#it's such a tragedy because they're so good

[bringbackmaes14]

My mom has her TV on in her room almost 24/7 and it's always on some news outlet or other. We talk a lot about politics and world/national/local events. And we do have a lot of varying views on a lot of things but we're both adults who are capable of saying "well we've both stated we have differing opinions and it's clear that we're actually arguing at this point and not just talking so let's put away the topic for now." But there are also other times where I'm just too overwhelmed by my own life to think about what's going on in the bigger world around me, so my mom knows to be hesitant to bring up news stuff with me (i.e. she doesn't just start talking about politics/world events with me rather she'll ask if I'm in the mindset to discuss things when she wants my opinion on something). This is all relevant.

We've always been able to talk about nearly everything from the economy to the school system to human rights to human tragedy and we've never tried to censor ourselves around each other (outside of getting too emotional with our language). But about two weeks ago when the United Healthcare CEO was assassinated, my mom, who is in her 50s, came to me and she said "Did you see that the CEO of United Healthcare got unalived?"

And I just sat there and looked at her completely confused and she was like "did you not hear about it? It's all over the news. It happened in clear view on the street." Like the problem was that I hadn't heard of the event not that my Gen-X mother had just in a real life conversation said the word "unalived".

And I told her as much. "Yes I've heard that. Why did you say 'unalived' instead of 'murdered'?

And she told me that she just thought that since I'm touchy about heavier topics sometimes (which is definitely true, that does occasionally happen) she thought it would be better to just not use the "heavy" words. I asked her if she realized, honestly, how stupid that was because regardless of the word she used, she was still talking about a murder, it didn't change the subject matter, she was only making the subject matter seem less significant and severe by changing the word to baseless internet lingo that a bunch of misguided, clout-chasing influencers spread.

She hadn't. She's doesn't use the Internet replacement words a lot, online or otherwise. This was a first. She thought this was a different situation, and a fine one to use it in, and like the above stories people shared, it's still not.

I'm allowed to say there are days where I want to avoid heavier topics because I'm overwhelmed. I'm allowed to not ever really discuss certain topics because they actually trigger me based on my own experiences. But people who are out here living their whole lives like just talking about about difficult or controversial topics, or asking questions about it, or enjoying media where it's portrayed (especially when it's actually portrayed respectfully) are being ridiculous, and they're handicapping themselves. They're never going to learn how to talk about hard things, or how to handle hard things. And honestly I feel bad for them.

Luckily, in my case, once I explained why my mom saying what she said was incredibly weird and honestly devaluing to the conversation, she backtracked and told me that (like I said above) she doesn't talk like that regularly and she has no intention to start; it's just that this was a huge news event and that day had been particularly rough for me emotionally and she wasn't sure how to approach it. So her intentions were good and I'm very lucky that she understands and also agrees that the Internet censorship language is incredibly unnecessary.

we have GOT to kill tiktok/twitter self-censorship i just witnessed a grown adult say the word “smex” out loud to our professor

[utilitycaster]

Inspired actually by me nonstop thinking about the Young Witch Solving The Disappearance Of Her Neighbor's Cat In The Alps tweet since last night and a number of other unrelated posts I have been thinking about the concept of maturity in media, because I think there's a lot of different dimensions to that. It's a series of spectra, rather than a binary, and if you use the terms "mature" or "immature" you can quickly realize that a lot of our societal metrics for what's adult-appropriate vs. child appropriate are very skewed in specific and in my opinion untrue and unhelpful directions. This could honestly be a 10 page essay and I may very well write that when I'm on break but just to give you my outline here:

Stimulation - is it grabbing your attention with bright lights and loud sounds and fast action, or do you have to actively focus? Action films can be just as "jangly keys" as children's animation despite being an "adult" work, whereas something like Mad Men can have vivid colors but would bore a child to tears in terms of pace and action. However, and this will be an ongoing theme, you can have a very choppy, fast-paced narrative that is complex and a very slow and dull one that is incredibly simple and childish.

"Ratings" Subject Matter: Sex/Violence/Profanity. This is the one I think is most misleading, because you can have an incredibly puerile R-rated film, and you can have an immensely complex narrative without any of the above. [note: I have zero patience for people who act like sex and violence are inherently unnecessary wastes of time; they are merely things within a narrative that can be executed well or poorly, but it is true that something can have a simple plot and constant bright lights and stimulation and essentially be big old jingling mobile for infants but there's a sex scene in it so it's Adult Now. Unfortunately a lot of people are like "and this is why YA is inherently better" which we shall see is not the case.]

