#i'm pretty sure i said it once

[geeky-nightphilosopher]

Nightowl's Thoughts for the Night:

I might have mentioned this before, but I'm just gonna keep saying it-

Eliot's relaxed/innocent expression is perhaps my all time favorite look on him. Especially when he's around the team.

And I think it's because he finally realizes that he doesn't have to wear a mask with these people. He doesn't need to be a gruff/meanie 24/7/365. All Eliot needs to be is himself and I think that's why Parker and Hardison love teasing and harassing him. They want him to feel safe enough to show the real Eliot Spencer.

Parker and Hardison already know they are safe with him. They want Eliot to know he is safe with them. (And by what? Season 2? Season 3?) He does. And I think that's why it's a major shame they cut it at Season 5 of the original.

[a-scary-lack-of-common-sense]

My real time reaction of watching an American influencer spread straight up lies about my country because they lived/visited there at some point

[chiyana]

Bruce: now, for the last part of this meeting

Dick, Jason, Tim, Stephanie, Damian, Cass, and Duke: ?

Bruce: -turns around to bring up a power point presentation, the title card of which just reads 'Please Be Normal About Tim'-

Bruce: -turns back around-

Bruce: ...Tim why are you the only one still here

Tim: I just like power point presentations

[syl-stormblessed]

guys i'm over 70% of the way through Night Watch right now and.....god I don't even know what to say. i still have 1/4 of the book left but i think my life has been changed.........they're waving the flags of Ankh-Morpork and singing the national anthem at the barricades because they are fighting for the city. they aren't rebelling against the city, they're fighting to fix it.....they're fighting for truth, justice, freedom, reasonably priced love, and a hard boiled egg..........the government is trying to name them enemies of the state but....that's just not what they are. they are The People of Ankh-Morpork, and they're rebelling against the injustice that's become ingrained in society, not against society itself...........

[lunarharp]

being attached to that moment qifrey held a baby one time and my ideas for the future :)

[spop-romanticizes-abuse]

you know. the term “gaslighting” is being misused so much that it's difficult to figure out if a person is referring to actual gaslighting, or if they're talking about any kind of manipulation or even just a white lie. with the rise of awareness for mental health, the unfortunate downside is that people label everything with psychological terms and spread misinformation. the term “gaslighting” has lost its original meaning and has turned into a sort of buzzword.

it's obvious that this happens in media analyses too, where people are quick to label any kind of undesirable behaviour as “gaslighting”. however, the only exception to this that i've seen so far is catra.

to refresh your memory (or lend you some new information), here's the definition of gaslighting, according to the APA:

To gaslight someone means to manipulate another person into doubting their own perceptions, experiences or understanding of events.

“I think of gaslighting as trying to associate someone with the label 'crazy',” says Paige Sweet, Ph.D., an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Michigan who studies gaslighting in relationships and in the workplace. “It’s making someone seem or feel unstable, irrational and not credible, making them feel like what they’re seeing or experiencing isn’t real, that they’re making it up, that no one else will believe them.”

when we say catra gaslit adora in the show, we mean it. we don't mean that catra just lied to adora or manipulated her (both of which she has done, to her credit).

some common phrases that gaslighters use are along the lines of:

“you're crazy”

“you're just imagining it”

“it's all in your head”

“you're just being dramatic”

“you're making things up”

this ensures that the victim believes that they are the problem and starts questioning their own sanity. if it continues for too long, the victim might actually be driven to a mentally unstable state.

let's see some of these examples with catra, shall we?

she says all of this word for word. they don't even try to disguise it. and we already know that catra remembered everything or almost everything, at this point. she was not only playing dumb when adora questioned her about it, but further went on to make adora believe that she was going crazy and that she was making everything up.

she also attempts to gaslight scorpia later on, and make her admit that entrapta betrayed them when that is not what happened, and scorpia was there to witness what actually happened.

