#i just want to do what each character needs and is true for their character

[secriden]

It's the way "I just think there's no one out there who wants the best for you more than I do" is true because it INCLUDES FADEL HIMSELF. Fadel is so steeped in his anger and hurt and fear right now that he can't even see how loving and being loved by Style is the door to true freedom.

But he's also nowhere near ready to handle that, emotionally, so Style will give him this honesty and then demand nothing from him and move right on to nipple play (familiar, and therefore comfortable, territory - because at least Fadel has a rulebook to follow in this situation). This reminds me of that time when Fadel told Style about his parents' murder and then Style said "I'm sorry" and then abruptly changed the subject. He senses when Fadel isn't ready to actually face the issue, so he'll give Fadel the space to process what's going on - be it his own shocking ability to be vulnerable to Style or the truth of Style's earnest love for him - in his own time.

Just. The selflessness in that. It would be so much easier for Style to push right now -- to force Fadel into the discussion about how Style actually was very much a victim of the combined circumstances of Kant and Bison and Fadel's past. Lest we forget: Style is the ONLY ONE not embroiled (as far as we know as of ep 8) directly with any of the criminal aspect of this universe. He was just a relatively innocent bystander who got into an accident because he was texting while driving, flirted a little bit aggressively because he found Fadel hot, and then got dragged into a game of lies and deception and power without having a clue about what he was getting into until his own heart was irrevocably compromised. (Like no, I'm never letting my Style apologist post go.)

But none of that matters to Style; the weight of Style's care, the way it's informed and threaded through with his own experience with grief and mourning, makes him infinitely more concerned with giving Fadel room to be angry, to be harsh, hell to even hurt him with his dismissal of Style's sorrow and fear. Style understands what it means to need space to grieve and hurt and he is literally making that space for Fadel.

And this is so important because Fadel is so very repressed. Like you know this is a man who hasn't actually emotionally processed a thing since his parents' murder. And who can blame him? He was a just a child. And then he was taken in by a woman who gave him the training and the tools to ensure that he would never be physically vulnerable again but also taught him to completely close his heart to love and trust. I don't believe for a second that Lilly cared one bit about Fadel's (or Bison's, for that matter) emotional wellbeing.

This is why Style is so perfectly suited for Fadel. He may not have the same experiences or lived a life as volatile and violent as Fadel, but the things he has experienced makes him uniquely suited to treasure and mend Fadel's fragile heart.

Fadel needs to allow himself to let go sometimes, to have some fun for once, to face and accept the reality of his own emotions. They both have to learn how to love and be loved, and its fascinating how ideally suited they are to teach each other these things. -- I wrote this on my thoughts on Style after episode 1 - and by god is this show paying it off!!!

I just. I'm so grateful to this show for giving us this. I know it's not prefect, there are things I wish the show had lingered on or left out, but by GOD there are some absolute diamonds in this story that render me overwhelmed with love for these characters.

[apoloadonisandnarcissus]

Von Franz finds the Şolomonari book in Herr Knock’s office, and this isn’t just any book; he calls it the Şolomonari codex of secrets, where are the instructions to break the curse of Nosferatu. Not to destroy him, or kill him; free him. The Dacian/latin word “voluerunt” (“voluntary”; “willing”) is marked, and the entire page is filled with notes; someone clearly studied this page (probably Orlok when he was awaken by Ellen, and saw himself as a strigoi).

Von Franz is the only character that understands Ellen and Orlok’s connection, and says she’s the way, she’s the one who is going to “save them all”. He has no trouble in sacrificing her to Orlok in order to stop him, and that’s his plan; because he just discovered that’s what Orlok wants too.

Von Franz never tells anyone about these instructions. He only tells the other characters about how they need to destroy Orlok’s lair for him not to have anywhere to return when dawn breaks. But that’s not what the book says, because the book is about freeing Nosferatu from his own curse. Otherwise they could just stab Orlok with a iron stake, and call it a day.

There’s a reason why Robert Eggers showed us a strigoi being killed by the Roma people at the beginning of the movie; that’s how you kill a strigoi. But this isn’t just about killing Orlok, it’s about breaking the curse he has upon himself, and set free his spirit.

Ellen knows she has to be the one to stop Nosferatu, probably because of her supernatural abilities (premonitions) or because she doesn’t want them to put a iron stake through Orlok?However, Von Franz never tells her what she needs to do, he doesn’t reveal these instructions to her either, nor that she needs to die in order to accomplish any of this. He only tells her she needs to be true to her own nature.

And so, Ellen re-pledges herself to Orlok, and accepts his covenant of being one with him ever-eternally (and so the maiden fair did offer up he love unto the beast). She doesn’t know she’s required to have sexy time with him all night (and him with him lay in close embrace until first cockcrow), nor that she needs to sacrifice herself (her willing sacrifice). But Von Franz confirms to the audience that she, indeed, broke the curse and freed them from the plague of Nosferatu.

