#i wish my family was cool

[fumifooms]

Chilchuck, family & alcoholism

Collection of thoughts and speculation on Chil’s upbringing, his dynamic with his family and how alcoholism ties into it all. If you want the groundwork info on Chil’s background I recommend my masterpost on his family, here beyond a summary of the facts it’s really just me speculating from the crumbs we get of his parents and siblings, how it’s all affected him and in turn affected his own wife and kids etc etc.

There’s nothing more I’d like on mother’s day than to speculate about Chilchuck’s maladaptive attachment style. I’m fascinated by how distant everyone is and how much he’s been devoted to them all despite having been so absent. Intergenerational trauma get over here

Actually it’ll be easier if I make a rundown here too, it’s just stuff I reiterate from my masterpost tho.

Tiny table of contents: 1- rundown: family facts 2- rundown: alcoholism 3- dad 4- parenting 5- daughters 6- wife

^ Every time his dad gets mentioned. His mom never gets mentioned. His siblings I think are only ever mentioned in this extra, and then there are more ambiguous relatives cameos.

We know is hometown isn’t Kahka Brud, but we’re not sure wether he moved there upon getting his own house (presumably around when he got married at 13), or if it’s only after his wife when he rented out his place to relatives then rented the place in Kahka Brud.

If he rented it out to relatives, maybe that meant it was in his hometown? Especially if he and his siblings are "almost strangers" so presumably he doesn’t really keep in touch with his family. And I mean, he hasn’t seen his wife or daughter in 4 years so you can imagine how he’s like with his more distant family…

Additionally half-foots and Chil are very coded to be from an impoverished opressed working class people. So that’s the context.

I’ll say that I mentioned intergenerational trauma at the beginning, and I def think the distrust of elves is part of that, but here I want to focus on the interpersonal effects rather.

Copy pasting my masterpost thoughts overall: Chilchuck is hinted to have had a rather dysfunctional family himself (alcoholic father, distant siblings, etc). So he doesn’t really have the best model on how to raise someone and such. I imagine it was a sort of neglectful home situation, where the kids are encouraged to be independent. If they didn’t have to work or help around much, then a free range parenting sort of thing.

We do see how the family has full and warm feasts, where someone cleans his mouth with a rag, so it’s not like he didn’t have caring people or had a tragic childhood though! I don’t remember if it’s explicitely stated but he’s heavily implied to having grown up poor, as most half-foots, and I just think it’s the hardened hardworking family type of childhood where just like he does with others, they instilled somewhat harsh life lessons in him, which in turn encourages him to indulge in the simple pleasures of life like alcohol and sex, or at least women’s beauty and crass jokes. We do see he seems more optimistic when he’s younger in flashbacks, so a bunch of his harsh view on the world is still likely learned and earned rather than taught.

I still think he inherited many flawed views from how his father acted, like his attitude about excessive drinking not being a big deal, it being worth it. That work hard play hard, enjoy life die young mentality he has, shown mostly in the “alcohol” section of his Adventurer’s Bible profile, could very well be partly a result of the general poverty half-foot communities are that he grew in as well, like how he doesn’t hope for things to be as best as they could be and contends with good enough.  As far as I remember, his mother is never mentioned, but I doubt it implies she was out of the picture. She was probably a regular sort of mother that took care of the home and was still around when his father died, not unlike how Chil’s wife was implied to be a housewife. It looks like there’s a good age gap between one sibling to the next, that could be interesting to speculate about too. Mostly though I think it’s big family because it’s just sorta what happens when you regularly have sex and you don’t have contraception, being poor often makes family planning harder for various reasons and leads to more children.

Alcoholism context rundown:

Good Chilchuck analysis baseline here. Alcohol seems to be his main stress reliever/coping mechanism, especially for how emotionally constipated he is, and his job is being stressed about his party’s safety. Then he also mentions as a changeling that having his senses dulled feels relaxing to him, further confirming alcohol, as a drug that dulls senses, is something that he likes for the intoxication aspect and feels it’s relaxing. Alcohol also acts as a hunger suppressant, so it for sure has played a role in his dieting and unhealthy eating/diet habits, especially since he shows the instinct to drink to soothe hunger, all of that about how going hungry for 3 days used to feel manageable. Chil dieting info compiled here.

Chilchuck is at his most effortlessly cheerful when drunk or drinking. Compilation of every time he was drunk here.

And to be clear, a cheerful drunk is still a drunk. He literally will drink anytime he gets the opportunity to even if he’s aware overdrinking leads to health problems and death. Like canonically. He does NOT see how drinking should be a problem and does not seek to show restraint with it.

Dad of the dad

Marcille and Chilchuck having a talk on how losing a dad be like "You lost your dad young too…? I know how it is, it must have hit you hard…" "No not really tbh. Do you want lasagna or chicken for dinner?" <- either genuinely doesn’t feel much about his dad’s death or has 10 layers of repression, idk which is worse

I think Chil not making a big deal out of his dad’s death, not having worries in following into his footsteps that way in the least, is super interesting.