(i am a bit hesitant to call this “gaslighting” because catra doesn't call scorpia crazy or anything like that, however, she does imply that scorpia was making things up about entrapta trying to save them from the portal.)

and people still have the gall to say that catra never gaslit adora or worse„ that she only did it because she wanted adora to stay. there's no excuse to abuse, manipulation and gaslighting. you can't just woobify an abuser by saying “oh but she just wanted her crush to stay with her 🥺” that's just gross. catra fans say that they empathize with abuse victims but their empathy starts and ends with catra. adora's trauma doesn't matter to them in the slightest, which is why they keep romanticizing this shit.

[trashcanwithsprinkles]

Do you ever play Honkai star rail?

in a sense? like i have an account and i go in to farm artifacts and stuff but i'm not doing any events or quests whatsoever. i kinda left the game post tingyun fakeout (?) and hadn't done any events for a while before that? like idk what the aurum alley situation is. after that i waited till they stopped handing out ratios (did they ever actually give him for free? i heard smth like that but idk if it actually happened) n returned to do penacony just to see what all the hype was about, but haven't done any events at all. nor any sidequests or character quests. i did do the first ruan mei one out of obligation, i can't remember whose materials were locked behind that quest.

kinda waiting until they implement a wuwa-styled skip button lmao

[skrunksthatwunk]

idk if i've discussed it before (i have certainly THOUGHT about it) but someone on my kuwa suffering ep 89 comp mentioned it and i just had to go off about it like. ok. sensui tells yusuke something along the lines of "you heard itsuki" when itsuki's inside the uraotoko, implying that not only can sensui hear those inside the uraotoko, but that he expects yusuke to be able to as well. which means that yusuke Almost Certainly Heard And Kind Of Ignored kuwabara's prolonged mental breakdown and wailing about how much he needs yusuke to live etc. which. guHHH i hate him yusuke you ass but also listen.

the only acknowledgement yusuke gives to this (if any) is when he says something like "sensui you're sooo fucking cooked this plan's going perfectly (my friends are going to get strong and kill you when i die)." he's trash talking to sensui, ignoring the others because, i think, he doesn't want to acknowledge what he's doing to them.

yusuke is explicitly recreating the experience he had with kuwabara's "death" at the hands of toguro, complete with the announcement of intent (and power) to kill, the inability to impede the threat in any way (barring a power-breakthrough), and the target in some way racing towards/volunteering for their death. yusuke learns through doing, and through tough love-style approaches. it's only effective if it hurts. watching kuwabara die like that was devastating to yusuke, but it sure as hell fucking worked. he beat toguro because of that maneuver. so even if he has to (re-)traumatize his friends in the process, this method will make his friends stronger, and he feels confident in that. but he never had to live with the consequences of kuwabara's death, not really. that's something hiei makes clear before they enter the cave as well, that there are no fake-outs ready to make him or anyone else stronger. the only deaths here will be real. the only power gained will come at a high, permanent cost. hiei's warning is an attempt to keep everyone alive, to keep yusuke from being stupid. and then yusuke decides to take that fatality into his own hands, but it's kind of his friends who would pay the price. he's going to make them live through the days, months, years without him, the actual permanency of loss (assuming they survive for that long), something he never experienced with kuwabara (a new facet of that traumatic scenario), AND he's escaping the emotional fallout of this choice through death. he doesn't have to see them mourn, won't get yelled at, won't watch them fail to move on. he's tapping out and choosing to believe they'll be fine.

but i think he feels guilty. just a little. i mean, yusuke couldn't even believe that people cared about him enough to want him alive in episode one. he's staked everything on his friends, which means he still kind of... doesn't value his own life, at least not compared to theirs. but he believes his friends love him and want him around, and we know that because he has to, or else he wouldn't make a plan that depends entirely on that love. he is actively leveraging the care he doesn't think he deserves, trying to hurt them in a way he is intimately familiar with (only worse), for.... what, exactly?

this is kind of my sticking point tbh. i don't think the answer is... super clear, but let's start with what it's not.

