#it feels rather strange

[ponuchuu]

wildest thing i have to do is to change niko's age to at least somewhere in the 20s cause wanderer is like 400+ and i do not want a lore olympus situation

[brw]

My least favourite type of internet person is the person who claims fanfic is over thousands of years old or whatever. I understand we like to joke but fanfiction is fundamentally tied to fandom culture and is a very specific way of engaging with media. Religious texts based off other religious texts is not fanfiction and it is worrying the only way you can justify your interest is by comparing the two. I promise you you don't have to reinvent the wheel to write fanfic you can just do that but we don't have to say "Shakespeare wrote fanfiction about Richard III", there was not a Richard III fandom in 1592, that was called the divine right of kings.

[shootingthe-stars]

unfortunately for me i don’t agree with the headcanon that lily was insecure and thought james was asking her out as a joke but now people just think that’s what’s up. lily evans knew her WORTH sorry to disappoint

[eri-pl]

The sad thing about Elrond

(no, not everyone sailing or going brr on him, the other one)

From all the people who like Elrond, who claim to be friends, even to love him maybe, very few see him as himself. His parents (sailed, effectively sailed + parents extended edition: dead, ???), his brother (brr), his wife (sailed), his kids (brr, ?, ?). Maybe a few others.

Others look at him and see someone else's face. Or at least they see Elrond as a symbol of this or that. Never as himself.

He just tends to remind everyone of someone or another.

Many of the old Noldor see him as The Last Feanorian (minus the kinslaying problem), many elves see him as Luthien 2.0, many humans see him as the blend of all the elves they ever heard of (at least the good ones) and/or as a stand-in for their legendary ancestor king Elros, even Bilbo sees him as Mister Related To All The Stories Which I'm Gonna Sing Anyway. And there are probably many other things worrying is seen as.

(yes, Arwen has this problem too, but she's not in the Silm, and I mostly think about the Silm)

I suppose even Elwing sometimes looked at her kids and saw Earendil's face in them. That's what parents do, especially when missing the other parent. But it was only moments.

And then she was chased and jumped.

I'm sure M&M initially saw the twins, at least subconsciously, as a replacement Ambarussar, and as their redemption for what happened to Dior's sons. But I think they (at least Maglor) got over it and learned to actually see them, and this was one of the things that made "and love grew" possible.

And then one died and the other disappeared.

What's most sad in this is that I don't treat Elrond better. All the reasons I like him (at least the vast majority) aren't really about him. Realizing that may be the reason why I count him on my fave list lower than Finrod. He's still 3rd on the list anyway. But I wish he was there more as himself and less than the symmetry axis of the Silmarillion and all the associations I have to him.

Tbh he probably wouldn't be this high. I imagine Elrond is actually thie same kind of well-mannered, polite and kind as was one of my friends in high school and while it was fully a good thing, it also somehow made her hard to approach or to relax around. Which... Is even more sad, I guess.

[kryptonbabe]

You will get a new Wonder Woman run planned to be a long and structured one - but it's written by Tom King

You will get a new Black Canary run - the thing is, it will be written by Tom King

You will get a series of some silver age partially forgotten characters you like - Adam Strange, Omega Men, Metamorpho - but here's the catch: they'll all be written by Tom King

Why all these times I got something I wanted from DC it was like meeting this wise and cruel Jinn trying to warn me about the potential harm of my heart's desires?

"Be careful what you wish for, little one. Now take this Tom King book" the creature whispers while I sob

[magiefish]

Something I've kind of noticed about a lot of the academic scholarship I've read about Frankenstein / Dracula / Jekyll & Hyde is that everyone just seems to completely dismiss/ignore the characters as actual characters most of the time unless they're the Main Guys. Like, they'll go really in depth about Victor or the Creature's motivations and backstory and spend ages talking about Jekyll's relationship to Hyde and stuff, but the second it comes to characters like Enfield and Elizabeth or Lanyon and Clerval or frankly the Entire Rest of the Cast of Dracula, they just immediately seem uninterested. They'll just sort of vaguely gesture in their direction and go 'Oh yeah X and X thing happens to this character and here's a one sentence summary of their personality which doesn't really matter because this entire cast is interchangeable, anyway, onto the next theme' and half the time their One Sentence is just textually incorrect (looking at the New Woman/Traditional Woman descriptions of Lucy and Mina). And the reason I find this so baffling is because with other analysis I've read (e.g. Great Gatsby stuff) people seem to actually slow down and consider the characterisation and motivations of the cast as a whole with like. Nuance. Like they sit down and treat the characters as multifaceted and complex and having actual relationships with one another, and then you get to these books specifically and no one seems to care? Like they'll go really in depth with various interpretations and historical context for the Big Guys, and then never apply the same sort of examination to anyone else, and if they do, very rarely and probably only for one other character e.g. (Utterson or Mina).