Other Difficult Subject Matter (I don't have a good name for it, but to give examples, death, racism, genocide, abuse, serious or chronic illness, etc). This one is tricky because all of the above are topics present in works for quite young children, because they can experience all the above or have someone close to them experience them, and fiction is a powerful teaching tool. Obviously the nature of how this is presented varies, and later points will cover it, but while in my opinion the simple presence of these topics says nothing about the work's level of maturity on its own I'm including it because you do get people who think that children should be shielded from all the above and would consider the mere inclusion of those topics as inappropriate. They're wrong, but it's definitely an axis of judgement/categorization that exists.

Adult-level processing of information (probably a misnomer in that teens can do this but like, teens read adult books all the time, and as Tumblr has shown us, many adults cannot do this): does the narrative require you be able to pick up on subtext? Do you need to understand what is relevant to the story and what isn't? Do you need to be comfortable with or at least able to tolerate not knowing entirely what is going on right away? Do you need to have a sense of irony? Is there an unreliable narrator?

Adult-level processing of moral complexity (in my limited, not a parent or educator experience, I honestly think teens do better with the information processing than this, ie, this is one of the last things to develop; also Tumblr is even worse): does the narrative require you accept that sometimes things are unfair and will never be fair? Do you need to accept a story in which the Quote Unquote Bad Guys walk free without real consequence? Do you need to accept a story in which no one's actions are entirely defensible or in which no choices are easy and clean and harmless? Do you need to attempt to understand an alien perspective? Is there senseless tragedy? This incidentally is how you separate out the children's books from the adult books on topics like illness or catastrophic events; a lot of children's books end with a message of "it's hard and sad, but it will be okay eventually" and focus on very relatable POV characters which is understandable! But, to use an example as someone who went to a Jewish school with a robust Holocaust education, elementary schoolers read Number the Stars in which the (entirely fictional) Jewish family escapes to Sweden; middle schoolers read Night in which Wiesel's (real) father dies painfully in front of him.

None of this is to say that escapism/cozy fiction/whatever you want to call it is bad - I am not interested in a diet entirely made of thorny moral quandaries and no happy endings. I enjoy a stupid turn off your brain action movie, or a fluffy romantasy. But I do think that a demand that every ending be happy and that Justice Be Served in every story is no less immature than saying "ew, there's kissing in this???"

[cleveradjacent]

I'm so super curious can you tell me more about your interpretation of Yuusaku as a character ^_^

oh thank you for asking! tbh i haven't given yuusaku all that much thought compared to other characters, but i tend to ramble when no one is there to stop me, so this will probably still end up lengthy. (edit from the future: it did)

because of my latest fic and a previous ask, one might get the impression that i dislike him, but i don't. i don't feel one way or the other about him, he's fun to me as a tool for writing ogata and that's about it (same for vasya but this ain't about him). but! ever since i've written 'all that loves you', i've been thinking about the juxtaposition of his good intentions and the more sinister undertones of his worldview, and that's a juicy contrast to sink my teeth into.

on the one hand, he's a naive sheltered kid, a victim of his father and his country. i cannot in good conscience prescribe him ill intent. i believe he suffered at the hands of his father as ogata has suffered -- he was raised an unquestioning lamb to the slaughter and sent off to charge head-first into said slaughter over and over and over until his inevitable end.

not his father, not tsurumi, not ogata, not any other soldier saw him as a person. being disdained for who you are and put on a pedestal for the very same thing are both a kind of dehumanization. he was never hanazawa yuusaku the man to anyone, only a symbol, either in life or in death. even to the story, he's nothing but ogata's plot device. he's barely there. hell, he's nothing but ogata's plot device to me. talk about tragedy.

he wasn't given much time or chance to break out of what he's been taught. all that bullshit about duty and purity and having to be a symbol of both -- when it's all you've ever known, it'll stick. maybe, the inevitability of all i'm about to describe makes him tragic all the more.

and yet!

he is not any naive sheltered kid. he is a japanese soldier in china in 1904. he is dying and leading others into death for a brutal imperialist landgrab. you could argue about how much agency he has over the fact and over his convictions (as a ukranian in russia and the child of an officer, i've had PLENTY of that argument), but i'm not gonna do that here. whatever your stance, the outcome is the same: he's an enthusiastic participant to something truly horrible.