yusuke is not doing this because it is the most practical way to save all of humanity; that would be the mafukan, which he stopped. it could be a gamble to save all of his friends? the mafukan strategy would guarantee koenma's death/eternal imprisonment, whereas this strategy gambles all of humanity on the chance that his friends come out of the Easy Break Oven strong enough to avert the end of the world. if the sacrifice of even one friend is completely intolerable, perhaps he'd accept those slim odds and their steep consequences. yusuke tends to take risks like that, especially when he's got fight-induced tunnel vision. he doesn't think things through too much; his schemes are usually dependent on surprising his enemy enough to oneshot them. truthfully, i think this is the closest we'll get to an answer, and it's a more conventional one for this kind of story. but there is another layer i haven't been able to get from my mind.

i think yusuke is gifting each of his friends an honorable warrior's death.

so, in case it needs saying, yusuke, kuwabara, kurama, and hiei all (at least once, if not several times) exhibit a desire to die in combat in a way they deem noble to give their lives purpose (usually by self-sacrifice, but sometimes by another metric of honor, like hiei's duel with shigure and his desire to die in mutual defeat against an evenly matched opponent; or even kurama's decision to fight shigure in his human form, displaying a sort of passive suicidality via placing being true to himself in this (somewhat symbolic/inconsequential) way over survival). they need to make their lives count for something, because they feel guilty for being alive (kurama and hiei feel guilty for their past actions (hiei's is most evident in his distance from yukina, though that's not its primary reason), hiei, kuwabara, and yusuke have all been ostracized and made to feel like burdens on/unwanted by their caregivers and general society; all four of them have felt profound isolation even from their loved ones (yusuke and hiei are rather obvious; kurama can never tell his mother about the majority of his life nor what she truly means to him in the context of it; and kuwabara is separated from his peers for his spiritual awareness and his "stupidity" (plus his parents aren't around? and he is Desperate to define manhood/manliness through a broader pop cultural one which includes the warrior sacrifice thing bc he has no male role models BUT that's for another post) (i will admit kuwa's the most tenuous one here irt isolation)). they want to die for a cause so badly it's actually physically painful to me. it is passive suicidality, and they define their lives and identities by their relation to, engagement with, and skill at doing violence, etc. they live to die by the sword. anyway. nobody talks about it but i think it's very important to understanding what yusuke's doing here.

because i think he knows that about himself and his friends. they're kindred spirits. at the very least he knows this about kuwabara, who literally made a speech about this before diving into toguro's fingers In The Event That He Is Recreating Explicitly. he is dying nobly like they all want to on the chance that they'll get to break out and fight sensui rather than dying without even getting to take a swing. it's about his pride and theirs. but i don't think yusuke necessarily believes they'll win. he knows better than anyone how strong sensui is, and how wide the gap is between sensui and team urameshi. his stated position that humanity is doomed and that he doesn't care about its fate is, i think, not completely genuine, but if we take it at face value, he's not killing himself so that his friends can survive the end of the world. something's going to come around and kill them eventually. he's doing it so they can survive long enough to fight sensui. he needs them (specifically kuwabara) to be strong enough to free themselves to begin round two. but he's given up on their side winning, on humanity surviving, on his own victory---why should he think his friends are capable of winning? this could be another case of yusuke's fight-blinders. it could be another gamble, more blind faith put in his friends. but honestly it reads more to me that yusuke's giving them a chance to die together on the battlefield. them winning would be great, but it's not his goal. it's a pipe dream.

he knows he's going to be killed. they're probably going to be killed, too. but to make it so they last a little longer against sensui, to make the odds a little more even, so they are killed not like livestock, but like worthy fighters, he'd die a little faster. it's the best kind of death someone like them can have; and he'll deprive himself of it just to make their ends a little sweeter. even if the road to that is far more bitter.

