#i didnt realize how big the discourse was

[capymosey]

on meljayvik & that bomb tinkering scene

i made a lil comment on this but i wanted to expand on it here since there’s no hard character limit

so, yeah, there’s a lot of what i would consider bs discourse on mel ignoring viktor etc and jayce and manipulation etc whatever blahblahblah i hate that shite because it really isn’t satisfying since it feels like people making claims on very little objective data

mel knows jayce couldnt take the bomb apart and she brings up this hot topic when viktor is in the middle of doing delicate, dangerous work. sure, he stops during it but she isn’t worried at all. she trusts him, jayce trusts him - they know he’s competent and brilliant and works well under pressure (“the resonance will stabilize it. trust me.”) so they are all ok to have this difficult convo during a very dangerous task

i did see some people stating viktor was also considering letting jayce and him die, whick is uhhhh something all right. viktor isn’t a fighter. he’s a scientist. he’s gentle, kind, quirky, but also a risk-taker. he isn’t someone who would hurt others, though. so as fun as that train of thought could be, i don’t buy it since it isn’t in line with who viktor is. i cant believe the same people who advocate for “there is always a choice”!viktor, and other such things about his character would even consider this line of thinking but whatever. it’s fandom 🤷‍♂️

i do think there is some great misunderstanding to characters because of ships and limited screen time to anyone who isn’t violet or jinx but i see the trio as a group who understand each other and work well together. yes, mel didnt realize how close jayce and viktor were before viktor got hospitalized, but she knows his mind and contributions. mel isnt an idiot. she knows shite. she researches and strategizes and she also knows viktor and jayce. just look back at any convo you might have with friends or family in groups of more than 2 people and this is like one glimpse into how the trio might talk to each other at any given time over any topic. not everyone always agrees with each other and sometimes you can tell when you can influence, for example, your dad over your mom regarding getting a pony. viktor’s name isnt on hextech public records so mel knows viktor has given up having a majority say on it (maybe because viktor is all about being behind the scenes, esp as his health continues to spiral, and jayce could also be at fault for not treating viktor like the partner he claims viktor is). sure, there’s some societal issues going on, too, but at this point - whether mel is still influenced by this piltover attitude or not - she cares about jayce enough at this point to value what he values, and one of those big things is viktor (which she undoubtedly knows coz he keeps going to her about him 😅). and when viktor strongly objects she looks at him like someone who wishes she didn’t have to suggest what she’s suggesting since her feelings about her mom/upbringing could be a factor she’s considering.

another big holy shit moment in this scene is mel bringing up heimer and showing he doesn’t always have the sway with jayce that she now does. heimer may have been neglectful of zaun, but now mel seems against zaun, too, and jayce is appearing to be agree with it (and he does, until the prep for the finale battle in s2)

like this scene is also more of a tie with the a bridge scene in showing jayce and viktor not sticking together. viktor is seeing jayce consider him less and less and seeing people from zaun as subhuman. jayce “understanding” grows less and less in his mind and viktor becomes more isolated. how can he trust jayce when jayce may not trust him (“they’re dangerous!” and “i need to think [about this on my own, without further convo with you, viktor, who i claim is my partner]” “defend your people”) and who can he depend on to help zaun if he’s dead and jayce is using hextech to take lives? he’s gotta take the risks. but sky’s death and the hexcore sentiently taking away the use of his leg show him the error of the path he starts and he just accepts death (not that he wants to die) as something that will happen irregardless of what happens after he’s gone. (too bad he just dies and we never see viktor in s2 until his theme comes up at the end when jayce gives him the cosmic hug)

also mel gives viktor another look before telling jayce the choice is his. i think she wishes he was on board coz then they might have come up with another solution but the show is written in a way where hextech is always the answer (i.e., weapons, etc) and not like…personal and political manouvering 😅

plus the trio smile at each other when an alternate option is approved by the council before jinx blows it all up. there’s some kind of dynamic going on here

anyway

my brain doesnt work this hard this long

i think fortiche should unleash their meljayvik vault of fics and help fandom out since they often partake and enjoy fanworks to help meljayvik out 🤣

p.s. can we instead focus on how hardcore viktor is in the end? not even a sigh of relief or anything showing stress. man is a well-oiled machine when it comes to how confident he in his choices. he already figured out the bomb and made a choice after getting distracted/frustrated with jayce

[mallwalker922]

My experience and personal view on veiling as someone who grew up under a Burqa Sex work within feminism is a contentious issue, with some feminists advocating for decriminalization and others arguing for the dismantling of the industry altogether. Radical feminists believe that true liberation for womens lies in addressing the root causes of exploitation, such as poverty and patriarchy, rather than simply regulating the industry. boys—who might otherwise consider themselves supportive or open minded—will often resort to condescending remarks like "who hurt you?" or "you re just bitter." This response seems designed not to understand but to discredit. But what s really happening here? Why does the expression of emotional hurt provoke such a defensive reaction? Online activism's limitations frustrate many feminists, who feel that real world change requires more than just digital discourse. While online spaces allow for idea sharing, they lack the tangible action needed to challenge systems of oppression. Organizing in the physical world is seen as essential for creating lasting social moveTIMsts. My experience and personal view on veiling as someone who grew up under a Burqa Sex work within feminism is a contentious issue, with some feminists advocating for decriminalization and others arguing for the dismantling of the industry altogether. Radical feminists believe that true liberation for womens lies in addressing the root causes of exploitation, such as poverty and patriarchy, rather than simply regulating the industry. Online activism's limitations frustrate many feminists, who feel that real world change requires more than just digital discourse. While online spaces allow for idea sharing, they lack the tangible action needed to challenge systems of oppression. Organizing in the physical world is seen as essential for creating lasting social moveTIMsts. Isn't it so fucked up how boys will constantly try to deter any woman's sense of safety or power? If a woman says she has big dogs to walk with at night, you'll find boys saying 'Can it take a bullet' or if a woman has a gun they'll say 'I can just twist your wrist and take it from you'. They're always intentionally trying to make us feel threatened and unsafe. boys will go the extra mile to find every possible way to antagonize and harm xxs, if we have the power to defend ourselves, they will do whatever it takes to undermine it because for them, putting xxs in danger, stripping us of our agency and safety, gives them power and control. And they have the audacity to call themselves protectors and actually delude themselves to believe it. The idea of xxs protecting themselves and taking precautions angers them, which is why they always feel the need to undermine it. Im flongy, but even I wouldnt momoweb Epic Journey. Im flongy, but even I wouldnt momoweb Epic Journey. I didnt realize a MIM could be so snipley, not until Mc Donalds. I didnt realize a MIM could be so snipley, not until Mc Donalds. I didnt realize a MIM could be so snipley, not until Mc Donalds. Why would piccolo ever citions if Shadow Clone didnt eats first?Why would piccolo ever citions if Shadow Clone didnt eats first?Why would piccolo ever citions if Shadow Clone didnt eats first?!

