#like every other relationship in this series- complex and toxic and abusive but he does love him

[dreadfuldevotee]

Carol Cutshall I know your game, Rolin & Co. I've got you beat. Color (in terms of wardrobe, specifically) in IWTV so far has been representative of a kind of vibrant inner life and honesty in characters. It's the reason why it's so jarring go from seeing Louis in his beautiful multicolored array of stylish clothes in New Orleans to his solid, un-broken string of Couture Minimalism All-Black Ensembles in Dubai. Even in just comparing his unassuming browns and muted tones of Paris next to Claudia's self discovery in pastel. So, to then turn your eye to Armand; always in black, white, greyscale and browns so dark that in most lightings- they end up functionally black.

And then I think about how his rare pops of color, outside of his green shirt in Just Start The Tape, are orange and red. Adoration of the Shepherd continues to be a interesting painting to tie to Armand, this time in the detail that our only image of Armand before his turning is him in a bright blue gown. And in thinking of all these things at the same time, mentally, I am whacked in the face by a piece of trash on the wind which has this The Vampire Armand quote plastered to it

Anyways, anytime someone goes "Oh I hope to see Armand in color in S3" I think the monkey's paw curls

[chaos-of-the-abyss]

akio and the coffin

it’s fascinating how akio both literally IS the coffin of ohtori academy and, simultaneously, is trapped by it. ohtori academy is in many ways a manifestation of the ugly side of adolescence, of clinging on to something in your past and refusing to move forward in your life. every character has something they continue to hold on to despite the fact that they ought to let it go for the sake of growing and maturing. for example, saionji has his inferiority complex regarding touga, his refusal to let go of the simplicity of their childhood together when he felt that they stood on the same ground, and that touga saw him as an equal. everything he does in the series is an attempt to make himself feel as though he is finally on equal grounds with touga. if he would only stop tying his self-image to the perception that touga is somehow above him, that touga looks down on him, then he would be able to let go of that sense of inferiority and move on. but he can’t. juri refuses to let go of the pain she feels regarding her past with shiori, and continues to see shiori as someone who is “innocent”, albeit cruelly - someone who is unknowing of the pain she causes juri through her actions when in fact, shiori in seducing the boy she thought juri loved was deliberately acting to hurt her. if juri would only realize and accept the true intentions behind shiori’s behavior, then she could get one step closer to understanding shiori, to being understood by her, and moving past the pain of shiori’s betrayal. but she can’t. 

most of the characters, except utena and anthy of course, remain in ohtori by the end of the show. while they’ve all made progress in “maturing” thanks to the events they experienced throughout the series - both saionji and touga’s as well as juri and shiori’s relationships have gotten visibly better, as shown in the final medley of scenes - they still have more growing to do, hence why they remain in ohtori academy until their time comes. one day, the show suggests, they might also revolutionize their own worlds - their own selves - and finally leave the coffin of ohtori behind as well. 

so where does that leave akio? i think he can be said to literally be the coffin of ohtori in that he is explicitly shown to try to manipulate others into remaining stagnant, to clinging on to whatever toxic things they are struggling to process and come to terms with, though this is of course only shown via the characters he most directly interacts with. naturally it comes across most clearly with anthy, although i think utena and to a less direct extent, touga, are the other two people who are the most straightforwardly influenced by him. when it comes to anthy, she clings to her love for the person her brother used to be, the older brother who, at least as she perceived, was kind and caring and wanted to protect people. to protect that older brother, she willingly took on the hatred of the world, and continues to endure the pain of it to this day for what is implied to be centuries. but akio has shown time and time again, through the repeating dueling cycles, that if he was ever kindhearted and genuinely caring, those parts of him are gone now. i do believe he cares about anthy to an extent even now, but whatever affection he has for her is paltry in comparison to his desire to reclaim his power as prince dios. it’s for that purpose that he set up the entire dueling system, for which he freely allows duelists to treat anthy like a prize and an object. and additionally, because anthy is so integral to the power he has now in ohtori, he uses emotional, psychological, physical, and sexual abuse to keep her tied to him. he’s willing to not just let her wellbeing come last, but puts it at the bottom of the list of priorities, and actively tears it down himself for his own benefit. anthy knows all this - but because she still holds onto that love that she had for who he used to be, she stays with him and does his bidding. and that’s what akio wants. he is the coffin, wishing to keep people in their states of despair, conflict, and pain, therefore ensuring that they are compliant and vulnerable to his manipulation. 

at the same time, akio is trapped by the coffin like everyone else. he, like all the other characters, has something that he ought to move on from for his own sake as well as the sake of the people around him: his goal to reclaim his powers as prince dios. akio has failed in this goal every single dueling cycle that happened before the show’s events, and as displayed in the final episode, he definitively fails the one that takes place during the show as well. he can attempt the cycle over and over and over again, redo and tweak and modify the dueling system however many times and in whatever ways he wants - it’s all useless. there is no sword that can break open the rose gate. there is no way to reclaim his powers. they’re gone, that part of his life is over, and if he accepted that fact, it would allow him to move on and heal from what he experienced. but he can’t. at the very end of the series, right before anthy leaves ohtori for good, he’s typing away just as diligently as he ever did and, completely oblivious, tells anthy that he’s rewriting the rules of the rose crest, that he’ll be counting on her again. and i didn’t pick up on this until rewatching the episode, but it really just hits you then how utterly stupid he looks, working so hard and speaking so confidently about the upcoming dueling cycles as if any of them are ever going to matter in the slightest. i love anthy’s response to him too; i love the subtle but at the same time so blatant scorn in her words: “you really don’t know what’s happened, do you?” because once again, throughout all this, akio has learned nothing. he hasn’t realized it’s useless, what he’s trying to do; he hasn’t realized all the effort and pain and anguish he’ll cause in people for yet another dueling cycle will never make any difference. he is unable to come to terms with the reality that he will never have his powers as prince dios back. he refuses to move on. 

akio is the coffin of ohtori, wanting to keep others in stagnation and regret. he’s also trapped by the coffin, incapable of maturing past his own stagnation and regret. and it really, really says something that all of the other major characters of the show, who have been in ohtori for far shorter a time than he has, have been able to make visible strides in their growth. anthy, who is the only one comparable to akio in terms of duration at ohtori, revolutionizes her world and leaves. meanwhile akio, as deluded and self-unaware as he is, hasn’t made a single step of progress in all this time. the only thing he does is call in bewildered desperation after anthy as she finally leaves him behind, still totally clueless as to what has happened. 

tldr; i once saw an author say one of her characters represents inertia, in fact he is inertia. i think that’s a spot-on explanation of akio, at least in terms of what he symbolizes in the story. i want to beat him in the dick with a cactus

[helloofromthewired]

No Matter Where You Go, Everyone's Connected

At its very core, SEL is about connection, I think.

SEL was originally created by aBe to appeal to both Western and Eastern audiences, but for Western and Eastern fans to have very different views on it. It was kind of meant as an attempt to show how different West and East (specifically America and Japan) are, but I think it kind of backfired for the exact same reason it succeeded at the same time. Contradictory, I know, but stay with me here.

Lain has many connections across the series: some personal, but the vast, vast, vast, vast majority are impersonal. They're connections that exist, but that she doesn't necessarily feel connected to; they're the billions of people in and connecting with the Wired, which thanks to Protocol 7 has implanted itself in the subconscious mind of humanity as a whole. These connections aren't as important to Lain as her personal connections are; or, to expand on that a bit, the connections she wants to have.

Alice is a key example of this, and I think that she's Lain's most important relationship: Lain loves Alice from the bottom of her heart. It's a very deep and very important love for Lain; it's the only thing that could've realistically broken her from Masami's control, and we see it happen. Likewise, Alice loves Lain; if not loves, then at least has incredibly deep, caring, and complex feelings for her. Throughout the entire series, Alice is the only person we see actually care for Lain Iwakura: not Lain of the Wired, or Lain-as-God, or "Lain". Even her own father kind of kind of haphazardly dismisses her, her mother downright hates her, and Mika couldn't care less about her. Taro is interested in Lain, primarily for the Lain of the Wired as well as his role as a servant of the Knights, but I can't say he actually cares about her. Alice's friends more or less hang out with Lain because Alice does. Masami doesn't care about Lain in the same way that Alice does; his "care" is incredibly selfish, incredibly toxic, and incredibly abusive.

(TL;DR: they're lesbians, your honor)

At the same time, though, is the connection that Lain has with the rest of the world not important? In that vein, not potentially more important? We can comprehend Dunbar's Number: we can maintain social relationships with about 150 people. We can't comprehend the millions of people we connect with every day; we watch the same videos, we look at the same images, read the same books, watch/read the same news, laugh at the same jokes, play the same games, and so on. Even since the beginning of widespread international... well, connection after the Agricultural Revolution, humanity has been interconnected in some way or form.

It's not a direct connection. I know jack shit about any random 30 year old living in Jakarta or a 13 year old living in Tehran, aside from the fact that they live in Indonesia and Iran. But it's still a connection: it's a connection across time, across borders, across nations. When I'm reading, say, Marx, I'm reading the same books that people in the 1800s read; that inspired Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Luxemburg, Foster, and others (some of whom weren't even socialists, like Ataturk or Mussolini); that changed western philosophy in the last two centuries. I'm connecting with the millions, if not billions of people who have also read Marx; be they from 1856, 1917, or 2024. When I watch a video with 30 million views, I'm connecting with 30 million people; it's an indirect and impersonal connection, but we're all connected through watching that video.

The internet connects billions of people simply by its very existence. When you log into an internet connection, you are connecting to 5.35 billion other people. SEL understands that. Everybody in SEL is connected to the Wired; not just through hooking into it, but through Protocol 7 connecting all of humanity subconsciously, as well. Lain herself is the amalgam of that; she is not just a product of the Wired, or the God of the Wired, or God at all: she is the output, the child of that connection. In a sense, the connection itself.

That's what "Let's all love Lain!" really means, I think. It's a meme; an idea spreading from person to person in a culture. Or, contrary to what aBe might've expected, multiple cultures. It took over MAL about a year back, and it's become popular in both Japan and the States. "Let's all love Lain!" is the ultimate meme in SEL; it is the connection point, ultimately what connects everybody together in the end; their connection to the Wired, their love for Lain, their link to all other 8 billion people in the world.

"Protocol 7 is expected to allow the seamless transfer of information between the Wired and the real world." The message immediately after that?

[cosmicjoke]

Hello, I am a recent fan of Saezuru and this story has me looking at every detail in the pictures. I saw your analysis of Chapter 52 and how gender plays into Yashiro's trauma. It made me realize something I noticed when I was re-reading the story again. Sorry that this ask may be more mature. As I look through the sex scenes again, I noticed that Yashiro's genitals are not present when he is having sex with other men, but are present during his sexual encounters with Doumeki. Do you think this is Yoneda-sensei's way of showing that only Doumeki has treated and seen Yashiro as a man? If it is, I think it brings a new meaning to contradiction.

Hi there,

That's a really interesting observation, and I'll have to keep an eye out for it when I reread the manga again!

I wouldn't at all be surprised if Yoneda did intend for that. This story has a lot of symbolism going on, and a lot of layers. In a lot of ways, of course, while Yashiro longs to be treated gently like a woman would be, and while Doumeki is the only person to ever give that to Yashiro, Doumeki is also the only one to ever acknowledge Yashiro as a man worthy of consideration and respect. At least initially in their relationship, he deferred to Yashiro and took him seriously, and didn't treat him as frivolous or silly or air-headed, which all the other men in Yashiro's life always had, and which many men tend to treat women like as well, as people less deserving of their respect or to be listened to, etc...

There's of course a lot of complexity involved in Yashiro's feelings towards being "womanly", or being treated like a woman. While his step-father told him he was really a woman, he also was physically abusive toward Yashiro, as we see in that one panel where he slaps him and then observes how Yashiro "likes" being beaten. But Yashiro later realizes that women, at least in his limited experience with them, don't enjoy being brutalized, or roughhoused. He even makes that remark to Kage at one point about how it's worse for women when they're raped. All of this flies directly in the face of what his step-father told Yashiro about him being a woman, and contradicts it in the way his step-father treated him too. Yashiro might have thought, subconsciously then, that his step-father had been wrong about him, because he "liked" being hurt during sex, unlike women. I think this plays a big factor in why Yashiro clung so desperately, for so long, to his self-image of masochism. Because it proved his step-father wrong and a liar. He might think 'See? I'm not a woman because I liked being abused.'.

But then Doumeki came around and tore that self-image down for Yashiro, and left him with the devastating reality that he DIDN'T like being abused, and in fact, that he responded more powerfully to being treated gently. All of this no doubt wreaked havoc on Yashiro's mental stability. Any thought that his step-father was right about him would just further drive home this idea that his step-father also possessed him, or owned him in a way. That he exerted a certain amount of control and understanding of Yashiro and his life.