Orlok is also very much aware his lair is going to be attacked that night; not only his most devoted servant is inside of his sarcophagus, but the manor burning is visible from Ellen’s window. He knows his physical form isn’t surviving past dawn, and that’s his plan:

Now, the audience can interpret this as something that Ellen chose (which seems to be Robert Eggers intention), or as Orlok and Ellen deceiving each other, and Ellen doing this for others and not for herself. I would argue, this last interpretation is kind of contrived because Von Franz confirms Orlok’s curse has been broken (his spirit is free, and so is Ellen’s) and he even places Orlok and Ellen’s lilacs around their bodies, almost like a homage (which would be kind of odd if deception was involved in any of this).

[fatalism-and-villainy]

Another part of untangling the Garashir knot i.e. trying to make their relationship make sense for fic-writing purposes is the question of Bashir’s ability to trust and be vulnerable around Garak.

I got to thinking about that because of this 10-year-old post (yay old meta dives!) that points out that Bashir is just as emotionally closed off as Garak in The Wire, and it’s really true - he never explicitly tells Garak he that he cares about him, but instead frames his care for him through their doctor-patient relationship, or through his higher ethical convictions (that is, when Garak says “Have you considered I might be getting exactly what I deserve?” and Bashir says “No one deserves this”). And given that part of the conflict of that episode is Bashir’s uncertainty as to whether Garak actually considers him a friend or cares for him on the same level as Bashir cares for Garak - as indicated in Bashir’s conversation with Dax - I think it speaks to a level of emotional self-protection on Bashir’s part that’s pretty often at play in his relationship with Garak.

Because for all that he wants Garak to open up to him in those early episodes - it comes up in a more playful mode in the way they banter with each other, but The Wire shows more legitimate frustration from Bashir at the possibility that Garak might not trust him - Bashir never actually leads by example there. When does he ever share anything about his personal history with Garak? When does he ever confide in him about his hopes and fears and insecurities? Pretty much never! And he’s not at all averse to sharing things about himself, whether it’s to get laid (like the adapted story about his medical exams) or to make a friend (like him telling Miles about Palis in Armageddon Game, or telling that pregnant woman about Kukalaka in The Quickening). He gave Jadzia his medical school journals (to get laid… and make a friend?). And there are plenty of instances of him confiding in his friends - Miles, Jadzia, Ezri - about his insecurity, fear of failure, feeling like he’s a monster because of his genetic engineering, etc.

But not with Garak. The closest he gets to sharing anything significant about himself is his grumpiness about turning thirty in Distant Voices, which isn’t even close. And you could argue that that’s a contrivance of the writing, a consequence of their relationship not being allowed to be developed more. But I actually think it makes a lot of sense from a character angle. Because for all that he seemingly can’t stop talking about himself, Bashir is a lot more selective about what parts of himself that he shares than it initially seems, as is most obviously demonstrated by the fact that he hid his being genetically engineered from everyone for years. So I do take him at his word when he tells Jadzia in The Wire that he doesn’t exactly trust Garak either, and I think that’s modeled in his (possibly subconscious) reluctance to truly open up to him. I mean, in Distant Voices he casts the guy telepathically attacking his brain as Garak! Which he and Garak laugh off in an extremely charming scene at the end of the episode, but it really does say something about how he sees Garak on a subconscious level.

So it’s honestly much easier for me to imagine fic scenes and whatnot in which Garak opens up to Bashir, because there is plenty of precedent for that in canon - largely in The Wire, but also when he vents to Bashir about his frustration with Tain and desire for Tain’s forgiveness in In Purgatory’s Shadow. And there’s a real sense that he really does want to unburden himself to Bashir, even if primarily in his own evasive, circumlocutionary way. But it’s so, so hard for me to get Bashir to a place where he’d do something similar with Garak, because given his characterization wrt their dynamic, I just feel like there’d need to be so much more work done in their relationship to get him to feel that kind of trust towards Garak.

(This dovetails with my headcanon that they weren’t that close in the later seasons, because the events later in the show would honesty make that even more difficult. After being interrogated by an intelligence organization, I imagine Bashir would be even warier of Garak!)

There’s also the fact that the most intense intimacy between the two of them always comes up in situations where Bashir is the stronger one, and Garak is the one who needs to be cared for, who’s being pushed into being vulnerable. And that again is a contrivance of the writing, but it is something that I think is compelling to contemplate when it comes to their relationship dynamic - specifically, how it might affect a long-term relationship dynamic in a post-canon setting. Because Bashir can be something of a fixer-upper when it comes to his romantic relationships, and I do see him as drawn to dynamics where he’s the stronger one who’s positioned to care for and guide the other person. And so, while I don’t think Bashir would be the sole cause of any difficulties that might arise in their relationship - trying to get open and honest communication from Elim Garak really would be like pulling teeth - I can really see him falling into a pattern of thinking with Garak wherein Garak is the one who needs to be cared for, the one who needs to communicate with him, etc etc, but being very very bad at being open and communicative with Garak in turn. Even if their relationship does develop sufficiently for him to feel more comfortable sharing himself with Garak - and I really think that it could - I still imagine his first impulse when he’s Going Through It would be to close himself off from Garak. And that does cause problems.

