#intentionally or otherwise)

[nattikay]

oh and by the way, the fact that even a lot of the fandom still views the tulkun on the same level as animals like ikran even though the tulkun are explicitly established to be a fully sapient people with their own culture and language etc. is exactly why the “Avatar would’ve been better if the Na'vi were less humanoid” crowd is dead wrong lol

[apparitionism]

Tabled 3

Hello yet again, @barbarawar ! I swear I’m not dragging this @b-and-w-holiday-gift-exchange  out on purpose—the thing is, I always think, “This will be the time I make these loons get it together with reasonable speed,” but I’m (almost) always wrong. This third part follows part 1, in which Myka met Helena for that Boone-mentioned coffee and suffered its consequences, and part 2, in which more coffee caused her to suffer more consequences, leading her to decided that the only way to mitigate the suffering was to cut Helena out of her life, choosing to do so on a busy concourse in Chicago’s O’Hare Airport. Helena for some reason (tragicomedy?) responded to this idea by dousing Myka in coffee.

Anyway, this third part will in turn be followed by at least one more part, because god forbid they work anything out unwordily. (In semi-positive news, I don’t think this will extend to the seven-part opus I inflicted on my poor giftee last year.) (However: I should acknowledge also that, unlike the book Myka consults in this story, I can’t predict the future.)

Tabled 3

Myka’s head tilts down again, involuntarily, to behold her now coffee-stained shirt. Just as involuntarily, she then raises her head, and, yes, Helena’s still looking like she’s proud of herself. Proud and calm and at peace. Myka voices the bafflement in her head: “You... what did you do?”

Helena’s expression doesn’t change. “Isn’t it obvious?”

Obvious? Yes? “You threw your coffee at me?” Obvious but incomprehensible? “You threw your coffee at me... on purpose?”

“Yes,” Helena says, like it’s an accomplishment. “I can do that. I’m not a hologram.”

That’s true, and... good? Important? But... “But you ruined my shirt,” Myka says, which is objectively a fact. Even though the fact makes no sense.

Helena offers a tiny shrug. “So take it off.”

At that, Myka hardens: You don’t get to say things like that to me! she wants to yell. She settles for demanding, “Are you insane?” As the words leave her, she feels their carelessness. But they had come in response to the extremity of the situation, and that was all Helena’s doing. Your fault not mine, Myka thinks, in mulish self-defense.

Instead of objecting, Helena blinks a slow, condescending blink—a blink of I know you know better—and says, “The answer to that question depends entirely upon whom you ask.”

Nobody better ask me. Not right now. Reassembling her outrage, vowing not to fall victim to any impulse to protect Helena (from careless words or herself or anything else), Myka sputters, “I have to get back on a plane!”

Helena gestures, lazily, at the disaster she caused. “In that ruined shirt?” she says, now with a tsk-tsk, as if Myka is the one whose actions are inexplicable, given that they’ve landed her in this unfortunate situation.

“I loved this shirt,” Myka says, and it’s an embarrassingly, tellingly true statement... why did she let it escape? She’s wearing the shirt because of that love, which she feels because it enhances the green of her eyes in a very particular way, a way she has all along admitted to herself she’s hoped Helena would notice: notice and... maybe... regret the loss of.

But choosing to wear it was, she sees, yet another blunder, because of course she’s now the one doing the regretting. Of course she is.

“Did you?” Helena says, with one of those maybe-I’m-just-vain head tosses. It displays her neck. It’s probably intended to display her neck. “More so now.” She follows that with the challenge of a trickster eyebrow-lift.

Myka wants to strangle her, for all the reasons but mostly because she isn’t wrong. Because this shirt, even if the stain washes out, will always now be this shirt. Particularly if the stain washes out: if Myka wears this shirt, or even considers wearing it, on some eventual, otherwise unremarkable day, the this shirt of it will occupy her thoughts.

Hey book, she thinks in the direction of South Dakota. Look at me, predicting a future I didn’t see before today.

Calmly, now, she gazes at that future. She can live with this unspooling, because being reminded of Helena, having to process nostalgia, is something she knows how to handle. So many things in the course of a normal day spark a similar memory walk, and she imagines—no, she sees—that they always will.

That retrieval will always be that retrieval—matteringly large. That aisle will always be that aisle, a place of unfinal goodbye. Quietly, in the kitchen, that tea will always be that tea. Et cetera.

This airport, in fact, will now always be this airport.

This shirt will always be this shirt.