But of course, Yashiro's step-father WASN'T right about him at all. Yashiro isn't a woman, and he isn't any less of a man for having a more feminine inclination when it comes to sex. In a lot of ways, Saezuru is also tackling issues of everyone's favorite term these days, "toxic masculinity", but it does so without turning it into a cliche. Yashiro is tougher, smarter, more capable and more of a man, I think, than just about anyone else in this series. He's courageous enough to give up what's best for him in order to help others. He's a protector, through and through. And really, what's more masculine than someone who protects others? Than someone who serves as a protector?

It's just, as you pointed out, nobody else other than Doumeki ever treated Yashiro as a man, in terms of showing him respect and acknowledgement.

Yashiro also spoke about how his being in love with Kage was proof of his own freakishness, because he saw himself as this sadistic, masochistic person who sort of encompassed what he was taught were normal behaviors for men. Violent, cruel, uncaring, etc... He couldn't reconcile his tender hearted emotions for Kage with what he had convinced himself he was. Not without also acknowledging that he was a victim and that his step-father had been right about him.

I think Yashiro is going to have to learn that he can be both masculine and feminine. That him wanting to be treated gently and kindly doesn't make him any less of a man, or any less of a human being, and most of all, that it doesn't at all prove his step-father right.

[nefertakicold]

These persons comparing real abuse to a fictional characters! This type of post is a insult to Sasuke and Sakura fans. This make me sick and how these people failed to undertand the manga.

Where's is that moral police to judge others characters like :

Neji beating Hinata to death and being forgiven?

Itachi killing his clan, father and Mother and torturing Sasuke until insanity?

Gaara killing thousends of persons, unleashing Shukaku to destroy the village ans trying to Kill Sasuke and Sakura?

Obito killing 80.000 Persons and Kushina, Minato and a baby and naruto defeding him?

Why the flipping F do people hate Sakura so much they gotta project their hatred on Sasuke calling him names like abuser? People need to separate their personal self insert and incel vibes from their analysis of Sakura's and Sasuke's character and yet that’s completely impossible for 90% of naruto fans and fanboys and the loong time dead NarSak Fandom.

Damn, it's almost as if sasuke did alot worse to the Naruto and yet Naruto considering him his closest friend and most important person is still accepted and the manga theme isn't about forgiviness and redemption or we didn't have the same MC calling a mass murderer who killed 80.000 in the War, the Collest guy and still defending his honor. Sakura always cared for Sasuke because saves him was one of her goals in life. The public learn this at the beginning of the manga. Naruto's case is the most ridiculous one. Sakura never forgive every criminal she ran across including her parents murderer because she have a messiah complex.

Sasuke was basically led by his feelings for the whole serie and somehow people assume he'd marry someone he doesn't love - going as far as to assume he married someone he can't stand. If we are to count when they are actually together then to my knowledge Sasuke has never treated Sakura bad in Part 1, the War and as adults. The haters of this paring always bring up events that happened when Sasuke and Sakura were enemies. They aren't in any relationship to be considered "abusive". Most of the Abusers wants to force Girls to stay by them using force. Sasuke did the exactly oposite. He wants to force Sakura and Naruto to forget him and cut all his ties.

Abuse and Toxic implies Sasuke was taking advantage of a relationship between the two, but no such thing existed . This never existed in Part 1 and during their marriage. At the Kage Summit Sasuke was trying to kill everyone who he used to care about because of the curse of hatred and his traumas. SS haters make it sound like he was coming home to his girlfriend and beating her because he was drunk!! That never happened.

Sakura isn't some fragile toddler. She was trained by the Hokage, planed to kill Sasuke using a poisoned Kunai and almost managed to get that. She knew what she was doing, she knew that she put herself in dangerous situation. She even tricked and knocked out Kiba, Lee and Sai so she can accomplish her task of killing Sasuke alone. Sasuke considered the entire Konoha as his mortal enemy and Sakura was the one who chase Sasuke to kill him. Sasuke apologized to Sakura after he was truly redeemed and Kishimoto wanted to save that moment for the last chapter to milk the drama because it was much more important to Sasuke's plot.

When Sasuke try to kill Sakura as his official girlfriend or wife this non sense argument will make some sense

Sasuke was emotionally manipulated and traumatised to the point he lose himself and have a psychotic breakdown. Sasuke always have a soft side for Sakura but was blinded by revenge and hatred. As soon he comes back to his sense was obvious he was gonna to accept Sakura. The second he turns good, what does he do? Apologizes to her, his isn't a romance or Shoujo manga.

You never will see lovey romantic couples in this manga and Sasuke was an antagonist who wanted to destroy Konoha during shippuden. Dont expect lovey dovey romance, they were not in a relationship yet. In the Naruto world, children are sent to war, and are meant to kill one another in a mere exam or in random mission. Making a big deal of Sakura getting with sasuke after they attempted to kill each other when they WERE ENEMIES is stupid. Especially stupid since it's not even that same sasuke she fell in love during part 1 or married. He changed and undergone to reform himself before starts a relationship with her even refusing Sakura's company during that time.

By the end of part 1, Sasuke considered her and Naruto a second family and was willing to risk his life to save Sakura from Gaara. It was her that stopped Sasuke's rampage in the Chuuning Exams when he was being taken over by the cursed seal. Sakura was the one who perceived Sasuke was leaving the village and the only person Sasuke even talked about his objectives and his revange too. Narratively, she's irreplaceable and the only female option to Sasuke. As soon he comes back and get redeemed was obvious he was gonna to accept Sakura. This was just a natural progression of his character.

Anyway Sakura at 2023 is officially the most female popular alive character in Naruto and the most popular female in Japan. Sakura didn't need NaruSaku or Naruto self inserts fans. She is fine with her current SS fans who didn't judge the character just because she refused Naruto and married they guy who she always loved. Get Out Sakura never needed these type of idiot fans.

I’m a girl, I’ve been a Naruto’s fan for seven years. I’ve been reading Naruto since I was 12, at this age, I had my first abusive relationship. He treated me like shit, he told me over and over that I was annoying and even mocked my looks, he lied about me to all of his friends to make me look like his ‘obsessed fangirl’ and in the end I found out he never liked me. This man was abusing me just for fun. He made me cry and feel worthless so many times, he even crated a ‘hateclub’. Yes, this man created a HATECLUB for the GIRL who were abused by him.  I used to look up to Sakura all this years. She was just like me. Underappreciated by an arrogant boy who she really liked. All Sakura ever wanted was to be noticed and loved by Sasuke, however, he treated her like shit. Like worthless thrash. He didn’t give a shit about Sakura and wasn’t interested in her during 698 chapters.  I grew up with Sakura, in Shippuden’s she had become a strong and confident woman (at least until the last two chapters) and she was starting to realize how Sasuke made her suffer. Her confessions to Naruto was fake, but the words weren’t. I wouldn’t care if she ends up alone or with someone, even though I ship NaruSaku and SakuHina, all I was expecting from Kishimoto was a well-writen character development, and he threw that away. Look at how Sasuke treats Sakura during the entire manga:

Then, in chapter 699 he just had to apologize so she could say ‘sorry for what’? Really, Kishimoto? Not satisfied with ignoring all the abuse, he made Sakura become a housewife. He showed us how Naruto and Sasuke were doing their thing, but what about her development as a medical ninja? Wasn’t she supposed to surpass Tsunade? Kishimoto could have showed us the ‘medical-nin Sakura’ at the hospital with her daughter, but no, he rather make her a housewife.  Sasuke had made Sakura cry and had ben insulting her during the plot so many times. He tried to kill her THREE TIMES. He has  strangled and called her useless in the pictures above. That’s how you want girls to be ‘appreciated’, Kishimoto?  I used to always look up to Sakura, I wanted to become a strong young woman like her, I wanted to bloom and become a beautiful flower like Sakura. You ruined my favorite character who helped me getting through abuse, Kishimoto. All Sasuke had to do was apologize so she would forget about all the abusive things he done to her. That’s how you want woman to be portrayed in your precious story, Kishimoto. You want us to be portrayed as dreamless housewives, it doesn’t matter if men makes us feel like nothing, it doesn’t matter if this man had struggled, tried to kill her and even created a genjutsu where he stabbs her in the chest. As long as he says ‘sorry’ any girl in the world can forgive him and forget about all responsibilities and accomplishments just to ask him if she could join him in his travel and further in the manga she gave birth to his daughter. Sasuke crushes Sakura’s feelings and dignity in all possible ways and even so, you make her MARRY HIM and not satisfied, MAKE HER BE THE MOTHER OF HIS DAUGHTER and only show us the ‘HOUSEWIFE SAKURA’. Because that’s what we, women, are to you. Walking-bodies with no feelings, who doesn’t deserve to be respected and loved. If the abuser says ‘sorry’ it’s completely okay.  You destroyed my favorite character. You’re making me feel ashamed of everything I’ve been through. You dismayed me. Thank you, Kishimoto, for thinking about all the girls that reads your manga. That’s what you’re teaching them.  SasuSaku fans, don’t even reply me, you’re just gonna make fun of my suffering and try to convince me that this shitty pairing isn’t abusive. I hope you’re happy that this crap became canon. 

[emtmercy]

I do think it’s insulting to the clear narrative they are trying to give this gay black man to decide he is simply being victimized by a white man and needs to Escape and Be Rescued

Louis’ agency is purposefully being hidden by Louis as acknowledged all throughout the season and especially the finale but the audience isn’t supposed to buy it just like Daniel doesn’t (Louis pretending he didn’t know Lestat could fly etc)

Rolin said “this is the interview [the first book] and this is the show [the VC series]” for a reason

Iwtv AMC’s playing with narrative and truth/lies and memory is all based on Anne rices choice to change canon to redeem (to a certain extent lol, he’s a vampire) Lestat decades after writing IWTV. The show is clearly trying to recreate and also expand upon that experience and those themes for the viewer

That reversal of Louis’ moral conviction of Lestat is what they’ve based the whole show around. That is the part of the books that is the inspiration for every piece of that memory and pov shit and it only follows that they are using it in a similar but expanded way

This means we will surely see Lestats version of things and certainly of episode five. And I have no illusion that they aren’t a toxic couple (they are murderers, Louis literally murders Lestat they are toxic lol) but it will reveal the situation to be more complex and not what Armand wants Louis to define it as not what it would be easier for Louis to define it as

deconstructing Louis’ role as Victim Who Things Happen To and Lestat’s role as Villain Who Does Things is a pillar of the series and something Rolin is explicit about wanting to do here. It’s his admitted inspiration for doing the show in the first place. It’s the whole point (aside from the expansion of explicit queer themes)

Rolin has explicitly defined this interview as a story Armand has told to Louis and Louis has told to himself because they both need Lestat to be an irredeemable villain in their relationship to get what they want (Armand wants to hold Louis with him, Louis wants a respite from guilt and a simple narrative he can tell himself to be happy with Armand and without his family)

I also find it really grating as a black fan that people need to slot Louis into this role of powerless person who is acted upon. It’s understandable tjag this happens in fandom because a huge part of VC is that Louis wants people to think this. But it’s such a thematic pillar of the books and the show that this is not the case. Louis deserves to be a character who is as complex and self directed as any other. Simplifying him into a damsel in distress under the thumb of this white man is not progressive. The show is trying to allow for a great deal more complexity than that

And thats not saying you couldn’t tell stories with abused characters and allow them agency but that’s not the story here. They would need to tell it very differently to do that respectfully. If this were actually supposed to be a domestic violence narrative it would be extremely offensive. But that’s not what they’re building (as they’ve told us explicitly)

Obviously an aspect we are running up against here is tjag fictional characters can act in ways that do not imply their real world origins and results. Like statistically con men tend to be psychopaths and sexual predators but jimmy McGill is a shithead but not a predator because it’s fiction and humans want certain things from even morally defunct protagonists

Like obviously in real life if a partner ever punches you there is no excuse no reason no alternate explanation other than abuse (unless it’s self defense). But we are not evil murderer vampires written by a group of theater gays at a table as inspired by the beautifully insane works of Anne rice

Also tbc when discussing abuse we need to first establish that there’s no such thing as “mutual abuse.” Abuse is power motivated violence exerted over someone to maintain coercive control of them. Hence beating one’s children is abuse and a bar fight is not abuse. So ppl who are like “well it’s mutually abusive” also need to stop doing that we see how that cultural belief plays out

Loustat are extremely toxic and I’m sure even the true events of ep 5 we’re pretty fucked up but that’s not the same as being in a cycle of abusive violence. They are evil fucked up vampires doing evil fucked up shit and then lying about it to excuse themselves to middle aged closeted reporters. I’m sure they really did go toe to toe in that ep and that Lestat did really get the upper hand in the end but there’s a reason Claudia hits her head in that scene and stares into warped mirrors and Louis and Lestat keep leaving our view screen and saying things that don’t make sense with what Louis wants Daniel to think happened

