#ill do npc or season 2 kids too

[yeahiguess3232]

My beautiful son-father in the style of Mucha! Which character should i do next? (Lemme know in the tags lol)

Symbolism of the flowers under the cut:

Ivy: dependence, endurance, faithfulness

Heliotrope: devotion

Blue Iris: faith, hope

Dandelion: overcoming hardship

(Source)

[maukiki1-but-cringefail]

okay i probably would've asked more abt your bsb thoughts sooner except i got shy. but i'm going insane rn so i gotta ask.... your thoughts on zeo. bc when i watched v-force nearly 2 years ago the robot twist took me out for like an entire day and now i'm still insane about them. like it's ridiculous but also really fucked up when you think abt it. and if/when you get to the manga. well i haven't read most of it EXCEPT for volumes 7-9 and vol 9..... ough. manga zeo my also beloved. i think abt this kid and their fucked up ass dad so much

omg im gonna lose my mind i just spent so much time typing the anwser to this and tumblr just DELETED IT ARE YOU KIDDING ME😭 sigh okay ill do it again ig...

i read the manga+rising but the manga version of zeo didnt really stand out to me so im gonna talk about the anime version of him only.

The season hes in, v force, is notoriously fucking boring (i knew this before watching v force even though i stayed out of any info abt bsb to avoid spoilers AND i still knew, imagine that) its like an entire season of filler but the character who stands out the most is Zeo obviously. ozuma/ozma is there too but eh. standing out in v force isnt saying much considering its not really intresting but that doesnt mean i hate him. hes .. neat but i dont think about him a lot.

in the anime when they first started hinting at something being off with zeo (and learning who his father is) my IMMIDIATE guess was oh this guys some kind of lab experiment, ailen or a robot and i was right lol. i mean considering his fathers job it isnt hard to predict but it is a kids show🤷

what i thought the most in the finale fight was okay, so he wants to be human, my boy yearns for the flesh, but like.. why? i know he has zagarts dead sons memories inside of him but if hes human enough to live and not notice he was a robot whats so bad about being a machine??? (robot propoganda lmfao) . he talks like a human feels like a human walks like a human feels like a human.. the gang™️ points this out too. i think there shouldve been more physical indicators to this guy straight up being a machine.. so many cool shit u can do with a ROBOT BLADER HELLOOOO ... ??? like do u have any problem in ur system or did u just not notice?? also how long has he been a robot? i feel like i needed more explanation on the dead son thing. yall couldnt take all those pointless boring episodes of those npc dudes trying to steal the sacred beasts and give it to zeo's backstory? what happened to this child? how long has he been a robot? when how which who which colour how many??2?2? was the original child also mint haired lmao? -also his hair colour is rll nice ^^

but yeah i think hes neat and probably the best character in his season.. i think his design is decent too, atleast the one w the white-ish outfit

oh and also this shit was raw as FUCK

[strangertheory]

How do you think people in Stranger Things would react to Will being THAT powerful??? His allies (friends, family), his enemies (Lonnie, Dr. Brenner...), other psychics (would they be jealous?) MIKE??? Would he still want to be with him? (I know he's been with Ell, but wouldn't he be too scared to be with someone THAT powerful?) And finally WILL HIMSELF?

Hello there! Thanks for Asking! ^_^

So - I believe that the context of your question is that you are assuming that my understanding of the Stranger Things universe is that Will Byers’s mind created the Upside Down and the monsters and the “Russians” and that in this sense he has “god-like” psychic powers just like @kaypeace21 explains in many of her blogposts. Correct?

Yes. I believe that Mike and Joyce and Jonathan would still want to stay with Will. I believe that his friends will ultimately choose to stay with him, too. I personally believe that El will also ultimately be an ally to him just as she always has been since season 1.

Jealousy, in my opinion, would be inappropriate and ignorant. Will’s powers are nothing to be jealous of since they stem directly from the abuse and trauma that he has been through and they are fantastical manifestations of his mind attempting to do everything it can to protect itself. But I suppose it's always possible someone would be jealous and ignorant about his powers nonetheless.

