#in flawed and hurtful ways

[maingh0st]

do i think selfishness is a particularly laudable quality? no

do i think it is important—even vital—for our media literacy, our thematic authenticity, and our ability to see ourselves in stories that we write characters (especially girls and women) making selfish choices? yes, deeply

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Bare skin, bare feelings.

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[demigods-posts]

okay but you can see the moment percy's heart shatters into pieces once he learns that grover was also annabeth's protector. because this child grew up watching as his peers chose schoolyard taunts over compassion. watching as his dad chose freedom over fatherhood. watching as his mother chose to protect his life by sacrificing her own. but when his mom dies, he holds onto the notion that at least he's not alone. at least he has grover. but that worldveiw wastes away when he learns that he is, first and foremost, grover's assignment. that he was no one's first choice at all.

[queer-reader-07]

you know what i think is interesting? the way that some people have just flat out decided that aziraphale being in hell during the body swap wasn't even a little bit traumatic.

we obviously know it fucked with crowley (see: the telling jim to jump out a window scene)

but what about aziraphale? sure we have no concrete proof it messed with him, but we also don't have proof to the contrary

"oh but he was just laughing about asking for a rubber duck". when has aziraphale ever actually been upfront about his feelings? he consistently outwardly acts like things are fine even when they very much aren't. i don't know about you but me personally? i wouldn't put it past him to be jokey about it when really it messed him up inside.

sure the holy water isn't painful to HIM. but he's down there knowing full well that it was supposed to be crowley in that bath. it was supposed to be the love of his life melting and dying in that bath. and it was to be put on display for all of hell to watch. in the same way that crowley was up in heaven knowing that gabriel told aziraphale to shut his stupid mouth and die already. the same way crowley knew they were reveling in ending aziraphale's life.

like, idk. i just think that maybe aziraphale also has a lot of trauma to work through and him working through it and his shitty coping mechanisms is part of the growth he needs to undergo in season 3.

[da-janela-lateral]

And You and I

[shannonsketches]

[eternity-death]

God… Sunday’s desire for control stemming from his fear of losing what he loves is like… gutting.

Look at what he did, look at the lengths he went to, looks at the lengths he was WILLING to go to if we didn’t stop him. And all of it was in good faith. ALL of it was to protect.

Do you guys get it?? He feels that deeply, he loves that deeply— so gravely that he was prepared to sacrifice himself to create a world where no one would ever know suffering or pain again. A world where he would become the ‘strong’ and protect the ‘weak’.

A world where he has control. Because under his control, no fledglings would ever learn what it feels like to plummet. He will become the metaphorical and literal cage that protects it.

[ofswordsandpens]

I am going to have to reread to double check this but another aspect of Percy losing control in cotg that's so worrying is his fear that he could have inadvertently hurt (or killed) Annabeth, cause like, he's never thought that before, has he? Not even at his worst in Tartarus. So again, Riordan has not just characterized Percy as someone who's angry and spiraling and losing control, but now has added the aspect where Percy is afraid of hurting or even killing his loved ones on accident. But then in the book its just like haha that's our Percy what a guy!!!! like???? hello??? the kid's not alright???

[booasaur]

Special Ops: Lioness - 1x08

[skrunksthatwunk]

kinda thinking about how the women who serve as maternal figures/raise kids in yyh are never quite ready for it. genkai's an arguable exception, but like.. atsuko had yusuke at 15, shizuru's basically in charge of kazuma full time in her early 20s/late teens (depending on version) with very very absent parents, and even shiori is given a kid she wasn't expecting, in the form of an old, old demon rather than like. a regular, blank slate ass human baby. and although shiori seems to do quite well with kurama, kurama can never be honest with shiori about who he is, or much of what he's seen. if he was, it'd probably make things far more complicated and overwhelming. atsuko, no matter how much she cares for yusuke, Could Not Have Been and thus wasn't ready to have him at 15. her attempts to make the most of that situation have had middling success at best. shizuru has also been placed into a parental role. we don't really know how long she's been raising kuwabara, but that's.. probably still parentification anyway. she shouldn't have to do that, and she shouldn't have to do that so young. and i think some of her coarseness with kuwa is out of frustration with her own inexperience + inadequacy + uncertainty, his not cooperating, and their parents for putting this on her in the first place. the ones who know the full extent of their situation grow desperate and it squeaks out in unpleasant ways, and the one who seems unbothered by it is the only one who has no idea that she's in way over her head. and i mean. ok. gonna preface this by saying keiko is NOT yusuke's mom in any sense of the word. but she does take care of him in a way atsuko couldn't manage to. she's often looking after him and cleaning up after his messes and stuff. she takes him on as a responsibility, and that is, in a way, a caretaker role. not to say that it SHOULD be her responsibility, but it's how she ends up being.

and when the stress of trying to make someone take care of themselves or be kind or good or Whatever goes awry, again, the violence and arguing and distance and ugliness of caring for someone reveals itself.