And also why Claudia supposedly is aware of events in her journal that she wasn’t there for

And why the season ended on Daniel saying “this is just like [the first interview in] San Francisco” ie a lie told to Daniel to cover deeper emotional truths

And why Rolin jones based the entires shows narrative around the Lestat switcheroo Anne rice did to us as gay teens

Obviously I understand objection to this aspect of the plot because playing the POV and memory game is something that’s used against abuse survivors in real life and in real life this wouldn’t be the case but it is fiction. And that doesn’t excuse it of responsibility but it does give it different rules and boundaries in the narrative itself. Whether we like it or not the writers (like Anne rice) are telling us a toxic gothic romance not a story about a man escaping his abuser

If Lestat was Louis’ abuser the whole point of the show that Rolin jones has defined himself would be pointless

If Louis was telling a true story to Daniel we wouldn’t need a season two

And this is not like a Lestat defense post (I was sad he didn’t get burned up and thrown in the swamp lol) nor am I trying to claim that loustat is or should be portrayed as healthy (I thought Louis murdering him was extremely romantic I can hang with toxic fictional romance)

it’s rly a post defending the shows over arching themes and narratives because it’s sooo good (even if flawed) and I’m weary of people not engaging with the full text of the show and of what the show runner has already told us out loud in interviews especially because I think fans would engage more with Louis’ inner complexities motivations and deceits with much more attention were he some white twink

TLDR they based the whole show by their own admittance on the pov and canon reversal Anne rice did to deconstruct the concept of Lestat as monster and Louis as victim and I’d like us to acknowledge that regardless of it we believe it to be appropriate or effective

[frenchkanna1808]

Went to Reddit saw some ... very interesting take

The post was talking about the fate that you think this character will have in season 5. 1)A third of the post concerning will was about his haircut 2)The other third was all about will moving on from mike and “growing up” and realizing mike will never love him 3)And the last third was all about how will would die in season 5 and hating on him  4)Everyone i mean everyone was talking about how Jonathan would die and with that Nancy wouldn’t have to choose between him and Steve

1)Will bowl cut jokes are not funny anymore and the reason you keep bringing up his hair his because you’re an unimaginative mindless mob who is only capable of mocking a 15 years old because he’s gay. It’s not only not funny but also offensive i would say, because labeling a ptsd abused traumatized child journey as “that gay dude with a bowl cut”, you’re reducing him to a one dimensional character. It’s diminishing and ableist. 

2)Will.is. never. gonna. get. a. boyfriend. other. than. mike. Stop lying to yourself. Either Mike and will become cannon or Milkshake endgame and will is single and depressed. There no alternative. The only reason you want will to have a boyfriend is so that you don’t feel to much pity and guilt of robbing him of his one and only true love since childhood. You are not a fan of will if you want him to be depressed and in a terrible relationship with mike, you’re just lying to yourself. Also the term of him “Growing up” rub me the wrong way, you think that will love for mike is “not mature”, “childish”,”infantile” cause it’s not. Macarena is childish, infantile and not mature as a relationship. Will love for mike , is beautiful and complex. Either you’re projecting  (like mike) or you are implying that mlm love is childish.

3) Okay the Will would die theory is pretty popular but i don’t get it, Will is currently the only gay character in stranger things. The worst mistake the duffers would do is to kill the only mlm character that they have. The backlash their gonna get is immense and the fandom will tear itself apart. Most of season 4 was all about making the GA root for will happiness and understand his struggle. It would be like a knife in the back, it would be again “the bury the gays trope”. And Will would become probably the most tragic character in TV history in my eyes. The Will hate is one of the most ridiculous shit in the fandom, Will never did anything wrong, he’s a creative kind soul, all he ever did was loving his first friend, the first person that made him feel like he was normal. You don’t have any reason to hate will except if you’re homophobic or toxic ass My mother aborted me stan. Will want the best for eleven and mike, he is currently the only mileven fan in the series, so you should be thankful, without him you wouldn’t have got that stupid ass monologue. Or maybe... Just maybe the reason you hate him... Is because you know deep in your heart... That mileven is bones and you’re scared that will finishes with mike. Also why the Noah acting hate, he’s  one of the most wonderful actor in the series, so stop it, it’s idiotic.

4) Do you not realize how reducing it is to say that Nancy, Jonathan's girlfriend, isn’t capable of making her own choice and that when Jonathan “will die”, she will jump inside Steve arms and realize he was the man of her life. Not only will Nancy will never be able to accomplish her dreams of becoming a journalist with Steve, but do you think that after Barb and Jonathan death, she is gonna move on and be capable of living like nothing happened. Jonathan love her so much and she does too. Also reducing her character to the girl who gotta choose between two men is stupid. Either she stays with Jonathan or she become and independent, there no way she would be with Steve. Also what is it with the Jonathan hate, No the Byers hate in general. Jonathan is a abused young adult from a poor family who had to around 7 to 9 years old take care of his brother. He has every rights to kinda fall the deep end. In season 4 he completely left his passions, his hobbies, his dreams and his relationship with Nancy in the bin. He deserve just like any character to be happy and get up. But all the GA thinks is that he became a drug consumers for fun. Buuuut no he deserve to die so that a character can die and stancy become cannon. Also the Byers deserve to never be happy and Joyce after living with an alcoholic father who abused her kids, losing her lover better lose her son. Like the Byers are gonna fall the deep end. But it’s starting to be a pattern

So my final take: I can’t wait from when Will keep his bowl cut and kisses his boyfriend mike wheeler on the swings they met. Can’t wait from when Noah get an award for his acting and kills it in season 5. Can’t wait from when Steve and El become independent girlboss/boyboss. And i can’t wait that compared to what you wish the Byers-hopper live happily with the people they loves.

[kwonhoshi0]

𝐛𝐚𝐤𝐮𝐠𝐨𝐮, 𝐭𝐨𝐝𝐨𝐫𝐨𝐤𝐢 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐬𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐬𝐨 𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐨 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐟𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐜𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐝𝐮𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐚𝐧 𝐚𝐫𝐠𝐮𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭 | h.c

navigation | requests : open | 9th feb 2021 | 

pairing : bakugou, todoroki, shinso x gn!reader [separate]

genre : angsty fluff

warnings : mentions of toxic relationships/toxic past, abuse, read note below,

themes : toxic relationships, hurt, not specified trauma, only talk, mutual pining

note : i’ve never seen a headcanon for this and of course i would never write about this if i didn’t have experience on this and how it feels and i wouldn’t write about this if i didn’t know how much it hurts and sticks with someone, i’m not saying you can’t write about such events if you haven’t been through it but the emotions you can feel when in a toxic relationship is much more complex than one might think, i’m proud of everyone who’s been through this if you want to talk about this or you’re going through something right now my dms are open always <3

[ bakugou ]

> before you and bakugou started dating you knew you liked eachother but neither of you made a move

> that was until he realised his feelings for you couldn’t just pass with time

> he knew however much he tried you’d still make him feel funny whenever he sees you

> so he decided to ask you on a date, he didn’t show it but when you said yes he was over the moon

> since this is your first date since you had been in a toxic relationship you were nervous

> the first date went amazing he held you hand after you got ice cream and you got coffee, drinking it as you walked in the moonlight

> ‘y/n, i uhh- i like you a lot’ he said cringing a little as he blushed, you were both leaning against a railing which was placed over beach watching the waves crash against the sand as the moon shon over

> ‘i like you too katsuki’ you smiled blushing as a unknown feeling creeped up your body, it was unknown in a good way but it still made you feel uncomfortable and weary

> bakugou noticed your furrowed eyebrows ‘are you feeling okay?’

> you nodded quickly not wanting to talk about how you felt since it always led to arguments with them

> ‘in that case’ he cupped your face gently with his pulling you in, ‘you’re mine’ he grinned placed a soft kiss on your lips which you returned

> you’ve been together a couple weeks now, almost a month

> bakugou has realised you’re not the same as you were before you were dating he knew some things would change since you’re dating now but he didn’t think you’d be distant

> if anything he thought you’d be closer to him and he couldn’t help but think if it was because of him

> everytime you’re alone he notices you tensing up a little when he touches you, whether it’s a hand around your shoulder or on your face you tense up

> but you don’t do that when mina or your friends touch you so he was convinced it was him

> after you had only glanced at him not talked to him through school again he decided he had to talk to you about this

> he knocked on your door as a warning before walking in, you were sat at your desk watching anime and he frowned a little

> he knows he isn’t too affectionate or by any means perfect as a boyfriend but you’re always watching movies with other people or series and he wanted to do that but everytime he brought up the idea of spending time watching something together you never got around to doing it, acting as if you forgot

> ‘y/n what the hell is going on?’ he frowned as you looked up with fear in your eyes

> ‘i- what do you mean’ he didn’t notice the fear he was thinking about every possible reason for your distance

> ‘i mean am i not fucking good enough anymore?, we’re meant to be closer as a couple not fuckin further apart’ he raised his voice a little as he walked towards your desk

> ‘i don’t get what you mean uh, am i being too much?’ you respond, you always got told you were too pushy and needy so you didn’t want to make the same mistake with bakugou

> ‘i mean why the fuck don’t you even touch me for fuck sake, y/n you barely fucking hang out with me i barely know anything about you because you don’t stay and talk to me for more than 10 fuckin minutes’ he edged closer to you now towering over you,

> ‘i-i uhm’ your words got caught in your throat as his arm left his side and as he opened his mouth you flinched shutting your eyes and shaking a little as tears filled your eyes

> then there was silence, he was trying to get him hair out of his eyes, ‘did- did you think that i was going to..’ he was hurt that you thought he’d do that, that he made you feel unsafe

> ‘y/n...’ you looked up at him, he saw the tears peaking out of the corner of your eyes slowing lifting his hand to wipe it

> ‘has someone done that to you before’ you nod as he placed his chin on your shoulder carefully rubbing your back up and down soothingly, he didn’t know how it felt but he knows that nobody deserves this and if he can help in any way he will, even if it means letting down his guard for you

> you explained how the last person you were with didn’t like your affection and love because you showed it to your friends and they wanted you to only show him love and no one else

> ‘y/n i’m not angry that you show your friends love idiot, it’s because you don’t let yourself open up to me, i want you to feel safe alright idiot not the other away around, i’ll help.. and for the record i don’t care if you hug and show them extras love that doesn’t bother me just don’t let yourself be so guarded around me, i’m here for you to feel safe alright’

> you nod wrapping your arms around bakugous torso as he picks you up still rubbing your back, he sat on the bed leaning back letting your head rest on his chest

> ‘now what’s that extras name teddybear’

[ todoroki ]

> todoroki made you feel safe but that feeling is new to you so you didn’t understand what it was

> before you started dating you both got close as friends, you knew you liked him but being friends made you feel safe with him and dating has scared you, he didn’t know much about your last relationship only that it hurt you

> but he didn’t know that meant they literally hurt you

> so when he asked you, you said yes because of how amazing and happy it made you feel

> before you started dating you always laid your head on his lap to nap or talk to him, you were open and honest

> but you didn’t know how to act, you wanted to be yourself but that wasn’t enough then with them so why would it be now you thought

> todoroki noticed your change in behaviour and also noticed you always change when he’s around which led him to believe that he made you uncomfortable

> so when you were sat watching a movie he asked you getting a little insecure and heated

> ‘y/n do i make you uncomfortable?’ he said noticing how your eyes widen

> ‘no! how funny.. of course not’ you smiled which was clearly a fake smile to him and you wouldn’t have answered him like that if you didn’t have this act on

> ‘then why are you acting different? please don’t lie to me.. i don’t like this you seem like a different person and i don’t know why’

> ‘how would you want me to act shoto’ you replied with the same look in your eyes, you weren’t being sarcastic you genuinely wanted to know and that made him confused

> ‘y/n i don’t .. control you, be yourself.. is this really what you think of me, you think i want you to change how you act, your personality’ he moved his hand from his hair moving towards your face making you shut your eyes flinching

> his eyes widened at this, his hand was on your shoulder he was trying to comfort you but before he could get his words out you flinched at him ‘y/n.. what was that’

> he moved his hand away in fear that he’d scare you again

> you wiped away the tears forming as he looked at you with sadness, ‘i’m sorry’ you spluttered out as you moved to get up and leave

> before you could you felt a cautious hand hold yours ‘talk to me, please’

> you sat back down, his hand still in yours his thumb grazing over your hand soothing you

> ‘i told you about my ex, i was never enough so i acted different.. just to please him, i could never be myself and when i was myself.. he didn’t like it’ you said staring at your hands

> he moved his hand up slowly so you could see and placed it on your cheek as he moved towards you

> ‘y/n i fell in love with you, no one else only you, you’re more than enough for me, i don’t want some other version of you i want all of you. you’re perfect to me and if they don’t appreciate that then they’re fucking stupid’ you smiled a little at his uncharacteristic swearing

> ‘i love you, thank you sho’ you rested your head on his lap, your head faced his shirt he leaned down turning your head, kissing you slowly as you hummed into the kiss smiling feeling that same safe feeling you felt before but this time the feeling was stronger

> ‘don’t thank me my love’

[ shinso ]

> you first met shinso at the sports festival and since you’re in different classes you don’t spend time together during school time other than a couple minutes at lunch

> you both started meeting up more and more until you realise you like him a lot

> you refused to date him even if he does like you you couldn’t date him because of your ex, you were afraid of getting hurt again

> shinso knows you like him because of the way you look at him and stare at him across the cafeteria and the way you get flustered everytime he comes over

> your friends knew how much you like him and told you to go for it but since they’re the ones you went to when you finally broke it off with your ex they understand why you shouldn’t

> the only one who didn’t agree and told you not to date him was bakugou ‘are you fucking stupid!? they’re not getting hurt again they don’t need him’ he was a little too protective

> when he told you he liked you, you panicked ‘i uh, i like you too but i just, i can’t sorry’ and with that you panicked running away

> the next day he found you at the lockers the halls empty ‘what was that yesterday?’

