#i feel like people are going to judge me

[sweetpumpkinmouse]

Oh boy—

Oswald the Lucky Rabbit (Disney)

Glamrock Freddy (FNAF)

Laurance Zvhal (Minecraft Diaries)

Noi (My Inner Demons)

Patton (Sander Sides)

@milothem4ge @theminimani @leafyboneking @mushysposts @rain-yskies

five comfort characters, five tags

(had to start a new thread, got too long) thanks for tagging me @loulooser ooh i like this okay - nick nelson (osemanverse) - aled last (osemanverse) - peeta mellark (hunger games) - linh song (keeper of the lost cities) - xavier hawthorne (the inheritance games)

tagging @lyssified @mister3127 @raeny-nights-and-faery-lights @weirdo09 @charliethinks

[marypsue]

Man, it's cool and all if you see a metaphor for marginalisation in the monstrous, and if you want the power fantasy of 'what if you could just eat anybody who threatened you/pissed you off'. Me too.

However, as soon as you start saying 'no, these monsters are a 1:1 on Specific Marginalised Group, and you have to treat them in the fiction like they are directly representative of real human members of the marginalised group', BUT you also, in the fiction, make them hurt/kill/eat humans? And then try to shame me, your audience, for noticing or engaging with the bit where they kill people, because you made them directly representative of a real-world marginalised group? You have lost me, and also, I think, the plot.

[kacievvbbbb]

You do get the sense that the fallout of Roger's death and the Roger pirates disbanding not so much traumatized Buggy and Shanks indifferent ways but instead generated such drastically different reactions to the trauma.

While the trauma of everything seemed to push Shanks into the future, always constantly waiting for something, putting plans on hold and then later in place, for this great moment, this great coming that he sees on the Horizon. For Buggy it rooted him firmly in the past keeping him trapped in this grief masquerading as anger.

While Roger's death forced Shanks to grow up fast, it kind of arrested Buggy's development keeping him stuck in those same feelings, rooted int that same place.

You get the sense that Buggy's whole east blue schtick is just one long overdue rebellious phase one big fuck you to Roger and his ideals. He's rebelling against Roger's principles. One of their rules was don't steal from innocent people and Buggy was keeping a whole town in poverty. If Roger and Luffy's pirating styles are diametrically opposed to someone like Blackbeard, who might be the most literal pirate in the entire series, then buggy is the parody of that Blackbeard piratism. He is playing up cruelty, being the most piratey pirate possible, hell he's literally a clown on a stage. It's all a show! It's his own special way of trying to "get back at Roger" of trying to discard everything Roger taught him for this overacted, over exaggerated clownish cruelty. Mentally he never left that execution square. He is still 15, alone and scared.

Hell he literally never left either, while I'm pretty sure Shanks' booked it out of the east blue as fast as he could, Buggy never lef, might have never left, if not for Luffy. It's part of why Luffy bothers him so much, he's just like Roger everything that Buggy is trying hard to forget and here comes this kid, whose never even met the Captain but is wearing his hat, shoving it right back in his face.

It makes sense that he never leaves the east blue till Luffy literally forces him out of it (fucking with Luffy gets him captured and imprisoned) and it makes sense that it's Luffy that literally breaks him out of prison, literally sets him free, and on the path to greatness that maybe he was always meant to achieve (even if he trips his way into it). This boy that is tragically so much like his old captain but so beautifully unabashedly himself, is what Buggy needs to start letting go off the past, to start trying to move forward.

Maybe that's why Buggy, at what could arguably be described as his lowest moment, gets the strength to free himself from his own self imprisonment, realizing that even back then he was locking himself away and pinning his own dreams on Shanks. And, maybe for the first time ever, Buggy really own his dream. He declares to his tormentors and his crew and the entire world that; actually He wants to find the one piece, him, as captain of his own crew, this crew, not just a part of someone else's. That's his dream and he's willing to turn the world upside down to do it.