She looks down again; the coffee has fully reached her skin, and the entire scene—the increasing damp chill, combined with the initial splash as well as Helena’s words and face and neck and this familiarly angry need to put hands around that neck—it’s awakened her. And it’s awakened them, or Myka’s sense of them, the two of them together, that perfect entity: Wells and Bering, Bering and Wells...

Myka picks up her (surprisingly) unempty cup from the table and removes its lid. She then lifts her eyes to, and her own eyebrow at, Helena, who smirks. Myka tightens, brightens, and she flings her remaining coffee at the pristine, creamy expanse of sweater, surely cashmere, adorning the perfect body across from her. An uncanny joy floods her as the liquid hits—as a stain blooms, marring what was previously flawless. As, even better, Helena’s smirk enlarges into a smile.

But the moment has no chance to resolve, for they’re interrupted: Myka hears a throat-clear from behind her. Helena widens her eyes, then rolls them like some adolescent book-artifact. Myka, unclear on what that reaction says about who the intruder is, turns herself around... ah. An authority figure. A woman whose badge and uniform identify her as airport security.

“Ladies,” that authority says, tired and resigned, as if that Myka and Helena’s little coffee assaults barely even rank for her as inappropriate behavior but she supposes she’d better intervene before some overvigilant busybody attacks her for not doing what they see as her job.

“I’m sorry,” Myka starts, but that’s a knee-jerk remnant of table-lying. Or, no: hiding. In any case, she’s not sorry. Not at all. She closes her mouth.

“Ladies,” the careworn agent says again. “This is not the way.”

Not what Myka expected to hear. She swallows a laugh at how the words sound like advice from a parallel universe—one in which she and Helena are in couples therapy. The laugh tastes of regret.

Helena shakes her head. She says, with seriousness, as if the agent’s words were what she expected to hear (as if that parallel universe were this one): “I assure you, this is the way.”

And Myka can’t help but confirm, as she suspects she would in that other universe as well, “The only way.”

To that, Helena offers a beautiful, open affirmation: a soft-eyed, beneficent nod.

Wells and Bering. Bering and Wells.

The agent gives them her own eyebrow—pretty effective as chastisement, as far as Myka’s concerned—then makes them show her both their cups, ascertaining their emptiness. She says, again, “Ladies,” cautionary but also long-suffering, like she’s seen this exact scenario play out too many times. Myka finds her jaded view comforting: she and Helena aren’t singular. This isn’t once-in-a-lifetime; it’s over and over in everybody’s lifetimes.

The agent takes her leave, but she stations herself only a gate and a half away, communicating quite clearly that Myka and Helena—Wells and Bering, Bering and Wells—can’t be trusted.

Well. That’s certainly true.

Focused on each other again, they breathe and look for a little. The respite is heavenly. Myka stands in her coffee-spoiled shirt, looking at Helena in her similarly marred sweater. It’s the least complicated span of time she’s enjoyed in months. No: years. She is regarding someone, a non-hologram someone, she wants to regard, at momentary peace, with the next moment (at the very least, the next moment) undetermined.

“I’m so very relieved to have passed inspection,” Helena eventually says, breaking it.

The fracture threatens to let the complications back in, but Myka resists. “You know she’ll be watching to make sure we don’t go back to Starbucks for refills. Or even to a water fountain.”

Helena smiles. Myka feels no need, in that moment, to spare a thought for what the renewed winch of circumstance will bring. Their accord, in that moment, is full. It’s them.

Them, full, beautiful, but it’s not for keeping. This is one last hurrah of their beautiful connection—and it does warm her that Helena would take such drastic, security-attracting action to resurrect the feeling, to call it back into being, as this coda.

That’s all it is, though, for there is Giselle. And there is Pete.

Myka looks, one more time, down at her shirt: ruined. Up at Helena’s sweater: ruined too. Then she says it aloud, what she knows, in the wake of all the destruction: “It’s the end.” Then, because they might as well rule the day, she lists the proximate reasons: “There’s Giselle, and there’s Pete.”

“No there isn’t,” Helena says, enviably serene.

Also obstinate. Myka supposes she should have expected that. “Yes there is. I won’t tell you again.”

Helena’s eyeroll now is no less exaggerated than the one she produced in response to the agent. “Won’t you? Thank god for that. However, my disbelief regarding ‘you and Pete’ aside, my meaning is that there is no Giselle.”

Hope is a muscle, according to cliché. If that’s true, Myka’s will one day blessedly atrophy, for it will no longer be subjected to Helena saying things that make it expand. “You broke up?” she asks, unable to control a traitorous tremor.