As a buddy @saccharineomens puts it: " I kinda imagine chilchuck and his dad didn't have a bad relationship, but in general chilchuck is so blase about drinking (he sees it as a delightful time, a wonderful thing! he wouldn't mind dying doing something he loved!) that he's not very upset about his dad's passing? like "yeah, he died, but i was already an adult, he was an adult, he made his choices, i make my choices, it's cool" " And I���ll nitpick that we don’t know how old he was when his dad died, I always assumed it was pretty early since Chil left home when he got married, and like I’ve gone into he doesn’t seem to be the keep in touch type. It’s on the table though, and he could have learned about it through letter if nothing else and that contributes to the "meh" reaction.

And that is very Chilchuck, the whole "we made our choices, it is how it is, he died doing something he loved", and you can totally believe that that’s the crux of it, but I do think the nonchalance hints at the family overall being distant and not only the siblings, that there’s dysfunctional shenanigans going on in there more than just… Healthy coping and having moved on.

I wonder when Chil first drank… And I wonder how he came to realize he liked alcohol a lot. His father probably gave him sips… Or he stole them

No because, with how disaffected he is about his father and siblings I could definitely see him having started to kind of numb himself/dissociate with the help of alcohol in that home environment that felt so… Either devoid of feelings or too messy to get attached. I can totally see his family being one that encourages dealing with feelings by bottling them up.

Because too… We saw him have a family/community feast of some sort presumably when he was a kid, in that chapter cover, so it’s not like there’s no warmth or sense of family at all, but then like… What went wrong? If as I theorize that girl with short black hair in that panel is his future wife, since she’s his childhood friend and all, what if his family/home life was always kind of cold and distant, even when gathered and cheery or despite those occasions? So then it’s like, at the family gatherings, she’s the most important person there to him, the one he actually connects to the most, the warmest presence he has…….. Someone he jokes around with that feels on the same speed as him, that doesn’t have the same connotations as everyone else present, a bit of a haven, someone different, a breath of fresh hair and a regained sense of childhood… Spitballing of course of course

I feel like they had a pretty big family and they were poor and such so there were always chores to be done etc, so their household might have operated like a mini busiess of sorts where everyone’s too busy, always has this and that to do and the mother asks them to go do tasks. I used to think it might be more of a neglect situation, where the kids are expected to provide for themselves and so cook their own meals and whatnot, both parents distant, but I don’t think so with the feast illustration. Chil at the beginning of canon used to see eating as a practical thing more than anything, you have to eat to live but don’t eat much or your weight will make your job more dangerous, might as well skip meals and have beer instead, etc etc. So the thought that he doesn’t know how to cook all that well despite this speculated background where he cooked for himself and keeps cooking minimalistic, since he does tell Senshi he taught him about cooking, is fair, but still… There could definitely be a situation where his older siblings were pushed into a parental role too, where they helped with the food and raising the younger siblings etc etc. As mentioned, the age gap between siblings may play into the dynamic as well. But on this front I have less ideas…

So yes my general take on Chil’s family is that everyone was too busy to emotionally connect as much as is normal, the parenting leaving things to be desired with alcoholism and emotional neglect.

Fathering

And I think that’s especially interesting considering he hasn’t been keeping in touch with his daughters either. It’s "they’re independent now" and that’s kinda it. His daughters haven’t sent him letters or visited him or tried to make him talk to their mom again. It does feel like with his own parents and siblings to me, where people are almost strangers, where relationships grow apart and everyone shrugs and goes ‘that’s how things are’. Is it that everyone including all his daughters gave up on trying to keep in touch, or is it that they all went "well divorced or not he’s absent, this is our normal tbh", and which is worse?

So yes, I think his relationship with his daughters is probably similar to his relationship with his parents, sort of hands off. Chil's dad was probably not a good dad but probably not quite a bad dad. A definitive He Was There, to quote another friend heh

Imo the thing with Chil is that he was pretty absent bc of work travels to dungeon dive, right. He’s working hard to provide for his family but in the process he’s not spending much time with them, slowly making a gap grow between him and them as they drift apart and change as people. He’s a career dad who never realized spending time with his family was more important and threw his pager into the ocean— But also here’s the thing!! You want to say being his family is more important, but money is arguably more important! They’re poor, they don’t have the privilege of free time as much. Sure he’s not there, but he is providing for them what they need to keep living and growing healthily. Similarly, you want to say Chil should stop doing harsh dieting for weight management, but, he has a point, maybe starving is still preferable than dying in traps. Of course the ideal would be to change jobs, but again, life is a struggle and that’s not always an option.