Currently Will does not have conscious control over these events. Not that we know of yet, at least. They also appear to be tied to his anxiety, his emotions, and his trauma that is buried in his mind. Of course people in Hawkins would be intimidated and afraid of Will if and when they figure out that his feelings and traumas are manifesting themselves in their world and are creating dangerous circumstances for everyone in Hawkins and the world-at-large. Of course. But it’s important to remember that he is not choosing to cause any of it, and it is not his actions but the actions of those who hurt him that are reaching out and spreading and incidentally harming the town as his mind tries to process what has happened and deal with everything and, ultimately, protect him.

However. I want to also add a tiny bit of my own speculation regarding what these supernatural and fantastical occurrences could represent within the theory that Will has dissociative identity disorder:

As you have probably noticed - I am a huge fan of @kaypeace21‘s theories and I agree with her on many, many observations and ideas about what is going on in the Stranger Things universe. But sometimes I might have slightly different ideas of my own here and there. I go back-and-forth on many of them. They tend to not be as well-organized or cohesive as @kaypeace21 ‘s interpretations, but I do have a collection of “maybes” floating around my mind most days.  I’m not committed to any of these rogue thoughts, and I change how I feel about them every single day and so I haven’t wanted to share them. But I will mention one of those thoughts in this answer to your Ask:

I continue to go back-and-forth between whether or not I see this story as one about literal monsters attacking a very real town and creatures that have emerged from Will’s mind in the flesh, or whether this entire story could be a story-within-a-story. Might there be a real-world, realistic-fiction version of everything happening that is hidden behind this curtain of fantasy? Could there be a version of Hawkins itself that is an internal world with alters and introjects and NPCs living in it? Was Will “going missing” really El fronting in a DID System for a few weeks because Will was afraid and “hiding”? Did Mike yell at Max for allowing El to show up at the Mall and say “You know she’s not allowed to be here!” because he’s worried it’s not safe for her at the mall for reasons that don’t involve the Lab or Evil Russians? Were we supposed to pick up on Will tapping out Morse Code to Hopper and saying “Close the Gate” in season 2 as being a method of communication that Hopper had taught to El for when she needed to reach him? I don’t know. I do think about these details and these possible hidden layers sometimes, though. These are just some thoughts that nag at the corners of my thoughts some days.

But whether Stranger Things is a fantastical retelling of “What Happened to Will Byers and How His Friends Helped Him Defeat the Monsters” written by author Michael Wheeler or not, I think that much of the conflict with supernatural elements in Stranger Things is still functioning on a very metaphorical level and will be resolved within the emotional and psychological aspects of the story getting resolved.

To return to the heart of your question and how his friends and family might feel about him being “so powerful” :

Yes. Will’s friends and family and all of Hawkins will probably be afraid of him at first just like (sadly) people in the real world are often afraid of those that are dealing with trauma and mental illness and those that behave “strangely” and are different compared to others that they are used to understanding. I think that their reactions will probably be analogous. We have already seen how Will (and El!) is treated as different and ostracized socially in many ways, both intentional and unintentional. Will is known to be not like other kids. (”He’s not like you, Hopper! He’s not like... most.”) Will is anxious about being treated like a baby and like he can’t handle things on his own by even his friends. Will is bullied. Everyone at school, even high schoolers that aren’t Will’s classmates, refer to him as a “freak.” Jonathan was referred to as “the freak’s brother” at one point. Can you imagine? Will is mocked so widely by the town that even high school bullies take jabs at him in casual conversation when insulting someone else: his older brother. He’s mocked. He’s bullied. He’s ignored. Will is already treated as someone different that the town is uncomfortable with and doesn’t respect. His “powers” growing or Will suddenly becoming more aware of his situation as someone that is different and called a “freak” will surely be a very hard thing for him to deal with while he is also met with increased ostracization by the people he knows and loves.