[caligvlasaqvarivm]

To elaborate more on the Pesterquest stuff -

Alternia is a hell world. It's shitty to live in, even if you're a highblood, unless you fit a very specific mold of person AND are lucky enough to be born of a high caste. Every troll character we care about is, in some way, fucked over by their relationship to their society; Eridan and Vriska get it the worst, having been forced to participate in the murdering side of things since they were young, but every lowblood is screwed and every highblood is made worse even just by their passive participation. Kanaya becomes less sympathetic because she seems completely at peace with the society she grew up in, and Feferi wants to enforce casteism, even if it's of a different flavor. Gamzee and Equius both hold genuinely casteist beliefs and attitudes, which slip out and alienate them from the people they care about.

Putting a friendship simulator into the middle of all this is... a choice, I guess. I'm not going to begrudge anyone for wanting that or liking that, but it's going to be inherently at odds with what Alternia is and is meant to represent, and thus, fundamentally at odds with many of the characters' arcs and even basic personality traits, so heavily are they influenced by the shit society they grew up in.

For a non-Eridan example, Karkat loathes himself in massive part because his society loathes him. He's kill-on-sight and lives in daily terror of death. He wears a symbol at all because not having one marks him as even more of a freak, even though he knows that that symbol is connected to the empire's biggest rebel, whose footsteps he is expected to follow. The reason he's so obsessed with being leader-y and earning his teammates' reapect, or the respect of anybody, is because he's so deeply insecure about whether or not he even deserves to exist.

If you soften Alternia to the point you can write a lighthearted friendship simulator in it, then that characterization... goes away. Karkat is no longer motivated by deep, overwhelming insecurities, which drive him to idolize the society that deems him unworthy, mistakenly believing that if he can find validation in that society, he'll feel less bad about himself. Instead, Karkat is just kind of an asshole!

It's the same way with Eridan. He and Karkat are equal and opposite in this way - while Karkat is marked for death by his society, Eridan belongs to the extremely privileged caste of sea dweller royalty - even moreso than Feferi, as Feferi is slated to be murdered by the Condesce as soon as she comes of age (and her ridiculous optimism is likely something she cultivated in outright defiance of this fate). But it turns out that being a sea dweller sucks shit, too, if you aren't the extremely niche type of person that society deems "correct."

Eridan is not actually casteist and genuinely likes his land dweller friends - and this is unacceptible. Not only that, but smaller "unacceptible" offenses are wrapped up in big ones - despite not liking murder and feeling guilty about it, murder is objectively the correct thing for Eridan to be doing, constantly, to the point of it being "all [he's] ever done practically," because if he doesn't fulfil the duty of his bloodline to be murdering lusii (and by extension, their charges, who are culled when their lusii die), EVERYBODY dies. The constant push-pull of trauma, societal expectations and obligations, the fate of the species, and the fact that he is inherently not the "right" kind of person for his society, are pretty much his entire character. He's basically a walking ball of anxiety and emotional turmoil.

So, again, if you soften Alternia to the point where you can write a story about Eridan wanting to see Shrek in a public theater (something he would not actually be able to peacefully do in canon Alternia - at least not without taking off his cape, hiding his fins, and going anonblood - as sea dwellers are considered ridiculously hostile to the point even Gamzee's nervous about being on the beach for too long), Eridan ends up being just kind of an asshole!

Pesterquest!Eridan is, and I cannot stress this enough, fundamentally not the same guy as canon Eridan. They have practically nothing in common, from the fact that PQ!Eridan is willing to do something for leisure, to the fact that he isn't widely feared and the movie theater doesn't empty out in a panic when he turns up, even down to the fact that he likes femme fashion (canon Eridan goes to Lengths to lean into masc fashion) and Shrek (canon Eridan is a hipster). Hell, even the fact that PQ!Eridan SMILES is a massive deviation from canon!Eridan, who has never once been depicted smiling, and probably hasn't for many sweeps.