Helena purses her lips. It’s distracting. “I should say yes,” she offers.

What does that mean? As Myka wonders, she watches Helena fidget: she has her cup in her hand again, and she’s picking at the label, which refuses to come free. Myka waits out the struggle, until Helena finally abandons the task and says, “I should, but I’m newly committed to pursuing a policy of truth. And the truth is, there is no Giselle. There never was.”

An involuntary “what” escapes Myka’s mouth. It isn’t really a word; rather, it’s her placeholder when she has no coherent response to... anything.

“I made her up,” Helena adds, unhelpfully.

“What,” Myka says again, low and quiet, and this time it’s holding the place of—holding her back from—a scream.

“In that coffeeshop in South Dakota,” Helena says.

Myka registers that she’s touching her wet shirt, wrapping her arms around it, seeking protection from... this. She removes her arms and thinks herself down: What is a rational response? She turns to a nitpick. “That’s... when. When you made her up.”

“Yes,” Helena says.

“But why. Why.” Myka’s arms want to move again, and she doesn’t stop them. They press her shirt cold against her. Cold, so cold.

Helena delivers yet another infuriating shrug as she says, “You wouldn’t connect.”

“I wouldn’t connect.” Nightmare, nightmare. Myka is slogging through a cold, wet nightmare: the dream-logic of it, of Helena saying that Myka did what Helena actually did, makes that so, so obvious. But obvious also is that it isn’t a dream; Myka is awake and confused and if she could just go to sleep maybe everything would be put back where it belongs, but probably not, because her shirt is coffee-sticky and she is tripping, falling, drowning, all these but awake, awake and still stupidly willing to partake of hope, that drug she will never, ever be able to kick.

“I said there was someone else,” Helena says, schoolmarm-severe.

How dare she. “I know. I was there.”

Helena does dare: she dares to look wounded. “Yes, you were. And yet you weren’t, in that you so obviously, so coldly, refused to entertain the possibility that ‘someone else’ might be you. Given that, I had to protect myself.”

Myka had thought it a nightmare only seconds ago—she’d had no idea how much worse it could get. She can’t in any way process that “might be you,” and certainly not followed by the “given that.” The consequences. She can’t. She forces out, irrelevantly, “So you made up your ‘new’ girlfriend right on the spot?”

“Yes. I suppose I took some perverse pride in being able to do so.”

Of course she did. It’s exhausting. “On the spot, you made up someone named Giselle?” Myka is offended by how... believable this is. How if this thing had happened—as apparently it had—this was its necessarily, entirely credible form.

“What?” Helena says, in that familiar there is no reasonable basis for your skepticism tone. “It’s a name.”

“But that’s the name you came up with?” Myka pushes, knowing she’s pushing—seizing on it as exemplifying the absurdity, as if by forcing Helena to make sense of that, she can make everything else fall into place.

Helena’s slight hand-wave isn’t a shrug, but it’s even more infuriating in its dismissiveness. “On the flight to South Dakota I may have read an article about the ballet.”

That’s “making sense,” in a very Helena way, but it sure doesn’t help. “Thanks, ballet,” Myka snarks.

“Does the name matter so much?”

“I told it to people.” And the people she told it to remembered it, because it was memorable. She’d been subjected more than once to Pete “joking” about Helena and her fancy French girlfriend. It had been awful.

“To people at the Warehouse,” Helena guesses. Presses.

Myka isn’t prepared to acknowledge that pain, not here, not now. “To my sister,” she says, because that is true, and, thank god, less painful.

“You told the name of my supposed girlfriend to your sister,” says Helena, not as a question, but with wonder.

Myka had. In a vague “someone I know” sense, in the context of supporting a contention that it was just fine for people to love who they love, and Tracy had been thrilled to connect it to ballet, so obviously everything was a stupid circle. “What does that matter?” she demands, though she has no right to be so defensive; she brought up that telling. Why had she? As a way of pushing the case for Helena’s wrongness in being so misleading... but Myka is now exposed as being overly invested in speaking about Helena... which she is, but... this is all going completely wrong again.

“You spoke of me outside the Warehouse.” Still with that tinge of wonder.

Myka has no way to counter that. Helena’s right about its significance. Myka sometimes finds herself desperate to speak of Helena, simply to savor the saying of her name, and when Steve or Claudia isn’t available or willing to indulge her, she calls Tracy. She tries a shuffle to the side: “I thought it was important. To you, I mean.” That’s a feint. “And I tell my sister about important things.”