^ Truly the classic "if you don’t listen to me, your parent, a cryptid is gonna kidnap you!" international experience………

He is so so so the "What? My way of parenting is kinda bad? But my father raised me like that, and look how great I turned out!" <- emotionally dysfunctional…….. "Pshhh what do you mean having an alcoholic parent negatively affects you? My father was an alcoholic too and look at me"  🤡

All of it was behavior normalized to him. And listen, I’m saying this but not as like, shirking of his part in it. This isn’t a teen or young adult, he’s middle aged, he’s become the one giving and not receiving the generational trauma. He’s chosen to never think deeper on the topic.

And like, he himself is so indifferent to his father and what their relationship was like, of course he wouldn’t notice if a parenting choice wasn’t great for his daughters. He doesn’t have a relationship with his dad, he’s not (at least not consciously) traumatized by him, so from his perspective it’s mission success! He got raised decent enough 👍⭐️ Except he doesn’t realize that like, not particularly caring if he died is sign of a problem between them in itself… And this even as he remains somewhat of an important figure in his life, especially since that’s who he sees on the other side of the life river in the ghost chapter. It’s implicitly the biggest instance of loss through death Chilchuck has in his life I think.

But despite it all he obviously does love his family a lot, right. So I do believe that like, while he has imperfect standards when it comes to parenting he still tries to be better than his dad was, that even if it’s necessary that he has a lot of long work travels, he spends time with them. And there’s sort of this dissonance that he’s both "it doesn’t matter wether i’m here or not, they’ll live, they’re tough girls. Oh they didn’t like my scolding earlier? It’s just how kids are" dismissive and "I love them so much and I want them to have a good life. I want to do my best by them" devoted and so so caring. And like that’s why he works so damn hard, he does it for them, but also that’s why the girls grew up with an absentee father and aughhhh AUGHHHH the unsolvable dilemma of it all Chilchuck in Dunmeshi truly represents like, the harshness of reality & the world and how sometimes things will just suck no matter what, and then of course balancing that with Marcille in their shared arc where she tacks on "And despite that there is beauty everywhere even in the small and menial things, despite that your flawed relationships and dreams are still worth fighting for" ie giving reconciling with his wife a shot, etc.

All that said I think the very strict "you’re gonna grow up to have a stable job by god, young miss" attitude, those strong work ethics he highly values and focuses on and no doubt tried to instill in is own kids, is something he somewhat inherited from his own upbringing and parents.

In my masterpost bit on his parenting, I said I don’t think he’d do any kind of corporeal punishment, but. I do wonder about spanking aftee all. It can be so so easy to rationalize it… Sigh

Daughter pov

Again, my general interpretations for the daughters are written in my masterpost. I think Patti knows her father the least and is the one least worried about jobs and stability and least settled down as a result. Flertom is the more social one who I imagine tended to be the one worried about her parents’ couple and their emotions the most. And Meijack… Ohh Meijack.

When your father tried his best to provide for you but he worked all the time and even when he was home he was either tired or stressed and he’s always liked to get drunk to relax and cheer up. When you know he values work ethics and respectability so you grew up to be capable and quiet. And when he says you’re like him you’re sort of puzzled, does he really know you so little, or does he know himself so little? But you like the feeling of your father ruffling your hair so you accept it and still you stand next to your mother just as quiet and just as stoic during family gatherings. He leaves again and again and when your mother leaves him nothing changes, really. You wonder if it’s more telling that you know him better than he seems to himself or that you don’t know him as much as you wish you did, or that you don’t think about him all that much these days. Out of sight out of mind

Thinking of those posts about how kids never forget and during the "draw your family!" things at school, some of the kids draw their working parents seperate from the rest of them...

Absent father and when he’s at home you get the crumbs of him that you get and you’re grateful for it and that’s that <333

She doesn’t know how much he loves them bc he hasn’t showed them in a long time </3

The horror of drunk Chil in my fics is often about what in this state he can’t do rather than what he could do, how someone who’s as proud of his skills and work ethics as he is has truly changed, not comprehending how he could become so sloppy or how he could allow himself to get like this, marred the values he preaches above all else. It’s in the way that he fumbles with doorknobs, that he could never lockpick a door if you were to lock it, and it both being your salvation and bringing you extreme distress at the thought of it all. His footsteps usually featherlight now sound heavy as stone, like a troll’s.

You know the thing that gets me so bad with alcoholism angst is when people describe the drunk person as a stranger. Often making a metaphor that they’re monsters, have some monster they shapeshift into uncontrollably once in a while, as a way to split the unreconciliable halves of the person sober and drunk in your vision of them……. It gets me soooo bad Little Puckpatti growing up on tales of trolls kidnapping disobedient kids and replacing them with doubles so no one even knows they’re gone… Coming face to face with a drunk Chilchuck that roams the halls of the house with heavy steps in the night, because she wanted to go drink a glass of water, too thirsty to sleep………..