A broader angle that canon does not really bring out is the potential for Bashir’s dynamic with Garak to draw out some of Bashir’s hypocrisies, or aspects of his ideology that are incomplete or contradictory. Bashir on Cardassia post-canon has a lot of potential to do this - not that I’d want him to let go of Federation ideals, but the reality of living somewhere else would necessitate those ideals being qualified, or him becoming more flexible. And with the shift in their dynamic, in which Garak is in his natural habitat (even if it’s drastically changed from the Cardassia he remembers) and Bashir is the outsider, Garak could potentially be put in the role of having to guide or protect Bashir. And given the nature of Cardassian politics, the actual methods he might take in order to do so would imo not necessarily be within Bashir’s comfort zone. And I like the idea of that conflict, and that kind of testing of Bashir’s values and expectations and perceptions, coming through on a smaller scale just within their relationship, wherein Bashir really wants Garak to communicate with him but finds it (not even consciously!) very difficult to reciprocate that.

[goldenroutledge]

when you reach me

pairing: jj maybank x fem!reader

word count: 1.1k

warning(s): main character death, grief, spiritual connection. this one’s pure angst.

summary: in which you mourn the love of your life.

jj maybank masterlist

Tears cloud your vision, preventing you from reading the words on the page. This is it, you think. The moment of closure you still haven’t allowed yourself to have, nothing but guilt clouding your mind since you left him. Not since you, supposedly the love of his life and the keeper of his secrets, abandoned him in Morocco. His worst fear in life come true in his death.

No matter what you tell yourself, it will never be enough. There’s not a single magic spell or genie in a bottle that could bring him back. There’s nothing– that’s good for you anyway– that will ease the pain of losing him. You remember the sadness and the frustration you felt watching him on the boat, drinking the days away because of a purpose he lost sight of. Now, that memory resonates with you more than ever. You know the feeling, it’s resignation.

The only thing that motivated you to pick up a pen and write was the fact that you owed it to him to send your feelings out there, somewhere into the universe. The tranquility of the water at night welcomed you from where you sat on the dock. You figured this would be one of the hardest places to be, overwhelming you with the reminder of what’s happened. You don’t need to be reminded, you can feel it. In every breath there’s an ache in your heart and a bruise to your bones. You can feel him here, ready and waiting to receive you. It’s the closest you’ll ever get to leaving flowers at a graveyard after all.

Rolling your letter, watching as the ink disappears with each movement of the paper is enough to make your throat swell and tears brim in your eyes. Sliding the message into the bottle is excruciating. Taking your deepest thoughts of him and sending them away. As if someone is stripping a child of their favorite toy, infringing on the emotional attachment they have to it. That’s exactly what this feels like, words in the shape of your heartstrings that you badly want to let go of, yet can’t help but stay close to. Until you remember, these words don’t belong to you. They belong to him, wherever he is. Gently, you press your lips to the bottle, giving a kiss goodbye to the metaphor it holds. JJ Maybank, your heart in human form once upon a time, is gone from your reach forever.

These waters are the closest thing you have now. When you look into them, only then can you remember the beautiful days you shared with him here, free of the anguish that locks your heart up in chains. The days of diving, swimming, kissing him in these waters, are long gone. A place where the world used to wait, where the moment would never end if you could have things your way. Setting the bottle free into these waters, you feel nothing but uncertainty that you’ll ever be the same. Watching the bottle float away and out of sight, you can’t help but wonder if he’s somewhere out there feeling the same thing.

-

‘I know I’ve waited a while to do this, JJ. I’m sorry. I’ve been in shock, in pain, angry enough to set the world on fire, numb enough to not feel the flames as they burn. You need to know that I’m sorry. I’m not who I used to be, I’m not the person you said you love with your last breath. I can’t be that person anymore after your killer released all of his hell and gave it to me. I can’t look in the mirror without seeing a shell of who I once was. I can’t take care of the others when I don’t remember how to take care of myself. I’m sorry that I have broken all of the promises between us. You wouldn’t want this for me and I don’t either. But here we are. Here I am really, it’s just me now. Sometimes I forget that, things should be different.

Someone asked me out on a date about a week ago, I felt like punching him in the face. If it weren’t for the others, I would have. If anything, they are taking care of me. I know you want me to be happy. For some people that means moving on, lighting a new torch with the one you carry for a past love. I’ve come to accept that I’m just not capable of that. What would make me happy about looking into another’s eyes and seeing yours? How could I feel safe from another’s touch if it isn’t yours? Our love made me believe that my heart could never break. I was wrong. I was so very wrong. Maybe that’s cynical of me, but I witnessed your life come to its end, I deserve to be. A part of my life ended, too.