> ‘sorry i’m not good with this’ you mumbled as he got confused

> ‘are you dating bakugou is that why you can’t be with me?’ he said observing your reaction sighing when you started panicking

> ‘what?.. no! i don’t.. i’m not with bakugou i’m just not-’

> ‘y/n.. i like you a lot i do but this is.. messy bakugou came and threatened me earlier’ you flinched shaking as he moved his hand closer, not thinking you thought he was going to hurt you because of your indecisiveness

> immediately after he took you in his arms ‘shit what the fuck.. y/n i’m sorry’ he held you as you teared up telling you about why you don’t feel ready and that’s why bakugou threatened him

> ‘i’ll wait, for now we can just be friends until you’re comfortable alright kitten?’ his chin rested on your head until he looked down at you and took both his thumbs wiping both cheeks pressing a small kiss to your cheek

> after a couple months of hanging out and being friends you were talking to your friends

> ‘alright i guess he’s fine’ bakugou admitted as you talked to them about how you felt

> you called shinso ‘hey shinso come over to class a’s dorms’

> as soon as he arrived you sat in your room gaming, after a few rounds passed you took your controller from him placing it beside you and turning to face him on your bed

> ‘shinso’

> ‘yes kitten’

> you grinned as he raised his brow smiling back at you his purple locks framing his face, ‘i’m ready’

> as soon as those words left your lips he jumped at you climbing on top of you as you giggled, he tickled you making you laugh harder

> after a couple minutes of play fighting he layed his head on your chest smiling furiously but not letting you see that

> ‘then you’re mine’

A/N :

IM LOWKEY HIGHKEY BECOMING A SHINSO SIMP :(( BABY IS SO :(( CUTE :(( IM

/)/£/;)28: anyway wbahahahdbfn help it hurts

taglist : @blazedbakugou @todoroki-shoto-is-life @luluwiie

[vexingvorta]

Im not a fan of every argument made here on either side, so first I'll get a few things out of the way;

1, that abuse victims often go on to be abusers themselves if they don't put in the work necessary to heal from their own abuse, that's what people are talking about when they refer to the CYCLE of abuse. To deny that is... Also uncomfortable. Being a victim of abuse does not make you exempt from abusing other people. 2, I wish we'd stop equating toxic with abusive because there is a difference. 3, i don't think autistic coding is really a fair defense of said toxic traits I'm gonna be real. There's nothing wrong with headcanons and projection but just to focus on what actually happened in the series without using headcanon to excuse harmful behavior. I don't know what traits are being referred to as "autistic coded" here so honestly I'm not gonna touch that with a ten foot pole and just focus on what we see;

Its hard for people to accept, but abuse does not happen on accident. Abuse is an intentional choice one makes. And over all, no, Ford isn't abusive. He, throughout the series and due to a combination of his self-centeredness and being a victim of abuse (hell, his self-centeredness was weaponized against him as part of the abuse) was absolutely toxic for most of the time we've seen him.

The argument that he abused Fiddleford is so stupid I'm not even going to acknowledge it. The thing with Stan is, he frankly wasn't around him enough to actually abuse him. A one time event is not abuse. A single fight is not abuse. Abuse is long and drawn out and, as I said earlier, intentional. And, like what was already pointed out, Ford was in a bad state. He'd reached the point of Bill going fully mask off, so to speak, and the abuse now being at it's worst. He was fully isolated and sleep deprived and it made him crazy. Yes, his unwillingness to destroy the journals was deeply selfish and another mark of how self-centered he is. It's the definition of irrational. But, once again, he wasn't in a spot where he could think rationally. (Granted, even if he was, I still don't think he would've been willing to destroy the journals because his self importance and self centeredness is one of his biggest flaws and an important part of his character)

The closest Ford ever comes to being abusive is, yes, with dipper. He starts telling him a lot of the same things we know Bill told him at the start of their partnership; you're special, we need each other, these other people are only holding you back. Nobody understands you like I do. When Dipper expresses concern for Mabel, Ford is immediately dismissive. He looks at Dipper and all he sees is himself, and all he sees in Mabel is Stan. He is the one who pushed that dichotomy, because he really couldn't think outside of himself.

His greatest flaw is that he's self centered and self obsessed. But the thing is, is that he learns his lesson. It takes literal apocalypse to get there, but he does learn and he does reflect and he does apologize and try to do better. He course corrects. Gravity falls, ultimately, is about family bonds and breaking the cycle of abuse. Ford almost continued that cycle with Dipper, but he stopped before any permanent damage could be done, both to their relationship, and to Dipper and Mabels. He fixed his relationship with Stan.

He did in fact have abusive tendencies and toxic traits but ultimately he put in the work to fix them and be better. Ford is a well written and well balanced character. He displays how someone even with good intentions can unintentionally fall back into cruel and toxic habits, and can start repeating the abuse they were put through. He also shows that you can come back from that. That starting down that path doesn't mean you have to stay there. That it's possible to heal and get better.

None of what I'm saying is an indictment of Ford's character. The opposite: he is complex and well written and imperfect, and I love him and his character arc. He could've been so easily made into an irredeemable villain, a no good bastard who's just horrible and abusive. He had all those pieces laid out. But the choice and skill to actually have him go through the motions of falling into abusive tendencies and then getting better is amazing on Alex Hirsch's part, and a testament to his ability to write deep and complex characters.

(also this is just kind of my own aside but the use of "autistic-coded" as like an excuse for how a character acts is really annoying to me for a number of reasons? For one, just off the bat, it's an attempt to make your headcanon sound more canon than it is, but by nature of being a headcanon, it's not really a fair or valid argument here. Second, there are ways to make a legitimate argument and analysis of a characters actions in canon and debate criticisms of their actions without saying "they're autism coded so actually you must hate autistic people", like it's okay, you're allowed to make a legitimate argument. Also, "character did shitty thing because they're autistic" isn't the win you think it is, because let's be real, you're either implying that they have no autonomy over their actions because of their autism, or that you think autism makes people shitty or toxic, neither of which is the win you think it is. Ironically lack of media literacy applies in both cases here, just for different reasons. Okay side rant over, just wanted to throw that out there because holy hell it's something that is used so much in fandom and it gets grating after a while.)

The tldr here is that Ford isn't an abuser. He was abused, he had toxic and abusive traits, but he put in the work to heal and better himself. He's by no means perfect and that's okay, he's a good character, and he's actually trying to be better.

Today in "I hate autistic-coded abuse victims", this shitty take.

Ford did not abuse Stan. He did not abuse Fiddleford. He did not try to drive a wedge in Dipper and Mabel's relationship (he was doing what he thought was best for Dipper and thought Mabel would be fine).

Just admit you hate autistic people and have no compassion for abuse victims. And admit you have no media literacy.

Also, calling a canonical abuse victim an abuser is...uncomfortable, to say the least. Especially with how you're just making him out to be abusive for...not handling personal interactions perfectly. You're demonizing autistic traits. And you need to research how abuse can effect people.

(Also, I know Ford's not perfect. But you don't seem to know that he's flawed but ultimately a good person. You just want a "perfect victim" when it comes to abuse victims, and it's obvious)

[highfaelucien]

I completely agree with how you feel towards azriel. Thinking about azriel’s character now vs how I used to view him during acomaf times is just... sad and so so so much more complex. Part of me still wants to love him for the character that was presented to us in acomaf and other small good moments, like his friendship with nesta. And then the other part of me is disgusted, disappointed, and honestly kind of terrified of who he may become if sjm allows him to continue acting predatorily/toxic. The whole mor/az situation really fucked me up. As someone who is also a lesbian and an abuse survivor, it broke my heart to watch the situation unfold in acowar. It still hurts seeing many readers (and sometimes even sjm) take az’s side and paint mor as some sort of liar/two faced character that is playing everyone. I kept thinking that things would be fixed in future books, but instead az has grown worse and mor was, once again, sidelined and written out as a character. And honestly... as much as I love the idea of gwyn x azriel ... I think his books would need a lot more focus on his own recovery/growth and not center on a romantic relationship. If anything, I hope it’s written as friends to lovers so az has a better way of interacting and forming relationships with women. Because right now... well, that shit is borderline predatory and isn’t coming across well. And I really really do not want that for him. Basically, azriel deserves a better arc than what has been written for him. I miss him :( he used to be a character that made me feel safe and now :/ idk anymore

I'm going to quote parts of this/chop it up and reply to them a chunk at a time. because there's a lot going on here and I want to try and reply to as much as I can because I resonate with.....all of it. Please forgive me for the length of this.

I completely agree with how you feel towards azriel. Thinking about azriel’s character now vs how I used to view him during acomaf times is just... sad and so so so much more complex.

He feels like a different character? There was always an anger simmering under the calm surface, we knew that. But it was an anger born of love, deep down, and the desire to protect his family, and his court, at the expense of himself. Az was always the first to volunteer himself for dangerous missions, to spare the others.

Now that anger is directed at his family, and at the world, for not giving him what he feels he 'deserves'. That has NEVER been Azriel. Azriel's deepest issues and insecurities have always stemmed from the feeling of being unworthy, and undeserving of anything.

She's just made him into......Every other dude in this series tbh. Snarling, and possessive, and wanting to fuck anything in a skirt that moves.

Azriel was actually somewhat of an original, complex character initially. It's unusual that we see trauma affect men in the way it did Az. Usually it makes them angry, and vengeful, and eager to prove they are the alpha etc. Seeing them withdraw, and think less of themselves/that they're unworthy is something not explored often enough. But bye bye nuance hello #Drama.

Part of me still wants to love him for the character that was presented to us in acomaf and other small good moments, like his friendship with nesta.

I feel this. I found a lot of comfort in Az's character. Particularly the way he reacted with Mor. I was a big fan of their relationship, and I wrote a few 'missing scenes' style fics in the gap between ACOMAF and ACOWAR. One of them was where Az went to her when she had pushed everyone else away, including Cassian, and comforted and calmed her.

I hate that Maas took that away from Mor. I hate that Az no longer does that for her. I hate that Az was the one to betray her along with Rhys and bring her abuser into her safe space behind her back. I hate that he is no longer a symbol of calm, stable, dependable comfort and support for Mor, but is instead a threat. I HATE it.

Every now and then Az has lovely, gentle moments - his friendship with Nesta is a good example, and something I hoped we'd see. But also quieter times with Rhys, and their similarities being explored. And I adored the flying lessons with Feyre in ACOWAR, and the training he did with Cassian and the others in ACOFS.

But then she goes and twists him and does something else that just makes me want to fucking scream. Like the High Lord scene where he 'frightened' Mor. And his entire POV chapter which is frankly fucking gross.

And then the other part of me is disgusted, disappointed, and honestly kind of terrified of who he may become if sjm allows him to continue acting predatorily/toxic.

I agree.

I don't know how she can write a series that explores the effects of emotional abuse so well with Feyre and Tamlin...And then write what she did with Az?

The possession to a traumatised, still impressionable and desperate young woman, who likely finds the same comfort and safety in him that Mor did. Before that got shot to fucking pieces.

He sounds like a whiny toddler 'Cassian has a mate, and Rhys has a mate, where is mine!?!?!?!?' I DESERVE Elain, because I'm your brother and you guys have her sisters and what the FUCK. Who let that shit get published holy mother of god.

It's just...It's so unhealthy? Like, not even talking ship wars here (which I'm aware are rampant, and which I'm trying my best to stay away from). But that just.

How can that ever be a healthy foundation for a relationship? A man who thinks that he deserves, not only to be in a relationship with her, but to be bonded to her. Not because of HER, not because of who she is, or how she makes him feel. No. Purely because her sisters are mated to his brothers?

The whole thing made me feel so uncomfortable. It's predatory and toxic, just as you said. It's not right, it's not fair. Forget alliances and Lucien, even if none of that was a factor, that sort of thinking is still not right. And it's completely unfair to Elain.