If I had to posit an explanation, I would say its a combination of the archetypal nature of the title characters and the admittedly patchy writing of these books (which arguably lends to their archetypal status). I think academics kind of assume that the primary draw of these books are The Big Guys and the expansive themes and ideas they cover and that everyone else is just a pawn there to enable the narrative around the Big Guys, and the propensity for film adaptations to scrap or rewrite characters probably compounded this impression. And while I think this is at least partly true, the thing is, these characters were not always archetypal Big Guys. They originated in stories alongside *these* other characters *specifically* and it is worth asking what it is about the rest of the cast that makes the story interesting as well. Because, let's be real, if there was approximately no interest in the fucking *narrators* of Dracula, the best friends of Henry Jekyll, or the victims of the Creature, the original readers would have been completely bored out of their minds for most of these novels and public interest in them would not have been as great as it was. All of these novels were stories before they were myths, and academics should not be letting pop culture eclipse them unless they're specifically talking about the relationship between the two.

Overall, I just feel like academics are not only shooting themselves in the foot, but also doing a disservice to these stories by not bothering to investigate the other characters because frankly. It's lazy. It's lazy to dismiss an entire cast and basically skim read any sections involving them just because it's easy to focus on The One Guy. If you people really cared about themes, you'd understand that characters are inextricable from them. Like shit dude I see more care given to characters in essays about Greek tragedies, you guys are waaaay fucking behind

[mikodrawnnarratives]

Me, before finishing Renegades Trilogy: Oh okay! This series shows complexities on both sides but over all it echos anti police brutality shown in the "heroes"

Me, after basically reading "the anarchists were completely in the wrong and being a renegade was the 100% path the whole time": I'm sorry w h a t

[icewindandboringhorror]

sometimes looking at like Self Help Strategies lists for the symptoms I'm having is always just like:

thing that I already do

thing I have tried 10 times

thing I already do

thing that I don't have the money to do

thing I already do

thing I've been doing since I was 10yrs old to no avail

thing that is impossible given my situation

thing that doesn't apply to me

thing that I already do

thing I have already tried

hrmm, oh wait, maybe finally- OH, yeah.. okay. thing that I already do but it was just phrased slightly differently

thing I have already done

[feyd-meowtha]

man, it really is crickets in the dune tags these days huh? I gotta start saying more unhinged shit.... let me think.... what do you freaks want....

Cenobites? Cenobite Feyd and Paul as Uncle Frank? (Alexa play Come to Daddy by Aphex Twin)

Feyd getting his head all sunburned on Arrakis

Dune but make it succession? (I have never seen even 1 minute of that show and I probably never will)

Evangelion? Paul as Shinji and Chani as Asuka and Irulan as Rei and Feyd as Kaworu. Fuck it, Jessica is Misato, Pen Pen remains unchanged

Paul is a priest Feyd is a sinner, confessional box, DOG COLLAR

Scratch that, Paul as Jude Law in The Young Pope, Feyd is... also a priest I guess?

Mad Max, Feyd is a son of the Immortan Joe and Paul is..... overheated and dehydrated as usual and dare I say.... mad? Potty Paul? Paranoid Paul? Furious Feyd: Mad Road? (Alexa play Mad World by Tears for Fears)

FeydPaul old man yaoi where Feyd somehow survived and they get together post-messiah annd Paul has no eyessssssss (when they say any hole is a goal they MEAN IT)

Gimps???? Is that anything? They're gimps? (Hilly, they're already gimps)

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[yurious-george]

4'33'', by John Cage, is commonly remembered as 4 and a half minutes of silence. But contrary to popular belief, the song is not actually meant to be the sound of silence, but the sound of quiet. Ambient noises contribute to - and consist of - the performance. True silence does not exist. If one tilts their head right, the whole world sings. and, with that said, a playlist.

yeah, this one's a doozy. hi, cubewatermelon and co. miss me?

rhetorical question. don't answer that.