and in the midst of it, his desire to preserve his "purity" comes off as absurd and self-delusional. i'm not arguing for murder; i'm arguing that his belief in this abstract purity, that he has one to maintain in the first place, and, by extension, that he's the only soldier around who should do it makes him extremely out of touch. i've written about this from ogata's perspective in 'this weapon wants' and 'all that loves you': while ogata doesn't think much of the war they're in, he does see a holier-than-thou attitude in the way yuusaku refuses to kill. it's as if he's the only one who can and should keep his hands clean in an inherently dirty ordeal. yuusaku may not himself be an arrogant man, but arrogance does follow from his worldview.

there's a different, more sinister side to this i've explored in 'all that loves you', which i remember you (the author of the ask) (god i hope you're still reading) have read! the world is complex. you cannot let black-and-white thinking dictate your actions without eventually stumbling into a whole lot of harm, whether to others or to yourself. murder is a terrible act, yes. but some people need to be stopped, and for some of them, murder is the only way to do it. if you (the person reading this) haven't read 'all that loves you', it puts yuusaku's views to the test in this exact scenario. and the result is. well. quite fucked up. and it follows pretty seamlessly from what we see of yuusaku in canon, so make of that what you will.

speaking of which, you know how he tells ogata that people like him shouldn't exist while embracing him? also fucked up. yuusaku has the best of intentions, and there's not a chance in the world he has the awareness to go "ok not feeling the emotion of guilt doesn't inherently make you Wrong", but the fact remains: he assumes ogata shares his presumably universal morals and ends up playing right into his insecurity.

there's also yuusaku lacking the self-awareness to know that he's imposing on ogata with his affection. i'm extrapolating here, but i feel like yuusaku's simplistic worldview only allows for affection=good! desirable! and he doesn't stop to question whether it's welcome.

to that: a friend of mine has pointed out once that this astounding inability to read the room could be due to autism. genius take in my opinion. seeing how strong, rigid morals are also an autism thing, i'm convinced now that autism runs in the family. diversity win?

so yeah, to sum this all up, yuusaku has been set up to fail, and fail he did. he's naive, kind, well-intentioned, he's as much of a victim as his brother, but all sorts of messed up things follow from his beliefs and his actions.

and i just think that's neat.

[5ummit]

HTP Fic Recs: Hidden Gems

Have you, like me, devoured everything in the Hydra Trash Party AO3 tag and are desperate for more? Well you may be in luck.

In honor of CATWS's 10th anniversary I’ve decided, yet again, to make a new rec list so that these gems don't get buried in my overwhelmingly extensive original rec list. This list features HTP and HTP-adjacent fics that are NOT tagged as HTP (either because the author didn't know the label existed or didn't believe it applied to their fic), making them particularly hard to find, and I think, deserving of more attention.

Many of these fics don’t have much, if any, explicit noncon, but noncon is often implied or referenced and they’re all rife with other types of dehumanization and abuse so the usual HTP warnings still apply. Read tags carefully etc.

The Making of the Winter Soldier [series] by CluckU & Mumble_Bee Relationship: Hydra Agents/WS, Zola/WS Words: 13,700

There are a small, precious collection of things he knows for certain each time he wakes in his chair: He is a weapon. A soldier. An asset. He is being molded into the Fist of Hydra. He must prove himself. Failure is not an option.

Muscle Memory by sparklingbinjuice Relationship: Rumlow & Bucky Words: 4500

It had taken five minutes of fumbling but he had eventually picked the lock. The soldier wouldn’t be back for hours. Coordinates provided by the remaining, somewhat rudimentary, tracking device installed in the titanium arm indicated that he wandered the streets on weekends – watching people, visiting libraries and museums, feeding the birds. It was all so horribly human.

Reconquer, regain, recover by werebird Relationship: Hydra Agents/WS (past) Words: 2300

Hydra had known his body better than he himself ever could. They had taken it, reshaped it, reprogrammed it. They had birthed the Winter Soldier although they had never given him life.

Taming Winter by Runlights Relationship: Rumlow & WS, Steve & Bucky Words: 91,000 Notes: terrifying bloodthirsty WS

Regardless of the intravenous set pumping warming fluids into those veins, regardless of the fact that a moment ago, the guy looked on the verge of death, the Winter Soldier was out of the chair and in front of him with two steps that happened so quickly he didn’t even have time to do more than inhale. He froze as he felt the press of his own combat knife against his throat, the bite of the blade causing blood to well and slip down his throat. This was the point where he suspected people felt fear, especially staring into those unfocused cold eyes. He only felt a twisted fascination.