Also that he has that much beef with Sollux when, canonically, the two had a lukewarm mutual dislike and didn't even bother interacting until Feferi was added to the mix and Eridan became mad that Sollux was dating her. He wasn't even casteist about him until then, and after, even Sollux and Feferi don't think he's casteist, they just think he's ashenflirting so he can get into a quad with Feferi. Like come on, if you're going to feature another troll in Eridan's route, 1) make it be Karkat, and 2) have Eridan cheat on you the whole time with Karkat like he does to Feferi.

Eridan is just overall a wild choice in a friendship sim - I can't even blame them for just writing an OC and putting an Eridan skin on top - because societally, Eridan isn't even supposed to have non-sea dweller friends. The sea dweller/land dweller race war is something the Condesce deliberately put into place in order to keep land dwelling nobility in line, and Equius cites it as one of the reasons he never got along with Eridan. Like, the very fact that Eridan talks to two land dwellers on friendly terms (Kanaya and Karkat) is a MASSIVE deviation from what he's "supposed" to be like, and a huge hint that he's not as casteist as he'd like to appear. You are genuinely hundreds, if not thousands, of times likelier to end an encounter with Eridan either orphaned or dead than as his friend. He's an unstable maniac, and there's a reason so many members of his team don't like him even though he's legitimately not casteist and they mostly seem aware of it (nobody really complains about or even notices Eridan's casteism by the time they're on the meteor - his contradictions are really obvious, and it's likely that they've more or less realized that he's full of shit).

Again, I don't begrudge anybody for wanting or liking PQ. Who cares, really. I'm just saying that as a canon discussion blog, there's not really any place for PQ because it's so far removed from canon that, like, there's not really anything meaningful to discuss about it. The setting and characters in PQ are fundamentally divested from canon, and not even in an AU way. And it's totally fine if that's what you like, but, yeah, like.

Was Eridan written well (where "well" = accurate to canon): no. Maybe he's fine as an OC with an Eridan Minecraft skin slapped on, but that's not my beautiful son, that's not my baby boy.

What did they get wrong about Eridan (where "wrong" = inaccurate to canon): all.

What route would I have written for Eridan: he shoots you with a gun and you die. And then maybe cheats on you with Karkat

[sisterdanielstits]

both of my siblings have tumblrs and we all follow each other, even a few of our side blogs, but i have never told them about this one because i knew they'd judge me for it

today me and my siblings were in the living room and i didn't want to get up so i sent a post to my sibling and told them to open tumblr

a few seconds later they jumped up and yelled really loudly "who the hell is sisterdanielstits?"

keep in mind MY DAD IS STANDING IN THE ROOM WITH US

so i had to quickly start explaining things and backtracking like "IT'S A JOKE IN THE FANDOM! IT'S NOT AS BAD AS IT SOUNDS! IT'S A JOKE ACCOUNT! THE NAME'S A JOKE!"

...

oh my fucking god i need to walk into oncoming traffic

[scalpelsister]

dark justiciar shadowheart is genuinely so interesting to me as like... a facet to her character. like it really hammers home how desperate she is for shar's love and affection (+ the validation and love from other worshipers of shar). like in a lot of ways I get that it seems shocking to others / some fans because it really does contradict some of the morals we see her express BUT imo that just speaks to the level of desperation she feels. her comments on how shar "must" love her for her to survive the shadowcursed lands, or the bit where she talks about shar nurturing her and loving her and sounds... almost more like shes trying to convince herself more than shes trying to convince you. theres a bit about other sharrans not thinking she had earned her name, and of course the mother superior not thinking she was ready / worthy of being a dark justiciar. like shes just so completely desperate to feel unconditionally and securely loved, and to earn the approval of others that shes entirely willing to injure herself in the process (as well as.... the people who actually love her, of course).

not to mention that mechanically, afaik, she can only end up there if shes encouraged to by the player. ie... she needs to know someone else approves.