Hopefully those that love Will are going to ultimately realize that his “powers” and his condition are not a threat to their safety, and that the true danger and evil stems from the person (or people) who have hurt Will and who need to be brought to justice. Helping Will heal from everything that he has been through will surely be the key to banishing the monsters from Hawkins and allowing Will himself to realize that he doesn’t have to see his life as ruined by his condition or his “powers” and that he can truly have a happy, fulfilling life with those he loves. On that note: I highly recommend @kaypeace21‘s response to this blogpost (click here to read the thread) in which she discusses how important it is that storytellers create narratives in which survivors find happiness and love in spite of everything that they have been through because too often the lie and the damaging trope that mental illness inevitably condemns people to misery and death shows up again and again in pop culture. It’s important that we reject the lie told to us by society that the mentally ill are incapable of having happy lives.

(Thank you for Asking!)

[backupblogforjg]

The racism, sexism, homophobia, ableism and cruel tropes in Voltron

So, it’s the anniversary of the ending of Voltron. And I’m getting really, really tired of people saying that only shippers hated the ending. There were many issues with Voltron, and they were neither limited to shipping nor to S8.

So, I’ve decided to compile a list.

It gets LONG. Turns out there was a hell of a lot of racist, sexist, ableist and cruel tropes in VLD.

In fact, I had originally planned on writing a list of both the terrible tropes and the plot holes. But there just wasn’t enough room for both. The post is huge as it is, and with the plot holes, it would have been twice as long, so I had to focus on only one thing.

Salt, obviously. So, so, so much salt. I could turn a lake into a sea here. You’ve been warned.

RACISM:

1) The Alteans are genocide survivors. Out of all the Alteans, only the black Altean was used for a Reverse Racism story where she resents a teammate for belonging to the race that exterminated hers. The white Alteans are totally cool with him, and with his race in general, and only hate the bad people. But the black one had to be taught that hating people because of their race is wrong.

2) VLD Allura is also the only version of Allura who is black. In every other Voltron media (several different cartoons and comics), Allura is blond with blue eyes. All the white versions of the character get a happy ending, while only the black version ends up dying to save the world.

While "hero sacrifices their life to save the world" is not a bad trope in and of itself, it becomes bad when it kills off one of the extremely few black female characters in leading roles. You kill off a white male hero, there are 463278462387 more. You kill off the black female hero, you are kinda screwed. Making it worse, Allura had been portrayed as suffering from depression throughout the latest seasons, so that her death comes across less as heroic sacrifice and more as suicide.

3) The brown Cuban kid who dreamed of being a pilot, and never once in 78 episodes ever expressed anything but sheer love for an exciting life, in the final two minutes of the final episode ends up realizing that the place for him is a farm.

4) As told in interviews, Lotor was meant to be a bad example of mixed-race person, to contrast him with Keith as good example of mixed race person. Do I even have to point out how messed up this is?

5) Even before they became Space Nazis, back when they were still on the side of the angels, the Galra invaded and conquered planets. This is portrayed as totally cool when they happily name the prince after a "hero" who invaded and conquered a lot of worlds, and the peaceful Alteans think the guy is just as heroic as one of their greatest scientists. Apparently there is such a thing as ethically killing people to steal their land.

6) They whitewashed Keith, a character who is poc in every other iteration of Voltron.

I’m sure a lot of people are going to get angry here, claiming that I hate Keith. Let me assure you, I don’t. I love Keith, and I hate what was done to him. I hate that they took a traditionally poc character and went to frankly ridiculous lengths to erase that part of his character. Keith should be Asian, and it would be incredibly easy to make him so in VLD (seriously, all they’d have to do is update the freaking bios, an intern could do it right now in 5 minutes). But they refuse to do it.

A lot of people don’t realise that the surname “Kogane” in VLD is fanon.

I’m serious. Check his official bios page. Keith is not actually called Keith Kogane in VLD. Fans started calling him that in fanfiction, and it stuck, but it’s not canon.

In every other Voltron media, Keith is an Asian guy. But in VLD, they:

- went out of their way to always avoid giving him an Asian surname

- gave him a Texan father

- refused to confirm his race, even when every other character had a specific race. Again, check his official bios. All the other characters got a race, Keith gets “human.” It got so ridiculous it would be funny if it weren’t sad. It pretty much went like this:

Fans: Keith is half alien, but about his human half, what is his ethnicity? EPs: oh, we couldn't possibly say, because the story takes place in the future, and in the future, everybody is mixed up! So, Keith is HUMAN, we can't give him a specific race because there are no specific races in the future! Fans: ok. And what are the races of the other characters? EPs: Pidge is Italian, Lance is Cuban, Hunk is half-black half- Samoan, Shiro is Japanese. Fans: but Keith...? EPs: HUMAN! There is no such thing as race in the future!