And this is where I reveal that I wrote a fic about just that!! Trolls that thump and tiptoe through the night Mei @ Chil, You made me of stone and still every day you wear me down and chip away at me bit by bit

In the end notes I describe my takes and interpretations: With Mei I tried to give the sense of a kid who sacrifices some parts of childhood to feel closer to her parent, like not playing games to spend more time with him no matter how empty, or wanting to be worthy in his eyes. With Fler, since she was the one in canon to take in their mother and write Chil a letter explaining the situation, I feel like she’s always been the one most involved and aware of the problems in their family. The one most there to emotionally support or to understand what the vibes in a room meant. Puckpatti I think knows her father the least, since with time I think Chilchuck was more and more away from work and more and more cynical like the flashbacks of younger him dungeon diving. I think because of her not minding unstable odd jobs that she’s the most passive, that she’s the most go with the flow. I do also love when Mei is the one most aware of her parents’ flaws and most critical as the eldest, but not in this fic. Meijack grows up to never touch a drop of alcohol, what people joke is the one difference between her and her father. Flertom drinks, too much sometimes, but she considers drinking should be a social activity rather than a habit. Puckpatti only drinks on special occasions when she has the chance.

They already don’t have that much time together because of his work, I wonder how big of a percentage the amount of memories the daughters have of him are when he’s not himself truly… How they kinda reconcile it all. It’s their normal. 

And the thing that’s gutting too, is that Chil always looks so so much more open, relaxed, cheerful and happier when drunk than he usually is. He doesn't know how to get his defenses down without alcohol

"you're all that's good"

Because we do see how he truly used to not be so closed off and bitter. But distrust and fearing for betrayals from both coworkers and then his wife aka the person who’s supposed to be closest to him (he doesn’t even have close family besides his daughters. Does he even have close friends) turned him into what he is now. He was so cheerful!! Happy and trusting and optimistic.

He leaves and she left

God there’s the whole ‘wife leaving him’ trauma too is the thing… It had to have fucked him up so bad like no wonder he got paranoid and decided not to open up to ANYONE like. He never saw it coming is the scariest thing. He didn’t expect her to just up and leave. He didn’t see the warning signs. He won’t know if it’s coming this time either.

….. But then also, why he didn’t reach out to her (besides hurt) was because it was a petty silence treatment, like "oh she left without saying a word? Fine well I won’t reach out to her either" <- man who is so not fine and collected about it. It’s been FOUR YEARSSSSSSS I wonder if he always was like… "This week she’s gonna send a letter. … Ok fine, this month she’s gonna crack. … Within the year she’ll come crawling back." and it’s a bit why it was allowed to go on for this long unchecked like… Why he still considers her his wife even though functionally she’s more of an ex by that point after 4 years.

I can never stop thinking about him and his wife they’re fucking crazyyy. Him not reaching out to her started as a silent treatment from frustration. She never reached out to him either, she just up and left, didn’t even leave or send one last letter she’s just gone and has left this all behind, the house and everything in it. It’s been 4 years but he still considers her his wife and considers themselves only "estranged", "due to circumstances we haven’t seen each other in years". His face in the panel he said this is interesting too, trying to be casual but defensive and exasperated, already dreading the judgement and questions. He moved out of his house to rent a place in Kahka Brud instead. How much of him not reaching out was avoidance… Guilt, frustration, sadness, confusion, just procrastinating and dread and fear of a rejection more concrete, or something else… Maybe realizing he doesn’t miss her as much as he should, not enough to chase after her or try to get her back, just resigning himself to it… Is he a bad husband, is he a bad person? Should they reconcile?

Not seeing it coming… It’s half trust, that this person who’s so dear to you could never just up and leave and hurt you like that, half entitlement, thinking that she would never think of leaving, and third it’s blinding himself to the warning signs, not wanting to believe or acknowledge them. Because like, there WERE some, he said she "suddenly fell into a bad mood on the way back [from the outing]" and I don’t think he’s too dumb to be aware that something was off, he literally just dismissed it and then went surprised pikachu face when it turned out things were indeed off.

Part of it is definitely, how do you even react if your wife walks out on you without warning. If it happened to me I think that I wouldn’t reach out for a while either, wait for them to reach out to me first, give them space. As I put it in one of my marchil wips, "I respect your right to be rid of me too much to try and shackle you to me if you want to leave". Inaction is easier than admitting he’s scared to check and find out that the worst case scenario is true. It’s been years and he still hasn’t worked it out why she left. Do you think that’s on purpose. That he doesnt want to know for sure. It’s so so so scary to try and do anything about it

He said he didn’t reach out right away when she left because he was petty and wanted to give her the silence treatment back. Ok but is it that he blames her for their marriage falling apart or does he blame himself and he’s just misdirecting the conflicted feelings? Did he not reach out because a part of him was too scared to know why she left or if she would refuse to come back? Did he just think that she’d come back on her own, and things would get fixed while still staying unsaid and unconfronted like they always have, the first month, then the next and the next, until it was a year in and it sunk in that oh, maybe she wasn’t coming back?

