.

[basilone]

y'all have got to stop interacting with posts that contain uncredited gifs istg

using my gifs in your post without crediting me gets you blocked without pardon, I am sick of chasing after credit for my work

(also in that same vein: gifmakers can see when you use their gifs with credit because we get a notification if you do, and not every gifmaker wants their gifs included in other people's fics/posts. please try asking us first, esp if you want to use it for explicit content.)

[o-wild-west-wind]

tumblr algorithm stop feeding me takes that this show is just a silly goofy comedy that shouldn’t include death or that Izzy is the token disabled elder queer on the show where an actual disabled elder queer is literally the romantic lead or that Lucius and Pete being called “mateys” is diluting their gayness because it’s not “husbands” or that it’s sexist that Zheng lost her fleet and later prioritized her love for a man or that Ed is Izzy’s abuser because we conveniently forgot all of season 1 or that trauma is never followed through with because sometimes actions are used instead of words or that Ed learned nothing because the inn was apparently a whim as if he hasn’t been obsessing over retirement from day 1 I swear did we even watch the same show?? I literally feel like I’m in backwards land?

I have a really novel concept for y’all complaining about character’s arcs not being fully resolved or healed and that’s called there is supposed to be another season of this show

I also have another really novel concept as to why every single character did not have a one on one trauma apology session and so much time was spent on Ed and Stede and that is because this is literally the Ed and Stede show and also sometimes parallels are meant to be inferred and extrapolated because that is what efficient storytelling does instead of spoonfeeding you

And my most novel concept of all as to why some beloved characters had less screen time is because Max is a massive jerk and cut the budget

Y’all this wasn’t personal and maybe this show was never about Izzy maybe the show called our flag means death is actually about death maybe sad does not equal homophobic letdown maybe the brown gay character introduced as the love interest from day 1 gets to outlive the angry white guy that had a redemption arc after actively bullying and trying to break up every gay couple for a season I don’t know what to tell you just can you please let non-white people have this arc for once without assuming it’s an attack on you I’m BEGGING y’all

[janey-jane]

apparently a controversial opinion but:

unless you have personal first-hand experience wearing and working in properly-made, well-fitted corsets or have done extensive period research on historical dress you shouldn't be promulgating "feminist" opinions about how oppressive and painful corsetry was and how women were 'forced' by male expectations to suffer and ruin their health for a tiny waist.

its not that exciting, they were mostly just a longline bra y'all.

[pyrepostings]

whumpee who's only given soft water to drink/bathe with.

[rickktish]

Some unsolicited unpopular marvel opinions:

Loki was 100% responsible for destroying every bit of trust Thor ever had in him and if the fandom could get over making Loki their uwu baby they'd be able to recognize that Thor deserved better. Loki gets no rights for having daddy issues, actually; by the time you’re an adult, you are responsible for your own shitty behavior.

Tony was actually, genuinely wrong to support the Accords and the weight of his teammates' "betrayal" should not in fact be more highly valued than the actually immoral choice he was supporting

honestly maybe the entire fandom just has a betrayal kink? like i know we all grew up when those horrendous "all their friends betrayed them and now they've gone and found new friends in a crossover universe who are better in every way" fics were so popular on fanfiction.net but like. those weren't good fics. and their revenge plots weren't satisfying. and also they were always out of character. and just because you saw a chance to fulfill all your betrayal drama fantasies because of how many people sided with Cap doesn't make Tony's choice the right one, it just means you weren't paying attention to the political intrigue because you cared more about "oh no! Tony's parents were killed by a guy who's inevitably going to get a "redemption" arc (insofar as you need redemption after being brainwashed???) and Awful Steve cares more about his best friend from the War than Tony's Feelings! How Dare Awful Steve do that?"

Hawkeye's life is (on the comics side of things, which I know many of us draw on when we need to flesh things out) canonically sadder than Tony Stark's and none of y'all were ready to deal with that, so you had to make your uwu baby's life harder to make him more important. Which is fine, I do it when I'm in the mood to write sadfic too, but like. Clint was right there. He already existed. You didn't need to give his backstory to Tony so many times.

Also Thor's life (in mcu canon, right there, in front of your face) is canonically sadder than Tony Stark's and y'all completely ignore him so. You're missing out focusing on the ambiguous daddy issues instead of the victim of both parental and sibling abuse who watched his entire culture be destroyed. Just saying.

on the one hand, sibling fics are fun. on the other hand, anyone tagging "loki is a good sibling" needs to acknowledge that they're writing a wholeass au which does not exist after the first Thor movie. Loki is explicitly and intentionally written as a bad sibling in every movie. To be fair, Thor is explicitly and intentionally written as an infuriating sibling, but that doesn't change the fact that Loki is worse.