But it also just. It didn't read like Azriel. The first part, where he struggles to sleep, and pushes himself until he passes out, and the insight that his shadows are basically hovering beside him screaming SELF CARE YOU DUMB BITCH at all times was very pleasing.

And the part where he goes to Clotho and leaves an anonymous gift for Gwyn. No fanfair. No audience. No pressure on either of them to react/perform. That felt like Az, too.

But everything in the middle. Everything with Elain, was just...Gross and out of character. And this is not because I dislike E/riel as a ship. I could get on board with it, tbh, if it wasn't written the way it was.

But it's not about ships, for me. It's just. Everything felt out of character. The predatory way he was with her. The fact he lies awake and gets himself off to fantasies of her. How apparently quickly he was aroused by putting a necklace on her. Idk, maybe it's my ace ignorance, but that doesn't sound normal/healthy to me.

Nor does him having to leave a room because he can scent her mating bond with Lucien. Or not being able to control himself to sit and eat dinner with her?

This is the same dude who has, apparently, been in love with Mor for 500 solid years, and who never did a damned thing about it. Who always kept himself in check. Even while she's had other lovers. But he can't control himself through one dinner with Elain?

It just. It doesn't feel like him. It feels like...Honestly not even Cassian. It feels like Tamlin on horny, predatory steroids. And that's not something I ever wanted to see from Azriel's POVs.

She could have explored a darker side to him without making it sexual? And misogynistic. And having him treating Elain as little more than a fucking object that he feels entitled to because 'everyone else got one, where's mine?'. What the FUCK???

The more I write it the more angry I get.

Because SJM has consistently put Az in the position of saving women when they were in danger? He was the one who found Mor near death at Autumn. He was the one who rescued Gwyn from her attackers during the war. He was the one to retrieve Elain when she was taken.

She always puts him in this position and, for better or worse, presents him as a safety figure for these women. The first person who they saw come for them, and fight for them, and protect them.

And on the inside she makes him this vile, predatory monster who just thinks constantly about fucking them? Who isn't actually safe at all?? It's sad. And it's infuriating. Because this isn't about ships anymore. This is about female survivors who have an apparent safe person who's presented as almost as dangerous as the people who attacked them in the first place. And that makes me feel so sick and sad that we've gotten here.

It still hurts seeing many readers (and sometimes even sjm) take az’s side and paint mor as some sort of liar/two faced character that is playing everyone. I kept thinking that things would be fixed in future books, but instead az has grown worse and mor was, once again, sidelined and written out as a character.

This is yet another vile thing SJM has done to queer readers with this whole fiasco. Because it puts me in a position where I want to call out her shitty writing, and what she's done to Mor - sidelining her as soon as she became queer. Undermining her power and her strength. Undermining her role as the survivor to look up to. Saying her power is truth but then making her seem like a liar. Which is all shitty, shitty, shitting writing.

But I'm also a queer person. And I will always always ALWAYS want to defend a queer person's right to remain closeted. Regardless of their reasons for doing so. But in this case it's a concern for their safety/a fear of how those around them will react. And I will NEVER condemn that. I will never say Az is suffering more than Mor for her being closeted. I will never call Mor a liar/a manipulator/two-faced when all she's doing is trying to survive.

I WILL condemn SJM for making this a scenario. For putting homophobia in her world purely to cause pain for queer characters, and drama for her straight ones. And for sidelining Mor as soon as she can't write graphic scenes with her fucking men because now she's a lesbian so we best get her off the page so the guys can get their cocks out some more.

And honestly... as much as I love the idea of gwyn x azriel ... I think his books would need a lot more focus on his own recovery/growth and not center on a romantic relationship. If anything, I hope it’s written as friends to lovers so az has a better way of interacting and forming relationships with women. Because right now... well, that shit is borderline predatory and isn’t coming across well. And I really really do not want that for him.

This is going to sound sarcastic but I actually mean it fully and completely genuinely: 95% of the drama inducing problems in this series could be fixed with some fucking therapy.

But I agree with you. I think it's high time Azriel worked on his own issues. Even if they've apparently made a complete 180 from what they were in ACOMAF.

I...Like the concept of Gwyn/Azriel, but I'm not sold on the ship. Not with the way Maas has been writing Azriel lately. That kind of man shouldn't be with any woman right now. But especially not a rape survivor who sees him as one of the first men she's been able to trust in a long time.

Basically, azriel deserves a better arc than what has been written for him. I miss him :( he used to be a character that made me feel safe and now :/ idk anymore

"he used to be a character that made me feel safe" - This shit hit me like a tonne of bricks because this is EXACTLY how I feel about Az, too. You just managed to say it in a few words instead of 12 pages of rambling, like I do.

And I think this was intention. Azriel was presented as a very dependable character. He rescued Mor, and was respectful enough to keep his distance, despite his feelings, for 500 fucking years. Because he didn't think she was ready/interested.

He had a very calm, and calming air about him. Always in control of himself. Without the expected bursts of aggression and temper we'd seen from...Every other male character in this series. He was stable, and solid, and that was comforting. An anchor. And someone who would quietly, and without fuss, seek out Mor/others when they needed someone to talk to or comfort him.

That was a very soothing, reassuring presence in the book, I felt. And now she's made him seem...volatile, and unstable. With this dangerous anger that he can't control, that he uses not to protect, but to intimidate, and to fuel his entitlement and desires.

it's just sad. It's sad that she's taken this away from Mor, but also from other survivors who found comfort and safety in Az. Because I'm sure we weren't alone in that regard.

I miss him. And I mourn the character he was, and feel anger for the character he should have been. but instead he's become yet another possessive, entitled, snarling cardboard cutout dude like...everyone else.

And I ache for the Az/Mor dynamic that we had in ACOMAF. Even without it becoming romantic, there was no reason for that to be destroyed/ruined.

She could have written it that Az is the only one who knows about her sexuality, and that he pretends he's still in love with her as a shield/buffer, so no one looks too closely/to protect her and make her feel comfortable.

Instead she turned it into a soap opera style drama. And wrote it almost as though her sexuality was her cheating on him? Denying him what he deserved. And now she's just...just pussyfooting around it. And apparently he's just. Just moved on. Without them having any kind of conversation or closure at all. He just wanks off to the thought of Elain instead of Mor, now, problem solved /s

I miss what they were. I miss what he was to Mor. I miss when she had that support system, and that safety net. I miss when he protected her. And looked out for her. And understood her in a way that no one else, not even Rhys, did.

Mor deserved that. Azriel deserved that. WE deserved that. And she nuked it for some fucking twisted drama that punishes a lesbian because a man is thirsting after her. it's a fucking disgrace. I'm so fucking done with SJM, y'all. So fucking done.

[mingmingfufu]

Can we just talk about the ending of KawoShin open discuss. *sort of spoilerish*

I feel like I’m the only one who’s like reallly disappointed LMFAO--ya’ll there’s so much “canon” alternative universe and merchandise for Kawoshin in Evangelion that it kind of makes me upset to realise this couple just went down the drain. Yeah, I can see how people were like, “Kaworu’s toxic” or “Kaworu has a hero complex for Shinji” to which I say are valid points. But the toxic thing I feel like can also be applied to pretty much everyone around Shinji tbh, except for Rei. I did NOT, like Asuka at all but I really love her character though, and I felt for her a lot throughout the series.

I did not ship them either because honestly, Shinji and Asuka seemed better off playing the sibling dynamic instead of trying to play bf/gf which honestly is kind of forced by their living situation. Also since they’re in a similar disposition non existent father and dead mother, you’d imagine they would rely on each other for emotional comfort. Though Asuka—her personality I feel like she can’t differentiate between familial love and romantic love and the affection she wants is a bit of both. But, her character tries to be “mature”; she wants romantic love more and does this through sexual means and romantic gestures e.g. like kissing. One of my friends told me that you can’t stay friends as a boy and a girl cause eventually you catch feelings. Which I say is kinda dumb cause I have a lot of male friends, and I definitely don’t harbour those feelings, but I guess it’s a common phenomena.

I think this is what happens in this case, of Asuka and Shinji. Even after rejection of instrumentality they actually are depicted as childhood friends. But knowing how they both were before to each other, it was not good tbh. Also to mention the choking like thrice— bro if anything, this showcases a really abusive relationship and I think this outstretches the idea of their character tropes. Which I firmly stand by saying they’re superficial to each other. AsuShin were never really there for each other and are using each other in a forced situation. However, you can’t deny that they didn’t at some point catch feels, also Shinji is pretty consistent how he still cares about everyone around him. Which I really like how they add that to his character because it reminiscent of Yui, because you see a duality of both his parents personality in Shinji throughout the series—it’s a really nice touch. But bruh, if we gonna talk about that coma scene—I’m out LOL.

Thoughhhh, she is a true definition of best girl I really like her arc, fighting drive, and her skills as an Eva pilot 😭💗--but bruh she’s still a toxic and sometimes annoying tsundere trope, but still she’s 14 what can you do. So I feel like Kensuke and Asuka are actually a pretty good combo, cause he’s always been pretty mature even without parents. Also Asuka was into older guys, so I guess this is a win win?? Also Rei and Shinji, I honestly cannot get my head around it cause that’s pretty much his mom—so in a way that’s like either his half-sister or mom-ish clone?? Idk but Yui is definitely the donor LOL.

Kaworu and Shinji I felt like brought a bunch of things out of each other. I don’t know which timeline begins first, but I’d like to think the manga, the anime (plus its movies), and then to the rebuild series. Because I think that order is kind of pivotal to observing Kaworu’s character development from being a person who’s trying to understand human feelings to then the kinder person we see in the final series. You can tell how he’s changed and he knows Shinji a lot more as well as being considerate to him e.g. giving him personal space or letting him work at his own pace. Also that “we’ll meet again.” Is an obvious nod to how he’s done this before.

His literal story in every timeline is always romantic LOL, like bruh I can’t remember which game it was but basically a bad ending of Kawoshin route is that you reject Kaworu and he starts the third impact 🤡. Also I don’t know why but I started to see a weird dynamic between those two, in the manga their interactions reminded me of Asuka and Shinji—which Shinji is the tsundere Asuka here. I don’t know if this is relevant but the older character relative to the character they’re with seems to play off a mature vs a childish person trope. Asuka is younger than Shinji and Shinji is actually younger than Kaworu. Then again I could be overseeing this but istg manga Kaworu and Shinji mirror the whole Asushin dynamic. Like he’s seriously agressive against Kaworu, then after killing him he admits liking him. 🤡 I don’t know which is funnier no homo Shinji, homophobe shinji, or just closet Shinji who needs to realise sexuality is a spectrum so he could’ve idk—come out as bisexual, but whatever manga Shinji lol that timeline is over.

Anyways the development of these two is real and I think the rebuild timeline shows them at their best bringing their own personage out from each other like how they both enjoy music together--WHICH I’M SO SAD WE NEVER GET TO SEE THAT CELLO AGAIN. Then there’s those feelings of humanity, love, kindness, etc. Which yeah an angel could represent those things, but Kaworu is still his own person, self-aware of a cycle and if you think about how he initially was there to USE Shinji, but ultimately turned on that plan set by SEELE because he loved Shinji (and a bunch of other things like him showing Kaworu humanity). I also can see the argument, how “ideal” Kaworu is to Shinji, but he’s more self aware of the time he has before he KNOWS he’ll die and knows how to act for himself in that duration to make the most of it. All with Shinji. At some point, I think he fell in love with Shinji tho I don’t know where it began tbh—considering that all those alternate universes do exist. Kaworu does romantically love Shinji--so, in some universe they both reciprocate their feelings to each other. 

In the last movie during that convo with Shinji. Like bREH it’s so emotionally moving because Kaworu remembers ALLLLL the timelines and how he’s been with Shinji and later Shinji himself recalls the events too. Where they show the scene from the manga and anime. Kaworu cries after being set free from the EVA cycle. Which, I definitely understood what he meant by him saying “it’ll be lonely” and how Shinji changed or that he’s actually different this time.

Either way, Shinji did right by him because it’s always Kaworu who has the purpose of “trying to save Shinji” but it always ends up the same. I thought that was really moving because Shinji tells Kaworu he’s gonna let him live a life for himself for once and he wants the same for everyone as well. Which was honestly so meaningful cause I think Kaworu’s character and like Rei too when they start to realise how to “live” like a person and not another puppet it’s truly liberating. Another thing I forgot, bruh Kaworu calls Gendo his father and ngl I feel like this is kind of a weird lore situation because I for sure don’t think he’s the donor. I think he calls him that as an insult because he knows Gendo’s whole doing and relative to Shinji—I kind of see it as a joke LOL. Like it’s equivalent to saying, “daddy chill”, or “hey look it’s daddy and his plans to end the world” also I kind of like to think of it as a father in law thing cause you know, Kawoshin *winks amirite*

The ending, I’m honestly hoping is just an open ending because it gives everything an actual start of their adult lives not being dictated by extraterrestrial forces. Though, I’m kind of wondering if the world doesn’t have EVAs does that still mean everyone else still has the same backstory, and do they remember? Maybe Mari really is just a coworker lmfao, and there’s still a chance for Kaworu and Shinji cause ngl, they did have a convo (presumably from the spoilers) about still remaining close afterwards and that stare at the ending seems very hopeful.

