#i dont think it's that big a deal

[thrumbolt]

I see people continue to lose their shit over printed fanfiction - and yes it's obviously illegal and yes most of the time it's not even the actual people who wrote that fanfic who sell the prints (which is EXTRA scummy) but I keep wondering....

Is it really different from selling fanart prints, stickers and other merch? Why does the community accept doing art commissions of licensed characters, but printed fanfictions (assuming they were done by the actual writer) are where everyone is losing their shit and worries about legal repercussions?

Like, I see fanart sticker sets with stolen artwork on Amazon, but printed fanfic will bring down the legal hammer on fandoms? I just don't really see it.

[bugcatcherkit]

Man that sure is a Situation where two 14 year olds push the limits of each other’s trauma responses until they both reach extreme breaking points. and then they deal with the aftermath basically all by themselves. Isn't that super awesome and totally not kinda fucked up at all.

[queermasculine]

I identify as butch but have lots of soft plushies in my bed... do you think I ought to remove them before I invite someone over for hookups? never see any butches with plushies tbh so a bit selfconscious

don't be self-conscious dude. hoarding plushies is a masculine trait. your ancient shepherd instinct. if i came over and saw a butch had a bunch of plushies i wouldn't be like Ew i'd be like Bro, your deep intrinsic drive to protect and shelter other creatures is being channelled into collecting all these little yarn animals and tiny cloth people? kiss me

[meamiki]

silly comic based on a time i struggled to read live on stream :thumbsup:

context clip compilation below ASDASDFASA

(cw for brief mention of hospitals/strokes)

[v-arbellanaris]

hrmrmrm idk that i am actually all that impressed by this incredibly simplistic explanation im getting in veilguard of the archdemons basically just being regular dragons enthralled by the evanuris. like. sorry but isnt that literally what corypheus did with his dragon. im sorry okay, i just...

okay. let me try and explain my issue with it. solas says, in trespasser, the first of my people do not die so easily. and sure, i suppose a dragon is not exactly an easy kill except for the way there's literally dragon hunters in thedas. as the warden, i killed at least three dragons including urthemiel. hawke kills at least one high dragon. as the inquisitor i kill like. eleven. so its a difficult task. but clearly not impossible? and as we see with corypheus - kill the dragon, and the main body becomes completely vulnerable and mortal again. the pride demon in the opening was harder to kill than corypheus was after his dragon died. h*cruxing the dragon is so simple j/kr could've thought of this, and i feel cheated of the like... scale of the magic and power that the evanuris commanded before the veil came up? i dont want to see magic we already thought of, i want to see how a world without the veil allows them to command magic in a completely unimaginable, unfathomable way to the way we currently can conceptualise magic at all in thedas.

i guess you could argue that it's either solas' hubris or the evanuris' pride that they thought no one else would ever figure out the secret to effective immortality but there's apparently at least 200 shards of mythal swimming around out here possessing people and shit. you cant throw a fucking rock in thedas without hitting 3 mythals. that is what i would consider not dying easily. and, if they go down the route i suspect of confirming that the ancient elves are spirits made flesh, i wish there was some kind of reference to the fade forever reflecting the desires and beliefs and dreams of people in the waking world - which is to say that, for example, simply still believing that mythal or elgar'nan or ghilan'nain still exists is enough to bring the shards of their spirit back together again - just like solas' wisdom spirit friend in dai.

my private working theory is that if the evanuris are spirits made flesh, then somehow, the creation of the veil effectively... made them tranquil, in a way. separated their mortal bodies - trapped, as mindless archdemons, slumbering in the deep roads, in the mortal coil - from their spirit selves, locked in the black city behind the veil. this would explain why he needs to move them in the first place, to a more secure prison - corypheus fucking up the veil in 9:41 reconnected the physical bodies of the evanuris to the spiritual selves trapped in the fade. idk i just feel a bit like. not to say caught out, but i feel like a lot of the lore drops are just like "whats popular fanon theory about this. lets just confirm that" and i wish there was just... something more. some attempt at surprising me or aweing me with the lore drops. like it is what you think but there is something else here you didn't think of, or it's more complicated than that - to leave some kind of mystery behind, still. but idk.

[thylacid]

Queerplatonic relationships are not bad. I do not think queerplatonic relationships are Bad and Shouldnt happen -- ive been in qprs myself in the past, however I think when a character turns to the camera and says "I dont want to be in a relationship, the concept of it grosses me out" and then the rest of the story goes lengths to show just how important platonic love is, something that is very rare in media and something that Needs to be said and portrayed more, it just rubs me the wrong way to then see that character shipped. idk. this is once again just my take as an aromantic

[usertoxicyaoi]

"Despair and sex go well together."