He seems genuine here when he says that he was angry about it and gave her the silent treatment, but it is an habit of his to lie to make himself look worse instead of showing vulnerability, so who knows.

He is so so scared of being affected by relationships. Same thing with his compulsive habit to disguise his worry for anger. It’s why he doesn’t want people to have expectations of him, "I’m a coward I’m selfish", because then they can’t be disappointed, they can’t be surprised if he bites, they can’t leave when you lose what they’ve been staying for.

He has avoidant tendencies too. Every time there’s an interpersonal issue he just accepts it’s out of his control immediately. He’s passive when it comes to relationship problems, just like with coworkers, relationships are a ticking time bomb to him, and he just wants to be left out of it and come out unscathed. It comes back to his pessimism. He doesn’t think that like, things could be better. According to him life is tough and cruel, you accept your lot in life and make the best out of it and that’s it. If people are scummy you don’t whine about how unfair it is, you close yourself off and work to not be taken advantage of again and adapt. So then with his wife, when Marcille is like "Have you tried… Talking?" it’s such a crazy idea that it might work at all, that he could have the power to fix things… And that’s why it’s such a big deal when he goes "Alright I’ll try… I don’t know if it’ll go as well as in the stories, but I’ll try". That CRUMB of allowing himself to be hopeful is so huge

Honestly for the longest time I misread this bit, I thought she left in the night like how Marcille framed it, but no she left after he left for work. She left after he left again.

The way it’s told, it really sounds like Chilchuck just came home from work, stayed probably a couple of days in which they went to that outing together, then left for work again right away/soon after and it’s like. Was that outing the most special thing you guys did together. You came home from like a month of work, you had one outing where she ended up having a bad time, y’all didn’t talk about it further and then you left for another couple of weeks. Are you kidding me

Your married life is waiting for your husband to come home, spending mediocre time together, being shut down when you voice discontentment, and things being left unaddressed before he leaves again.

She left when he was gone for work, but did she leave the day of, or did she flip flop on it and took a while before working up the strength to leave? Was she waiting to see if he’d say anything before leaving and when he didn’t that was the last straw?

Chilchuck trying to prove a point that half-foots can make it out there, trying to rely more on himself because that’s the only person he can trust. His wife feeling like he's leaving her behind (because he does. over and over and over and over.) This guy just keeps throwing himself into work because he thinks it's what's best for everyone. Hey sir neglecting emotional needs can be kinda detrimental to everyone involved, I think you might wanna know that ^ quotes courtesy of @soappox

And to come back to alcoholism for a bit, alcoholism is alcoholism, and someone asked why I thought that a Chilchuck with depression would drink and cope through alcohol, since drinking seems to be something cheerful to him. It does puzzle me a bit but it’s worth going over, so… I don’t think him using drinking as a coping mechanism is far fetched at all. Cheerful drunks that are alcoholic still can absolutely use alcohol in ways like that. If something makes you happier, or even just more numb which translates to you feeling more free etc etc, then I definitely think it tracks that he’d keep drinking. Like personally I do think he’d drink a lot after his wife left him, and in rough patches like that. Depression -> not wanting to have to think, the days are blurring together and you either don’t want to be conscious or you want to feel something etc etc -> drinking for the alcohol. Alcoholics tend to be, well, dependent on alcohol. If something bad happens etc they’re usually more likely to go harder on it rather than stop. We can debate on when and why Chilchuck first started to drink but it’s straight up his favorite food now and it’s deeply ingrained in his life, in his favorite outings and activities and priorities and moods and meals. A CHEERFUL DRUNK IS STILL A DRUNK!!! They drink to get happy not drink because they are happy, though obviously the two can have overlap.

Chil represses sooo much. His solution to interpersonal conflict and feelings is just don’t think about it and dull your feelings & senses to everything ✨ I love him. I need to kill him with hammers Like the other day I was thinking about an AU where he might have ran away from his neglectful home or something, but then I remembered he deals with everything including his family by dulling his feelings and senses to things 🫠 He wouldn’t leave

I’d say he doesn’t look troubled by loss through death, moreso loss through mistakes. His nightmare is his daughters dying yes, but moreso them being killed, there’s an axe in the wall etc, it’s about having failed to protect them.

If he can’t fuck something up or if he’s already fucked it up there’s this pacifying sense that he can’t have the rug pulled from under him, because that’s what having connections is, having a wife isn’t an insurance it’s a rug waiting to be pulled. And his brand is sort of Flawed Mr Mistakes Man so he’s kinda been having to cope lol. I do think he throws himself into workaholism, because it’s sort of the only way to live he knows, making yourself capable and useful and spending his days working like that, less time to think, too tired to think. Senses dulled, senses that are usually too sharp, cutting with clarity that he prefers ignoring and avoiding. Work is something he doesn’t have to feel through, something that gives him pride and self-esteem, something through all the danger and life or death risk feels safer, emotionally. No one taught him how to deal with things another way, it’s always been suck it up and work.