[bisnes-socks]

so korjaamo was absolute fire tonight jesus. definitely my favourite of his gigs i've been to 💚

but i have something on my mind and i'm a bit conflicted.

i was maybe idk seventh row or something, not like super close to the stage but closer than the middle. i didn't take any pics this time, but a lot of people around me did. and multiple people filmed entire songs, autiomaa in particular. and that moment made me a bit.. sad? because for me, this time, experiencing autiomaa was me trying to focus on him but having 15 phones in my direct eyeline filming the entire song. and for that song in particular it felt a bit wrong, you know? (shoutout to those who waved their phone lights in the audience, that was cool)

now the reason why i feel conflicted is because i get it. i get wanting to capture that moment, i really do. and i know how much it means to fans who haven't had the chance to see him live and maybe never will, i get that this is a way to connect. but that's exactly why i feel so two ways about it: i recognise that getting that song on video might be a way to immortalise the moment for someone, and maybe that video serves as a way for someone else, who wasn't there at all, to connect with him. but at the same time, the sea of phone screens filming the entire song, created a disconnect between him, the song and me, someone who was there.

and that song in particular feels to me like a moment where i wish the audience would just... be there for him, with him, in the moment. but then again, last time i saw him less than a month ago i too took a couple of pics of autiomaa. so do i really have a leg to stand on.

i guess where i'm going with this is two things: 1) i wish we could learn to let go of this need to film gigs so much because it does kind of interrupt the live experience, and learn to let go of the fomo, and 2) i wish we could go back to how it was like 20 years ago when artists used to drop pro shot, pro edited live dvd's with cool documentary extras and stuff from like every other tour or something. or official live videos of individual songs. i wish that it wasn't on fans in the audience to capture and convey the moments to the fans who can't be there.

[uncanny-tranny]

Something I realized (which was obvious to me subconsciously) is that... The family that vehemently didn't accept me when I first came out but now do accept me are still the same family that I am most unwilling to be open about things I feel protective over.

I remember that my dad reacted so poorly, not to my coming out, but to my transition specifically that my therapist was the one to ask if I wanted to put it on my file that I wanted nothing to ever be shared with him about my health after I broke down multiple times due to my anxiety that I would never transition. While there are and were protections for me, I was incredibly fearful at the time because I was a minor, and I was so worried that he would have prevented my transition that I couldn't have said for certain what (if any) lengths he would have gone to to prevent that.

He's grown a lot as a person, and made some commendable strides. But he didn't find out from me when I medically transitioned the second I turned eighteen, and I think that's among the things that truly made him realize the scope of the issue.

I'm not here to guilt trip parents, guardians, or other members responsible for the care of the children or teens or young adults in their care.... but this is a cautionary tale. You aren't saving the people in your care when you do this, you simply reinforce an idea that you will never care for them, never want them as they are, would rather them be shoved away.

When you give people reasons to be secretive, they will behave secretively. When you give people reasons to doubt their safety around you, they will become sneaky, defensive, and withdrawn. When you give people reasons to doubt that you value their life, they will believe that you don't care if they live or not.

[fireflysugarpie]

people should write more about Shang Qinghua cross dressing imo

[kil9]

sorry ive been a yaoihead my whole life i can try to change but i will only lie to myself. my true nature will always be sexy neko boyz

[lunarsolar1]

PLEASE READ AND HELP A small FANDOM OUT 🥺

(If you can and if you want to) please CHECK OUT DEAD BOY DETECTIVES ON NETFLIX!!!!!!!! I promise that it’s good (and even if you don’t like it, please watch at least in the background) we need more views for season 2 and we’re running out of time. So please, if you know how that feels please help this fandom out and check out the tv show!!!!!! Please watch it or recommend it to other people you know 🥺❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️