I wish I could keep believing in everything that brought us together, but I can only remember everything that tore us apart. I hate it when people tell me that someday I’ll find love again. I do have someone I love, but not in a way that their eyes can see. They don’t understand that I don’t want to know a life without you. I’ve been told that each day gets a little better. They’re wrong. My heart breaks every day that life goes on without you. I loved you for practically your entire life, how am I supposed to be okay knowing that you loved me for only a part of mine? I don’t want to wake up one day and remember you only exist in my memory, that you’re only a shadow playing tricks on me.

I can’t make any promises to you. A part of me never wants to forgive you for leaving. The best I can do is thank you for showing me what it means to love someone, to know that I’m only one half of one soul. For giving me a reason to laugh and smile. It is because of these things, that makes you the reason why I scream and cry. There’s so much I wish you were here to do, so much I wish we could still do together. I miss you, JJ. I don’t think I’ll ever stop. I’m trying to learn about who I am without you. I don’t know if I’ll ever find out, but please just know that I’m trying. Every morning I wake to an empty bed, every time I want to shatter the mirror in front of me, I keep trying. For you, I’ll never stop. You didn’t have a choice nor a chance, and I’d be damned if I didn’t take mine. I love you.’

Y/n

💌: had this in my drafts for months now, really ever since watching the obx 4 finale :,) it was nice while it lasted right? thanks for reading!

[alarajrogers]

Writers Tell You What They Believe, Not Who They Are

I’ve been percolating this post in my head for a while.

I want to talk about the Neil Gaiman situation. How there are, apparently, people out there who are trying to declare that there’s evidence in his writing for what he turned out to be, who blame the fans who were taken advantage of or who still find the writing beautiful no matter what the man is. Those people are wrong. They point at previous examples of writers who showed their true colors like JK Rowling, but this is not that situation.

I’m going to contrast this to Rowling, and to Orson Scott Card, another writer many of us (particularly us older ones) loved before he turned out to be a shit. In fact, I’ll start with him.

But first, I’ll tell you: Writers do not tell you who they are. They tell you what they believe. Sometimes those match. Sometimes they do not.

I was a huge fan of Orson Scott Card, and read everything he wrote once upon a time, so I know he wrote kindly and sympathetically about gay men and boys. He didn’t give any of them love or a happy ending, but most Card characters don’t get love or a happy ending, so this was not notable. Thus it surprised many of us when he came out swinging against gay marriage, and some people viewed him as a hypocrite.

He wasn't.

Card’s work repeats a theme over and over: older men have to hurt children and young people, raise them harshly, crush their dreams, in order to save them, or the nation, or the world. Over and over again. It’s relevant that Card was abused by his father as a child, so we can certainly see how tempting this paradigm would be for him. These older men suffer, because they sympathize with the young ones. But it has to be done, for the sake of everyone.

Around the time he was campaigning against gay marriage, Card said, in a forum post that unfortunately appears to have been lost forever, that we can’t have gay marriage because men would naturally want to marry men. Men just understand better and are naturally simpatico with other men, and presumably the same is true for women. So if we had same-sex marriage, all the men would marry other men, and human reproduction would stop, and the species would die out.

Leaving aside what this implies about Card himself and what he was obviously not letting himself realize about himself, this means his opposition to same-sex marriage is exactly what he told us, in his books, over and over, that he would have to do, when he became an older man. Older men hurt young people to force them to conform to what society needs. If men being allowed to marry men could destroy the human race, of course it’s his job as an older man to prevent it, no matter how sympathetic he might be to gay people’s desire to love each other. They have to suck it up and endure heterosexual marriage, like he has to, and like he assumes most married men have to, or humanity dies.

He's wrong, and his belief is honestly kind of repulsive because it means he assumes every man who says he loves his wife is kinda lying, or at least, made himself believe it. But he’s not a hypocrite. He told us what he believes, and it matches what he does.

Now, JK Rowling. I was an adult when Harry Potter came out, so I was never a huge fan of Rowling. I’d already read better fantasy, for children, by female authors, from England… Seriously, Rowling is kind of mid when compared to other fantasy writers for kids. But Harry Potter was pretty cool. I liked the fact that she presented us with an obvious villain, an absolute asshole, a cruel teacher who bullies the kids, plainly in league with the main villain… and then made him turn out to be a hero. Someone who, the whole time, was sacrificing himself to keep everyone, including Harry himself, safe. And who was, nonetheless, still an asshole. I liked that. “You don’t have to be a good person to do the right thing.” Sounded to me like a good message.

Rowling’s beliefs seemed pretty bog-standard white suburban liberal. Of course diversity is important, that’s why there are token members of several races. Fascism is bad, of course. The circumstances of your birth don’t matter nearly as much as what you make of your life. Child abuse is bad.