Conclusion

Stop smoking we love you and we don’t want you to die

No drinking will not externalize your feelings no it won’t vent them out well please Chilchuck ple-ea-ease…….

</3 They should invent an alcoholism that doesn’t make you dysfunctional and hard to be around

^ Drunk, by The Living Tombstone

I’ve been thinking about enneagrams and Chil is 6w7 highkey. Becomes 3 when stressed, a little 8 but it’s more that he wants security so much that he becomes paranoid rather than having the core of an 8 y’know. I haven’t dug into it for quotes yet but this paper goes hard if you’re curious.

Dropping my relevant Spotify playlists here bc why not: Chilchuck & his wife, marchil angst

[ywraa]

🪲

[seventeendeer]

uncle iroh is predictably one of the characters I've enjoyed the most on my ATLA rewatch but I hope we never find out what happened to his son's mom. unpopular opinion maybe but that man's got some unchecked misogyny problems and with his family's track record vis a vis women, I can only imagine he fed his own wife to the royal piranhas or whatever bc she said his favorite tea tasted like ass

[xxplastic-cubexx]

if we're talking about weird ways the prequel movies handled raven and erik, i still can't really get over how they

- made a huge plot point of first class physical mutations

- erased erik's physical mutation (his white hair)

- made raven's opinion on her physical mutation that she doesn't wanna hide it

- then proceed to have her shapeshifted and hide it almost constantly

- then gave quicksilver and polaris their unnatural hair colors that they should have inherited from erik

it's just hilarious to me. i wanna see the talks that lead to these decisions.

i think At Most i can justify raven hiding her true form as a way to protect herself and/or because she's insecure: evidently a lot of people dont act kindly to blue scaled women (tho i did wish she showed her true form more while at the cia base with the other mutants) and it's fair to assume that even if she wants to be out and proud she has some apprehension about it because of Aforementioned safety/confidence issues

everything else tho yeah LOL whats all this then. wasnt in the budget i support- tho i stilllll so badly wish that they at least let erik's hair go white in apocalypse ..... that woulda been cool at least .....

[sorrelpaws]

proper refs for my new r&m ocs :-) more info BELOW

morty v-37 - basically gets used as a human shield and then promptly left for dead by his previous rick(which is why hes got the scar and prosthetics), y-4441 finds him and fixes him up + erases his memories of the whole nearly dying thing. he’s pretty chillaxed and a bit more cynical than an average morty, more “rickish” i guess idk. tends to be skeptical, likes poking holes in rick’s arguments/inventions etc etc but like in a teasing way

rick y-4441 - very peppy, upbeat and emotional. he kind of reeaalllyyy dislikes the cfc and stays away from it as much as possible, especially after finding and unofficially adopting v-37. he’s not as tech savvy as most rick’s, his abilities are more akin to s1 rick’s skill level? as in, he lives off of scraps of materials and creative solutions, less god-like and more “old man in garage who happens to know physics and chemistry”. loves to ramble about basically anything and happily indulges in morty’s hypotheticals/questions whatever. EXCEPT! for why morty doesnt have his fingers he shuts that topic down immediately just does not want to deal with that can of worms at allll

[mosstrades]

im having an absolute unadulterated blast with the Ethersea prologue for many many reasons, it's beautiful and exceeds all my expectations.. but also. there's many moments here that genuinely make me go "oh god damn, these people are Americans." the Quiet Year system is a profoundly fascinating and revealing game - nothing tells you quite as much about how somebody sees the world than asking them to imagine a new one.

[myballsitchaurghouchie]

Oh to live in a country where Halloween is a big event

[thetwilightroadtonightfall]

finally watched Wish and had a major brain blast

They’re besties now because I said so 💫

[good-beans]

Thanks for the tag @rainbowghostcat!! This is really fun :3 ✨

Are you named after anyone? - Aw, my middle name is also after my (great) grandmother! I know my parents knew someone with my first name who they really liked, but I wasn't specifically named after her

When was the last time you cried? - Lmao I'm a big crybaby so. um. today. asdfasdfs

Do you have kids? - No, and no plans on it, really.

Sports? - I did dance for a long time! It wasn't competitive, but the company was very involved, so it never felt lesser. My favorite was ballet, but I did jazz, modern, and musical theater :)

Do you use sarcasm? - Absolutely nonstop with my family since that's all of our humor, though I'm hesitant around others since I never want to come off rude.