Some people at least hoped that Keith's Texan father had Asian ancestry because he kinda looked like Shiro, who is Japanese. But the EPs confirmed that the resemblance was just a coincidence, they never meant for the dad to look Japanese.

At this point pretty much the only evidence that Keith is Asian is that he is voiced by an Asian person. But then, Josh Keaton is not Japanese, is he?

7) After whitewashing Keith, they claimed he is the best leader of Voltron, better than his poc predecessor, because he has Galra blood.

So, instead of bringing up any sort of legit reason to justify why Keith should be in charge (like his empathy or pilot skills), they go with "the half-white guy is also half space-nazi and that's why he should give the orders instead of the poc guy."

If you think I’m bashing Keith here, please ask yourself why you are getting angry at the person pointing out the whitewashing instead of getting angry at the whitewashing. Especially when, again, making VLD Keith canonically poc could be done anytime with zero cost and zero effort, and DW just doesn’t want to.

- Hunk, the half-black half-Samoan guy, was going to be killed and replaced as Paladin by a blue alien. The EPs were pissed when DW forbade them to, and complained in the interview about it.

SEXISM:

Every single woman who is ever put in charge ends up going insane, making terrible decisions that endanger her planet, or losing all of her authority.

Allura starts out as co-leader of Voltron and leader of the Coalition. Ends up as a foot soldier who takes orders from the new leader and his right-hand man, and is treated as a cadet by the Earth military.

HOMOPHOBIA:

1) Dreamworks, Netflix and the EPs very, very, very heavily promoted S7 as GLBT-friendly. The EPs gave whole interviews about the past relationship between Shiro and new character Adam, retweeted a ton of posts celebrating Shiro’s homosexuality, and enthusiastically sent tweets like "you are going to see more of Adam in S7! :D" from their personal accounts after they showed the episode that introduced him.

In S7:

- Shiro's homosexuality is so ambiguous that even the Brazilian voice actor didn't realize that he was supposed to be gay. Just by watching the show, without knowing the World Of God, you can’t tell he and the other guy were engaged.

- Adam gets about 30 seconds of screentime after that one episode they had already shown. Then he dies screaming in pain and terror in a fire.

A lot of people claimed that it was okay to kill Adam because Shiro was supposed to be our rep, not Adam, who was a brand new character we knew little about. And, out of context, that would be true. Adam was pretty much a NPC, why would his death matter?

But the problem here is the context:

- Shiro is closeted in S7, you need to read interviews to know he is gay. So, if only Shiro is meant to be the rep, they couldn’t even do that right.

- They very heavily marketed both Shiro and Adam as gay rep, and specifically talked at length about Adam in several interviews.

In THAT context, REGARDLESS of what you ship, killing off Adam revealed a complete willingness to manipulate the audience to the point of outright lying. Even if you hated Adam, even if Adashi is your NOTP, the clear evidence that the creators had absolutely no problem making empty promises was NOT a good sign.

2) The moment Shiro is revealed to be gay in interviews, he is practically quarantined from the Team.

3) Shiro is also given a Totally Not AIDS deadly disease.

Making it even worse, Shiro never actually gets cured in canon. We are told he is cured in interviews, but the show itself drops the topic entirely. Depending on where you lean in the Word Of God VS Death Of The Author debate, Shiro may be doomed to die.

4) A female villain is revealed to be a lesbian. 30 seconds later she gleefully tortures a little girl. Then she, too, dies in a fire.

(Fan outrage about pulling two Bury Your Gays in the Season that had been very heavily promoted as GLBT-friendly caused DW to retcon her death and bring her back in S8, but she was originally meant to die in the explosion)

5) Shiro ends up marrying a random character who doesn’t even get a name in the show.