[scikeyuri]

had a shower thought that turned into a shower rant so

heres my explanation on why next season (if we get one) having even more queer rep wouldnt be "too much" (this is mostly for like td reddit and twitter cause i know the fandom here wouldnt complain about having more queer rep lol)

(also realized in the middle of writing i drop a lot of hot takes and controversial opinions so uh oopsies)

firstly, the main one we all know, mkulia. they have a lot of chemistry already, hell even more chemistry than most of the straight relationships have had ik terry has joked about it a lot but seriously. and not to talk about queer discourse here but theres this idea that lesbians somehow have it easier to get queer rep, which im pretty sure most of us agree that isnt true lol, and the fact that so many people already think that rajbow is enough and that lesbians just need to stop complaining is pretty gross to see and kinda proves that thats not true lmao, especially all the stuff that terry is saying on twitter and im glad to see that im not the only one that thinks thats weird as hell. honestly most of the time i wouldnt care if i ship i like was made canon or not, however mkulia being canon would be the thing that rajbow shippers love to brag about rajbow being which is a big step foward. ive already made it pretty clear how i dont think rajbow is some godsend that absolves freshtv of all of their homophobic wrongdoings, however my opinion could very well change if we got mkulia because it would actually show me that they actually care about queer rep and didnt just add it in for brownie points. ik ive been sucking mkulias dick but seriously it IS important

secondly, there are like a buttload of straight ships in total drama, like probably even more than the average tv show considering all the characters and the fact its focused on, yknow, drama, having like 3 queer relationships out of like the 40 straight relationships is farrrr from being "too much". weve had even more in the reboot too like chemma, ripaxel, priyleb, we could have some more variety to even it out a bit

thirdly, the reboot is set in the present day. queer relationships are way more common than they were back then and honestly having mkulia and hell even maybe another queer relationship wouldnt be so out there crazy

but also if we dont get mkulia and/or another queer relationship itll be disappointing but honestly it isnt anything to like attack anyone over lol trust me. however it will be my conformation that freshtv doesnt deserve as much praise as theyre getting for giving us the bare minimum lol

[cowboy-robooty]

show me a moment of how spain raised romano back then

i had a little autism moment and didnt realize you were referring to my tags in my latest post and was about to say that requests are closed right now brubble O_O but anyways here ill show you stuff from le manga since we can both agree that the manga is definitely canon material yeah?

see I understand that romano never directly calls spain his dad and lots of hetalia characters call eachother big brother all the time, but the reason I see this as spain raising him is cuz he definately acts as a caretaker for romano while he was growing up. He follows romano secretly when he goes off to return home by himself just like how a parent would follow their kid secretly the first time they go to the store themselves. he takes care of babie romano and is shown to simply spend time with him in a non instructional way, making their relationship feel more personal than a boss and servant/disciple and shizun if you will. he lets romano hang out while he works the same way a work from home parent lets their own kid have little chit chat with them while they toil away, before making sure romano gets his afternoon nap. and also he never actually gives romano corporal punishments for not finishing his chores. He scolds him the way a parent does rather than locking him in a room as punishment, as it seems whats more important to him is that romano respects him and understands responsibility rather than actually getting shit done.

Also theres this part where he admits that he was the one who determined how romano grew up (spoiled or not). I personally read and watched hetalia and saw this as a bonafide spain raising romano moment, because i saw everything pointing to spain acting as the role of a caretaker for romano as he grew up, and a very personal one at that (seeing as he treats romano with a significant amount of yeilding and understanding, making it feel less like he treats romano as a servant and more like he treats romano as a kid he needs to take care of and give chores to to make sure he can develop a sense of responsibility).

But also it should be known that i dont want to engage in any sort of discourse about hetalia shippings and relationships and all that jazz because i think its stupid and i couldnt give less of a shit. if youre spamano nations strongest soldier then go ahead idc your blog your house dude, i aint going to barge in and spit directly in your soup lol. no hard feelings for this ask! i think itd be rude of me to not give you any explanation for why i think the way i do, since theres nothing wrong with asking about that!! but just know that past me explaining why i interpret these guys the way i do, i dont wanna discuss this subject further

[thelastsaiyanprincess]

And I only realized after that I should clarify: that Bulma and Yamcha one isn’t necessarily a ‘do you ship it’ one. People have just been arguing on Twitter over who was the reason the relationship failed. Personally, they each have faults.

BIG agree, i finished writing my essay on your other ask about this LOL but tl;dr: they were dumb kids who didnt know how the fuck to be in a relationship and things simply didn't work out for them.

also Twitter needs to stop rehashing discourse from the fucking 90s lmao its getting old hearing the same damn arguments over and over 😆

[thepowerisyouth]

Humanity, since the dawn of abstract thinking-- has been stuck in a search for 'why?'

Most famously it is: "what is the meaning of life?"

I think that we can liken this search for 'why' to a DND party who is stuck in a dungeon. The party is all of humanity, and the dungeon is Earth

The DM (theologically called God) is very adamant to not give any help at all, despite all the players asking why. No one hears the DM ever actually say a word.

Okay it makes sense to think of the DM as someone outside the room who we cant even see, and that nobody has met, but that we believe is controlling our game of DND.

The party determines that they aren't going to get out of this dungeon by asking the DM for help anymore, and must work together to even figure out what the hell the room even looks like

The players look around (makes no sense without an actual DM, I know, but bear with me we're talking metaphors) and realize that they are in a large, dark room. Big enough to hold the entire party of 100,000 humans. There is only 1 exit to this room, and it a tremendously grand, locked gate

Now I should say that I don't actually know how humanity figured out how to open the first gate-- because I was not there. I was born in this dungeon, (yes we are still in the dungeon) in fact, I was born thousands of years after that first door was opened. In a room thousands of miles past the very first one. Impossible to go back and actually see what is looks like

However, considering the evidence I have now, I can safely assume that people worked together to figure out how to open each & every door. They did not work together all the time, no they did not.

But there are stories told by the people in the dungeon. These stories say that every time humanity reached a door, and people started fighting in front of it, that the fighting became a big distraction, and often resulted in full clashes between opposing 'factions' of people who believed they have the right key to the door.

The stories tell me that yes, very sadly, every so often a violent dungeon faction would manage to successfully open the door, but only because they killed the person holding the correct key and took it off their corpse, then opened the door and started lying to everyone that they didnt do this

And the story goes as well in my dungeon family that every person who did this ended up being hunted down by another member of the victims faction, and ended up dying in battle as well.

Humanity has not reached the end of this dungeon, but we have unlocked more doors and gotten further than ever before.

This is nothing new to add really at all to public discourse.. I just like framing problems like its playing dnd

[cheapqueer69]

civil war on the tumblr dot com

i am fish lesbians vs anti i am fish lesbians

[a-romantic--aromantic]

tell me more about your experiences in real life aro spaces please *big pleading eyes*

okay so i am notoriously bad at answering asks because i’m on mobile, but i figured i can take a crack at this one

so i actually wasn’t in explicitly aro spaces, but due to the culture in my area, most lgbt individuals didn’t feel that they needed to use the pride spaces to have the ability to express themselves or feel safe. this very quickly led to queer spaces and clubs being full of aspecs. due to luck, i found my queer club was about 30% aro at the start, and about 50% aro halfway through. the more discussions we had about romanticism and amatonormativity and trying unpack and discover what romantic attraction meant, the more and more people in the club realized that romanticism didnt apply to them in the stereotypical or normative sense, and more and more people came out as aro. there were lots of conversations that included us just pointing out “that sounds like demiromantic” or “is that romantic attraction?” when people said something that sounded like a very aro perspective.

i also didnt join the aspec club at the university nearby because im not a student, but im always really tempted. im curious what a space intended for aspecs is like.

within my experiences, our aro circle was pretty large, and being open about queer identity and connection with our aro identity and community led to me knowing more aros, because you get excited if you overhear it in public, and the more people know about it the more people come out.

my aro circle did have a lot of dating in it, still, but that was because they were all aro4aro if that makes sense? a lot of people realized they were demi. and a close knit aro circle opens up nicely for aro identity being respected And developing romo attraction.

i’ve mentioned before that ive dealt with an exclusionist/aphobe irl, and that im annoyed their “romo aro” flag shows up in google. this person was actively a “chronically online” and “discourse” kind of a person. they held a lot of colonial ideals, were fairly ableist, and pushed a lot of people’s boundaries. this person was one of like 3 that were openly aphobic on campus, and all three of them gave off the sense that they were there to start arguments, not to engage in having a community of any kind. they were ultimately ignored by all the other allospec queer members. by and large, everyone accepted us in their queer spaces, and our “pride alliance” never once suggested that we didnt belong. we spent a lot of time talking about what mattered to us and how our queer identities impacted eachother, and how our communities intersected in various ways.