“Such as your relationship with Pete?” That’s a taunt. Helena’s the one pushing now.

Myka wishes she could yield.... fall over, soft and easy, and let Helena win. Instead, what emerges from her mouth is an unhelpfully true “Not yet.” Helena smiles, and it’s mean, so Myka follows up with, “At least she’ll believe me when I do. She’s been on that team for a long time.” Now Helena squints. “The ‘men and women can’t be friends’ team,” Myka explains. “You know.”

“I don’t know,” Helena says.

History. Helena has offered a similar deadpan response, with that same dry emphasis on the “don’t,” just about every time Myka has said “you know” like this to her, and Myka used to find it charming. But she doesn’t want to start remembering patterns. Falling back into them. Not when she knows she’ll have to break them again. So she treats Helena’s objection as entirely literal, saying a pedantic, “Men and women can’t be friends without romance getting in the way.”

Helena literally turns up her nose as she says, “The grounds upon which to object to such an asinine generalization are many and varied.” Her upper lip then drifts in the direction of a sneer. “But you know that perfectly well. You know also that it doesn’t apply to you and Pete.”

“It does,” Myka says. It sounds pathetically petulant: an adolescent’s objection to a more-mature figure’s knowing judgment. Great. Now she’s the one aping the artifact-book.

“It does not. You are friends.”

“And then romance—”

“Got in the way? No.”

“Yes.” Myka hears herself say the word, knows it is yet more artifact-book puerility.

“Got in the way? No,” Helena says again, as if repetition is all that’s needed to cancel out Myka’s objection. Myka tries not to concede, even internally, that that might be true. “Occurred at all? No to that as well.”

“Yes it did! Stop making me say it!” Why can’t she just let this be? Myka let her be, back in Boone.

“If it had in fact occurred, you would be delighted to say it!”

That’s so true that Myka desperately wishes she could throw more coffee, or something heavier and more damaging, to get Helena to shut up. “Stop it!” she shouts, knowing that those words have no weight, that they won’t damage.

Surprisingly, Helena does stop it, and the pause rings in Myka’s ears, making her aware of how loud their voices have become. She dares a look around: passersby don’t seem to care, but the agent has turned to look at them disapprovingly again; she’s shifting her weight from foot to foot, most likely preparatory to drifting with intent in their direction.

Helena copies Myka’s gaze, then grimaces. “I don’t wish to be placed under arrest,” she says.

“I don’t think she’d do that. Maybe she can mediate.” The alternate-universe-couples-therapy theory certainly suggests that’s within the realm of possibility.

“I don’t wish to share our discussion with her either.”

Myka knows she shouldn’t ask what seems obvious. Knows, knows, knows. But she asks anyway. “What do you wish?”

Helena inhales and exhales, once and then twice, her shoulders and chest rising and falling, rising and falling—clearly she’s considering, and abandoning, a series of possible responses.

At last, she produces words: “To continue to speak together.”

Myka’s plane doesn’t board for another hour and a half. She can grant this wish. She says, “If we can just keep the noise level down—”

“In private,” Helena says.

“We’re in an airport.” Myka spends so much time in airports. They are so unprivate.

Helena swivels her neck around, as if seeking to confirm Myka’s statement for herself, then focuses on Myka again. She holds that focus, for one beat then two, and this time she obviously already has an answer in mind; she’s trying to pique Myka’s curiosity. Of course it’s working. If Myka could put her hands on that neck and be assured of forcing words from that intentionally withholding mouth, she’d do it.

But she stills her wishing hands, and at last, Helena relents. “An airport, yes,” she says. “But one that houses a hotel.”

Which brings Myka up short. It also opens a chasm. She entertains, for one morally evacuated second, the idea of being in a hotel room with Helena—and, worse, of doing what people do in hotel rooms with Helena. Then she snaps her spine back into place and says, “Absolutely not.”

“For privacy,” Helena says. “Nothing more. I swear it.”

Myka knows what being manipulated by Helena feels like. This... isn’t that. Or at least, it isn’t a “doing what people do in hotel rooms” sort of that. “Privacy,” she echoes.

“Do you dispute the notion that we have more to say to each other?”

In so many parts of the past, Myka’s answer to that would have been an immediate “no.” Now, she pretends she has to think about it—but Helena most likely knows it’s a pointless pretense. Myka gives up and says “no” out loud.

“And would it not be better, in saying that more, to say it freely?”

The answer to that is less clear-cut, despite what Myka would love to believe is sincerity in Helena’s eyes and voice. She would love to believe it. So much... so does that mean she should say no?