A few nitty-gritty things out of the way, first. this is specifically intended for the 2018 mod team for the sleepless domain fans discord server, primarily cubewatermelon/mary cagle. Folks who knew me are welcome to look on, but I'm not going to do much to catch people up to speed. hi, everyone! hope you're well!

I also might be a bit disjointed or biased in my recollection. For reasons that will be made clear extremely soon, I can't put my childhood on a linear timeline. I can only express myself, and hope I don't mess it up horribly this time.

Noooowww to the big stuff. re: stalking; i genuinely didn't mean to stalk anyone, and when they told me to back off, i backed off. I am not willing to discuss this further. not being able to conceptualize other people's emotions or the consequences of my actions has caused some problems for me

that's an autism thing btw. im autistic i dont think i told anyone that

And now, the special guest you've all been waiting for: a big round of applause for the elephant in the room! In accordance with the WMA Declaration of Tokyo, the deliberate overprescription of psychotropic medication is a form of pharmacological torture. Most victims of pharmacological torture and experimentation are children, because it is nigh-impossible to sue for brain damage when there is no fully-formed adult brain for comparison prior to the abuse.

Torture is a strong word, but I don't have another word to use. psychiatric abuse usually describes mistreatment in psychiatric wards; pharmacological abuse describes a patient who takes advantage of a prescription; medical abuse is when a doctor (usually physically) abuses their patient. Being able to understand what happened to you is a form of agency, and I don't even have the words. I identify as a torture victim; this may change.

This high dose was precedented and legal, but the vaginal stretching of intersex infants is also legal. much involuntary psychiatric & psychotropic treatment (such as restraints and solitary confinement) are legal, and child marriage is legal. abuse is not abnormal: it is profoundly normal. Because something is normal, legal, and precedented does not prevent it from being torture.

and when your mother hands you a poison apple and says "here, eat this; it will be good for you; i hope someday you'll forgive me" you have to eat it, because you are eight years old and you don't get to argue with your mother. despite all this, I don't blame my aunt for refilling the high dose. when I said the dose was hurting me, she listened. (thank you, auntie. i wouldn't have gotten out without you.)

And this brings us to you. oh, you four. (five? i forget myself!)

I'd like to establish some context. I was used to things getting taken from me. friend groups in particular: I didn't expect to keep any friends, because I constantly expected to have to pack up and move on. I moved a lot in my childhood, and in Africa, i was constantly told that at some undetermined point in the near future, i'd have to go back to the states. living with my aunt was a temporary thing, i was expected to eventually move back in with my parents at some undetermined point in the future. I relied heavily on online friends because they were people I could have anywhere, so online communities were my only lifeline - not to mention, i was basically in solitary confinement while in Kenya.

Most of all, I was terrified of my mental health/actions being exposed, examined, found lacking, and ultimately excluded. (this is why i was so afraid of psychiatric wards.) When you decided something had to be done about me - cutting me off from the server so i had to speak with you - It was either comply with your demands to communicate (which I could not, and did not understand why) or lose the community. I was so, so afraid of you i wanted to die when you all confronted me, and of course i couldn't say that, because only manipulative people would say "your attempt to solve this problem makes me want to seriously hurt myself."

But then I got called manipulative anyway <3 yay <3

Seriously: I wasn't trying to manipulate anyone, and i have no idea how you can manipulate someone without intention. (ah, that felt good to say!) Between medication spellbinding, alexithymia, and prior abuse, all my thoughts were so disordered i genuinely couldn't explain myself most of the time. Looking back, I have no childhood memory where I was fully lucid. I leaned into a manic persona because it was the only way I had any agency at all. I was something beyond both reason and self-recognition, and I willingly tried to brute-force my way through an extreme trauma response to please you. And you still hit me with my worst nightmare. that's why i was mad at you lol

I was so, so afraid, all the time, and I didn't even have the tools to understand I was afraid. How could someone as confident and impulsive as me be so fearful all the time? Was that manic persona freedom? Or was it a longer leash?

(Forgive my impulse toward rhetoric. I shouldn't ask questions you can't answer.)