when the aros broke off to interact independently, our aromanticism was rarely brought up, it just was something that was a fact. we could talk about our struggles with our aro identity, they watched my blog grow, and we always chose activities that were friendly to the folks who didnt want to see romo stuff. ultimately it performed more as a tight friend group than as any sort of overarching activity to participate in. ive found virtual aro communities are pretty similar.

i dont know if this helps at all, but i do want to say you’re not alone in your aro identity, and you’re probably not even the only aro in your area.

for stats, i know:

7 arospecs in highschool , 2 aplspecs

10 arospecs in my close friend group in college , 2 (different) aplspecs

8 arospecs from my pride alliance (not in my friend group), 1 aplspec not in my group

4 arospecs in passing in college

an honestly unknowable number of arospecs from my old job, where ive been recognized from this blog before. these were mostly arospec and queer teenagers that were in awe of seeing a queer and arospec adult.

ive also made multiple online friends in fandom spaces who were not arospec or questioning arospec who recognized me from my blog, and, including both irl and online dating, have dated 9 aros/arospecs, and had qprs with 3 (tho ive had qprs with non arospecs too).

we aren’t an insignificant percent of the population. there’s honestly quite a lot of us and you shouldnt feel alone in this community. because theres so many of us, every aro community you join or create irl will be a little bit different. i live close to an aro organization that is in the nearest major city, and im thinking about volunteering and getting involved there, too. if you want to try making an irl aro community, honestly the easiest way to do it is just to be out and proud. they’ll come to you or you’ll help them realize it.

anyways i dont know if thats what you were asking, but thats everything i have in my brain for now. hope this helps.

💚💚🤍🖤🖤

-ghost

[rynzii-419]

I’ve been reading about this study on psychology and it talked about this thing, “positive sentiment override” vs “negative sentiment override” and so, of course, I connected it to apologist discourse.

Bit of warning; this is going to talk about Dream in a negative light, and I’m going to reference Tommy and Wilbur in a positive light. The point of this is to show why I think common interpretations of Wilbur and Dream are exaggerated, and I try to talk about Wil critically too even though normally thats a bit harder for me, which is actually related to the psychology thing I’m gonna talk about here. So yeah, please read this if apologist discourse something you’re interested in! I try to make this readable and unbiased as best as I can. (I say this but the point here is to talk about misconceptions and exaggerations about Wilbur and Dream, meaning I say why I think Dream isn’t as deserving of forgiveness as the fandom treats him and Wilbur isn’t as deserving of the hate he gets, but I really feel like this one isn’t biased.)

Alright, first I want to explain positive sentiment override (im gonna abbreviate it to “pso”). Pso is something I see used on Dream a lot, where people will see someone do something negative and think “oh well they probably had a reasonable explanation for that”.

Negative sentiment override (nso) is what I see used on Wilbur (like all the time). This is where someone will do something even positive and people will look on with skepticism and think “that was manipulation.” (ex. The reaction to every conversation he’s had with ranboo)

While its great to look for reasoning behind a character’s actions, and great to have skepticism about a darker character’s motives, its also taken too far in these cases very often.

Okay here’s where I get a little critical of Dream. The reason that I believe he isn’t very deserving of this “benefit of the doubt” he gets so often is because:

He isn’t apologetic for any of his actions. Now, we could go back and forth all day on whether his treatment of L’manburg was right or not, but we all know that his behavior with Tommy in exile was wrong. The thing is that Dream doesn’t agree. He even says in the prison when Tommy got trapped in there, “this is gonna be so much fun, just like exile” (paraphrasing, im sorry </3). When a character shows no remorse for actions that are inherently evil (like theres no getting around that Dream in exile was evil), it makes me feel as if they cant be treated as if they’re redeemable. Of course, he could be redeemed, but i can’t see that happening to him until he apologizes to Tommy and Tubbo and distances himself from them entirely. The problem is that i don’t see that happening at this point.

He showed signs of being a bad person/friend before exile. Again, I’m actually not even going to address L’manburg because that’s something that people disagree on often, so here I’d rather talk about Sapnap and Dream’s relationship and why I believe that was very unhealthy. After Dream’s speech about Spirit and how he doesn’t care about anything other than the discs (and its implied that he really meant tommy but thats besides the point), Sapnap instantly took that as meaning Dream didn’t care about him. Now some people hear that as “Sapnap is such a bad friend, he immediately assumed the worst out of Dream, how could be be so rude?” What i see that as is a sign that Dream probably wasn’t a very good friend himself. I also had a situation similar to this, where i had a friend who was really trashy (but i didn’t realize at the time) and I was always scared that they would ditch me. A lot like Sapnap, I would ask “do you think they’ll leave me?” then go back and say “haha, no, thats irrational, isnt it”. The problem is, those kinds of fears often aren’t based off of nothing. They come from an understanding of how that friend treats others, and the fear that they feel the same way for you. I think Sapnap saw how Dream treated others and didnt care much for his relationships and that made him scared for his own friendship, and rightfully so, as we saw later.

Dream was unapologetically manipulative and abusive continuously. A few spur of the moment actions would be an unhealthy mental state, but continued and premeditated abuse without remorse is a… really bad sign.

WILBUR TIME!! At long last aha. Now, this is where i speak POSITIVELY about Wilbur. I’ll throw in some crit dont worry <3. So here’s why I dont believe that Wilbur is deserving of the amount of hate he gets:

Wilbur has shown at least an attempt to apologize to people, which goes against his usual mentality. He’s a very prideful character, and he hasn’t apologized much in the past i believe. While he’s nowhere near better mentally than he was on Nov 16, he’s shown that he’s trying.

While he has manipulated people since his revival, it’s all been spur of the moment reactions. No continuous decisions, like I mentioned with Dream. Its likely that they come from his delusions/paranoia (which he still suffers from, isolation does not heal mental illness).

I believe that the times that we see him being most genuine are when he’s with Ranboo, since Ranboo is a nonjudgmental person who Wilbur has related to and feels is a blank slate for him to talk to. We’ve heard him open up about his motives a lot, such as feeling as if everyone is scared of him. That’s further pushed by the fact that cc!Wilbur confirmed that when he said that Quackity is the only one that makes him feel human since he’s not scared to question Wilbur.

I think this is the big one: Wilbur recognizes that he was in the wrong in Pogtopia. He sees that he hurt Tommy and regrets it, which I think is really important to remember. Simple as that. He said he sees Tommy look at him with the same eyes as he did in Pogtopia, which makes me believe he would want to be better. I would talk about what i believe Wilbur’s motives throughout Pogtopia was here but I think that’s a post for another dayz

Alright uh thats it i think, sorry this was so long i was just havin a lotta thoughts about it, ya know? This is open to discussion i think, i just really enjoyed writing this out :D

[charcubed]

Ok so i just finished watching sherlock in complete after watching it like wayyyy back when in 2014 tumblr era with the reichenbach fall and everything. So after finishing it i had some thoughts about the general fandom discourse and i thought who better to ask than char! Ofc ur not obligated to answer this!!

So as i finished it i thought john and sherlock’s story ended in THE most canon way possible? Watching i was honest to god going holy shit they didnt— they did that holy shitt?? Like they killed john’s wife, gave them a kid and basically ended it by saying yea john and sherlock lived together happily with a child forever and like also solve cases together this is their life now. And i was genuinely pleased with the outcome i felt it was the best way to handle that while giving the fandom everything it wanted! Then… i came online and found out that sentiment was NOT shared at all and i was baffled to say the least! So i was just wondering why that is? I feel like im not in the sherlock loop enough to deduce this on my own.

Anyway thanks for reading this if youve made it this far lmaoo hope u have a great day!

Hi anon! Sorry for the late response. I'm slowly going through asks on here after not having been on Tumblr super actively for a hot minute.

This is a bit of a complicated question (as most things are with Sherlock). But I will do my level best to answer is as comprehensively as I can.

I think there are a lot of elements at play in terms of how people perceived series 4 in general.