Sorry about this but I’m desperate enough to call out other ships and fandoms for their help cause I really care about this tv show and I REALLY want a season 2 and I’m sure some of yall will understand how that feels so please HEAR ME OUT and read this!!!!!!!! This is so so so important and I KNOW you know how it feels to have something so important to you, like these tv shows I’m tagging and ships. Yall know how it feels about thinking what you would do without them and I know yall know how it feels to be scared they might cancel it or not have them get canon etc. we all been there so please please help this fandom out, if there’s anything we can do for yall WE will help yall out. We need more LGBTQ+ representation in tv shows, this is what we have been fighting for YEARS, so please help us out!!!! Especially for older generations, I know yall know how it feels to be queerbaited/not have enough representation in movies and tv shows. I was THERE, I got to experience that when I was younger and it was awful. Now we are FINALLY having something we thought wasn’t possible years ago, we’re finally having more lgbtq+ representation!!! we cannot let them take that from us. This is what we WISHED and HOPED before, for the first time in YEARS I finally found a tv show that I NEEDED when I was younger, that healed me, so please help us out and make them give dead boy detectives a season 2!!!!!! This show has so much potential and it deserves to have a proper ending (if season 2 going to be the last season) so please please please I’m begging yall!!!!!!!

[statementlou]

.

[notasapleasure]

Kay, thanks for this link, reading the essay was almost quasi-religious to this lifelong atheist. It's an absurdly optimistic piece and all the more rebellious for it, I think.

I could quote so much more from it, but perhaps this is the most relevant bit right now...

For radicals, fetishizing the guillotine is just like fetishizing the state: it means celebrating an instrument of murder that will always be used chiefly against us.

Those who have been stripped of a positive relationship to their own agency often look around for a surrogate to identify with—a leader whose violence can stand in for the revenge they desire as a consequence of their own powerlessness. In the Trump era, we are all well aware of what this looks like among disenfranchised proponents of far-right politics. But there are also people who feel powerless and angry on the left, people who desire revenge, people who want to see the state that has crushed them turned against their enemies.

Reminding “tankies” of the atrocities and betrayals state socialists perpetrated from 1917 on is like calling Trump racist and sexist. Publicizing the fact that Trump is a serial sexual assaulter only made him more popular with his misogynistic base; likewise, the blood-drenched history of authoritarian party socialism can only make it more appealing to those who are chiefly motivated by the desire to identify with something powerful.

-Anarchists in the Trump Era

Now that the Soviet Union has been defunct for almost 30 years—and owing to the difficulty of receiving firsthand perspectives from the exploited Chinese working class—many people in North America experience authoritarian socialism as an entirely abstract concept, as distant from their lived experience as mass executions by guillotine. Desiring not only revenge but also a deus ex machina to rescue them from both the nightmare of capitalism and the responsibility to create an alternative to it themselves, they imagine the authoritarian state as a champion that could fight on their behalf. Recall what George Orwell said of the comfortable British Stalinist writers of the 1930s in his essay “Inside the Whale”:

“To people of that kind such things as purges, secret police, summary executions, imprisonment without trial etc., etc., are too remote to be terrifying. They can swallow totalitarianism because they have no experience of anything except liberalism.”

[rxttenfish]

i won't lie, a major part of why i feel so... embittered? disillusioned? with the whole "TERFs DNI" or "this post isn't for TERFs" thing is simply that, for the majority of people, it seems like their awareness of what TERF ideologies actually is ends there. they cannot identify TERF talking points if they aren't pointed out as such, they don't know the history of the movement, they don't know when they're being radicalized by INCREDIBLY obvious TERF beliefs, because the extent of their activism or safeguarding against radfem shit is legitimately just pointing to the name or memes about TERFs. like, please do ANY historical research into the formation of the ideology or what came before in the 80s-90s. you are not immune to propaganda.

[giantkillerjack]

Uh-oh! You are like, SOOO awkward!!

You're so awkward that it is occasionally mildly uncomfortable for people!

You're so awkward that sometimes people are confused by you and then there are awkward silences!

You're so awkward ...... that ultimately no one is harmed!!

Oh damn!!! What a vile crime you have committed! What an unforgivable thing it is to make a fellow human briefly confused!