But there was stuff that people who were not raised as white suburban liberals kept pointing out. Like… Rowling doesn’t think it’s important to do enough research to have a real Chinese name for her one Chinese character. It’s not going to be a problem that Irish, Scottish and Welsh children – all oppressed by England once upon a time and in many cases still oppressed – are going to school in Scotland with English children; the only conflicts will be between houses. Slavery is of course bad, but have you considered that maybe some slaves want to be slaves and you should probably leave them to it? If a woman is sufficiently evil, it might be a good idea to arrange for her to be raped by centaurs. Women who look mannish are figures of fun and probably bad people. Fat people are bad. We do not at any point need to think about the question of, in general, what would wizards from oppressed Muggle families do if brought into the wizarding world and trained, because, well, that’s not worth thinking about.

Also, while Rowling might not consciously be an anti-Semite, she did come up with one of the most vicious collections of anti-Semitic tropes and applied them to her goblins, who are money-obsessed, bankers, have pointed noses and ears, and are not treated kindly by the narrative as non-human magical creatures the way Hagrid himself and any of his pets are.

Also, she gave us “Dumbledore is gay” in Word of God, but couldn’t be bothered to put it into the book that is heavily about Dumbledore’s past, which goes into detail about his close friendship with a fascist who despised the Muggle-born, where establishing that he loved Grindenwald would have made the whole relationship make more sense and make Dumbledore more sympathetic.

So… she ended up becoming a TERF. And this felt like a betrayal to those of us who saw in her beliefs the same liberal ideals we held. Except… she was never intersectional. She never told us she cared about minority humans. Her bad guys were fascists because they wanted to dominate the Muggles – a group that includes all of us, actually – and to purge “half-bloods” and Muggle-born, which, again, all of us are Muggle-born and we would be if we suddenly got that owl from Hogwarts. It’s real easy to hate fascists who want to put the boot on your neck specifically. She got a little bit into fantastic racism with the prejudices against Hagrid, but other races – like the goblins! – were just treated badly because that’s the way it is, and Harry never thinks to push back against obvious injustices unless they affect him and his friends.

She was always a bit skeeved out by “women who look like men”, and then the TERFs radicalized her and told her that trans women are a dire threat to cis women and that trans men are sad little girls who’ve been brainwashed to give up their womanhood, and she believed them because none of this contradicted anything she told us she believed. She very clearly told us in the books that she really didn’t care about anyone who wasn’t a white British human, and she has next to no consciousness of how the Irish, Scottish and Welsh actually perceive the British, and while the Weasleys are poor because they have way too many kids on a government worker’s salary, they have no class consciousness that stands in opposition to Harry’s, or anyone else’s. Rowling just doesn’t empathize with people who aren’t like her. So it wasn’t hard to get her to hate people who never did anything to her, because they were different enough that she could be convinced they were dangerous.

Neil Gaiman is not like that.

Like most good writers, Gaiman told us what he believed. And I think he was sincere in those beliefs. Even after he himself became a monster, I think he believed what he believed because those themes show up consistently in all his work, from the Sandman to his more recent works. And I’m going to point out the relevant ones, that seem to have an impact on this discussion.

We make our own hell with our guilt. Lucifer said so in A Season of Mists, despite it contradicting DC continuity and some stuff Gaiman himself did, such as Nala being condemned to hell by Morpheus. It is still consistent in most of his depictions of Hell. The angel Remiel is corrupted by being forced to punish sinners, but it’s the sinners’ own guilt that demands punishment, not a directive from God.

Desire is capricious and dangerous. Desire wants to destroy Dream for reasons we are never given. Alone of the Endless, Desire is never shown in a positive light. (Despair is, in places. Desire, never.)

Predators deserve to die or suffer a fate worse than death.

This is important to note. A lot of Gaiman’s villains don’t really suffer much of anything; their ability to do harm is removed, that’s it. Such as John Dee, who murders an entire diner full of innocent people. But predators and people who betray people who look up to them and trust them… they suffer.

In Sandman, Richard Madoc, a writer who can’t come up with ideas, catapults to fame when he takes the Muse Calliope as a sex slave, imprisoning her, dominating her, and repeatedly raping her. Morpheus punishes him by driving him mad, with a torrent of so many ideas he cannot express them all, and he ends up destroying his own fingers trying to write the ideas down on the wall in blood. This is a particularly horrifying fate for a writer, and a particularly horrifying fate for a writer to imagine.

Prince Franz Drago of Bohemia, in A Study In Emerald, is an eldritch abomination, as are all the royalty of Europe in this particular AU. He is brutally murdered by two of the most beloved characters in the canon of English-language literature. One of the two explains how Drago was lured to his death, in a way that the character (and the author) intend to justify the murder: he was promised a virgin girl, raised in a convent, who had never seen a man. The sight of Drago would have pitched her into “a perfect madness”, which Drago would have feasted on while raping her. For being the kind of entity who would want to do this, and probably has done it before, Drago was eviscerated. We are intended to sympathize with the murderers.