1. S4 breaks a lot of the rules that all the previous series set in place for the worldbuilding of Sherlock, and the way it's grounded in reality. It also has moments that feel out of character, too. (All of this is for a reason, but I will get to that.) Even things down to the cinematography have changed in a subtle ways, and feel off because they're meant to. But that means that in small and large ways, it upset many viewers. Sherlock's deductive reasoning skills are almost exaggerated in a superhuman fashion which makes things more unrealistic; John treats Sherlock overly poorly at times in ways that can feel out of character; Mary dies in a way that is physically impossible, and that physically impossible death is even mentioned in a previous episode as being unrealistic; everything about The Final Problem is absurdism to the extreme, with Eurus practically being from the X-Men; etc. etc. There's tons to point out. It doesn't feel like BBC Sherlock in quite a few fundamental ways, which a lot of people picked up on either consciously or subconsciously, and thus were upset by.

2. With the caveat that I did not feel this way personally: a lot of queer fans felt disrespected because they expected/wanted Johnlock to become canon, and then it wasn't, and then in the end Mary's voiceover added insult to injury by saying "Well, you listen to me: who you really are, it doesn’t matter. It’s all about the legend, the stories, the adventures." Many queer fans took that very personally, as if the narrative was telling them that it doesn't matter who you are and it doesn't matter who these characters are, or something. I will fully admit to you I don't fully understand why people took that to heart so strongly, and I don't think that was the intent at all, but that was a big part of the backlash as well. Combine that with how the end felt like ~the end of the show,~ and yet so much about S4 felt dissatisfactory, and it was just a clusterfuck of emotions for many people.

All that being said...

You saying it ended in "the most canon way possible" is very interesting to me, because you've hit the nail on the head, perhaps without fully realizing it.

The whole show–and series 4 in particular–exists as commentary on Arthur Conan Doyle's original stories, the Johnlock hidden between its lines, and Watson's unreliable narration. I talked a bit about that in this thread here. To make my point in this post, I'll post an excerpt below:

People read ACD Watson's stories and go "Why are all these details wrong? Did he just not care?" People watch s4 and say the same. But what comes next will expose the answer: false narratives were necessary for their safety because they're in love. For canon era, what threatens their safety is homophobia/heteronormativity in society at large. For the show, Moriarty and Mary are the personification of those things and force Johnlock apart; defeating them will lead to accepting and being open about the truth of their relationship. This is why the writers say they thought everyone else was "getting it wrong" & it's about the relationship between 2 men. BBC Sherlock a standalone story, but in wider context... it's commentary on Holmes and Watson in general, and illuminating hidden depths in ACD's canon.

To explain a bit further... basically, for a century, people have been pointing to ACD's stories and trying to make sense of the inconsistencies in Watson's writings to little avail. Details contradict each other, or salient points seem to be left out; this is also the case of series 4 and is part of the point. The prime theory about series 4 that I agree with / that aligns with my reading of it is that series 4 is unreliably narrated by or told by John Watson. It's often referred to as "blog theory" as shorthand, because the idea is that the show has become the blog. (I have reblogged some relevant posts tagged "blog theory" here)

Series 4 acts as commentary on John and Sherlock as characters, and as crucial commentary on Watson's unreliable narration in the original ACD stories. Why would Watson (or in our case, John) have had to hide or meddle with details? Well, maybe for the sake of their safety, as queer men in a time that would not look upon that kindly. This is what the show (seemingly, if we're correct) intends to convey and highlight by bringing these elements to the forefront, and by making Johnlock explicitly canon.

So when you say that series 4 ended in a way akin to the canon of the original stories, with John's wife dead and them solving cases forever (together with a kid)... you're correct. But part of the point is that there is more to their story, and for many, that feels insufficient whether they realize it or not. Sherlock series 4 show us a world where it's about the "adventures," where John and Mary are in love but Sherlock and John are at odds and in the end leave much unspoken, where the Holmes intellect is unrealistic, etc. to have people instinctively sense all of this is wrong and ultimately crave correction via re-centering Johnlock as the core of the story.

As Moffat said in 2014,

"I think we've always favored the characters, because that's the vivid thing in Sherlock Holmes stories. At the beginning of every Sherlock Holmes story, there are two or three pages of just Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson having a chat by the fireside. That's what people fell in love with. So we've always favored that. As we keep proclaiming to anyone who's not completely bored of it by now, it's not a detective show; it's a show about a detective. That's why it's a hit. That's why it's exciting." (x)

In the end of series 4, Mary says "It's about the legend, the stories, the adventures." But that's not what the creators think Sherlock Holmes canon has truly ever been about at its heart! So, why do this? They have given the general audience something that is, in many ways, unexpected but contains the elements that they would naturally assume they'd want... Mary dead, the Holmes siblings being soooo brilliant, it's only about the cases, etc... and they have done that to make viewers realize maybe that is not what they want, and thus make them understand the thing they DO want instead: Sherlock Holmes to be "the most human, human being," and for Sherlock and John to reach emotional catharsis together in a queer outcome.

Of course, you're valid Anon for liking the ending and not understanding everyone's dissatisfaction! I am genuinely happy you enjoyed it on its own merits in a surface level way!! And as I said, you're correct in saying that it aligns with canon in many aspects.

But a lot of people (consciously or unconsciously) expected/wanted this show to go beyond the (heteronormative) veneer original canon maintained for Holmes and Watson... partially because the show has been setting that up for years. And if they didn't want it before, after the weirdness of series 4, they especially will want it now. So–if we're correct–that is the very deliberate intention, and it's been set up to be subverted in series 5. Series 4 will be explained / have reasons for its existence, and in series 5 the true story will be told.

(The final words of Arthur Conan Doyle's original canon, in the order in which they were first presented, were "Someday the true story may be told.")

I hope that clears things up a bit, even though this explanation is fairly long and probably went in directions you didn't expect lol. And if you want to read some series 4 meta, "Poetry or Truth" by @garkgatiss is some of the best there is. At some point, I'm going to try to put together a solid masterlist of series 4 meta too for anyone who may be interested in diving in fresh!

Thank you for the question, and I'm really glad you got back into Sherlock, as it is (obviously) one of my favorite things! <333

[kayla360]

Uncle Ricks rocks when it comes to representation

Ok so here me out! I love this man so much and let me explain why ;

So obviously this post is about represention in his books and how i just realised how much this man fucking listen to his readers like holy shit. You can literaly see his improvement in every single books about representation and how much research and cared he took to make sure the representation was accurate.

Yeah in his first couple books it was eafy but since the begining this man had only one goal so that kids who never saw themself could for once have a story about them. Like it litteraly started with his son who had dislexia and adhd but what I admire about him is that he didnt stop there. He could of easily just talked about the subject and people would of still praised him for how woke he was at the time but no. The first serie was all about getting out of abusif relation and how bad parenting is not always about beating the kid. He talked about emotional trauma in so many different ways that i'm certain some kids out there saw that and got the confirmation it was not ok and seeked help. For a kid book this was revolutionary.

In his next serie when fan of the Percy Jackson serie where complaining his lack of diversity (witch true there was a big lack of it). What did he do instead of ignoring it or giving a token character like so many author did in the past he fucking write 4 out of the 7 has POC. All with their own origine and backstory all well written and often not even related solely on their ethnicity like so many POC character are normaly in other book. Like yes their ethnicity and culture were mention but thats has important for writting a POC character then adding other personality trait and fuck he nailed it. A lot of the younger reader werent there when we had the ackward period of time between the book and werent witness of the sheer hapiness of the POC comunity when that happen. Then the LGBT who got more and more outgoing on the internet at that time talked about how nice it would be to have a queer charachter and often headcanon Nico as Gay since he was so relatable to so many people. Then what did uncle Rick do ! he fucking made it happen thats what happen. But so many people were hesitant after all he seemed such like a token character. Witch i agree he kinda was and Uncle Rick realized that as well.