and i wonder about that. for a series dedicated to physical fighting as a form of communication, what does it say that this extends to the complicated, quietly desperate situations of so many of the women/girls it depicts, whom our more central characters were shaped and raised by?

hell, even hiei touches on this, because hina loved hiei, but there was no way she was prepared for him, obviously, nor for the pain of losing him. rui (whom i also see as a sort of caretaker figure to hiei, inasmuch as either of them were caretakers) literally throws him off a cliff because she couldn't face down the village elders, and out of some mixture of care for hina and, likely, fear for her own survival. and the guilt and pain of that killed hina and deeply wounded rui.

it's like motherhood, this thing that's so often treated as sacred and beautiful, is a kind of stitched up, painful, eggshell-walking thing that hurts parent and child and it's just. oughh

[michi-chelle-draws]

that one scene from taku’s route 👀

[cringefaecompilation]

but the choice for ludinus to tell bell's hells that they would hate the gods just as much as him if he showed him the memories of the specific deities who destroyed aeor. matt saying that the gods are not perfect and are just as flawed as the mortals. ludinus vowing to avenge the destruction of aeor and then decimating molaesmyr and sending exandria into chaos unforseen. something about the broken pedestal of someone you thought to know everything being just as lost and scared as you. something about killing leaders, then installing yourself as the new one and swearing to do better. something about hypocrisy and how we become blind to our cruelest actions if we think we're justified enough in them.

because nobody else knows what we've been through, right?

[seaweedstarshine]

Late to the game as I’ve kinda been kinda non-here for a minute but I scrolled through the Dot and Bubble tag, and thought I wanted to write this post into existence.

There's this part in Doctor Who Unleashed where RTD says this:

“What we can’t tell is how many people will have worked that out before the ending. Because they’ve seen white person after white person after white person, and television these days is very diverse. I wonder, will you be ten minutes into it, will you be fifteen, will you be twenty, before you start to think, everyone in this community is white. And if you don’t think that — why didn’t you? So, that’s gonna be interesting. I hope it’s one of those pieces of television you see, and always remember.”

And I'm like. Yeah. But the reason this works even as well as it does is largely thanks to the work of the previous showrunner with the previous creative team, which was notably the first era to have any writers of color (amongst other firsts in terms of inclusivity in directors, composer, actors). While Chibnall fumbled whenever he tried to write about race himself, he did have the self-awareness to have Black and South Asian writers writing the episodes where race is the focus (and a female writer for the episode where sexism is a focus; my point is, he seemed to know his shortcomings).

I wonder what the current creative team looks like? (not really, but I wasn't 100% sure for all of them)

To quote RTD:

“...before you start to think, everyone in this community is white.”

This is pretty non-self-aware, right? It's pretty “It is said, and I understand this, there was a history of racism with the original Toymaker, the Celestial Toymaker, who had ‘celestial,’ and I did not know this, but ‘celestial’ can mean of Chinese origin, but in a derogatory way,” right? (from The Giggle Unleashed) It's pretty “and I had problems with that, and a lot of us on the production team had problems with that: associating disability with evil,” right? (from Destination Skaro Unleashed)

—none of which are issues that should be overlooked, but think how much exponentially better they might’ve been addressed if he’d consulted with Chinese writers and wheelchair-using writers before going straight to giving the Toymaker weird fake accents and making Davros walk?

How many Black or non-white people do we think saw the Dot and Bubble script before it landed in Ncuti’s hands?

And this just keeps happening.

And like, from some of the shocked responses I've seen from white viewers to the ending of Dot and Bubble, maybe the episode's unsubtlety was needed? From the way RTD talks about it in Unleashed, the episode was written with a white audience in mind, Baby's First Microaggressions (where of course the microaggressions come from people who are pretty self-admittedly white supremacists). Ricky September, a more seemingly normal depiction of someone in the racist bubble of Finetime, seemed like an interesting element, up until the way he died.

The ending worked for me, because I do think the Doctor's reaction is true to how the Doctor would react. I just keep thinking of how much better the core themes could've been handled by someone with actual lived experience on the subject matter.

[ryuseiired]

haven't seen anyone say anything about this part of T2 summary yet but uh. Oh boy this got me. "regardless of circumstances she's the one who has to take the blame for everything both in and out of milgram" what if i cried forever

[imminent-danger-came]

LBD: "No. NO! I will not be stopped by you foul insignificant creatures! You would allow this world to continue to fester and rot? The eternal misery of countless souls because of your sentimentality for mortal pleasures!" MK: "Eugh! You can't judge things by their worst qualities!"

(3x14 Destiny Fulfilled)

-

Ink MK: "Such pitiful creatures. Cowardly. Reckless. Monstrosities!" Sun Wukong: "MK, where are you!?" Ink MK: "All doomed to play a role in tearing this world apart—to cause nothing but chaos and destruction!"