There are other examples, of people looking up to someone they respected, only to discover that person was lying, or betrayed them. These people are killed, or their plans are ruined. I’m not going to list every instance of that here. But this is a thing Gaiman believes, a theme that appears multiple times.

Gaiman also believes that we make our own hell. It wasn’t until I watched the Lucifer series, and had some experience with people who do awful things, many of whom have managed to twist things around in their head so they are the victims, that I thought: if you know what you’re doing is evil, why are you doing it? Many of the people I know who do terrible things simply don’t recognize that what they’re doing is bad. Like Rowling and Card, both of whom think they’re doing the right thing. They’re not going to punish themselves in Gaiman’s Hell. Maybe someone who murdered in a fit of rage, but not someone who thought of themselves as the victim, or as someone entitled to do what they did… which seems to be a lot of bad people.

And Gaiman believes that Desire is the cruelest of the Endless, and has nothing positive to say about them.

Gaiman told us what he believed, and we were calmed, and pleased, because we believed those things too. Trans women are women. All people deserve dignity. There is no one we have the right to look down on, and everyone has their own reasons for doing things, even evil people. Demonstrate empathy for all. This sounds like the beliefs of someone who is very, very safe. Like… a year ago I would have put Neil Gaiman on a list of “Least Likely To Have Problematic Skeletons In The Closet” creators, which just tells you, I pay too much attention to what writers believe when I think about what they do.

Because people don’t always do what they believe.

Sometimes they know what they’re doing is wrong. Sometimes it goes against everything they believe. And they feel hellish amounts of guilt for it. But they still choose to keep doing it. Maybe telling themselves they’re slaves to their own desire, that they cannot stop themselves. Maybe telling themselves it’s okay, fooling themselves that people they overpower with force of personality could have said no if they hadn’t wanted to. Gaiman at one point admitted to impostor syndrome. To not being able to quite grasp how successful he was, how people looked up to him. Maybe he was able to fool himself into thinking that if you pressure someone who looks up to you, who you have economic power over, into having sex, you’re not raping them because if they’d really fought back they could have stopped you. (Never mind that you had too much power over them and they were lulled by your public persona, sure you were safe, until you weren’t.)

Trust me, I am not here to praise Neil Gaiman, but to bury him. (And unlike Marc Antony in Shakespeare’s play, I sincerely mean that.) The fact that he knows better, that he believes people who are doing what he’s doing should die or suffer fates worse than death, that his writing strongly implies that he feels intense guilt over it… but he does it anyway.

Anybody got that gif of Chidi Anagoyne from The Good Place saying “But that’s worse. You get how that’s worse, right?”

No one could have read Gaiman’s work and thought, this is a sex predator into domination and rape. Because Gaiman has consistently condemned people who do that, in his writing. And his writing is all we knew about the man.

You know how you read some fanfic authors, and you can see their personal fetishes glaring out at you? You can’t do that with Neil Gaiman. He’s a better writer than that, and he’s good at hiding the things that turn him on, because he’s felt guilty about them from the beginning. He’s told us what he believes, not what he thinks is sexy.

He knows what he did is wrong. He feels guilt over it, or he did when he was writing Sandman and having fantasies, maybe. He knew it was wrong when he did it. And he did it anyway.

The only hint we could possibly have ever taken was that Gaiman thinks the people who do terrible things know it, and feel guilt over it, and demand to be punished for it when they get to Hell. When we see a world around us of people who feel no guilt whatsoever for the terrible things they do, maybe we should have questioned?... but it could have been the naivete of a young writer (young-ish, at least…) who genuinely wanted to believe the people who do terrible things feel guilt for it. I know I wanted to believe that, and I was horrified at how not true it turned out to be.

I hope he burns in the hell of guilt he’s made for himself. Because he told us what he believed, and we all believed it too. We forgot that a person can do things they believe are wrong.

[theshipdiaries]

I can't go through losing another ship. I just can't. All I do is lose and honestly? It hurts me like someone I personally knew and loved died. I don't know why it hurts me this deeply. But it's crazy. I cried more when Klaus Mikaelson died than when my grandfather who I loved deeply died. To be fair he was 96 he WANTED TO DIE and literally stopped eating on purpose so he would die because he was bored out of his mind and all his friends had died and felt like he had no purpose anymore. It's not like you can have long term goals at his age. So we all saw it coming and I knew he wanted it and was happy so It brought me comfort.

BUT KLAUS MIKAELSON'S DEATH? Totally unexpected, felt like a huge betrayal. And it just sent me into a deep spiral and I'm still mourning him. Cried for 3 days locked in my room. Every once in a while I still cry. It's been 6 years AND I HATE IT. Because it's so stupid. HE IS NOT REAL. Just ink on a script and fake everything. And yet it hurts. It hurts so much. Losing Klaroline was like losing a part of myself. Something I had loved for so long, something I had invested so much time in, been obsessed with for so long.