but it's not like yusuke's friends know what he's thinking or agree to it, and he can't exactly make his case for it in the moment. he's making that choice for them. whatever his intentions, whatever odds he thinks they have of beating sensui, he's kind of sealing all of their fates. so how the hell is he supposed to acknowledge kuwabara screaming at him not to die, trying desperately to express what yusuke means to him in what could be their final moments together? this plan is going to hurt his friends terribly. it is already doing so, and he can hear it. his choices to stop koenma from using the mafukan and to die for his friends' strength are both selfish in some way, no matter how you read the scene. if yusuke comforts kuwabara, he might not get strong enough. if he twists the knife, well... how could he forgive himself? and either way by responding he would have to face them all and say yes, i'm doing this regardless of your feelings (with the intention of hurting you). so i think he does what he often does. he avoids it. he lets that emotion glance off him and his bravado and his one-liners so he doesn't have to deal with the fact that he's hurting people, that he's scared and guilty and unsure of himself. that he's about to die again, about to put kuwabara through the grief he saw at his wake again, only worse; about to put his quieter friends through something similar.

yusuke is confronted with the responsibility one has to the people who care for them, and he runs from it in an attempt to give them some small peace. just like when he died before and thought hey, at least my mom and keiko won't be burdened by me anymore. because the only thing he can really do for them is die.

[hatterofthelabyrinth]

if Halloween can´t be celebrated there, then what do they celebrated there or is there no celebration? (i hope you understand my english, i speak spanish)

There isn't any sort of celebration as far as I know of? I've passed houses and Lerkrims of people hosting parties and the like, but that's the closest I've seen. But no, I don't think anyone does holidays here. If they do, I haven't seen anyone celebrate it. Hey, maybe that'll be something someone can do. Set up a haunted house year round. Randomly go decorate. Make a halloween costume just for the sake of it. Seems like fun to me.

[nilesmoon]

this shot of sawashiro is simply breathtaking to me!!!

like. seeing him crash and burn after hearing that his son has never trusted him, realizing that the chance he took by sending a tip geomijul didn't pay off, that the "miracle" he asked for is too late (just like he is). It truly is something to watch!!

to me, this really is the scene to show how incredibly miserable this asshole is and the cherry on top is how the way he sits is the exact same pose the corpse next to him has got.

[gideonisms]

The writers of oniisama e failing to understand how drugs, illnesses, or human proportions work but understanding unrequited high school lesbian crushes on a deep and fundamental level:

[strixcattus]

What on Earth could there be left to find? I've brought all the vessels to Her. I've done every ending except A New and Unending Dawn, and Everyone Hates You. What am I missing...

...Oh. Wait.

People do that? Almost 20% of people did that—probably most of them completely unbidden? Who does that?

...Well. Shouldn't be too hard to go back and grab it.

[pardonmydelays]

i had so much fun last night omg

[softdreamlesssleep]

God, "I missed you" sex is the best

[tyrannuspitch]

here's a headcanon i've only just consciously realised i have:

whether it actually exists or not, mcu valhalla is meant to look like you expect: golden halls and courtyards where the warriors can endlessly feast and find glory in battle.

but mcu hel(heim) is meant to look like a battlefield after the battle is won. empty ash and mud and wasteland. mist, or smoke, or smog, or acid rain. visible decay that never cycles back to feeding new life. maybe traces of unidentifiable ruins or bones. hel is where those who died "without honour" go, the pointless deaths, the innocents, and so the supposed honour and glory are never visible there.

hel is where the enemies of asgard will (allegedly) one day rise up from - all the people they fed into the meat-grinder of their empire, all the women and children, the commoners and collateral damage, the so-called barbarians and slaves - and they can see that empire for the utterly bleak and pointless evil it is, and they're villainised for it. "the monstrous hordes of the undead". the ghosts on a nation's guilty conscience.

some of the monsters asgardians tell their children about are living, but the worst of them, the true existential threat, are the innocent people they haven't murdered yet. and the constant fear/shame of not dying well is only the fear of becoming one of them.

[gigantomachylesbian]

Guys. I did not know before now that writing could be painfully millennial in a full prose book but the pho*nix ke*per has proven me wrong and I have to complain about it in the tags