The Soldier’s Kittens by exclamation Relationship: Sam & Bucky, Steve & Bucky Words: 11,300 Notes: animal abuse/death

"Sam's a really good guy," Steve said. "I think you'd like him if you spent more time with him." Bucky said nothing. He would not show any interest in Sam, just as he had not shown any interest when Steve had taken him to the animal shelter to try and get him to interact with the dogs there. He knew this trap and he wouldn't fall into it twice.

Flinching by Exorin Relationship: Steve/Bucky Words: 570

It might finally break what's left of him if Steve knew the way he's had to dig his nails into his palms hard enough to draw blood just to shape his breath into the sound of a moan.

I'm comin' up only to hold you under by anonymous Relationship: Hydra Agents/Bucky, Steve/Bucky (past) Words: 2100

They drag him out of his cell by his hair and toss him into a room full of identical guards. He lands hard on his knees, the force of the impact stuttering up his weak, tired body, and he glares up and them with all the hatred he can gather. He feels off-balance, like he does whenever he tries to carry himself now—the stump of his missing arm has a phantom weight he can't get used to, won't get used to.

Context is Everything by thedevilchicken Relationship: Hannibal/Bucky Words: 2600

"I don't understand," Bucky replied. "Recontextualize?" "Your memories of HYDRA seem…distant," Hannibal said. "The way you speak about them is as if they happened to someone else. In order to process your trauma, you must understand that they happened to you."

Never Letting the Blood Dry by BarrenPines Relationship: Rumlow & WS, Steve & Bucky Words: 2500 Notes: whipping

After the mission, there were pats on the back, expressions of congratulations and thanks, and a dozen other little niceties that made his skin crawl. He’d gotten lucky, that’s all. And he’d also defied orders, departed from his assigned task. Praise wasn’t what he deserved.

[horreurscopes]

watching death note and house of the dragon simultaneously earlier this year did something permanent to my galaxy brain

[macbethisms]

underrated thing about wang baoxiang is how utterly pathetic he is. intentionally provokes his brother every time they interact because having esen be mad at him for something he did on purpose is easier than being vulnerable and then is like how could esen think i hate him :(( goes around rolling his eyes at all these Idiots who don't consider the Needs of the Common Folk and then gets grossed out whenever a servant dares to speak to him. constantly thinking about Hot Men Exercising and how much they all want to fuck each other probably. hasn't emotionally matured past the age of fifteen (he is twenty-three). thinks of himself as a Character instead of a person so much that he gets surprised whenever the things he did for their narrative significance have actual real consequences. while being quite literally haunted by a specter of his own guilt is like hm what could this mean. well time to not sleep for another 36 hours. kills people and then throws up about it and then goes off to kill more people because surely this is the one that will fix everything right. wants to be punished for what he's done because it's the closest he can get to admitting he feels remorse. looks for his brother everywhere but only ever finds himself.

which of course culminates with him stalking miserably through the hallways looking for someone to be mad at because there needs to be someone else responsible for making his life suck but there isn't anymore because no one has power over him anymore. and he can't go back but tries to convince himself that he doesn't want to because he also needs to see himself as being In Control of Everything That's Ever Happened to Him. he wanted it all along and he likes it here actually. and he won fratricide chicken and got himself tortured and tried to show mercy and did every evil dishonorable thing and now he just has to live with it all forever. loser!!!!

[pensivespacepirate]

it feels like the whole purpose of venom 3 is to kill off venom what the fuck

[agalychnisspranneusroseus]

Role swap AU in which Sasha ends up in Wartwood, Marcy in Toad Tower and Anne in Newtopia, but Sasha is still a manipulative little shit and Marcy a total sweetheart despite Sasha being with the "good guys" and Marcy with the "bad guys".

It's not like she enjoys tormenting Marcy for sport. It's not like using all her insecurities against her and destroying her confidence brings her joy, but she and her toad friends are threatening her Wartwood and her frog family and oh boy, she should have kept her head down among her books where it belongs because Sasha is not going to let this offense slide.

[sapphireswimming]

I just!! Am Screaming!!!! Sean said they were just going to keep sending him back into the field one more time just one more job you gotta do until he was dead but he never said no! he could have left Candela Obscura at any point, after any job, but he chose to stay there! even after he'd reached the end of his rope! and everyone else continued to stay with him! for him!! Marion told Sean he was only there because of him. Auntie Bee admitted she was only there to stay near him. if he ever said he wanted out they would have not only let him but left with him! and if Sean and Marion were both out, Jean would have been to! Nathaniel would have followed as soon as he paid his debt to Allison! they didn't want him to keep going until he broke! they were trying to be there with him for him by him beside him because that was literally all they could do for him! they all could have been happier outside of Candela Obscura but Sean was there so they weren't going to leave! they loved him!! the love was there!! the love was there the whole time and it mattered of course it mattered but it didn't do anything!!!! it didn't do anything except keep them all together until it was too late! and I! ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

[bayofwolves]

i was on the most random nostalgia kick and rewatched the prince of egypt yesterday and let me just say... that movie is truly one of the greatest animated films of all time.