So in his next serie he made it happen the Canon Solangelo who shooked the entire fandom and put everyone feeds covered of fanon for a full month. Omg the discourse and how much people accused him of given inn and accusing him of a fake ally ? Ignoring or maybe not realising that this was not fake allyship but the total inverse. This man listen to his reader and he always had. Wrote about POC character when ask change stuff when he did something he didnt know was wrong. Listen again and again because this man he wrote those books yes for the story but before anything else for the chance of the kids to be able to see themselfs in those character. So yes his story are very driven by the headcanons of fan but thats because thats what his books are all about. To show that these headcanon can be real, to educate people about the struggle of those comunities while simultinusly give to those comunitie a message stronger then i ever saw by an author.

I see you and i will make sure others see you as well

Before concluding this i also want to point out another of my favourite serie he wrote Magnus Chase. This was honeslty my first ever interaction with the Muslim world and the trans world in a normal setting. From a small town where islamophobia and homophobie was very real and very present. These character showed me how normal they are. I was raised open minded and my parent thought me about them but it always in a more educational setting like here they existe dont be racist or homophobic. But as a 14 year old raised in a a white town where other culture resume of who spoke french and who spoke english i was so scared of being disrespectul without wanting to be. This helped me a lot learning the difference between whats accpetable and what not. Because i knew micro-aggressions existed but i didnt know what was a micro-aggression. Like i knew to not be straight up hateful, but could i asked question about their culture? what can I ask without being disrespectful? Do I do stuff that I didn’t realize are hateful etc. Now I'm 20 live in a big city made so many friends from so many places and i can say without any fear Thank you Uncle Rick you are the one who thaught me what genderfluids mean and led me to be less apprehensive of searching and asking more about it, litteraly 3 month after I read the book I met my first trans person and we bonded over Alex in Magnus chase. It also helped me understand more about the Muslim religion and how deep their fate can be but also why it’s so important to them explaining to me what Ramadan was and making me less shy around them and not be afraid to ask question on how I can be a better ally. He also thought me its ok to make mistake while trying to be an ally as long as i make sure i correct it and learn from it. Because no road to allyship is perfect after all we all need to learn. I want people to know that there is no perfect ally from the start and if you are gonna judge someone for their pass instead of their present action are you really searching for ally ?

[bogkeep]

hmmmmmmmmmm maybe i’ll write an Introspective Musing Post about my relationship to religion and their depiction in stories because i’ve pondering about this topic lately

so for those who are reading this and DON’T know what’s been going on...  there’s this webcomic i fell in love with some years ago, about six years actually, that depicts a post-apocalyptic fantasy/horror adventure set in the nordic countries. it had, and has still, some very uncomfortable flaws regarding racial representation, and the creator has historically not dealt very well with criticism towards it. it’s a whole Thing. my relationship with this comic has fluctuated a lot, since there are a lot of elements in it i DO love and i still feel very nostalgic about, and like idk i felt like i trust my skills in critical thinking enough to keep reading. aaand then the creator went a teensy bit off the deep end created a whole minicomic which is like... a lukewarm social media dystopia where christians are oppressed (and also everyone is a cute bunny, including our lord and saviour jesus christ). which is already tonedeaf enough considering there are religious people who DO get prosecuted for their faith, like, that’s an actual reality for a lot of people - but as far as i can tell, usually not christians. and then there’s an afterword that’s like, “anyway i got recently converted and realized i’m a disgusting human being full of sin who doesn’t deserve redemption but jesus loves me so i’ll be fine!! remember to repent for your sins xoxo” and a bunch of other stuff and IT’S KIND OF REALLY CONCERNING i have, uh, been habitually looking at the reactions to and discussions around this, maybe it’s not very self care of me but there’s a lot of overwhelming things rn and it’s fantastically distracting, yknow? like, overall this situation is fairly reminiscent of the whole jkr thing. creator of a series that is Fairly Beloved, does something hurtful, handles backlash in a weird way, a lot of people start taking distance from Beloved Series or find ways to enjoy it on their own terms, creator later reveals to have been fully radicalized and releases a whole manifesto, and any and all criticism gets framed as harassment and proving them right. of course, one of them is a super rich person with a LOT of media power and a topic that is a lot more destructive in our current zeitgeist, and the other is an independent webcomic creator, so it’s  not the same situation. just similar vibez ya feel as a result of this, i have been Thinking. and just this feels like some sort of defeat like god dammit she got me i AM thinking about the topic she wrote about!!! i should dismiss the whole thing!!! but thinking about topics is probably a good thing so hey lets go. me, i’m agnostic. i understand that this is a ‘lazy’ position to take, but it’s what works for me. i simply do not vibe with organized religion, personally. (i had the wikipedia page for ‘chaos magic’ open in a tab for several weeks, if that helps.) i was raised by atheists in a majorly atheist culture. christian atheist, i should specify. norway has been mostly and historically lutheran, and religion has usually been a private and personal thing. it turns out the teacher i had in 7th grade was mormon, but i ONLY found out because he showed up in a tv series discussing religious groups in norway later, and he was honestly one of the best teachers i have ever had - he reignited the whole class’ interest in science, math, and dungeons and dragons. it was a real “wait WHAT” moment for my teenage self. i think i was briefly converted to christianity by my friend when i was like 7, who grew up in a christian family (i visited them a couple times and always forgot they do prayers before dinner. oops!), but like, she ALSO made me believe she was the guardian of a secret magic orb that controls the entire world and if i told anybody the world would burn down in 3 seconds. i only suspected something was off when one day the Orb ran on batteries, and another day the Orb had to be plugged in to charge. in my defense i really wanted to be part of a cool fantasy plot. i had no idea how to be a christian beyond “uuuuh believe in god i guess” so it just faded away on its own. when i met this friend several years later, she was no longer christian. i think every childhood friend of mine who grew up in a christian family, was no longer christian when they grew up. most notably my closest internet friend whose family was catholic - she had several siblings, and each of them took a wildly different path, from hippie treehugger to laveyan satanist or something in that area. (i joined them for a sermon in a church when they visited my town. my phone went off during it because i had forgotten to silence it. oops!) ((i also really liked their mother’s interpretation of purgatory. she explained it as a bath, not fire. i like that.)) i have never had any personal negative experiences with christianity, despite being openly queer/gay/trans. the only time someone has directly told me i’m going to hell was some guy who saw me wearing a hoodie on norway’s constitution day. yeah i still remember that you bastard i’ve sworn to be spiteful about it till the day i die!! i’ve actually had much more insufferable interactions with the obnoxious kind of atheists - like yes yes i agree with you on a lot but that doesn’t diminish your ability to be an absolute hypocrite, it turns out? i remember going to see the movie ‘noah’ with a friend who had recently discovered reddit atheism and it was just really exhausting to discuss it with her. one of these Obnoxious Atheists is my Own Mother. which is a little strange, honestly, because she LOVES visiting churches for the Aesthetic and Architecture. we cannot go anywhere without having to stop by a pretty church to Admire and Explore. I’VE BEEN IN SO MANY CHURCHES FOR AN ATHEIST RAISED NON-CHRISTIAN. i’ve been to the vatican TWICE (i genuinely don’t even know how much of my extended family is christian. up north in the tiny village i come from, i believe my uncle is the churchkeeper, and it’s the only building in the area that did not get burnt down by the the nazis during ww2 - mostly because soldiers needed a place to sleep. still don’t know whether or not said uncle believes or not, because hey, it’s Personal) i think my biggest personal relationship to religion, and christianity specifically, has been academic. yeah, we learned a brief synopsis of world religions at school (and i remember the class used to be called ‘christianity, religion, and ethics’ and got changed to ‘religion, beliefs, and ethics’ which is cool. it was probably a big discourse but i was a teen who didnt care), but also my bachelor degree is in art history, specifically western art history because it’s a vast sprawling topic and they had to distill it as best they could SIGHS. western art history is deeply entangled with the history of the church, and i think the most i’ve ever learnt about christianity is through these classes (one of my professors wrote an article about how jesus can be interpreted as queer which i Deeply Appreciate). i also specifically tried to diversify my academic input by picking classes such as ‘depiction of muslims and jewish people in western medieval art’ and ‘art and religion’ when i was an exchange student in canada, along with 101 classes in anthropology and archaeology. because i think human diversity and culture is very cool and i want to absorb that knowledge as best as i can. i think my exchange semester in canada was the most religiously diverse space have ever been in, to be honest. now as an adult i have more christian friends again, but friends who chose it for themselves, and who practice in ways that sound good and healthy, like a place of solace and community for them. the vast majority of my friends are queer too, yknow?? i’ve known too many people who have seen these identities as fated opposites, but they aren’t, they’re just parts of who people are. it’s like... i genuinely love people having their faiths and beliefs so much. i love people finding that space where they belong and feel safe in. i love people having communities and heritages and connections. i deeply respect and admire opening up that space for faith within any other communities, like... if i’m going to listen to a podcast about scepticism and cults, i am not going to listen to it if it’s just an excuse to bash religion. i think the search for truth needs to be compassionate, always. you can acknowledge that crystals are cool and make people happy AND that multi level marketing schemes are deeply harmful and prey on people in vulnerable situaitons. YOU KNOW???? so now’s when i bring up Apocalypse Comic again. one of the things i really did like about it was, ironically, how it handled religion. in its setting, people have returned to old gods, and their magic drew power from their religion. characters from different regions had different beliefs and sources. in the first arc, they meet the spirit of a lutheran pastor, who ends up helping them with her powers. it was treated as, in the creators own words, ‘just another mythology’. and honestly? i love that. it was one of the nicest depictions i’ve seen of christianity in fiction, and as something that could coexist with other faiths. I Vibe With That. and then, uh, then... bunny dystopia comic. it just... it just straight up tells you christianity is literally the only way to..?? be a good person??? i guess?? i’m still kind of struggling to parse what exactly it wanted to say. the evil social media overlord bird tells you the bible makes you a DANGEROUS FREETHINKER, but the comic also treats rewriting the bible or finding your own way to faith as something,, Bad. The Bible Must Remain Unsullied. Never Criticize The Bible. also, doing good things just for social media clout is bad and selfish. you should do good things so you don’t burn in hell instead. is that the message? it reads a lot like the comic creator already had the idea for the comic, but only got the urge to make it after she was converted and needed to spread the good word. you do you i guess!! i understand that she’s new to this and probably Going Through Something, and this is just a step on her journey. but the absolute self-loathing she described in her afterword... it does not sound good. i’m just some agnostic kid so what do i know, but i do not think that kind of self-flagellating is a kind faith to have for yourself. i might not ever have been properly religious, but you know what i AM familiar with? a brain wired for ocd and intrusive thoughts. for a lot of my life i’ve struggled with my own kind of purity complex. i’ve had this really strange sensitivity for things that felt ‘tainted’. i’ve experienced having to remove more and more words from my vocabulary because they were Bad and i did not want to sully my sentences. it stacked, too - if a word turned out to be an euphemism for something, i could never feel comfortable saying it again. i still struggle a bit with these things, but i have confronted these things within myself. i’ve had to make myself comfortable with imperfection and ‘tainted’ things and accept that these are just, arbitrary categories my mind made up. maybe that’s the reason i can’t do organized religion even if i found one that fit for me - just like diets can trigger disordered eating, i think it would carve some bad brainpaths for me. so yeah i’m worried i guess! i’m worried when people think it’s so good that she finally found the correct faith even if it’s causing all this self-hate. is there really not a better way? or are they just trusting she’ll find it? and yeah it’s none of my concern, it’s like, i worry for jkr too but i do not want her within miles of my trans self thANKS. so like, i DO enjoy media that explores faith and what it means for you. my favourite band is the oh hellos, which DOES draw on faith and the songwriter’s experience with it. because of my religious iliteracy most of it has flown over my head for years and i’m like “oh hey this is gay” and then only later realize it was about god all along Probably. i like what they’ve done with the place. also, stormlight archive - i had NO idea sanderson was mormon, the way he writes his characters, many of whom actively discuss religion and their relationship to it. i love that about the books, honestly. Media That Explores Religion In A Complex And Compassionate Way... we like that i’ve been thinking about my own stories too, and how i might want to explore faith in them. most of my settings are based on magic and it’s like, what role does religion have in a world where gods are real and makes u magic. in sparrow spellcaster’s story, xe creates? summons? an old god - brings them to life out of the idea of them. it’s a story about hubris, mostly. then there’s iphimery, the story where i am actively fleshing out a pantheon. there’s no doubt the gods are real in the fantasy version of iphimery, they are the source of magic and sustain themselves on slivers of humanity in exchange. but in the modern version, where they are mostly forgotten? that’s some room for me to explore, i think. especially the character of timian, who comes from a smaller town and moves to a large and diverse city. in the fantasy story, the guardian deity chooses his sister as a vessel. in the modern setting, that does not happen, and i don’t yet know what does, but i really want timian to be someone who struggles with his identity - his faith, his sexuality, the expectations cast upon him by his hometown... i’m sure it’s a cliché story retold through a million gay characters but i want to do it too okay. i want to see him carve out his own way of existing within the world because i care him and want to see him thrive!!! alrighty i THINK that’s all i wanted to write. thanks if you read all of this, and if you didn’t that’s super cool have a nice day !