As she thinks about it, however, this has all the hallmarks of being another blunder. As foretold by the book. And really, who is she to think she knows better than a predictive artifact?

“Okay,” she says. “Hotel.”

TBC

[trollbreak]

I love when it’s remember abt characters time it’s always so lovely I’m just thumbing through guys I don’t think abt often and going ehe I like them

[asanjou]

something i really enjoy about watching old toku is seeing the ways they come up with to do certain effects without advanced technology or a huge budget. it's one of the things i love about doing amateur theatre tech too because people come up with the smartest most creative solutions to things that you yourself would never have thought of

like in kr 71 the different ways they have of showing the kaijin bodies disintegrating.... just really genuinely cool

[alangdorf]

Ok nevermind all that I listened to the Len’en ost for the first time in a month or two and thought about Tsurubami again and I’m normal now 👍

[sing-me-under]

I don’t remember if I’ve done this on Tumblr for this month but whatever HERES YOUR MONTHLY REMINDER

THAT MURDER IS BAD. FOR THE LOVE OF GOD. STOP ENCOURAGING IT. DEATH THREATS ARE BAD. HOMICIDE IS BAD. HURTING PEOPLE IN GENERAL IS BAD. ITS NOT GOOD FOR YOUR MENTAL HEALTH AND DEATH THREATS ARE NOT SOMETHING THAT SHOULD BE PERPETUATED EVEN IN A JOKING MANNER. CALM THE FUCK DOWN AND TAKE A GOOD LOOK AT YOUR PRIORITIES.

[harbingersecho]

in-story drawings i love youuuuu anyway shea now why would you draw a lovingly rendered portrait of the helvling and also a sketch of their monster form? 🤨 gay ass.

[septimusmoonlight]

You doing ok?

hi

[bunnidid-reviews]

CDD Writing Prompt: Entering Inner Worlds

I welcome everyone with a CDD to talk about their experiences, or write an excerpt on how they would like to see this aspect written in media :-)

If you don’t feel comfortable for any reason tying this to an account, feel free to send your writing through an ask on anon, just be sure to mention which prompt you’re referring to!

—————

I feel like there are many ways that this sort of thing can be portrayed because I’m certain that its different for everyone (even differing between parts). But it’s also one of those things that signals to me whether the author deals with dissociation themselves or not.. here are some tropes I’ve found with portraying a character going into their inner world, let me know if you’d write it similarly or differently:

In order for the character to enter the inner world, they must fully blackout switch into it

in order for the character to go into the inner world, they must be either nearly or fully asleep or in a trance-like state (like meditation or going through some trauma)

the character confusing the inner world with the real world (all senses feel realistic, all things seem tangible)

Alters other than the host having fully-running lives behind the host’s own, almost as if the inner world takes place in another dimension with the same sense of time and everything

There hard divide between being in the inner world vs outside of it

Being unable to know whats going on inside without intentionally going in

Alters in the inner world abide to real-life limitations (having to intentionally walk places, showing up as a full person with all their details, sometimes having to eat or sleep)

What are your thoughts on the topic? There aren’t as many examples as one may think about the inner world, even though it’d be vastly useful in storytelling to include.. but then, most DID media is about the discovery phase, so its rare they get to the point where they explore it

How would you write a character going into the inner world? If you have one, what does it feel like for you to go/look inside? How would you like to see it portrayed?

[starleska]

you guys are going to hate me for this, but this isn’t the first time Tumblr has fallen for a small, silly Sexyman who seems perpetually sleepy, but whose eyes (when fully ‘open’ or altered) signify something far more terrifying, dark and powerful than their story suggests...😉

[willyhoos]

a very self indulgent twipri au i made... vampire!zelda x vampire hunter!link..

in which a rancher from ordon is suddenly afflicted with lycanthropy, and hunts down the cursed hylian queen who is absolutely, DEFINITELY responsible for it...

(spoilers: he's Mega Wrong)

a bit more info about the au below the cut!

"Link, go assassinate the Hylian queen so we can go back to living normally." instructions unclear i have fallen in love with her

midna is somewhere probably maybe once i figure out what to do with her .

[romaine-bromaine]

The real reason Lassie had relationship troubles.

[lady-corrine]

"Why do you keep saying all the historical sources are biased against Rhaenyra?"