ABLEISM:

1) Shiro's PTSD magically disappears offscreen. In interviews, the EPs claimed that he "got over it" between S6 and S7 because "he is a professional." Wow! Who knew being a professional magically cures mental illnesses!

2) Shiro is an amputee. The EPs admitted that they never put any thought into his status as disabled rep, they just wanted a character with a cool-looking arm. It literally didn't occur to them that making him lose his arm (TWICE! First up to the biceps, then up to the shoulder) meant anything. Also worth noting that Shiro’s new arm makes him look like the guy who tormented him.

3) Shiro is systematically robbed of his agency.

- He is the only Paladin who never gets to use his bayard.

- He loses his bond with Black for no given canon reason (and the reason they give in interviews makes no sense, they basically say that transferring his soul out of the Black Lion makes her stop loving him. But she still lets Zarkon fly her!).

I know that Keith is traditionally Black’s pilot in Voltron media (although that shouldn’t matter, because VLD made a lot of huge changes to the traditional status quo). But if they wanted Black Paladin Keith that badly, they could have given some non-insulting reason for it. For example, say “because Shiro has spent so much time within Black, their bond is now so strong that he will get absorbed again if he flies her again.” Or co-pilots in Black (if Pidge can co-pilot with Matt, why can’t Shiro co-pilot with Keith?).

- He is defeated not only by Sendak, but also by a bunch of random Alteans. He basically can’t win a fight anymore unless it’s played for laughs.

- His new robot Atlas is bigger than Voltron, but also much weaker, and can only buy a few minutes for Voltron to come save the day.

- Every single enemy he ever defeated comes back to be finished off by somebody else (even the friggin' Gladiator from S1 comes back in S8). In the epilogue, he retires in his twenties.

4) Narti, the disabled General, is fridged shortly after her introduction. For a while at least it seemed like her death had affected the remaining three Generals, but then it turns out that the "For Narti" line was a trick and they never actually planned on avenging her.

CRUEL TROPES:

1) They intentionally baited the fans by pushing the plot thread that Lotor would be redeemed. They named the episode where he defects "A New Defender," they kept saying in interviews that they come from Avatar and they are very familiar with Zuko *hint hint*, they showed his family as incredibly abusive and Lotor himself as desperate, they showed that Lotor was a victim of severe racism (he is mixed race, and as stated above, the Galra are Space Nazis and are pretty obsessed with blood purity).

Then, after revealing him to be a villain, they gave an interview where they practically dislocated their shoulders by patting themselves on the back as they gleefully bragged that "we made them think we would give them a Zuko, but we gave them an Azula!"

(Nevermind the fact that Azula herself was a 14-year-old child, not a monster, and that Aaron Ehasz himself confirmed that he always wanted her to be redeemed).

When fans who are survivors of child abuse told them that the bait-and-switch was really hurtful, they laughed it off, and claimed that Lotor was just beyond redemption. Then they proceeded to redeem Lotor's abusive parents, who were objectively much worse.

2) Shiro’s clone, who sincerely believed he was Shiro and always meant well, was dehumanised, demonised and discarded like his life meant nothing. His short existence was full of pain from literally the moment he first opened his eyes, as Haggar kept torturing him with migraines to manipulate him. In the end, she brutally violates him body and mind, and brainwashes him to force him to turn on the family he was so desperate to find in The Journey. He dies in incredibly questionable circumstances, without ever getting to learn that his family survived Haggar’s plans. He is victim-blamed for the things she forced him to do against his will with mind-control, and is never mourned because the only family he ever had writes him off as a “thing” and “evil.”

In fact, the horrific treatment of Kuron foreshadowed S8. The Medium article “It never stops at one - Why Voltron: Legendary Defender's tragic ending wasn't a surprise and why more DreamWorks' series will follow suit” explains how.

The tl;dr version is that, when a story posits that the circumstances of your birth determine the value of your life, so that good intentions and hard work mean nothing, and long-established bonds can be discarded with zero thought and care, and your very humanity can be revoked over something you have absolutely no control over, and the whole sociopathic disaster is celebrated as a happy ending... it really, really can’t end well. Not just for you, but for the entire cast.