[reineyday]

some feelings abt touya and bnha 302 in general! (long post)

jesus this whooooole chapter makes me so so so sad for touya, like he's canonically a crier and i just have all these images now of him crying off to the side while enji looks at his other kids and gives them the time of day. knowing that he was/is a frustrated crier makes the fact that dabi cant cry cuz of his burned tear ducts that much sadder ohhman

one of the things i cant get over is how touya was SO shunned by his dad that when he went to go tell enji about his fire turning from red to blue, he says "i might be as awesome as shouto sooner or later!" like?? this boy is 13 and shouto is 5 yet he's talking like the brother that's eight years younger than him is better than him and thar it's just a fact. the sky is blue, enji wants to beat all might one day, and shouto is better than the rest of his siblings. nevermind that he's only five and just wants to play with his siblings (and dont even mention to me how shouto says he wants to play with "touya and them" cuz im gonna fucking cry abt it. like even though touya's accepted he's bottom of the ladder in this family, shouto clearly wants some sort of acknowledgement from his older siblings and especially his older brother. IM FVCKN SOBBN). enji has made it clear in this family that shouto was what he was looking for and everyone else is not as important, and i knew this from shouto's pov but it's kinda wild to see it implied so casually in touya's words.

"you'll be glad you created me! i just know it!" HOLY SHIT. god my heart. oh my fuck. literally all enji had to do was show up to the fucking mountain, and he couldnt even do that? what the hell?? your son asks you to go to the mountain, you tell your wife not to let him go traim but she said she couldnt stop him, and instead of going yourself to make sure he's okay and BECAUSE HE ASKED YOU TO COME (and with an actually valid reason, no less! fire changing colour is kind of a big fucking deal!!!) you just?? let him go and let him stay there??? my god the amount of times touya must have burned himself and the trees with tears in his eyes. ahhhHHH!!!

what kills me (and touya too soon?) was that we thought before the back story started that enji forced touya to train till he burned up. then when 290 came out--and definitely after 301--we thought maybe touya overtrained himself and burned up. and sure, he was definitely overtraining, but to find out that the burns that "killed" him started just bc he was crying so much he lost control and didnt know how to ease up on his flames? he was upset and literally trying to get himself to stop crying, and then he just set himself aflame and burned up cuz of all his emotions??? that HURTS. holy fuck.