I also couldn't say how badly i was hurting, because that would be venting, but you also accused me of venting when I was just talking about my day? or what was on my mind? I didn't understand that very well. autism moment, don't bother explaining it now. I also couldn't burden people with my actual mental health problems, because making strangers deal with that would be toxic! I resent you for setting up a system where it seemed safest not to speak and then punishing me for my inability to communicate. I resent every system that set me up for failure and punished me for failing, including yours.

And yet - I know that was not your intent! I can see in retrospect how hard you tried to be kind using the tools you had. The people with power over me, who genuinely did not want to do me harm and gave me multiple second chances, still upheld and facilitated the systems that tortured me; a miniature parody of the psychiatric system. (talk therapy and communication are useless if you struggle with self-awareness.) The same is true for the source: No person in my psychiatric treatment wanted me to suffer, and yet, here I am: a torture victim without a torturer. (except my parents, sort of.)

The logical conclusion, then: the system only intends to heal those who are already compliant, or prioritize compliance. The rest of us are treated to induce compliance, and if we still cannot, we are sequestered away. My medicine made me sick, and my prescribers made money off of keeping me sick - off of my torture. This is not a conspiracy: it is my lived experience.

However, even if i could communicate perfectly, we still would have had massive communication issues. Like - you know that one page where ben and steffi talk about dating, and ben says he thought steffi was gay? and steffi gets super defensive and it escalates into a screaming fight? I found that offensive, because a character getting that offput by the concept of not liking men (or a man) is kind of lesbophobic! But I understood that it would be a pain to redraw/write the page so they they fight about something else, don't fight, or some other solution, so i didn't need it to be fixed - just wanted to point out that was a reasonable interpretation, and one to be aware of in the future. but somehow my concerns got interpreted as a phrasing issue…? like, Ms. Cagle rewrote the page to say "weren't into guys" instead of "gay"..? You were very polite about it, Ms! But I found this interaction so baffling I didn't even try to correct it. that… wasn't what i said…

frankly we should bring back mildly homophobic steffi. twas narratively appropriate (<- different essay for a different time)

but yeah the whole communication operation was doomed from the start. rip!

The issue was always my inability to communicate, but my meds made it nigh-impossible to understand what I was feeling, and when I did, expressing myself could get me institutionalized. My suffering was inevitable but always, somehow, my fault. Awesome! *disintegrates into a pile of sand*

I cannot deny I was a girl like a box of matches waiting to be struck. You had no choice but to do as you did. But is it really what you ought to have done? (On this, I have no answer. I hope you have one that satisfies you.)

(that was genuine, by the by. i've spent a lot of time pondering this mess, and I still haven't found the "right" answer. I don't think there is one - though action or inaction, there is no version of this story where I don't suffer. I can only hope it was worth it. wait, hold on *adds the omelas child to my Kin List*)

Nor can I deny making my previous open letter in a small attempt to 'get back' at you - i'm not above that. lord knows i'm not innocent. but i really was trying to channel that rage into something productive. unfortunately i was doomed to fail because i didn't know what i meant. if you showed me that letter now, you'd hear a lot of "what? I don't know why I said that" "i have no idea why i would complain about something so minor" etc. You can disregard all that. This is what I was trying to say. the obsession, the trauma, the projection: all of it. So much of my obsession was talking around an issue i couldn't identify.

(meguka image) I know now

I knew I would be traumatized by this whole situation. I saw it coming and i could do nothing to stop it. But Gear was crucial to deciphering all this - in fact, suddenly thinking about her last year prompted me to really dissect my medical situation and realize i was tortured. I couldn't have done it without her. cassie & maggie, against the world.

Gear scans surprisingly well as a victim of long-term torture, actually. I don't think you meant to do that but good job!

speaking of her - i still don't think she's consistently suicidal. she's a real cockroach of a character, and I love her for it! But sometimes, i want to die and i want to live mean the same thing, because they both mean i need to get out of here. Imo, her thought processes and desires frequently contradict themselves, like mine did. and making your favs kill themselves in increasingly gruesome ways is really fun catharsis!