And then sometimes karamel makes me cry. They were the representation of true love for me. True soft good love. What everyone deserves. And I cry at their loss. And the injustice of Kara ending up alone and sad. The message that if you are a woman you have to choose to either be strong and independent or be in love. And it was made explicitly clear that Kara wanted to get married and have a family. SHE LONGED FOR IT. But they didn't let her. They punished her for it. The same writers who forced the character to want it. But all the other male superheroes? They were applauded for it.

Most other ships don't make me cry but anger me deeply. Like bellarke and barchie and Hyde and Jackie. REYLO.

And now? I'm terrified for Kastle. I can't lose them too. I thought I was safe. The show was cancelled and there was never a resolution but it ended in both literally confessing their love. Karen begging him to choose her and telling him there is nothing he could do to change her feelings for him. That she would risk it all and run away with him. Him confessing that he doesn't want to feel this. He is not ready to feel this. Who is he without his war? He doesn't know. But he knows he loves her. She means everything to him. I was fine with that ending. Even with him REJECTING HER. Because it was made obvious that he loved her. But his arc wasn't over. He needed more time. And the writers had respect for the ship. Understood it.

But now? I have no idea what they might do. They might pretend they were never anything to each other. They might kill her off. They might betray all of us and destroy the characters completely. Just like with bellarke just like with Hyde and Jackie. Ignore everything stablished and stab us fans in the back. Treat us like we are stupid and undeserving of respect.

I CANT GO THROUGH THAT PAIN AGAIN. I know what it's like and it destroys something in me EACH TIME. Again, it's like someone I loved very deeply died. I don't know why. But it hurts. And I just don't know if I have it in me. I'm so scared. Terrified. More than for my future or for anything.

[gigifujijifu]

Ok so I first wrote a mess in the tags but by the end of it I realized the actual answer, for me, is not just following impulses for who I want to play but also: spreadsheets.

My boyfriend and I make spreadsheets almost as a hobby. We have... a lot of alts, so to make it easier we have spreadsheets for things like which alts we've done holiday events on, and which trade-able cosmetics we've unlocked on who so we can pass extras around without having to log into everyone to check (not that I collect anything in a completionist sense with so many alts).

I also made a spreadsheet that lets us mark which WT stickers we need that week and it will flag which ones we have in common with each others alts so we can pair them off to do them more efficiently if we want.

I realize it's excessive but it's a kind of fun project and I love all of my characters and my bf dearly so playing with them no matter who I'm on or with is fun and there's always something to do.

people who have alts on ffxiv

how do you do it /g

[lgbtlunaverse]

So I've said multipe times now (here and here) that thinking nmj is just so blinded by privilege he doesn't undertand that acting out of line gets people killed is, in my opinion, a misunderstanding of his character that ignores the part where he's, you know, actively dying the whole time and thinks that's a good thing. But that doesn't mean I don't think privilege plays no role at all in how he views the world.

Specifically, his view that death (at least premature or violent death) means something.

Death isn't always a tragedy to NMJ, but it is always meaningful. If you kill an evil dangerous person for your righteous cause, that death had meaning. There was evil in the world and now there is less of it. Similarly, if you die in the pursuit of your righteous cause, that death has meaning, because the sheer dedication you gave to it that you were willing to die for it will further that cause, and your bretheren will be invigorated by your sacrifice to fight even harder.

If a death isn't meaningful, that's an injustice and it is up to the living to give it meaning. That's what cuts so deep about his father's murder. There were no consequences, no changes, no meaning. Wen Ruohan was just going to get away with it! He fights and wins an entire war to make it mean something, to make it so that the unjust murder of Nie Mingjue's father is part of Wen Ruohan's downfall.

But this is a view he can only hold because he's the kind of person who's death will be meaningful. Most ordinary people's deaths are meaningless. Not ontologically, not inherently, but they are made meaningless because no one cares. For death to be meaningful you either have to be so powerful that anything you risk your life for will be impacted in some way. (Like, say, if you sacrifice a long life for immense martial power in a faustian bargain with a blade) Or if people with that kind of power care enough about you to do so for you. For most people, this isn't true. A starving street kid has no power to change the unfair world that put them there, even if they risk their life trying, and no one will do it for them once they die.

Nie Mingjue knows this in abstract, and of course rightfully believes it's wrong. But all that does is make it yet another righteous cause people should be willing to die for. Everyone's deaths should mean something, we'll make it so or die trying!

This is what the conflict between nieyao is about at its core. Because Jin Guangyao, fundamentally, cannot conceive of his own death as meaningful. Nie Mingjue grew up around powerful men who could change the world but refuse to do so because god forbid they risk a single hair on their perfect heads. Meng Yao, on the other hand, grew up in an environment where no one of importance would blink twice if you died. He was surrounded by meaningless death. Indeed his entire early life is defined by that lack of care.

Meng Shi dies and no one cares. Meng Yao gets thrown off a flight off stairs and no one cares. He has to be the one to do the caring, and once he's gone no one else will do it for him.