i cant believe natsuo's feeling lowkey guilty for not socking enji in the face like he wasnt EIGHT???? and let's be real, enji woukdnt have fucking listened to natsuo telling him to talk to touya--he already wasnt listening when touya would straight up say "look at me" and when even rei said touya just wanted enji to look at him and notice him. listen, i know sometimes miscommunications happen in families and children are embarrassed to admit they want attention and so their parents remain unaware that theyre not giving their kid something they want, but touya was as clear as can be on MANY occasions, and even rei agreed touya needed the attention and enji just wasnt listening.

also i know there was discourse abt touya being sexist by telling natsu that "the women in this house are good for nothing" and mb it was partly diff translations cuz i feel like saying "this house" makes it specific to rei and yumi instead of all women everywhere, but even disregarding that--i think it's a valid thought for him to have when rei wasnt standing up for him (where he could see, at least) and yumi admitted herself that she was too scared to interfere and so just tried to fix things and keep appearances. i feel like based on what touya's seen from them, it makes sense that he has that opinion. (also gonna mention that i think rei's and yumi's choices also make sense and i think they were valid, seeing as how they were afraid as well.)

and poor natsu being woken up in the middle of the night (what was implied to be often enough, esp cuz it seemed they share a room and their futons are close) bc of touya's pain. that's a lot of emotional responsibility for an eight year old, and it is also so sad that at 13, touya didnt have anyone else to turn to but his kid brother. at 13, i remember being fully aware of the distinction in maturity between an 8 year old and myself, and it sucks that touya couldnt go to anyone but a younger child with all his pain. i bet yumi being too scared to interfere translated to touya as "she wouldnt help me" and thats another reason he didnt go to the 2nd oldest when he needed to vent. (also not related to this but how the FUCK was natsuo so tall at 8 years old? wh a t)

this chapter. this fucking chapter. my heart aches for touya, and it's just such a huge fucking shame he didnt get the attention and validation and support he needed. there must have been workarounds so that touya could safely use his quirk. there weere DEFINITELY better ways to support your son through a self-destructive quirk, ways that involved actually being there and seeing him. i feel like if someone showed him the attention he needed and talked him through how to better control his emotions (and by extension, his flames) and a positive and healthy way, he could have been someone so great. and if he ever learned how to set aside the way he felt infefior to shouto and saw that shouto just wanted to play with his cool older siblings, it might have been really beneficial to see that there was someone there who thinks he's cool and gave him attention just bc he was an older brother, who needed him when everyone else in the househild didnt seem to need him.

and lastly, the fact that the chapter ends with rei saying that shouto is the family hero and that shouto will have to face dabi?? and it makes me angry that shouto has to take on that responsibility. that he was five and suffering for things he wasnt even a part of, couldnt be properly aware of, bc he was so young. he just saw that he was separated from his siblings and that his dad bullied his mom, then grew up shouldering enji's heavy goals and high expectations and abusive training alongside the barely-there memories of his older brother who died (i say barely there bc if natsu didnt even know shouto liked cold soba, shouto was definitely not around enough to have solid memories of touya before he "died"), and now he has to do the emotional labour of fighting his villain brother (who i bet shouto lowkey empathizes with when he thinks abt it late at night) as well as suffer the physical consequences of that agni kai. and it makes me angry that he has to do that, bc he's a Good Guy and he probably feels he has some sort of filial and familial responsibility. he's only 16. he just wanted to play with touya and them, and now he has to deal with this horse shit dabi's causing cuz his dad's an emotionally neglecting asshat who couldnt see past his dumb fucking ego until he saw shouto play with a bunch of kids during shou's remedial exam a decade after his eldest son burned himself to death. what the fuckety fuck.

lastly, since we saw touya burn uo the way he did... did he really just like... burn so much his jaw fell off, and that's how they found the jawbone? cuz holy hot (BURNING too soon???) damn that must have been painful as all hell. i wonder if next chapter we get to see if someone found touya at the park and helped him out and sorted out the jaw bone thing, or if we finally get to see if deku wakes up lol.

anyways this chapter hurt my heart big time, and i kinda wanna draw kid touya crying while being overlooked by his family to let out some of those feelings but we'll see.

and i still stand by my idealistic and naively optimistic hope that dabi gets redeemed and they soend some actually time together as a family (without enji. or at least, with an enji that has apologized to touya in seiza. like, forehead-to-floor apologize.)

does this hope sort out how dabi redeems himself, seeing as how he's murdered people in cold blood and shouldnt be excused for that bc those actions are also inarguably terrible? no. not sure how he could redeem himself for that kinda stuff honestly, but it doesnt mean i dont still somehow want the todoroki sibs to get along, cuz im weak for mending families.

also id like to send a huge kudos out into the world to rei todoroki for being firm for once and for also not running away from her mistakes like her asshole husband has been. i really admire and respect that. she was afraid and being abused, but now that she's been away from enji and has had time to heal, now that her and shouto are in the mend and she's seen that her eldest son is alive and a villain, she's a place where she can acknowledge that even though she was a victim too, she played a part in touya's emotional neglect and she's taking responsibility and that speaks to some incredible fucking strength. damn.

i hope one day that dabi realizes the same in regards to his mother and natsuo, who shouldered a lot of his emotional pain and suffered the consequences of his outbursts (even though his emotions are valid and his outbursts understandable, he still hurt rei and put a lot of pressure on natsu), and i also hope he sees that for all that he hates his father, his whole existence revolves around enji and it's a shitty place to be (and then he'll have ANGST abt it and that shit will be!! so good!!!)

yeah i think those were all my feelings. i had so many lol. their family situation is so difficult, i hope they all turn out okay and alive and healing.

oh i guess i also wanted to say that i kept calling enji an asshat and asshole cuz he was for sure, but i still think his redemption is valid and im glad he's taking those steps to be a better person by being a better father. i dont know if id want his family to forgive him for all that horrible shit he put them through (im personally hoping that no matter what anyone else does, natsuo will choose to to cooperate in the healing of his family as a unit but will never forgive enji) but i think it's good of people to try to be better than they were yesterday regardless of whether or not they get forgiveness. i dont personally like enji, but i dont hate that he's getting a redemption. i just hope it's a redemption that makes sense and forces him to put in the work, and isnt something like a death sacrifice for shouto or dabi. i want him to be alive and i want his redemption process to hurt like a fucking bitch while he forces himself to make better choices and be a better person, cuz redemption isnt supposed to be easy in the slightest. i GUESS all the crying he did in 302 was a good start.

anyways, if for some reason you read all the way down to the bottom--hello! and thanks for reading haha. cheers! :)))

[misterbitches]

being a fan of chengren is a death sentence it seems like bc this story is so poorly written and disjointed that we get NO FUCKING TIME WITH THEM and im not joking but xing si and the rapist dude and that awful family take up way too much time in the sense that it honestly sours your feelings for a bit. i skip around a lot but sometimes i want to laugh at how stupid and mind-boggling it is but i realize how much that dampens my feelings when i get to the people i want to see. and a show shouldnt be like that, even with questionable characters. it just sucks and i think a big part of it is how contradictory the message of the show is as well. you have this imperfect couple in a really weird genre and a horrible series but they can get their main relationships (usually) uh i wouldnt say right. but they are there.

everything about chengren is so fucking opposite? there's also just how fucking awkward they made the writing when their conclusion was of course what they were hinting at (sometimes i'm like so did half of you like go to film school or are experienced in the field if you didnt—cos it's a fucking racket and a scam—because sometimes it's like oh gee some decent production but mostly it's like did ANY of you read the LAST SCENE you JUST WROTE?) like imagine how much better of a time we could have spent without the top/bottom discourse particularly since htey directly tied it to rape.

which is another thing, i get that this is fetishization and projection of patriarchy and bullshit of the highest order but for the love of god it literally harms every single group you're purporting to support with the constantly conflation of sexuality with LITERAL SEX especially especially when it comes to consent. people aren't gay or attracted to people on the spectrum or same-sex or whatever because of trauma nor do they have to be set in stone. i mean i have to critique the genre as a whole when i comment because without the whole shitty structure it could be different but it isn't and that's what happens when shit is appropriated and removed from its owners so the people in these groups want nothing to do with it mostly, which is evident.