[gurorori]

haha oh no im definitely not at all disturbed by the prevalence of leftists on all platforms who are loudly 'anti-genocide' when it comes to the palestinian cause (and a couple others at best :3c) yet the only time ukraine [ʊkrɐˈjinɐ] leaves their mouths is in critique, in stark comparison to the former or in complaint about their (american) government sending aid.

at first what i saw often was pointing out the differences in western media framing [ukraine vs palestine], and that's fair (until the words and the agenda of western journalists are used to paint, as a whole, ukrainians who have been actively going through genocide as some kind of white supremacists hogging the blanket of global attention when they kinda just want to live and have the rights to their own land, culture, names and families)

but no one is even caring to do that anymore, today bitches just invent metaphorical scenarios and people to get mad at and to throw an entire ethnos away because wahhhh i decided that you care for X but not for Y!!!.... all while doing the exact thing they are condemning. the exact absolute same and they don't even hide it but do lack the self-awareness to realise

[viillette]

it's so crazy how few historical fiction novels are like sharon kay penman's. the way that they're built out of the skeleton of the historical record seems so obvious, but there's so few people who are actually willing to commit to it in the way that she did. it seems like so often that's just a starting point which gets reformed to fit a coherent narrative, but she makes no real attempt to do that. there's themes and foils and patterns, but first and foremost it is a reconstruction. you can't really know what someone who lived that long ago was like, only what they did, and you can feel how she takes these isolated, dramatic events and builds a whole life around them. the books are nothing more than an answer to the question 'what might someone have been like, what could the history between these people have been, to possibly explain something like this?' the ability to string together a handful of facts and events from medieval chronicles to create people that feel so real, and psychology and relationships that develop so naturally that these distant, seemingly impenetrable choices suddenly feel so immediate and clear is just beyond belief. you know this probably wasn't actually how things happened, but it doesn't matter because it was something like this. the particulars are less important the crushing awareness that at one point all of this made sense. there was a time when all of this was right now. the world is unrecognizable and exactly the same. that's something which sounds very simple but is incredibly difficult to accomplish.

you come to know these people so well, their loves and hatreds and ambitions and failures, and those things are rarely resolved in the end. you know them from the time that they're children, you watch each one of them die, and none of it means anything in particular except that they were a human being. things which seem like they must be building to some tragic fallout end in anticlimax. things which seem utterly inconsequential in the moment manifest again decades later in cataclysmic disaster. and then you see it all play out again from the beginning with their children, and their children's children. all these uncanny echoes, this endlessly unfolding palimpsest of lives, each laid over the triumphs and mistakes of those who came before. i've never read anything so epic with so much mastery over the micro and macro levels of history. it's the minute, seemingly inconsequential everyday details, which build into a lifetime, which builds into generation of lives, which builds into the rise and fall of kingdoms and empires. it's the merciless endlessly turning wheel of fortune that replays the same songs in different keys again and again for all time. a person is both an individual with free will, and the prisoner of their blood and circumstances. somehow everything has infinite weight, is tied to everything that has come before and will come after, is the culmination of someone's entire existence—their pains and joys and fears and hopes—and yet is simultaneously completely meaningless, just one more victim of fate in an endless procession of lives and choices. the whole impotent tragedy of humanity is laid out in front of you and it's so repulsive and beautiful. it's deep love and unfathomable, senseless horror briefly and miraculously reverberating in a vacuum, an absurd aberration fading into silence.

if it's not obvious these books have made me cry like 10 different times

[goodobservationshirley]

You almost died tonight, so, right now, running off with me probably does seem like a good idea, but you’ll find another worthy cause tomorrow, and another one the day after that.

[dark-night-star-light]

Breaking my silence to say: Shane and Abeke were never romantic to me.

[mercymaker]

woke up early, sick and feverish, and immediately thought of malstarion

i wonder what that means for me.. hmmm

[shannonsketches]

Nabooru and Ganon in the middle of an argument Nabs: You know what? *removes her wedding insignia* You're not the same man I married Ganon: What?? B-but--!! GUH!! QAQ

I actually do have a scene like this in Eidolon except they're only engaged, haha