(4x07 Pitiful Creatures)

-

Flawed Creatures.

[sylver-drawer]

The Cruelty of Novel-Ijekiel’s Rejection.

Thinking about how in the past, novel readers conveyed that Ijekiel rejects Jennette as softly as he can while apologizing for hurting her, telling her he thought of her like a sister. Funny how that works. I proceeded to read said rejection scene, and it literally explains how blunt and cold he was to her, and how it sets up for the climax when she then reaches out to Claude in desperation.

Got a quick translation online, but in no way is this a soft and polite rejection. Was Jennette also harsh in telling him that Athy won’t reciprocate his feelings? Yes. However, what she spoke of was only the truth about Athy, and frankly her judgement of Athy’s behavior as Athy’s best friend—a best friend of the girl, who Ijekiel knows nothing about aside from short conversations. Athykiel does have moments in the novel (half of them with Jennette as the topic of conversation), but they don’t nearly have the closeness as the Athykiel moments in the manhwa. In response, Ijekiel is the one who throws a fit instead by responding in a way he knows will hurt Jennette the the most—apathy, before throwing all of his bottled up feelings at her and even going so far as to practically blame her for why they’ve ended up this way. We dive into Jennette’s psyche multiple times through the novel, and Jennette asks Ijekiel’s input a lot but you can tell that all she wanted was the truth from him—the truthful, unkind, and bitter Ijekiel. She tried to give him outs, to give him opportunities to tell her his true feelings instead of dodging around them for false kindness, but he never takes it. And then when she gives him a reality check—and right after he confesses his jealousy to Athy of her only talking about or asking for Jennette—he’s the one who snaps and dumps all of the bitterness inside of him onto her.

Jennette expected him to get mad, to be upset disgusted or show some kind of ugly emotion because that’s what she wanted from him all along—just the littlest bit of truth after dancing around with false smiles for years. But instead he’s cold, unfeeling, spouting out what was the result of pent up bitterness and jealousy recklessly, and they’re back to square one. He put up another facade while speaking a myriad of things he’s bit back whilst somehow managing to spin her words and blame her.

He speaks as if he was the one giving in, as if she was this child blissfully unaware as she was trampling on him, babying her even now but the truth is she’s an adult, and has been for quite a while. Perhaps he has been forcing himself to be kind to her, but he honestly believes that was suffering—that in his whole life, while getting to know the world and traveling and meeting friends from other countries and cultures that this little girl asking if he actually liked her, was suffering. He was no protector of hers—if the slightest chance arose, he quickly abandons her among jealous strangers or predatory men and gives away things she’s fond of for a woman he hardly knows. He thinks of Jennette as lucky, as a girl who’s had everything she’d want, and what of him? He, who was given freedom by his parents, opportunities to expand the knowledge he’s so proud of and to grow and learn—while she was locked inside a house that didn’t even belong to her. She receives dresses and presents she did not care for unless it was chosen by him, and he had the same luxury but thinks even less of it unless it’s a means to gain Athanasia’s fervor.

His rejection is cold and full of criticism of Jennette, yet he’s the exact same as her. They’ve been dealing with and exhausting over each other’s falsities, yet he can only see his own. Jennette lays it out, Athy will ignore you just as you ignore me. And he coldly bites back, I ignore you because you ignore me—not seeing that she ignores him exactly because he ignores himself. He held himself to standards no one had placed, forcing his emotions and his behavior in a way no one wished for. Jennette does not even wish for Ijekiel’s love when she tells this harsh truth to him, yet he assumes she is doing this because of so. In turn, he is also blaming her for everything—the reason why I forced myself into this corner, the reason why I’ve exhausted myself, the reason I cannot have Athanasia’s love, is all your fault. Even though Athanasia accepting Lucas’ advances was of her own accord, even though he was the one continuing to uphold that false mask of kindness she easily saw through, even though these feelings had been bottling up for ten years and no one but himself stopped him from conveying them to her before he had gotten to this festering point—he makes it Jennette’s fault.

He rendered Jennette into a vulnerable position, by doing exactly what he had done in the past. He spoke words of, under normal circumstance, would sound like presenting equality: “let bygones be bygones”, “we’re two people”, “I’ve hurt you only because you’ve been hurting me”—such phrases, you could almost call kind. Yet he is repeating exactly what he had done before—speaking ‘kind’ words while upholding a mask, rending said kindness useless. As the words flowed from his lips, in reality he was taking away any semblance of standing on equal footing by upholding that unfeeling mask while venting his frustrations onto her, blaming her for ending up like this. Jennette isn’t a fool, she hasn’t been for a while now so she can see the underlying messages he’s trying to convey—that there is no future, no equality, no way to finally open up with the truth and their true selves. He will leave her there, abandoning her, alone with the same kind mask as before while spouting cruel words.

That is not kindness, nor whatever neutrality he framed he was offering—this is cruelty. And he knows it.