I call bs from Anno saying, “oh Shinji is based off him and Mari off of his wife”, like honestly any OCs made theres always some part of yourself made into that character. Which is probably why a lot of people relate to the characters in EVA because they’re based off real things (e.g. those war machines characters are named after and people around them). I think why Kaworu and Rei are together at the end, is bc they’re very much the same. They’re mass produced dolls—which oddly enough that’s the case for all the children except they don’t recall the loop. Kind of funny also how both Kaworu and Rei became farmers lmfao so ig it runs in the family (yes that’s right I like the idea that they’re siblings it was always noted that they’re like “the same”).

Another thing, i think why the rebuild really did well for Kawoshin and in my opinion canonised it—the convo with elder Ryoji Kaji (Misato’s baby daddy) that there was a time he felt incredibly lonely and depressed thinking Misato didn’t love him and so he started looking out for himself. So self love and found himself a hobby in farming which he suggests to Kaworu—basically saying he might feel like Shinji doesn’t love him but he’s gotta remember to take care of himself. if I go thru a breakup ill feel like it’s the end of the world but Kaji says y’a gotta self love broe and take care yo self gad dam fam 😭 💗.

Though, that look at the end from Shinji to Kaworu—I’d like to believe there is still hope that one day when they’re a bit stable in their adult lives, they’ll run into each other.

[makeste]

I just wanna enable you to talk more about Katsuki so. top 5 (or 10, or however many you feel like) Bakugou romantic ships? not like number 1 will be a surprise but hey ;p

ah, shipping. the perfect topic with which to take a breather from leg puns and the quirkless!Bakugou debate. nothing controversial about ships lmao.

disclaimer: these are literally just my favorite Bakugou ships, as asked. I have few to no NOTPs, and I’m not anti-anything, nor do I have any opinions on whether or not any of these will or should become canon (as it really makes no difference to me, since I ship them all platonically as well). basically I have no skin in the “shipping somehow has winners and losers” game. I’m just here for the emotional energy and the lulz and the character development.

anyways this is a top six because I couldn’t bear to leave either of my two favorite rarepairs out whoops.

BakuDeku - like you said anon, not a surprise lol. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again; for me, these two are the core of the series. honestly it sometimes strikes me as ironic that this ship is so often written off as abusive or unhealthy or toxic, because I often find myself thinking that roughly 90% of all of Bakugou and Deku’s problems could be sorted out just by them communicating with each other. and I don’t mean just their own specific relationship problems -- I mean all of their problems. Bakugou is having an emotional crisis about something? have him talk to Deku. Deku’s overwhelmed by a problem and way overthinking it? have him talk to Bakugou! they balance each other out, is the thing. when one of them veers off course, the other is the compass to steer them back on track. that’s the power of rivals!! and aside from that, this relationship is just so complex, and I am weak for absolutely all of it. it’s just this perfect blend of push and pull and friction and trust. it’s the type of ship where the two of them have such a strong connection that it’s like gravity; they can’t help but orbit the other, even when that orbit is sometimes unsteady. it’s just such a powerful bond and just... guh. I have way too many emotions about it so I am just going to STOP NOW and move on to the next ship.

TodoBaku - so by now we have reached a point where pretty much everyone in class 1-A is an expert on handling Bakugou, and ngl, it’s my favorite thing ever. but what makes the TodoBaku relationship so especially appealing is that Shouto is completely unafraid to just step right up and declare his friendship to the entire world. Todoroki “I’m calling it like it is” Shouto, who, after giving the matter careful consideration, correctly judged himself and Bakugou to be the closest of friends, and thus decided that they should intern together and he should introduce him to his family and get his sister to cook his favorite foods. and the entire time, Bakugou is all “please no one listen to this delusional freak, we are not friends at all,” even as he proceeds to get himself involved in all of the Todoroki family drama, and saves Shouto’s brother’s life, and learns all of his sister’s recipes, and presumably cries himself to sleep at night wondering how he could have let this happen.

Kacchako - what I like about Ochako’s relationship with Katsuki is that she’s one of the few people who’s not afraid to call him out on his shit. she’s not just warmly tolerant of him like some of the others; she has expectations of him, and will unabashedly express her sound disappointment if he fails to be the person she knows he’s capable of being. I feel like Ochako has no patience for him taking his sweet time with his character development, and is just “goddammit young man, just sort your shit out with Deku already and go back to being best friends like you both so clearly want, and while you’re at it please try to treat other people less like garbage”, and various other things that are all true but that he of course hates to hear, but TOO BAD lol. anyway so I love that, and I love that she’s just as stubborn as he is. and I also love that there’s genuine, mutual respect between the two of them as well. never forget that Katsuki is the one who first brought out Ochako’s homicidal badass side. anyway so they basically complement each other very well, and I have my fingers crossed that one of these days Horikoshi will decide to actually have them interact with each other again because damn.

KiriBaku - Kirishima, on the other hand, is warmly tolerant of Bakugou, and openly admiring of him even, but it tends to be in a way that brings out Bakugou’s best qualities. Kiri just has this way of bringing out Bakugou’s confidence in himself. like, he’s very good at saying precisely the right words to make Bakugou grin that smirky little grin of his, the one that’s all “oh yeah, that’s right, I’m a badass.” and seeing as Bakugou, for all his pride and bluster, is surprisingly prone to having mini crises of confidence, this is a valued skill that I’m very grateful to Kiri for having! and what’s nice is that Bakugou is very good at returning the favor, since Kiri is prone to crises of confidence as well. the little flashback right before Kiri unveils Unbreakable for the first time is one of my favorite moments in the series. when this ship is firing on all cylinders they really bring out the best in each other. and also they are both dumb bros which is an extremely undervalued dynamic. I love it when Bakugou is all “HEY KIRISHIMA LET ME BLOW YOU UP A BIT” and Kiri is just like “YEAHHHH!” heh.

KamiBaku - and now for the first of the two rarepairs! first of all I would just like to state that I absolutely cannot fathom why KamiBaku is a rarepair to begin with, unless it’s simply because everyone is already too obsessed with the previously mentioned ships. but at any rate it’s a damn shame, because the cuteness of this ship is off the fucking charts, and right now it’s all just going to waste. what I adore more than anything about this ship is the way Bakugou tolerates every single fucking thing Kaminari does and LETS HIM GET AWAY WITH IT. he lets him call him “Kacchan.” he lets Kaminari manhandle him into various getups (the A Band shirt; the Santa outfit) on multiple occasions while putting up absolutely no fight. he basically allows him an almost unprecedented level of closeness, which Kaminari proceeds to BLATANTLY TAKE ADVANTAGE OF at every turn seemingly unchecked! and he is the all time champ at tricking Bakugou into participating in social interactions (tying the ribbon to his foot during the Christmas gift exchange, telling him he won’t get any food at the New Year’s feast if he doesn’t help cook, etc.). he just loves him and wants him to be included. honestly this one of the most adorable relationships in the entire goddamn series and I am tired of it being slept on. the people deserve more KamiBaku dammit.

IidaBaku - last but not least, a relationship between two people who I’m pretty sure have only actually interacted with each other a handful of times, and most of those times involved them shouting at each other! ah, yes. the stick in the mud and the delinquent. god’s natural enemies. except that in this case the “delinquent” is a star student who tutors other kids and goes to bed every night at 8:30, and the stick in the mud once hatched a legitimate plot to kill a man. what I am trying to say is that these two are actually WAY more alike than they would ever care to admit, and I’m kind of obsessed with it?? this is one of those ships where all it would take is one well-applied trope and the possibilities are endless. you could literally just pick one out of a hat. fake dating, roommates, only one bed, undercover as lovers, WHATEVER. and not only does this have the potential to be the most hilarious ship in the history of time, but it also has potential to be disarmingly, shockingly sweet, I shit you not. there are a couple of little moments in the light novels that I absolutely adore, where they’re each taking care of the other with the other having absolutely no idea. Iida makes about four attempts to tuck Bakugou in during the forest training camp arc because his covers have fallen off and he doesn’t want him to catch a chill, and Bakugou unknowingly returns the favor by preventing Iida from stumbling across the preparations for his own surprise birthday party before the others are finished getting ready. by shoving Iida into an elevator and ordering him to go back to his room with absolutely no explanation given lmao. anyway, but the point is the potential is definitely there for cuteness and chemistry and mutual respect while arguing nonstop like an old married couple.

so there you go! honestly Bakugou somehow has chemistry with just about everyone in his class, which is super impressive for someone with the personality of a rabid wolf spider. god bless him.

[scripttorture]

I'm not sure if this question has been asked before, but what would be usually the reason why people would torture someone? Not to justify (torture is unjustifiable in any situation) but I really needed a driving force for a villain why they would w/o sounding ridiculous or implausible, and any reason I come up with falls kind of flat (... Which I suppose is expected, since that's how the reasonings behind tortures are in rl I guess)

I can help you out here. And I want you to know that from a writing stand point this does make perfect sense. Motivation, however shallow, is important for capturing a character.

 Yes a lot of the motivations in reality are flat, shallow and outright stupid. And it can be a careful balancing act, showing those motivations making them understandable without straying into justifying them. It can also be hard to make an interesting character with flat motivations.

 I think I’ll start off with talking about motivations/‘reasons’ in reality and then talk a little about when and whether we should break from reality when we write about torturers.

 Remember that there isn’t a lot of research on torturers. So I’m working from the little bit of research I can access, interviews with torturers and anecdotal reports. It isn’t perfect, but this is (so far as I can tell) the best information we have at the time of writing.

 Understanding why torture occurs means understanding that it is structural violence.

 I do take questions on abuse, I personally don’t see much point in sticking to the strict legal definition of torture when I’m trying to help authors do a decent job portraying trauma survivors. But sometimes the definition matters. And torture is essentially defined as abuse by government employees*, by public servants in positions of authority.

 Over and over again the reasons torturers give for their crimes come back to flaws in the organisations they were part of. Consistently, across cultures and time periods, they describe understaffed, high pressure environments with no training, little supervision and the instruction to produce results or else.

 This combines with cultural messages that violence ‘works’ and existing sub-cultures of torturers within organisations to perpetuate abuse.

 It’s also worth mentioning that for most torturers they’re coming into an organisation where there are already established sub-groups of torturers. The group dynamics do seem to play a role in all this. Though it’s difficult to say how much when we’re entirely going from what torturers say and they are… demonstrably inaccurate when it comes to talking about torture.

 Having said that; torturers do seem to encourage each other to more and more acts of violence. They treat it almost competitively. They will also, sometimes, approach new recruits and bring them into the torturer sub-group, pressuring them to participate.

 I’m unsure how much of a role the social factor plays in torturers starting to torture, but it definite seems to keep them torturing when they say they’d rather stop. There are a couple of reasons why.

 First of all there’s a sort of implicit threat; refusing to torture is seen as a threat to the torturer sub-culture. And these are people who have already shown a capacity for violence. There have been cases of torturers attacking other members of the same organisation for their opposition to, or refusal to, torture.

 There’s also a social aspect; once involved with the torturer sub-culture the individual tends to become more and more cut off from the rest of the organisation. The group of torturers becomes more or less their entire social circle.

 We’re social animals. So leaving, rejecting the entire social group, is a big deal. It’s hard for us to do.

 The toxic sub-culture torturers form encourages them to root part of their identity in their capacity for violence and how ‘good at it’ the other members of their group think they are. They tend to tie ideas of toughness, dependability, achievement and (often) masculinity to torture. They frame themselves as especially manly, strong and ‘willing to do the tough jobs no one else has the guts to’.

 It’s complete nonsense but it’s what they do.

 And it means that facing up to the fact torture is pointless feels like an attack on their self worth. A lot of them choose to double down rather then face that reality.

 This isn’t a definitive list of relevant factors. It’s my assessment of the ones that always seem to show up. There are usually other factors that feed into particular situations. Rejali’s Three Systems is a worth a read on that front.

 Ideas about social hierarchy and transgression are common features. So things like ‘anyone who does That Terrible Thing deserves to be tortured’ or ‘no one Like That would be in this part of town for an innocent reason’.

 All of this means that motivation can be tricky to write, because the real motivations are often not the sort of thing we’re taught are ‘interesting’.

 Real, honest motivations are often things like:

‘I think those people deserve it’

‘I was told to’

‘Everyone else was doing it’

‘I couldn’t think of anything else to do’

‘I got angry and took it out on someone else’

‘I thought it would work and no one ever taught me another way’

 That’s not a definitive list but you get the idea. And probably get the point about these sorts of shallow motivations being narratively unsatisfying.