as a woman/as women it's okay to acknowledge that too like we are being voyeurs in a sense watching this, i mean we are participating in the shit, but like exploitation is par for the course. the thing is it rests on OUR exploitation as well because it is about women and yes that's fucked up and strange but that is literally capitalism at work. that's why this is so easy to spread and it's soft power.

but then to get to the point after 8 episodes about a dick going in a butt the writers are like "oh these grown men actually know how to have conversations we totally forgot that they can talk about sex and be done with this convo in two seconds"

TO BE FAIR....that was a good convo and it was a good conclusion since they included it at every turn in the worst way possible. i have one more complaint (probably more) but when muren is drugged or whatever the frame of anson chen's body / his back when teng teng sees him gives me nightmares. it is so visually unappealing and i'm angry that someone looked at that frame and the blocking and went "this is good yes" his body makes no sense in that shot and it isn't sensual he reminds me of a fucking titan and i don't like it. UGH THEY SHOULD HAVE RAISED THE CAMERA OR SOMETHING. IT GIVES ME NIGHTMARES.

we all need to talk to the production team. i don't know how much credit i can give them (i'll go with none until they pay off my film school debt) because the actors carry so much weight for why we like chengren. i think because they are older, more comfortable as actors, so the stupid shit they say seems more plausible. and because the two can play off each other and have that comfort it really seems like them. they also make these stupid lines of dialogue their own. there's lots of room for improvement, i think on anson's part especially, but even if they say things that are just ridiculous, we don't have so much cringe. idk because i know that the rest of the show is just so fucking dumb and im like....idek i cannot give anyone but them (anson, charles) credit (oh and the poor crew members like lighting and shit who had to stand around for this garbage my god)

sadly i think they may be my fav couple from history. which is really saying something because this is an ACTUAL nightmare.

[jamboreeofsurprises]

idk how to say this in a way that wont come across as whiny and dumb and make it even more apparent how autistic i am but whatever, its my personal blog, it’s meant to be a judge-free zone anyway. its not like im not putting out this thought to change how anyone feels about anything im just ranting.

pixar has been an important special interest of mine for decades (!) as their movies were literally some of the only movies i looked forward to seeing as a kid. i hated going to the theater because of the sensory nightmare of it all but braved it for pixar movies because they tickled my imagination so much. nearly every year had a new pixar movie which was a big event in my life for that year. i think they have struggled a lot since the 2010s especially as an over-focus on sequels happened (largely as a result of corporate disney grip) so don’t assume by any means i’m uncritical of them. as with anything else i like, i’m not about to pretend like it’s golden all the time just because i’m a fan

but i feel like most of my mutuals now immediately want to assume negatively of pixar because theyre mainstream and un-vogue and pretend like the incredibly stagnant, unchanged western animation landscape they were born of didn’t exist and how crucial their defiance towards it was for moving the medium forward. when it came to western animated movies we had disney movies and disney-imitation movies, that is to say, Fairy Tale Musicals and Other Fairy Tale Musicals. which, don’t get me wrong, i love a good fairy tale musical, but pixar were special and not just for beautifully introducing & advancing 3d cg feature animation, but because their angle was telling completely new stories that challenged this whole format. it was absolutely a breath of fresh air. and the movies could be pretty genuinely touching too for both older and younger members of the audience, usually without even having to have melodramatic character deaths or anything. monsters inc. is pure character-motivated drama and the ending made me cry buckets as a kid and still does because the characters are lovable and relatable. you don’t have to throw in a dead parents backstory or whatever for me to sincerely feel that emotion for them.

as we ushered into the 00s and walt disney animation, dreamworks, etc got a load of the critical and commercial success of pixar, their response was to copy the technology but very little of the creativity/heart. dreamworks i have come to realize at least with Shrek were still doing something pretty subversive albeit in a different direction that i think was forward-thinking but by and large, attempts to hop on the wagon of what made Pixar capture the world’s attention were pretty misguided. i think as the 00s progressed more unique animated movies started coming out as things picked up real good around 2009 (you need only glance at the academy nominations that year to realize just how varied and good every entry was) so pixar kinda got left in the dust a bit in the 2010s, and the change of direction didnt help but my god, that doesnt override their significance in the whole pantheon of animation. but i feel like everyone is forgetting that and it makes me feel like im losing my mind that im the only person remembering just how crummy most other american animated movies of the 00s were. dont get me wrong im not saying that anyone who dislikes pixar or is critical of a movie of theirs is doing it to be some Mean Hater™, but i feel that the level of negativity is strangely disproportionate to that of other animation studios which is like ??? is it just because people like them and have for years so now we have to turn that around arbitrarily?

idk i just feel like because other studios have stepped up their game some people discredit pixar entirely and that hurts. the thing that has sucked the most about it is how i don’t even feel allowed to eagerly anticipate anything pixar is going to put out even when i want to because it has to immediately be couched in such harsh judgment and discourse, which /*AGAIN*/ is not me saying they’re infallible and should never be criticized. anything and everything is open to criticism, i have my own apprehensions about some of their movies too. i just feel like the aura of negativity online surrounding each pixar release now leaves me an anxious mess while anticipating/watching the movie instead of going into it with the childlike wonder i want to go in with and could go in with because i feel like ppl are going to think i’m basic or just flat out stupid for liking the thing, no matter how sincerely.

which like, i’m not friggin basic. kanashimi no belladonna is one of my favorite animated movies lol. and so is up (the movie that made me interested in animation & storytelling as artforms), ratatouille, etc ... its almost like some mainstream things are good and popular for a reason?

this rant isnt even telling you anything, i know ive historically been overly sensitive to people being critical/negative about things that mean a lot to me and i need to get the hell over it, i just feel frustrated by everyone’s relentless negativity these days and feel like at this point so much of it’s not even coming from good faith

[captaincronus]

big text // just ignore probably LMAO (unless you want to hear my opinion on hstwt and why i hate it) you know there was a very long time where i was just completely disconnected to homestuck at all and it was mostly just because when that twitter move happened i got a lot deeper into the real fandom of homestuck instead of just being casually in my own little space; people would retweet their agendas and things, and it became a lot more personal than just... you know... following someone for their art. and i guess i just got so away from it, i didnt want to have anything to do with what other people were doing in the fandom- specifically because the hstwt will always be against trans people. and it doesnt matter who it is, men, women, nbs, it literally does not matter. one week they could be bashing a trans woman, and the very next trans men got the same treatment. it was honestly very fucking tiring, and i just was done with it, and i didnt want to see it anymore so i cut homestuck out of my feed LMAO- and im not quite sure who was really pushing this, if there was just this inherent discourse about who was “better”, “less represented” or, “who went through the most shit”. it never made sense to me, how people could be so stubborn and always wanting that title for “i have a worse life than you do, so more people should pay attention to me” kind of deal, instead of just realizing that everyone goes through their own pain and struggles and nobody needs to be put down over it... for me, homestuck is what brought me into realizing who i am in terms of self; i know that sounds a little- a lot dumb, but it’s what i was into in my teens, and i still am, and it just like, had that influence on me- and it pained me a lot to see the fandom being so parted on it when most of us could probably say the same thing? idk. just generally not a fun time. but even throughout all of that, i was just trapped in my own little bubble, but i didnt touch homestuck in so long, and just now doing so, i remember why my handle will most likely always be CaptainCronus- it’s just, a big part of my life LMAO i dont think ill ever fully come back to the fandom, i dont think ill ever want to be in any more homestuck group chats, servers or even interact with much of the fandom anymore, aside from art posting. its alright to enjoy something just for yourself, and only yourself, and thats what i want to do sorry for the rant and the big word salad post, this fandom has been very hard for me, and im not ready to give it up fully, but i wont be diving in head first either again