The first thing you notice about someone - huh, I've never really thought about it? Not their name, that's for sure 😭

Eye color - Brown 🤎

Scary movies or happy endings? - I'm a big wimp and can't take scary things, so I'll go with happy endings asdfsd

Any talents? - Well, I'm hoping I'm good at writing (creatively and academically) 😅 I'd say I'm pretty crafty overall -- I may not have mastered a single art but I've dabbled in enough mediums and projects to have some skills

Where were you born - The new england area of the US! (Never managed to develop their cold tolerance, but some people around here say I have a hint of an accent asdfsdf)

Hobbies - Writing, drawing, reading, and though it's been a while since I've actually played anything, video games lol

Pets? - The rest of my family has always been allergic to cats/dogs, so we had bearded dragons when I was younger :3 Catsitting for my brother made me fall in love with them, so I'd love to get more reptiles/a cat someday :')

Height - 5'5/165cm but I'm still holding out for my growth spurt 😤👏(<- she is past growing any more -_-)

Favorite school subject - English/Language Arts! It could be hit or miss with the sciences

Dream job - Author..... I'm still hoping to write and publish things, but the dream is being successful enough to solely be an author 😅

Anyone is free to hop in! Tagging @iqmmir @justzosiahere @heynowisavedyouright @labyrintherim @trinipopkt :D

[icewindandboringhorror]

Pictures and things

[supercantaloupe]

What is the antisemitism in TUC season 1? Does it have to do with Wally the golem?/gen

[ID: an ask from an anonymous tumblr user that reads "would love to hear more about the antisemitism in unsleeping city! was a while ago that i watched it and can't remember what you might be referencing but definitely want to be aware of it.]

no, it's not about willy the golem -- i actually think willy is a great addition to the season (even if i wish we got to see more of him), and an indication to me that brennan/the showrunners were definitely trying to be sincere and inclusive. i want to make it clear that i don't think anything antisemitic in tuc is there intentionally; i think it's there out of simple ignorance, which is also why i think fans don't frequently see/comment on it either. but i don't think that's an excuse, either.

my grief with tuc1 is largely centered around its portrayal of robert moses as the villain. especially by making him a greedy, power-hungry lich working en league with bloodsucking vampires. (also his mini is literally a green skinned skull man in a suit. yikes.) here's the thing; i know robert moses was a real life horrible person, who actually was racist and powerhungry etc etc. and i know that robert moses, the real actual person, was jewish. my grief with tuc1 is not that they chose to use robert moses over literally any other person (real or fictional) to be their season villain (though i'd be really curious to know what tuc1 would have looked like with a different villain), but that they chose to take a real jewish person, turn them into an antisemitic caricature, and then only barely add other portrayals of judaism to balance that out.

like, tuc isn't completely devoid of other jewish representation. as you mention, there's willy the golem -- and again, i really like willy, and i love that it's a portrayal of a golem that's faithful to jewish folklore (ie as a benevolent, guardian construct rather than a mindless destructive monster. i am not a fan of how 'golem' is so frequently misused as a generic enemy creature in other fantasy and ttrpg spaces, including other seasons of d20). but as i said earlier, i wish we see more of him in the season, because he's not around very much, and feels a little more like worldbuilding than a full character to me. also, he's not human. jews are people.

the only other human jewish character in tuc1 is...stephen sondheim. which, again, yeah, that's a real person who really was jewish. but i really wouldn't blame you if you had no idea of that when watching tuc1. maybe from the name you could guess he might be jewish, but i don't think people ought to make a habit of trying to 'clock' someone being jewish by having a 'jewish-sounding' surname. as he's portrayed in tuc1, you'd never know he's jewish, unless you happen to already be pretty knowledgeable about the man in real life. it's far more likely you'll know him as a theater legend than anything else (may his memory be a blessing).

now i'm not saying that brennan or the showrunners should have played up the jewishness of Real Person Stephen Sondheim to counterbalance the depiction of robert moses; that just feels weird to me, especially considering that sondheim was literally alive when tuc1 was filmed and released. it's a tricky thing to portray real people in fiction alongside made up characters, especially when they are contemporaries, and i don't think 'outright caricature' is the way to go about that. nor do i think that moses' jewishness should have been played up at all, because again i don't think that would have been particularly true to the person/character, and also Fucking Yikes. but, c'mon, if you hear the names 'moses' and 'sondheim' next to each other, which one do you associate more with judaism?

and as it stands, these are the only representations of judaism in tuc1. one admittedly nice but very minor nonhuman character; one human character you'd never be able to tell was jewish; and a third human character who, while never explicitly referenced as jewish, plays into some really hurtful antisemitic stereotyping. and it was a choice to not include anything else. maybe not a deliberate one, probably more likely one made out of simple ignorance than anything else, but a choice nonetheless. in a city with one of the largest and most visibly jewish populations in the country, and a culture that is inextricably influenced by that jewish population. a jewish population which has been and continues the target of rising hate crimes for years. i know that nyc means different things to different people, and everyone's nyc is their own -- but my nyc is jewish, and it sucks that that its jewishness is referenced directly in only one very minor way, which is greatly overshadowed by its, in my view, really insidious indirect references.