 So let’s step back from the reality and tackle the writing problem at the heart of this: how do we make this interesting?

 There are a couple of different approaches.

 The first approach I see is to accept that the motivation and the villain are shallow and shift the interest away from the villain.

 Villains don’t need to be interesting. And they don’t need to be the focus.

 If your story is structured in a way which primarily makes the villain a looming threat and focuses on the heroes, their journey, their relationships then adding detail or depth to the villain is unnecessary.

 The Lord of the Rings trilogy does this with several of its major villains. The Shape of Water does it for the main villain. Zelda: Breath of the Wild (yes I bought a switch during lock down, and it’s my first Zelda game I am not sorry) does it with Ganon.

 Another approach is to accept the motivation is shallow and shift the focus away from the villain’s motivation.

 Villains do not need to have a grand philosophy or deep motivation or underlying pain in order to be a good read. They don’t need to be an intellectual threat to the heroes in order to be a legitimate threat.

 For instance Joker in Batman: The Animated Series, I’d argue one of the best takes on the character ever. But if you go back and watch the episodes he isn’t deep. His motivation almost always boils down to pettiness, greed and a vindictive streak a mile wide. It is incredibly shallow.

 But he’s fun to watch, because he’s unpredictable and funny. He’s also a legitimate threat to the heroes because he’s so incredibly destructive. More then any other villain his crimes are aimed at effecting large numbers of people. That sets the stakes high without any motivation or philosophy coming into it.

 The focus is on what he does each time he shows up, not why.

 Persona 5 pulls off a similar trick. Every single one of its villains has a shallow motivation. But each of them also has power over one of the heroes or another innocent person. They don’t need a deeper or more interesting motivation in order to make life miserable for the heroes. And every caper hinges on the heroes trying to stop that worst outcome.

 As much as Fullmetal Alchemist is a deep story which touches on many complex topics, neither version (the original manga or the 2003 anime with it’s very different plot) had a particularly complex villain at the end of the story. In both cases the ultimate leader of the ‘bad guys’ just wanted more power. And didn’t care how many lives they destroyed to get it.

 Not all stories need a Killmonger.

 It’s always worth taking the time to consider what your story needs, rather then what’s fashionable in fiction at the moment. On a personal note some of my favourite stories have been either entirely focused on the heroes or had explicitly shallow villains.

 The reality is that most of the time motivations for large scale atrocities are shallow and unsatisfying. Giving fictional villains deeper or more complex motives can work, but it can also mean twisting the narrative up to make it look like the villain (and hence their actions) are more reasonable then they are.

 Killmonger’s twisted vision of what would make Wakanda ‘better’ works in Black Panther, just as White Wolf’s similar motivation did in the comics a decade or so earlier. They work because they’re directly competing with the hero’s vision of what would make the world better. And because ultimately it’s about showing why T’Challa’s way is better then the villain he’s facing off against.

 But I can think of other stories where giving the villain a ‘deeper’ reasoning just served to make them look reasonable. While they were arguing for torture and genocide.

 And… I just think we’ve got enough of that in real life.

 At the end of the day your villain should be serving a role within the story you’re creating. Motivation is one of many ways that we try to make sure they serve that function effectively and entertainingly.

 But, despite what some people would have you believe, it ain’t the be all and end all of whether a villain or story is entertaining. Personality, plots, aesthetic and sometimes how satisfying it feels to see their day ruined, all feed in to how well a villain works.

 The threat they represent in the story isn’t dependant on whether their motivation is deep or nuanced or rational. It’s about their ability to follow through and sometimes the horrific nature of the desire itself.

 So I guess a lot of my advice here is to consider what your villain actually needs to do in the story. Then take a step back and consider whether deeper motivation adds anything to that.

 Be aware that the more complex motivations and drives you add the further you’re getting from a realistic torturer. Which is not inherently apologia, or inherently a bad writing idea, but consider what any deviation from reality implies.

 I hope that helps. :)

Available on Wordpress.

Disclaimer

*The international definition can include groups that control territory, ie an occupying force. In some countries the definition is slightly wider and encompasses some international criminal gangs.

[takerfoxx]

In response to JK Rowling and Joss Whedon, my (former) idols

I really didn’t want to have to do this.

So in addition to…=gestures vaguely=…all of that, the last few months have been kind of sucky when it comes to learning some really unpleasant things about artists that I looked up to, admired, and was in fact inspired by. I’ve already spoken about the Speaking Out movement revealing a lot of ugly behavior from various wrestlers, some of which I was big fans of, and then later we got Chris Jericho being a full-on MAGA. Yeah, that all sucked. But those were just performers whose work I enjoyed watching. The one that really hurt were writers who I deeply admired, whose stories I love, and who I was heavily influenced by.

The first, of course, was finding out that JK Rowling, the author of perhaps the single biggest YA fantasy series of all time Harry Potter, is a TERF. This really sucked for a number of reasons. Firstly, I really like Harry Potter! I mean, I’m not a super fan or anything. I came into it when things were kind of dying down, like the whole book series had already been released and there were only a few movies left, but I still really enjoyed it, have all the books and movies and a fair amount of merchandise swag, including a nifty wand I got at Universal Studios. Shit, I got two replicas of the Sword of Griffyindor, thanks to them screwing up my order in my favor and sending me a duplicate! They’re on my wall right across from me as I type this!

But in addition to writing a book series I really liked, JK Rowling was supposed to be one the good guys. She’s been vocally progressive, often openly comes down on British right-wing nonsense, has supported various persecuted minorities, and is on record as being one of the few self-made billionaires to actually stop being a billionaire for a time because she donated so much money to charity. And while we mock it now, her revealing Dumbledore as gay was a huge deal at the time. Plus, she cultivated this reputation as Auntie Jo, that cool, supportive aunt we all wanted.

But for a while her stock has been dropping. Her preference for confirming “representation” via tweets instead of explicitly putting it in the text of her stories has raised the question of queer-baiting, especially with a whole-ass movie with a young Dumbledore and Grindelwald to make their relationship explicit but failing to do so. The whole Nagini thing from the latest Fantastic Beasts movie was pretty gross. And re-examination of various problematic elements from the original novels has rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. Now, none of these really looked to be intentionally malicious, of course. Just about everyone’s early work will have problematic elements; that’s just how people work. And the later stuff smacked more of ignorance than anything. But after all this time, it’s like, c’mon. You should know better by now.

But the biggie came when her transphobic views finally came to light. Now, this one had been brewing for a while, due to some questionable likes and statements on her twitter. But then she decided to just go public and published what essentially amounts to a TERF manifesto, one with a very “love the sinner, hate the sin” condescending attitude and had a real persecution complex air to it.

Now, I’m not going to go into detail about what the manifesto was about, what the circumstances surrounding it were, or how wrong it was. It’s already been raked over the coals, dissected, answered, and debunked in detail by people far more qualified than me, so odds are, you’re already well aware of its contents and the subsequent rebuttals. But the gist of it comes down to her basically believing that transwomen are actually cis men claiming to be trans so as to infiltrate and invade female-only spaces.

Yeah.

Okay, that’s gross, but…why? Why is someone so noted for being progressive and wanting to foster an inclusive environment making this the hill of exclusion that she wants to die on?

Well, that’s where things get tricky. She mentions that prior to Harry Potter, her first marriage was highly physically and sexually abusive, and when she escaped from that, she had no place to go, leading her to be homeless for a time.

Oh.

Well, that makes sense. Someone goes through a highly traumatic experience with a member of the opposite sex, has no support structure when she escapes it, is left to fend for herself, only to suddenly get rocketed into fame, fortune, and influence, which in turn leads to a Never Again mentality. She was hurt, no one was there to help her, and now she’s afraid of men invading women-only spaces to victimize others like she was victimized. So…literally transphobic. Literally a Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist.

Guys, this is so fucked up. Like, how do you even approach something like this? She’s a victim in every sense of the word, so of course she’s going to have physiological damage and a warped view of things. I mean, if I found out that a close friend of mine went through the same thing and had the same prejudices, I would be nothing but sympathetic! I mean, I’d still do what I can to convince her to overcome those prejudices, but I’d still show sympathy and support for what she went through.

Abuse warps people. There’s a reason why so many abusers are abuse survivors themselves. It makes you terrified of being hurt again and often causes people to adopt toxic behaviors, beliefs, and reactions to protect themselves. I’ve already talked about it at length while discussing She-Ra and its own handling of the cycle of abuse, which included franks discussions of Catra’s horrible behavior, why she was the way she was, while never losing sympathy for her and rooting for her to overcome it. So if JK Rowling is an abuse survivor, is it really right to come down on her for having warped views because of that abuse?

But that’s the problem. See, she isn’t your troubled friend that you’re trying to help. She isn’t your cousin Leslie who’s a really sweet person but unfortunately adopted some bad ideals due to trauma suffered. She JK freakin’ ROWLING, one of the most famous, wealthy, and influential women in the world. She has a platform of millions, if not billions, which means her voice lends credibility to her bigoted beliefs. Alt-righters and other TERFs have already swooped upon this for giving validation to their awful beliefs, which puts trans people even more at risk. And as horrible as Rowling’s experiences might have been, the trans community is often the victim of far worse, and they don’t have a mountain of money and an army of defenders to protect them like she does. I’ve said it time and time again: just because you’re a victim, that doesn’t give you the right to victimize others! And bringing things back to Catra, as much as I loved her redemption in the final season, she was still a TERRIBLE PERSON for a huge chunk of the show, one that needed to be stood up to and stopped.

So yeah. That’s the messiness that is JK Rowling.

Now, let’s talk about the one that really hurts. Let’s talk about Joss Whedon.

I’ve made no secret of what a huge Whedon fan I am. Unlike Rowling, I was a HUUUUUGE superfan. Seeing Serenity for the first time in theaters was akin to a religious awakening to me as a storyteller, making it one of my top three movies of all time. Firefly is my favorite show ever. And I adored Buffy, Angel, and Dollhouse as well. I love Cabin in the Woods and The Avengers. The very first fanfic I ever wrote was a Firefly fanfic that disappeared along with my old laptop. I know his style isn’t for everyone, but I cannot understate how much of a personal inspiration he is to me as a writer.

And like Rowling, Joss was supposed to be one of the good guys! Buffy was monumental in pushing the needle when it came to female empowerment. Will and Tara were groundbreaking as a gay couple. He’s been outspoken for years about his feminist views and beliefs and was seen as one of the most prominent and influential feminist voices in Hollywood!

And then things started to go bad.

One day he was on top of the world, the mastermind behind the first two Avenger movies. And the next, it seemed like he was in freefall. It’s hard to really pinpoint exactly when the change took place. Some would say him being brought in as a last-minute substitute for Zack Snyder to take over on Justice League after Snyder had to leave due to family tragedy, and the subsequent awful critical reception to that film tarnishing his image, even if those were very unique circumstances that couldn’t really be blamed on him. Others might point to Age of Ultron’s less than stellar reception, as well as criticism of some questionable jokes and certain creative decisions regarding the character of Black Widow, which then led to a more critical examination of how Whedon continues to write female characters, as while his work might have been revolutionary in the 90’s, his failure to evolve with the times had meant that many of his portrayals are now woefully outdated and problematic, with his vision for a Batgirl movie getting hit with a lot of backlash as a result.

Again, I’m not going to go into too much detail, as this is all public knowledge and can be easily looked up, but overall it seemed that Whedon entered into a period where he was getting criticized more than he was celebrated, and his image of a guaranteed hit maker was now in doubt.

But all of this wasn’t the big problem. All creators go through rises and slumps, and everyone hits points where they get hit with a barrage of criticism; that’s just part of being a public creative figure, especially a progressive one. And had nothing happened after, it would have probably faded, got forgotten, and Whedon would have moved onto the next project with no fuss.

But as it turned out, it wasn’t just a minor slump in his career. Instead, it was the priming of the pump.

In 2016, Whedon divorced his wife of sixteen years, Kai Cole, and in an open letter, Kai Cole accused him of being a serial cheater, who would have affairs with a great many women, from co-workers, to actresses, to friends, to even his fans. And in addition to raising questions of him possibly abusing his position as showrunner to elicit sex from those working on his projects, there also is the ugly question of how could someone who speaks so highly of women then go and backstab the person who was supposed to be the most important woman in his life, as well as lying to her and denying her the autonomy of deciding whether or not she even wanted to continue to have a relationship with him?

Furthermore, Whedon himself has not explicitly denied these accusations, and comments made by him seem only to confirm them.

Now if you’ll recall, I reacted publicly to this news, and despite my admiration of Whedon’s work, I came down on Kai Cole’s side, and stated that while things like marriage issues and infidelity were no one’s business but that of the couple’s, it did raise a lot of uncomfortable questions about how Whedon treated the women in his life and he really needed to get his shit in order.