So he has to live.

Jin Guangyao eventually gets far enough that he actually does aquire the power to change some things... as long as he's alive. If he changes too much, holds on too tightly to his ideals, he'll die and it'll all be for nothing. He can't sacrifice himself for his goals because doing so would immediately render those goals unobtainable. No one will care about what he tried to do. He won't be a heroic sacrifice, he'll just be trash that finally cleaned itself up.

And well... Nie Mingjue dies, and someone makes it mean something. Makes it mean so much that the entire story of mdzs would not exist without it. Jin Guangyao dies and it doesn't mean anything. Most people are glad to be rid of him, and the few that are not don't do anything to change that.

[citrusai]

taash said "they were doing it" and people ran with the interpretation of an npc that doesn't know solas or the history of the elvhenan even when bellara interjected and said, no, that's not right. that's not how it was for the elvhenan. they formed bonds before they had physical bodies. and people ran to doompost or create weird anti-solavellan shit even though mythal & solas refer to each other as old friends and when she releases him there is no tenderness or love in it. it is the act of unchaining a dog from his post, the stepping down of a general. but to each their own ig.

[jackass-jones]

Details that make me FERAL

[sysig]

Pivotal bright spot (Patreon)

[ladysophiebeckett]

marcela does a lot of cruel things throughout the series but i think her true moment of traditional telenovela villainy is that dinner she has with margarita and patricia, (the day betty gets made president) where she basically states 'yeah i know armando is still in love with her and i know beatriz is still in love with him but she believes everything in the letter and she has no way to disprove it. and armando has no witnesses to speak on his favor.'

and she's very smug about it:

in marcela's head she believes the only one she's really hurting by withholding this information is beatriz, how armando feels is not even much of an afterthought. marcela puts herself and her needs first. which is understandable. she has no incentive to help beatriz and why would she? she sees beatriz as the reason why her relationship with armando deteriorated even tho it's actually more complicated than that.

of course armando knows he doesn't have witnesses or anything to prove that in middle of everything he did truly fall in love with her and he's not going to ask anyone for help. mario offers to talk to her (tho not seriously) and even patricia says mario could tell betty the truth but marcela knows betty would never believe the author of the letter.

her only goal is to keep armando by her side. i dont know if she knows that she's hurting him or if she justifies her own actions as a consequence of his past actions towards her. or maybe its something she knows she's doing but doesn't care. (im gonna let the audience decide that bc im not even sure how i feel about that).

we see armando go through hell after betty disappears but when she returns he never once thinks to tell her about what exactly happened after she went away. he only says 'all the damage i did to myself' but never elaborates and betty never asks. it's deliberate that armando never tells her about his state of mind during that period of time bc he knows that to do so would be seen as a form of manipulation. that's not how you prove to someone that you've changed. and that's aside from him knowing that she would never believe him. (bc we know she wouldn't). he loves betty and although he's not yet at the point of truly understanding just how much pain and damage he's caused her, he would never want her to take him back bc she feels sorry for him.

meanwhile, way before the truth of the embargo happens, marcela tells him she would never survive him ending their engagement. that it would just as bad as when her parents died.

his face is immediately affected and she knows. she knows that the only way to keep him is through manipulation. and later on, participating in the act of withholding information that could help him, but again she doesn't see it as helping him. and never actually does. when she gives beatriz this information, it's actually in her attempt to save the company her father co founded. bc up until the last minute she was still holding out hope that betty's indifference to armando would push him back to her. not understanding that armando's changed indefinitely. he's not going to be manipulated by her again and he's not going to stoop to his past behaviors bc it never did him or anyone any good to begin with.

[leori-the-unlearned]

the way digimon does conflict/drama between two characters who should be or are close: chef’s kiss <3

the way sonic idw handles creating conflict/drama between two characters who should be or are close: *wilting flower*

[phagodyke]

I love to talk but I rly do feel like we have to be talking for a minimum of 8 hours straight before I feel like I can even begin to rly broach things on my mind or that have been bothering me a lot that I actually want to talk abt without being vague or deflecting or omitting or lying and if the conversation takes a break at any point it resets back to 0 and its still nice regardless but.

[waywardsalt]

tag rant but man i fuckin hate the new direction for loz

[juniemunie]

ok im not sure if i can put this into right words which is why i took so long to respond but i see it a little like this:

a friend told me that GOTNF to them was like a promise to the audience that they wouldnt go with "a bunch of cheap, annoying, marketable tropes and cliches" and yea they're right.... and then THW happened

they wanted to try the whole "what if we gave toothless his independence? what if the dragons had to leave? how would hiccup handle being separated with toothless? how would berk feel and handle themselves living without the dragons?" the whole shebang but twisted everything about it it to end up like... *gestures to all of THW* that.

THE SHIT (GOLD) YOU FIND IN THE OCEAN (YOUTUBE COMMENT’S SECTION)