literally. when i joined tumblr when i was like, 14, i had no goddamn clue how this site worked. i didn't understand reblogs, and i couldn't figure out how to tag my posts correctly so all my tags got jumbled together "kindalikethis".
but i saw that i could leave replies on people's posts. so, i'd search the name of my fave show/things i liked, and when i saw a post that was neat, i liked and replied to it. and, usually, got replies back (usually from the op). i had whole conversations in the replies of posts. i'd usually follow the poster soon afterwards, and after i noticed the ask box, began to send asks as well.
within a month, despite initially not knowing how to reblog or how the site really worked, i'd made about 10 friends, and had a dash constantly covered in new posts that i enjoyed. around this point i really figured out how reblogs and tags worked, and i was off to the races, dragging in more followers and friends.
all of this, without an algorithm. i never needed one. and neither does any new user.
it might feel disheartening to get not as many responses at first, or for your dash to feel quiet, but you just got to keep trying + learning. don't just give up immediately when your post only gets one note or you go 30 minutes without seeing anything new on your dash. if you wanna have a good time on this site, you gotta make an effort to adapt to it.
the canon of dunmeshi makes it easy to imagine farcille with marcille as the perpetually pining party ready and willing to violate the most fundamental laws of nature for the woman she is utterly, irrevocably in love with. but.
the idea of marcille doing everything she does under the impression that falin is just her dearest most special friend that she loves with the normal platonic intensity of all girl besties while newly re-resurrected falin is shaking laios in their shared bedroom at the earliest opportunity trying to spark their two brain cells together to figure out if marcille, who she has been desperately crushing on since magic school, is actually in lesbians with her and just denser than a neutron star is infinitely funnier so that's the version of reality i subscribe to
(to sweeten the pot this makes marcille being obsessed with romantic drama and effortlessly spinning a character study of chilchuck's wife based solely on two sentences, her knowledge of him as a co-worker, and the power of her own delusions so much funnier too. too busy working that maxed out delusion stat on her unfortunate partymates to look inward for two seconds)
im gonna start a fight; and, at the same time, i need you to take this in the most good-faith way possible, but:
videos that involve body-checking and intentionally (and uncritically) show a mealplan of an unhealthy number of calories are just a revamped version of pro-ana food diaries.
and yeah, i know there's arguments. i address some of them under the cut. but at the end of the day, we're just coming back to romanticizing mental illness; we've just found a better platform for it.
this is already something we've done. we knew it was wrong and tried to stop it. and tbh. it just wasn't enough.
there are people who argue "well, what if you have an eating disorder, you can't help it if you don't eat!" except that as someone with an ED; we are not infants. we know what we're doing. part of having an ED is that you are like, maybe too self-aware. even if we can't help our own food choices, we don't need to fucking romanticize the disorder - something we've been warning you about since 2013. there are hours of setup, filming, and editing that go into these videos. they do not happen to fall into place randomly. there is a reason they are pieced together to be beautiful, bright, inspiring.
there's this woman who pretty much only posts daily plans under a normal amount of calories, and everyone defends her saying but it's better than nothing! and i'm like. except she opens those with images of her showing off her body and provides no context in the video or caption that suggests that she believes what she's doing is unhealthy. she has hundreds of thousands of followers on a platform designed for young kids and teens. i refuse to believe that by accident her content just happens to be cheery advice on "healthy" versions of starving.
for any other symptom of mental illness, we would be incredibly enraged by this kind of placid acceptance of a "tips and tricks" fast-start guide. imagine if people posted pink & pretty videos saying "best places to cut yourself" as if it was a fucking storytime. we, as a society, are so fucking fatphobic that we would rather accept blatantly harmful displays of self harm than admit that we are obsessed with a hyper-thin body type.
i am not suggesting someone never talks about their disorder. i talk about mine. actually, it's a plot point in my book.
here's the difference: i recognize it's a fucking mental illness. i am very careful to never mention a specific weight, eating pattern, or calorie plan. i always make sure to position it as something that ruined my fucking life. i do not put cheery music in the background and hearts and sparkles over my worst moments. i do not film it in bright light. i do not start each passage with an image of a thin body followed by "here's how to look like her."
eating disorders should not be framed as aspirational. and the problem is that society worships the "after" image, so long as you don't get too sick. there is a reason so many people who quit being "influencers" will later admit - i wasn't eating well that whole time; an obsession with food was completely destroying my life.
we let any uncredited, uncertified person write the most backwards, fucked up shit about how to get the body you desire! because the underlying, secret belief is: well, at least they're thin! and the real thing that fucking gets me each time - they make fucking money off of it. their irresponsibility and societal harm literally pays off for them.
"why do you care so much." "don't like it don't look." "so what if people experiment with new ways of thinking of food?"
thank you for asking. we're about to get extremely personal. it's because when i was 18 i discovered "thinspiration"/"thinspo." and it absolutely influenced, shaped, and codified my pre-existing eating disorder. i went from having some troubling habits and traits to being incredibly unwell within what felt like a matter of days. there were actual pages designed to train me on how to have an ED correctly. it was all so suddenly easy. i was sick; and the nature of the illness meant - i wanted to be sicker.
it takes an average of 7 years for a person to fully recover. i know this personally - even now, 10 years from the worst of it, i still fucking struggle. i am so much happier now and i eat what i want and i literally don't think about food at all (19 year old me would shudder) and yet - i still fucking know the calories of plain toast with butter.
an eating disorder is one of the deadliest types of mental illness. over 1 in 4 people with an ED will attempt suicide.
and i'm sorry. i just do not see the exchange rate of "high rate of engagement" versus "the value of a human life."
For some reason went about animating this by doing the rough sketch, animated THE FACE over that, made the face invisible cause it was distracting me from making the head look at all decent, drew the rest of the lines, made the face visible again and adjusted from there.
wof infection au part 3! more under the cut; all parts will be tagged under 'fragariapathosis' 😋😋
cw for scary imagery!! creepypasta-esque stuff, disease, blood, trypophobia, body horror, et cetera et cetera. inspired by the mlp infection aus on tiktok yayy
I find it so SO interesting that as soon as Kazui's breaking their marriage vows and revealing his true feelings (literally tearing apart the dove), the wife is already falling off the balcony
Her hair is fluttering in the wind. The apple fucking splatters on the ground this whole sequence is so visceral I'm spinning it around in my mind. Kazui views his truth telling as a violent act, the killing blow.
I might be misremembering but it's crazy that real lestat (that we know of) never refers to claudia as "ours", only ever refers to her as Louis' daughter. But dreamstat (AKA louis' imagined version of lestat) refers to her as 'our daughter'. This version of Lestat is both a taunting presence and also a comforting one and in this moment it's clear he's supposed to be comforting- meaning I think that Louis longed to hear Lestat take paternal ownership of Claudia the same way Lestat longed to hear Louis say I love you. Like a "this is it. We're a family. You're my husband and the father of our daughter"
A lot of notable things happened in this episode obviously but this is the one thing I can comprehend at this very moment
i feel like im not making any sense but does anyone else feel like there are stories that let u run with them and ones that spell everything out for you