But please don't take this to mean I consider myself - or Gear - blameless. I love her because she's not blameless, because she's cruel for fun, because she'd rather be wicked than helpless. Like knows like. What I mean to say is, as of 2018, there is a black space between little Margret and Gear, and I saw all the signs of something very, very bad happening in that space. I know because I shared that space. what I mean to say is, teenage girls don't go out of their minds over nothing. Everything I made here is just an expression of what I heard in the narrative's silences.

and thus my biggest apprehension around revisiting the comic. knowing the author and I have such fundamentally different experiences with mental health - what if the signs of torture i picked up on weren't intended, or i completely made them up? what if, in the parts i haven't read yet, there's information that uproots my entire interpretation, or berates her for refusing mental health services that hurt me profoundly? how do you reconcile that a character so crucial to deciphering yourself may not be anything like you at all? I Don't Know. Shitpost, probably

You're welcome to share those shitposts and whatnot by the way. Creating this let me put down years of hurt, and i hope it relieves you, too. I don't need to go back on the server, or forgiveness, or anything besides understanding. consider this a peace offering. the terms are yours.

Despite writing nearly 10k words, I still probably missed something or was callous or whatever. Self-expression and self-understanding are… new to me. My apology may be understated, but please take it as I meant it, with utmost sincerity. My askbox is open, and I'm more than happy to discuss antipsych resources, KB, What The Hell Is Wrong With Gear, artistic choices made in this comic, etc. I'm even down to reconnect on discord! Maybe. Uh, I'm conflicted. I reserve my right to not want to talk, be slow in responding, and so on, as should you. we've no obligations and all the time in the world. Let neither of us hurt ourselves in meeting because it's the "right" thing to do. I'm not blaming anyone or trying to start drama. If it would give you the most peace of mind to completely ignore this, please do so.

or, translated: as of right now, I'm not ready for any information about KB after steffi reunites with her dad, or difficult emotional reunions. I would really like to hear from everyone, and I'd appreciate casual well-wishes. I don't want things to be the same, I want them to be peaceful. Baby steps, cassie, baby steps. (very large and fearful prey animal tries not to run into oncoming traffic)

mostly, making this was for me. Perhaps I've said too much, but after spending so long unable to express myself freely, my art was cathartic and necessary. I'm no one's martyr or innocent, I'm just a torture victim trying to make sense of it all. I want to articulate some thoughts I couldn't figure out how to say before and make some silly things that make people laugh. Most of all, I'm happy in ways I never thought I could be, and I would like to share that joy with old acquaintances and other fans of a story I adored.

What I mean to say is: The train's about to leave the station, and there's an empty seat beside me. The train will still leave whether or not you board; but I would be honored not to go it alone!

Thank you to everyone who stuck by me even after the drama. Ethel, Felipe, Chris - even though we've fallen out of contact, your kindness and patience meant more than i can say. special thank you to @stars-in-a-jam-jar, the first person i confessed everything to after the smoke cleared, and someone i consider myself close with no matter how long we fall out of contact. My close online friends, @shafpanda, @theoandmoon, @dvanaestmrva, my honorary cousin @my-name-is-jimmy, and everyone else I confided in about my torture. and, of course, my partners @transloo and @teenyjellyfishy, and my little sibling, @aroacenezhaanddainsleif, the three people I love most in the world. Thank you, all. it is an honor to love you, and be loved by you.

[twotwincrosses]

In mass shootings like the most recent one: Do they usually leave the bodies there for investigations or do they try to take them out as quick as possible?

[basilcatchup]

Kieran doodle, I like him a lot :)

[saltwatersweets]

i like to imagine that sometime in between ep7 and ep8, charlie takes vaggie to cannibal town to help train some of the residents who will fight in the upcoming extermination, and while visiting vaggie sees the kid she spared and maybe gets to have a proper conversation with him and/or his family

[mariocki]

The Nesting (Massacre Mansion, 1981)

"It may come as a surprise to you that a physicist could even contemplate the existence of paranormal phenomena."

"But you admit to the possibility."

"I admit the possibility of the unknown. I admit that science is only beginning to understand its own discoveries. But I do not believe in evil spirits or painted phantoms in windows."

[themoonunderstoodmydadjokes]

Learning how to be alone as a healthy habit of just spending quality time with yourself and loving your own company vs being alone as a trauma response to not wanting to get hurt or used is something I was entirely unprepared for

[byanyan]

need y'all to know that some time ago xeno brought it to my attention that jesus of suburbia is an incredibly byan-coded song and i haven't stopped thinking about it since