Why, if *I* were ever briefly confused and kind of uncomfortable as a result, I'd be devastated.... by the absolute net zero change in my happiness and health! - From which I might never recover!! Yes indeed! No punishment can ever be enough for you!!

So you better absolutely hate yourself for it.

Better be SO MEAN to yourself about every single missed social cue so you don't forget your horrible crime! Meaner than you'd ever dream of being to someone else for the same thing! This is YOUR responsibility!

You need to show the world that you KNOW you are bad by punishing yourself constantly! After all, think of all the people who BENEFIT from you punishing yourself! - No, really! Think about it! Think about who benefits from your pain.

Think of alllllll the definitely-good people that your definitely-necessary self-torment definitely helps! I mean, you can't just cut off their definitely-life-sustaining supply of your suffering, right?? Sure, everyone else has a breaking point, but you're probably the only person in human history who doesn't, right? Best not to question it probably. Sure, it's a symptom that billions of people with trauma have had, but who knows? You could be a one-in-seven-billion exception. Anything's possible!

Instead, better just accept that idea that bullies carry like guns in holsters - the idea that people who have trouble with social cues deserve to suffer. Better carry on the burden they placed on you until you drop. Aid the cause of the callous by enforcing shame and suffering upon yourself extra hard; try your best to do their work for them. They're very busy.

Better not recognize that you need patience and kindness to heal from your trauma. Better not find out that it was trauma rather than personal weakness filling your head with self-hating thoughts. Better not find out it wasn't your fault.

Better not find out that awkwardness is not inherently harmful or unkind, and, in fact, the people who act like it is *are the ones enacting harm and being cruel.*

Better not get righteously angry when you realize just how much unnecessary damage this has done to you. After all, if you get mad, you might realize you deserve better. You might even feel brave enough to DEMAND better! You might build boundaries that keep you safe! You might make other people think they deserve to feel safe too! And we obviously can't be having that, so...

Better not show yourself even a little kindness a little bit at a time.

Better not make a habit out of it after all that practice.

Better not get confident.

Especially if you can't first wipe out every trace of awkward. (And you probably never will. Because people who experience absolute social certainty at all times tend to be insufferable assholes that enforce the status quo. And you just don't have the stock portfolio for that.)

Better not be confident and awkward because then you might confuse and delight people

- you might accidentally end up making other people feel less shame for their social difficulties

- you might make isolated, traumatized, and shy people feel like they deserve to be included in social situations

- you might even make them feel they can be themselves around you

- you might start loving the effect you have on a room

- you might enjoy conversations more

- you might forgive yourself and bounce back from shame more easily and frequently

- you might come to enjoy some of those moments of harmless confusion you cause because NOBODY expects the Confident Awkward, and that can genuinely be an advantage in social situations

- you might stop apologizing so much.

- you might find that socializing is like a video game: it requires practice but also a safe space for it to be fun and positive.

Or if you can't become assertive and confident, better not remain awkward and shy and quiet, and then love and forgive yourself anyway!

Why, it would be carnage!!

In either scenario, you run the risk of finding out that it's not your fault that safe spaces full of kind people can be really hard to find, create, and nurture. You could end up building a skillset that helps you do those things if you're not careful!

If you start giving yourself even the tiniest amount of grace at a time, you will find that you've accessed a gateway drug with extreme long-term side effects:

- You might realize that it was never your fault that it took so long to like yourself.

- You might realize that you were always worth talking to, even when you didn't like yourself and communication felt impossibly difficult.

- You might realize that you'll still be worth talking to even if communication becomes harder as you age and/or experience disability.

- You might come to know that you deserve to be heard even on bad days when words come slow and blurry.

You might discover that you were always deserving of kindness, first and foremost from yourself.

So. As you can see, it's FAR too much of a risk to start granting your awkward self free pardons for your many heinous and harmless crimes. Better to just leave it there.

[grace--le--domas]

Update

Okay so I just accepted the Phd offer and um, I'm gonna start next Feb. Super excited, good vibes all around (lowkey scared)