Maybe because they literally are:

[secriden]

yeah it was me who made the post about subbing in the assassins for the women - tbh i think you can assume if there’s a meta post about thk and comparing it to taming, im the one that made it cause i have genuinely not seen anyone else making meta posts about it shskdhd which is like fair! i get that people are way more familiar with 10 things and i also get the urge with the source material being so heavily about misogyny, but tbh i feel like you’re taking away from either one by making it about men, because while the misogyny isnt as prominent in 10 things, kat being a feminist is very integral to her character, so either way there’s things that are being lost if we’re saying it’s based on 10 things. but it’s just. very frustrating when i or other people comment on taming and people reply with stuff like “oh it’s not even actually based on that lol” because!! it is!! it actively is!! like i know a lot of people are gonna miss the direct references, hell IVE missed a number of references that i only caught upon rereading taming post ep5 but it’s such a discredit to jojo and the team when they have put in the WORK of this being a shakespeare adaption for so many people to just kind of dismiss it. like i have my grips with taking out the women but subbing them in for assassins and therefore allowing the stakes to be raised to the same manner that the misogyny exists within taming is something i have genuinely not seen in another taming adaption and it is utterly fascinating to me and it’s a genuinely interesting route for them to have gone. sorry for going off in your inbox but as a shakespeare nerd/someone who got their degree in theatre, i take the shakespeare aspect of this show far more seriously than most other people and it’s genuinely frustrating to me when people dismiss it shskdhd

Ok first off, please don't apologise for going off, I love this! I love reading about other people's passions and how they influence perspectives on something I also love because it's soooo fascinating to me the details that other people see that I'll miss because I don't have the same interest/background/experiences. Like. Everything Style right now is going to be tied to him losing his mother and how that influences his Character and Personality and Way of Looking at the World, but I'm also conscious that it's because that's literally My Story, too. Anyway, sorry for going on a bit of a tangent there.

I didn't mean to downplay (my tags here for context) the inaccuracy of assuming that THK is an adaption of 10 Things vs ToS, but what I was trying to get at is how it's simply easier for a contemporary audience to see scenes like Style embarrassing Fadel in the stadium as being a reference to 10 Things and Patrick serenading Kat at the end of the show and ignore the way the tone and the intention of the characters (Style in ep 3 vs Patrick at the end of the movie) are TOTALLY different, and actually Style doing that was far more in line with Petruchio subjecting Katherina to public humiliation in his method of wooing in the early stages of the play (although tbh I don't think that ever really changes in the play and in THIS, at least, I'm glad THK is ALSO a romance). Even the way the people in the stadium respond to Style's antics with baffled amusement is a better reference to how Petruchio's behaviour was mostly accepted by the society at the time despite how cruel it really was to Katherina.

But yeah, like, its just harder to see that because while both ToS and 10 Things actually does, as you say, deal with misogyny very intentionally, because they're both depictions of misogyny set in their respective time periods, what we see in ToS is SO alien vs what we see in 10 Things. And since THK is again an even more recent/current adaption, the social 'vibe' it has is closer to 10 Things than to ToS.

As a 90s kid, 10 Things was one of my favourite movies precisely because it unflinchingly commented on (and dramatised) my own experience of how girls/women were required to behave/speak/think in certain ways to fit a 'feminine' ideal, but if you compare it objectively to ToS, what it depicted was so much tamer (pun not intended) to what women in Shakespeare's time experienced.

And as someone who's currently working in education, it's sad to see the way classics like Shakespeare's plays have slowly lost value in education for more "modern" and "relevant" pieces of literature because I actually think the lessons to be learned in these works are so valuable and necessary to raise a generation of nuanced thinkers.

And the byproduct of this is that when people are watching something like THK it's simply harder to appreciate where the true inspiration lies.

[fullmetal-scar-simping]

Truly wish mangahood fans would just tell first time Brotherhood watchers to read the manga first to get all the context they need to make Brotherhood suck 1% less, instead of suggesting the broke-ass, tired "watch 03 until it diverges" nonsense.

These continuities do not line up. They do not click into each other. The characters in 03 are fundamentally different from mangahood, the events of fma 03 from episode 1 are fundamentally different to !the manga! let alone to Brotherhood. The way alchemy itself works is fundamentally different and that's pretty obvious when you compare mangahood and 03! So how are you going to funnel newbies into mangahood by feeding them half of 03?

I know we're all hoping new fans are as incapable of engaging with what they're actually watching as most existing fma fans, but it would make far more sense to prepare them by having them actually read the source material that Brotherhood is actually adapting, not an anime that Brotherhood has nothing to do with.

[gophergal]

Love doing studies of body variation, so *pushes these across the counter*