TAIKAN YOHOU (2023). EPISODE FIVE.

[kyonshi-8610]

ᜉᜓᜆᜁᜈ ᜀᜅ᜔ ᜎᜃᜐ᜔ ᜅ᜔ ᜂᜎᜈ᜔ ᜀᜇᜏ᜔ ᜀᜇᜏ᜔ ᜊᜓᜋᜊᜑ potaina ang lakas ng ulan araw araw bumabaha

[stromblessed]

Mizu's spectacles, and the levels of her disguise

In drafting some more Blue Eye Samurai meta posts, I find myself writing out the comparisons between what Mizu can and cannot hide about herself, and how that affects how she moves through the world.

Like, I get the jokes about Mizu's glasses, if only color contacts had existed back then, etc. etc., and I think (hope) that most viewers don't take the glasses jokes seriously, as in "I don't care about the suspension of disbelief because BES is a cartoon." But I wanted to write these thoughts out anyway without burying them in a text post about something else.

I think the points I'm going to lay out here are viewed very differently by different people, so please feel free to add to this post, reply, or put your thoughts in the tags!

Not only do Mizu's glasses not actually help her that much, there's surely more to Mizu's mixed race appearance than just the color of her eyes.

In my view, this was pointed out in episode 1:

I'm willing to bet most of us were expecting young Taigen to say "blue eyes," not "ROUND eyes."

Obviously this is still about Mizu's eyes, but not even spectacles can hide their shape.

I don't think the show is obligated to point out everything about Mizu's face that isn't quite as Japanese as the people around her expect. Though the creators have said that they specifically designed Mizu - and her clothes - to read both as "white" and as "Japanese," as well as both male and female. I think there's more about Mizu's features that read as "white" than just her eyes.

This is where my own headcanons start entering the picture, but it's my impression that people can just tell that Mizu looks different, whether or not they can put a finger on exactly how.

There's the little girl who looks at Mizu and then hides on the way into Kyoto:

When there's more to your face you'd like to cover up than just your eyes, big hats are a big help!

By the way, most of these examples have to come from the first half of the season, since by the second half, either Mizu is too preoccupied with fighting henchmen, or everyone Mizu is facing knows who she is already, and she therefore has no reason to hide her mixed race identity.

It's worth mentioning that the mere fact that Mizu has to hide multiple aspects of her identity - her mixed race and her sex - results in her having to choose clothes that really, really cover her up, which doesn't win her any favors either:

(Zatoichi reference, anyone?)

If it were as easy as, for example, tying her glasses to her head and wa-lah, nobody would ever know she was half-white - then (1) Mizu would've just done that long ago, and (2) Mizu wouldn't be so on guard and on tenterhooks 100% of the time the way she's depicted in the show, even when her glasses are on.

Her spectacles sure don't help her in the brothel, which is full of observant women who are trying to seduce her, meaning they get good long looks at her:

Mizu never takes her glasses off, but they still send a woman to her who has light eyes, thinking that must be what will interest a blue-eyed man:

No wonder Mizu gets mad after this, lol

So Mizu never takes her spectacles off in the brothel, it's dimly lit inside, and the women can still tell that she has blue eyes. I'm getting the sense that Mizu putting on her spectacles isn't a guarantee that people suddenly can't tell that she looks different.

And yet no one spots that she's female.

Mizu can hide her breasts, can wear her hair in the right style, can hide what's between her legs, can walk and talk and behave like a man - and she's been doing it for almost her entire life, to the point that not only is she very good at it, but the threat of being found out as female is deadly, but isn't presented in the show as omnipresent.

Let me explain.

She threatens Ringo for nearly saying the word "girl" out loud, because while she's constantly ostracized for being mixed race, being a woman traveling without a chaperone, carrying a sword, and disguised as a man will get her killed or flogged or arrested or some combination of these things.

But in addition, it's been drilled into her since she was a child that if she is discovered as female, the combination of her being mixed race and female will identify her as someone extremely specific, someone known to some bad people, and she will be killed:

I think of it as Mizu thinking to herself, "Being found out as mixed race means I'm treated badly. Being found out as mixed race and a woman means I'm dead."

Mizu's hair is cut as a child. But she isn't made to wear a big hat, or cover her eyes somehow, or anything like that. Because hiding her sex is a more successful endeavor than hiding her race.