Loki got a redemption arc because he was popular, not because he had good or meaningful points or because he was "always supposed to be redeemed." I just need you to know that.

It's nice that Tony got to have a Moment at the end of End Game, but he didn't deserve it. Both in the "he wasn't good enough to earn that kind of moment" and "he didn't acknowledge anything he had done that was bad enough to deserve that kind of end" kind of way. Both are simultaneously true. There are generally three types of arcs that end in a heroic sacrifice, and they are the Mentor, the Paragon, and the Redeemed. Tony was an insufficient mentor to Spider-man to achieve Heroic Sacrifice levels, Captain America was the Paragon, and Loki would have been the Redeemed except that Thanos killed him in the last movie. Tony Stark was, unfortunately, a Mid arc at best, and did not earn the kind of payoff necessary to have gotten the heroic sacrifice.

[procrastinatorproject]

Fuck it, I'm gonna start posting my own shouty thoughts on season 3 of Picard rather than just commenting on other people's stuff.

I'll keep taggin everything "#picard spoilers" (assume I'm talking about everything up to the most recent ep, I'll warn seperately for leaked/promo stuff about ep 10) and "#picard saltiness" so you know what to blacklist (or look for, I'm not telling you how to internet 😋).

I'm sorry/get ready.

Here's the thing. I would like to watch season 3 of Picard and think "Oh well, this wasn't made for me, the same way season 1 wasn't made for the type of TNG fan who is in heaven right now. And I'm sad my favourite characters and main reasons I liked the show in the first place got written off, but I'm glad these other fans are having the time of their lives. Good on them, I'll just mentally file this away as a season/new show that I don't connect with as much as I'd hoped." I really, really want to be able to think that and approach season 3 this way.

But the writers won't let me.

At every turn, and I mean every turn, the writers have gone out of their way to not just pretend the previous two seasons didn't happen, but to remind us they happened and they were stupid and you're stupid to ever have enjoyed them.

It's not just that Picard, in the middle of his disillusioned identity crisis, when he has been holed up on his vinyard for over a decade, talking to nobody, and feeling deeply disappointed by Starfleet, gives an impassioned speech to a bunch of young people about how Starfleet is the only family you'll ever need.

That's a type of discontinuity/soft retcon I don't particularly enjoy, but if it were just that, I wouldn't be writing this way too long screed.

It's not even just the implicit "we will do it right this time" on display e.g. when Picard "flies" the Titan out of the labouring nebula. In that scene, Picard walks up to the captain's chair to take the conn, the TNG theme swells, he sits down, the music becomes bombastic, and he gets to be the Heroic Captain We All Remember. That scene is, in my opinion, something of a parallel to the season 1 scene where Picard tries to hijack La Sirena to take Soji to her people. In the season 1 scene, he sits in the captain's chair, the TNG-inspired music swells, he is about to be the Heroic Captain We All Remember -- except then the music fizzles out and the moment deflates because Picard has been retired for a decade and a half and has no idea what he's doing (and is certainly not the most qualified to do it on an unfamiliar ship).

That parallel in season 3 rubbed me the wrong way, because it felt too close to a refutation of season 1. Too close to "See? This is how that scene should have played out!" But that is a me problem. If the writers were remotely aware of the parallel (and I honestly doubt it, because I'm not sure they know season 1 well enough), it's just as likely they wrote it as a tongue-in-cheek reference, more than a rebuttal. Assuming the worst would have been on me and my unwillingness to give this season a fair shake. And if that sort of scene were the worst of it, I wouldn't be happy about it, but I wouldn't make it everybody else's problem.

Except the writers didn't stop there.

I would (eventually) be okay with it if the writers had just quietly abandoned, ignored, or even outright retconned some characters, history, themes, and plots from season 1 and 2 they disliked. But instead, they repeatedly acknowledge the existence of these elements only to then dismiss them in frankly viscious ways.

It's not enough to ignore the Jurati-Borg in all their Eggness glory and how they would be incredibly relevant to this story season 3 is trying to tell. It's not enough to pretend that storyline never happened and move on. Instead, the writers acknowledge the existence of the new collective, but the only sentence where it's mentioned is a character talking about "That weird shit on the Stargazer."

Yes, Shaw is a dick, yes it fits his character, yes Watsonian reasons. But it was still an active choice by the writers to only bring up one of the major plot developments of season 2 in the most derisive way possible.