i don't know exactly how to go about addressing this. obviously, the show can't be changed by now. even if it could, i think the final product would be very significantly different from what it is now if the villain was something/someone else. i think including more references to jews in new york, more (human) jewish characters, hell, even mentioning hanukkah celebrations and menorahs in windows (it takes place in late december, after all; depending on the year it's not at all out of place for hanukkah to coincide with xmas!) would help. having literally any more positive jewish representation in tuc1 would, i think, help balance the bad stuff that's there. because, yeah, robert moses was real and he was terrible and he was jewish. but he's one jewish guy in a city with over a million jews, the vast majority of whom are just normal people. i don't want him to be the only vision of us that people get, in tuc1 alone or in any media. i'm not saying that jews can't or shouldn't be villains in fiction; but especially if you are a goyische creator, you should be really careful in how you're portraying us, and if there are other contrasting depictions in your work, too, in order to not (even accidentally) demonize jewish people as a whole.

[reinabeestudio]

More familial posting. He's like a squeaky toy to me

(also the reference in the first doodle) ↓↓↓

[theriverbeyond]

How many crafting hobbies ya got so far?

it's honestly easier to list the things I don't do (yet), which are uhhhhh metalworking or yarnmaking. what else. I have never made a shoe. Pre-COVID I used to volunteer at an art center thingy that let me take 4 free classes a year... I miss her.

I tend to cycle through which craft I'm doing the most depending on my current project, but my most active arts & crafts hobbies rn are:

Cosplay (big umbrella hobby! clay sculpting, foam stuff, painting, propmaking, sewing, wig stuff, photography/photo editing etc)

Sewing (normal clothing, mending/alterations, and also silly little guys/plush)

Bookbinding (and also typesetting)

Leatherworking (newest hobby! shoutout to the nice worker at the craft store who gave me a ton of scraps for FREE)

Doodling/drawing/painting

I have a ton of other hobbies I've done in the past but don't do rn due to lacking equipment/supplies/studio access (pottery and woodworking are the biggest, I've also dabbled in flameworking, flat glassworking, screenprinting, printmaking all of which require studio space I just don't have access to rn).

Then of course there is the purgatory graveyard of hobbies that I have lost interest in but sort of keep all the supplies around for bc maybe inspiration will strike someday or I can repurpose the supplies for something else (crochet, knitting, cross stitch, embroidery, felting, whittling, shrinky dink earrings), and also all the other random crafty things I've done once or twice but unsure if I can qualify it as an actual hobby (like papercraft and model making). Probably forgetting stuff but yeah

I am not necessarily good at all of these hobbies but doing art is sort of the same as being alive for me so that's kind of not the point. My biggest wishlist crafting hobby is shoemaking, because all the startup/materials and class costs for that are just really high. I REALLY want to make my own boots someday..... I think that would be a really fun and also hot thing for me to do.

[nervocat]

we could go on nature walks together but 💔💔💔

OMG DEVIL THAT'D BE SO FUN WHAT. I ACTUALLY LOVE GOING ON NATURE WALKS :33

[yuridovewing]

like guys i promise im aware blossomfall is meant to be a glass child. i just think she’s a poorly written one lmao

[cellgatinbo]

had such a stupid fun day just hanging out and being a little freak with the emotes (and. the return of the fridge bit.) that i almost forgot literally the Most harrowing moment in my minecraft life happened today

chilling in my ancient city basement with squash and his parents when the white baby comes and wrecks our shit, sends everyone into a panic, having nightmare stalkers and skeleton thrashers and fucking wardens spawned on us, being directly targeted TWO separate times (white baby back for round 2: electric boogaloo)

squash gets downed somewhere in the ancient city. i'm blind and slowed, nightmare screams and clanging hammers and effect clouds everywhere around me, i have no clue where this dying child is. thankfully i find my way over to them, the white fox glaring down at him in cold silence. i'm trying to focus on getting squash up first, throwing myself inbetween them, tanking every hit so he can run away, getting to the lowest health i've been in an attack so far. but he gets up, escapes, the monsters are killed, time resumes moving, everything's alright again.

my heart's still Racing, blood Pounding in my head, i'm on an adrenaline high like you wouldn't believe. then an egg gets killed in chat. i tail the killer and save another child that got downed right in front of me (whether they wanted me to or not). everyone's panicking, there's a server-wide witch hunt, and at that point i had to step away from the computer and. do chores like a regular fucking human being. my legs shaking like jelly as i walked outside to take out the trash. having a casual conversation with my parents as if i hadn't seen Death in front of me in the form of a fucked up minecraft fox model.