Ringo finds out she's female by accident, but once Mizu accepts the fact that he won't rat her out, she relaxes pretty early on in the season. Because the threat of being found out as female is mitigated pretty much 99.9%, since Mizu has gotten so good at being a man. And also, because most of the time, people see what they want to see. Even if Mizu's face makes her stand out as "not 100% Japanese," no one in the world of BES looks at Mizu's clothes, her bearing, her sword, hears her voice, and will ever in a million years conclude that she is a woman, because expectations around gender roles in the Edo period were so rigid and so widely enforced.

One detail that proved this to me is after the Four Fangs fight:

Ringo takes off Mizu's clothes so he can stitch her up, then leaves her clothes off even after he's done. He doesn't even throw her cloak over her as a blanket or anything. There's a little a straw (pallet?) as a divider there on the left, but anyone could just peek around it and see Mizu and her chest bindings. (I think it's mostly there as a windbreaker.)

And Taigen is right there, but he doesn't give a shit:

Opinions probably vary hugely on this, but my impression is that because the show doesn't make any kind of deal about Taigen being in the room with Mizu here, my guess is that Mizu isn't in any danger of Taigen thinking she's female. Even when I watched the show for the first time, I assumed that Taigen had seen Mizu out of her clothes here, and that he thought nothing of it.

Eat your heart out, Li Shang (Mulan 1998). I actually do think that this scene is a direct and purposeful side-eye to that movie, lol

There's obviously some nuance to how "severe" being mixed race is compared to how "severe" being a woman is for Mizu:

After all, Swordfather can't bear to listen to Mizu confess to being a woman.

So a Japanese man can go wherever he wants, whenever he wants in BES. A Japanese woman has limited options: marriage, religion, or a brothel. A mixed-race man is an eyesore in this story. A mixed-race woman is a death sentence.

May as well eliminate the female aspect, and do what you can about the mixed-race aspect. Because that's just realistic.

Meaning Mizu can avoid the strictures Edo society places on women. But she can't avoid the repercussions that come with being mixed race. And I truly don't think that it's just because "there's no brown contacts yet."

[introspectivememories]

nah cause like you dont get it!!!! the sully kids and spider are a unit!!! they're puzzle pieces that fit together perfectly. the very definition of "the gang is what i trust"!!! they're together their whole lives and then spider gets taken and all of a sudden the puzzle is in disarray. kiri's so spacey cause she doesn't have spider to bring her back down to pandora. lo'ak's acting out cause he doesn't have his usual partner-in-crime/fellow outcast to make light mischief with. neteyam is like two seconds away from a heart attack/stroke the whole movie because the other kid he used to parent his siblings with for the past like decade is gone!!! and spider on the other hand? is completely alone. at least the other four have each other. all spider has is his alien racist, genocidal, imperialist dad dragging him on the world's worst war crime road trip. there's no kiri to get him out of his head. there's no lo'ak to to be outcasts with. there's no neteyam to have a quiet reassurance that they're in this together with. there's just him and his stupid, fucking mind. and then they blend his brain at bridgehead and it's over for him.

[stealingpotatoes]

Once in an interview I think the actor of Yord said that Anakin blew up the Death Star.

let him cook maybe he's onto something

[anime-related]

Satou and Toritsuka are in the same class...

And Toritsuka's class did a cross dressing maid cafe...

Which means Satou was involved in a cross dressing maid Cafe.

Why is there no art about this??? Why are there no fics about this???

[medi-bee]

isat pokemon au, my liege?

my rambling in tags

[cosmicheartz]

CLEM AND CRYSTAL SCREENSHOT REDRAW

og screenshot

[redrobin-detective]

I’ve never seen this talked about but I found this a truly interesting bit of Skull lore. When he was alive it was a good century before the Problem started and ghosts were generally thought as fanciful.

But Skull could clearly see them, enough to be able to ward them off while making the bone glass. It gives so much context as to how and why Skull ended up with Bickerstaff and possibly explains how he’s able to communicate in the modern day.

I think Skull had been another ‘once in a generation’ psychic talent like Marissa and Lucy had been. Hell, Marissa has proven that with enough talent one could see spirits pre-problem. Skull’s innate talent from when he was alive is the reason he’s able to talk to Lucy, another talented Listener. Does Skull even know how incredible it was to see spirits before it was a nation wide problem???

[radioactive-mouse]

so i got to thinking about the timeline a bit