Another example: The writers apparently felt that the Troi-Rikers didn't belong on Nepenthe. But it's not enough to have them move somewhere else between seasons, or even to let them have a discussion about how Nepenthe is steeped in loss and grief and they want to move somewhere else and start over.

Instead, the writers have to take time out of their already shoddily paced season to have these two characters extensively shit-talk one of the brightest momenst of season 1 (figuratively and literally). It's not just "they don't like it on Nepenthe anymore", it's "they never liked it, everything about it is terrible, everything season 1 showed you about their life there is a lie, and it has always been shitty and cringey and stupid, and you were stupid to like it!"

It's not just "we dumped our diverse characters, challenging themes, and relatively fresh view on the Trek universe from outside Starfleet for starship porn, great (white) men, and more Starfleet nostalgia than you can even comprehend". It's not just "we're going to ignore the existence of season 1 (and to a degree season 2), because it's not doing the things we want to do." It's not just "we're making this show, knowing (and not caring) that it will alienate a large chunk of the people who enjoyed season 1".

It's "we see what previous seasons were trying to do, and we need you to understand, really understand, how much contempt we have for these seasons and the people who enjoyed them."

I know some people felt this way about season 1 and the way it deconstructed Picard's image as the Great Heroic Captain and laid open his flaws and the flaws of the Federation. And I now empathize with them more than I ever thought I would. But I think there is a big qualitative difference in there.

In season 1, Picard gets put in his place. He has women people telling him when he's wrong, where he has failed, where he should have stepped up and needed to do better. But the show is still deeply sympathetic towards him. By the end of the season, Elnor has forgiven him, Raffi has forgiven him (without ever getting an apology), and he gets to save the day [whether the end to this particular arc is well done (it's not) is a rant for another day].

The failures Picard is being reproached for in season 1 pretty much exclusively happen between TNG and PIC. They tie in to patterns and tendencies the character has always had and attempt to deconstruct some of them. But there's no direct evisceration of specific things that happened on TNG.

At no point does Picard get out his Ressikan flute to make a glib comment about what a useless trinket it is, and how he should have thrown it out years ago. At no point does he turn to Riker and say: "Man, do you remember that Darmok and Jalad shit? What a waste of time! I wish we'd blown up that ship when we encountered it."

Season 1 is critical of Picard's character, yes, and it might feel crass or unfair at times (not least because we're still not used to seeing Great (White) Heroic Men Of Our Childhood get deconstructed that way). But any reproach the season 1 writers levelled at Picard pales in comparison to the petty contempt the season 3 writers regularly display towards the show they've ostensibly taken stewardship of.

Season 1 might have been a bit glib or inconsiderate of the legacy they inherited. Season 3 is viscious. And I am so, so tired of it.

[hiemaldesirae]

one of the major problems i find with online discourse about antagonistic characters and storylines sourcing from novels is that some people cant see past what is said to what is meant- and that other people can, but in their perception of the implied lore, make overdue assumptions of plot and character.

for example: in svsss, it is heavily implied that qiu jianluo s/a'ed the original shen qingqiu, thus shaping his outlook on society in general: females are safe, males are not. this leads to point against him in the form of his favouritism for ning yingying, the only (afaik) female qing jing disciple and his habit of finding comfort in brothels. this is misconstrued by the original protagonist in the novel pidw, leading to a false misconception held by our protagonist, shen yuan, that shen qingqiu is a lecherous paedophile.

as the reader, there are a number of context clues given to tell us how that is not the case-- mostly found in the extras-- and are meant to challenge the worldview, make us realize that like shen yuan, we as the audience only know as much as the author will tell us. did shen jiu hate luo binghe specifically because his name reminded him of qiu jianluo? was he jealous of the potential luo binghe had? or was he merely looking for a target to take his anger out on?

it is not mentioned, therefore we do not know, and should not make assumptions on the canon behaviour of this character towards someone else.

however, this is often not understood by the overall fandom: either they completely look past the context clues that tell us, this character is more than they seem and instead jump straight to demonization without first considering context and setting, or they overcompensate for someone by making excuses to justify behaviour we do not have explanations for.

this is the reason why we have people who constantly demean and bully others in fandom: they cannot read or think for themselves past what is clearly shown to them and refuse to challenge the idea that the author may be deliberately feeding unreliable information to make a more interesting story, and it doesnt help that there are people attempting to justify behaviour that is specifically written to be bad.

[imtheiliad]

the fundamental misunderstanding of how songs are performed and the art of curating a show is only highlighted by thinking that a common surprise song could just be shoehorned into the set list.