But hey, a messy private life and a guy falling into temptation isn’t that big of a deal, right? Plenty of creators also go through multiple marriages and have problems staying faithful and still continue making great art. We’re all human, it’s a stressful job, and this shit just happens, right? Sure, it’s gross and a shitty thing to do, but ain’t no business of ours, right?

In late 2020, actor Ray Fisher, who played the role of Cyborg in Justice League, openly accused Joss Whedon of fostering a hostile work environment, claiming that the director’s behavior was abusive and unprofessional, and that Whedon in turn was protected by DC executives.

DC and Warner Bros. came down against Fisher, claiming they had done an internal investigation that turned up no evidence of wrongdoing (yeah, sure they did), and soon Fisher was out as Cyborg, apparently for rocking the boat.

But then Charisma Carpenter, noted for her important role as Cordelia Chase in both Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, then spoke up, claiming to be inspired by Fisher in doing so. She described Whedon did indeed foster a hostile work environment on his projects, that his often acted in a toxic manner, from asking incredibly invasive and inappropriate questions regarding her pregnancy to insulting her on set. She said that she made excuses for him for years, but after undergoing a lot of therapy and reading what Ray Fisher had to say, she felt compelled to speak out.

And this just open the floodgates. Other actors and actresses also came forward, some with stories of their own, others to offer support. Even Buffy herself, Sarah Michelle Gellar, confirmed Carpenter’s stories and said that she no longer wanted to be associated with Whedon. Michelle Trachtenberg, who played the character of Dawn, stated that she also experienced toxic treatment from Whedon despite her being a minor at the time, and says that the set had a rule that Whedon wasn’t allowed to be alone with her again, which really raises some sickening questions of what happened the first time. Even male stars have spoken out, from words of support and apologies for not speaking up earlier from Anthony Stewart Head and David Boreanaz, to an earlier interview with James Marsters, in which he described being terrified of Whedon, mainly due to an instance when Whedon was frustrated with the popularity of Marsters’s character of Spike messing with his plans and physically and verbally taking it out on the actor. There have been many corroborating stories of Whedon being casually cruel on set, on seemingly taking delight in making his fellow show writers cry, and even the man himself admitting to enjoying fostering a hostile work environment during his director commentary of the Avengers. We’ve joked about Whedon’s supposed sadism for years, but that was in regards to how he treated the characters in his stories, not the people helping him make them!

So yeah. That’s the problem with Joss Whedon.

So, do I think that Joss Whedon is somehow some kind of sociopath who lied about his feminist principles and deliberately put on a progressive façade specifically to get into a position of power so he could torment people? No, of course not. I think he was sincere about his beliefs, and I do think he didn’t realize the wrongness of his behavior. But that’s kind of the problem. See, it’s one thing to have kind of a trollishness to your nature, a sort of sadistic side. No one can help that. But when someone with that quality gets put into a position of power in which they are protected by both the higher-ups and their legions of fans, they are allowed to mistreat and continue to mistreat people. And by never suffering any consequences, that sort of toxic behavior becomes internalized, becomes a habit, becomes their moda operandi. And when you’re constantly getting praised as a creative genius and a wonderful feminist voice, any self-criticism just gets wiped away, and you think yourself above reproach, leading to what Joss Whedon became and went on being.

And you know what scares me the most about this particular issue? It’s not that I am a fan of his stories. It’s that I can so easily see myself turning out the same way.

Look, I’ll be upfront about it: I’m kind of a sadist myself. You’ve seen it in my stories, you’ve seen me gloating after a particularly dark plot twist makes my readers freak out. That sort of stuff is fun to me. There’s a reason why I have a much easier time in the dark and violent scenes, because I’m channeling something ugly within me. We all have a dark side, and this is mine.

But UNLIKE Whedon, that doesn’t carry over to how I treat people in real life (unless Monopoly or Mario Party are involved, then it’s fair game). Maybe it’s because I wasn’t given the sort of power and praise he did so early, and I was always taught to be considerate of other people’s feelings, but if I ever find out that I hurt another person or went too fair, I feel TERRIBLE, and it just throws me off all day until I apologize. Even if I don’t notice right away that what I said or did wasn’t cool (autistic, remember?), when it’s pointed out to me and I have some time to think on it, yeah, the guilt is on and I make a point to apologize to whoever I’ve hurt. I’ve even made a point to apologize to members of my family for inconsiderate stuff I said years ago as a little punk kid because it wouldn’t stop bugging me.

So maybe Whedon got too big, too fast. Maybe putting people on these sorts of pedestals, especially progressive ones, is ultimately a bad thing.

So where does this leave us? How are we to treat JK Rowling and Joss Whedon, one who developed a lot of transphobia due to abuse suffered while the other became a toxic individual due to unchecked control and a lack of consequences? Can we still enjoy their stories despite them now being colored by their creators’ falls from grace? Can we separate the art from the artist, or do we have to do a clean split?

Honestly, I feel that has to come down to the individual. I can’t remove the influence Rowling and Whedon have had on me as a storyteller, and I still highly respect both of their talents despite taking major issue with their problems as people. And I’m not going go throw away all of my Harry Potter or Firefly stuff. Because that’s my stuff. It has value to me, it doesn’t represent the issues with their creators, and a lot of it was gifts from people who are dear to me. Though I do think it’ll be a long time before I return to either of their work, as I just don’t have the stomach for it now.

But I will be avoiding any projects they have in the future. I don’t want to put money in their pockets that might go on to support their toxic beliefs or behavior. And as for royalties for their past work that would also support the cast and crew of the Harry Potter films or those who worked on Whedon’s shows who do not deserve to lose money because we don’t want any of that money going to the creators? Er, that question is a little above my paygrade. I don’t know. You’ll have to all decide for yourselves. As for me, I still have a lot of thinking to do.

Regardless though, if I or anyone else is still able to enjoy their work, then it’s important to not divorce what these people said or did from the art they created, even if it makes enjoying that art less fun. It’s important to be critical about what we enjoy, to acknowledge the bad aspects along with the good, and open up discussion of those elements, because that’s what mature adults are supposed to do. 

And as for JK Rowling and Joss Whedon, whose stories I love, whose talent I admire, and whose past good work I’ll happily acknowledge, I do hope they both experience some sort of realization and enter into a period of self-examination that leads to them getting help for their issues, for Rowling to get help in coming to terms with her trauma and realizing that she’s wrong about the trans community and a full apology, and for Whedon to also come to terms with his toxic behavior and how he treats people, for him to make no excuse for what he did and sincerely apologize to those he hurt and work on bettering himself, as well as them both examining some of the more problematic tropes still present in their works. Because despite everything, I do feel that they can still be a creative force of good, and it would be a shame if they let themselves self-destruct.

But if not, then if it comes down to choosing between Rowling and the protecting the trans community, if it comes down between choosing between letting Whedon continue to make shows and protecting actors and writers from his abusive behavior, then I know who I’m siding with, and it ain’t the two individuals this whole essay is about. No story, no matter how good, no matter how creative, is worth letting sacrificing vulnerable people in order for it to be made.

[mallowstep]

I just thought about this

Do you think the Clan cats might ever have some form of PTSD from eather witnessing another cats death in any form like in battle or another disaster or even killing another cat themselves

I really do want to expand on this

okay matthew from the end of this post here it turns out i have a lot of thoughts and talked for like, almost 2k words about this. sorry. there's a tldr at the end.

hmmmmm

my official answer is, "sure, anything is possible, especially if you want to explore that."

my more rambly answer is...kind of.

we're just going to jump straight in with serious cat talk here, but cats? those mofos are killing machines. they are highly efficient hunters. kind of like people and creating things.

on the other hand, cats are also huge cowards who don't like to fight. hence cat and mouse: the cat doesn't want to go in for the kill unless they're sure they can execute it.

i like to think of them as a very krav maga idea: "we don't fight unless we absolutely have to, but once we go in, we go all in."

so...on one hand, "do cats experience ptsd from killing each other?" feels kind of like asking, "do humans experience ptsd from making things?", and yet, that's clearly extremely reductive.

it's also worth talking about what ptsd is. it's easy to think of ptsd as equivalent to trauma, but it's not.

trauma is, well, traumatic events, ptsd is one possible response. most people who experience trauma do not develop ptsd.

(there's also c-ptsd, but i'm getting to that.)

ptsd is, basically, an overactive adrenaline response, basically. it can look similar to depression and anxiety, but it's not the same. things like flashbacks and triggers are not exclusive to ptsd, or even any specific mental illness. it's normal to experience ptsd-like symptoms after a traumatic event. that's a traumatic response.

ptsd is, instead, the unhealthy extension of that, in time, and possibly severity.

before i go any farther, i just want to say, this is not to say you need to have ptsd to have trauma, that you can't have ptsd/trauma if XYZ, etc., so please, give me the benefit of the doubt here. it's always tricky to word these things in a way that is both clear about what i mean and not harming people.

mental illness is always a tricky subject. trying to fit a sum of many symptoms into boxes will never work, but i am going to lean on it as a tool to categorize and discuss experiences in a general sense.

i also want to mention c-ptsd, or "complex post-traumatic stress disorder." this is a debated diagnosis, in that where it fits into mental illness boxes is argued and it's yet to be included in the dsm, but for now, it's sufficient to think of it as ptsd's fraternal twin.

c-ptsd develops when trauma is prolonged, and there's little/no chance of escape. think kidnappings and child abuse.

it shares a lot of symptoms with ptsd, but it has its own unique cluster of symptoms, especially surrounding relationship issues.

right. we can rule that off for things cats typically experience from battle. but i still want to talk about it.

but ptsd is in reference to human reactions to trauma, which is fine! all warrior cats are at least a little anthropomorphised, or it wouldn't be fun to read about.

okay, before i lose the thread, circling back to my point, the conditions for ptsd are a prolonged response to a traumatic event. i, personally, don't think that your everyday warrior is going to experience this. some amount of battle is normal for cats, yeah?

but i do think ptsd/ptsd-like conditions are quite possible. i'm going to move into a discussion of various characters, now, and i'll put that under a read more.

okay, let's examine a few different cats, starting with mudfur.

why mudfur? because he chooses to be a medicine cat specifically because the battles of being a warrior are too much for him. does this mean he's experiencing ptsd? no, i don't think so. we never see any indication of him having flashbacks or hypervigilance. mind, i have

okay sorry you uh

i took a break to read mothwing's secret

see i've been putting it off bc i knew it was going to make me feel things and lord it did

phew

well i was going to talk about mothwing but first, back to mudfur

i can now confirm that we don't see any evidence of ptsd in him. trauma, maybe, but not ptsd.

which...checks.

next cat, ivypool.

but my ivypool, not canon ivypool, because i gave ivypool ptsd.

if you haven't read it, hedera helix is my canon compliant ivypool series, and you can get the Deets there, but i think "fair is the night" is the piece to focus on here. specifically,

The dark is the same, and the heat, and the way she slinks through the shadows, trying not to take notice. The way every pawstep is echoingly loud, and how she can't catch her breath or find her thoughts over the noise. All that's missing is.

Him.

Maybe Ivypool does still dream.

She hisses, her belt bristling, tail lashing, and raises her paw, claws extended.

what's going on here is that she mistakes tigerheart for hawkfrost.

yes, she has ptsd.

she also has c-ptsd in my writing, but i don't want to talk about this at the moment, because ivypool is complex, and i don't feel like bringing dovewing into this. but no, this is her having ptsd from her (dark forest) mentor trying to kill her. a cat she, at least on some level, trusted turning on her and attempting to kill her.

so for ivypool, it's the unexpected that traumatizes her.

which i think makes sense: cats don't generally expect to be attacked by those they trust. which leads me into...

character three: bluestar.

now, bluestar is complex because of the dementia, but i think it's pretty easy to say: tigerclaw (a cat she trusts) betrays her, she gets hypervigilant and stops trusting people.

i'm deliberately going short on this because i'm at almost a thousand words and uh,, i just want to talk about mothwing.

mothwing. my baby. my beloved. my beautiful.

fuuuuck okay so i should not have read mothwing's secret because this is going to turn into me writing mostly about that, but i actually knew 90% of what was contained in it through moonkitti videos + doing research for various mothwing related projects.

i think the only thing i learned was the moonkitti scene about bees is actually completely canonical, as written, and that it was possible for me to love mothwing more than i already do.

usually, i'd want to also talk about willowshine, but i'm going to keep my focus on mothwing. willow my love is going to come up, but i'm keeping my focus tight.

mothwing! onto my purpose: mothwing and c-ptsd and religious trauma.

she will get her own essay i have a document titled "mothwing and religious trauma" but with trope-bingo i've been writing the essays less, so bear with me.

anyway. i'm not waffling, i'm just trying to set up a good starting point so i don't ramble past the purpose. and i think...the scene with mudfur and mothwing near the end is what i'm honing in on. (spoilers, duh, but also, you don't need to have read it.)

so mudfur comes to mothwing after the battle, and she turns him away. he doesn't understand, but i do.

religion has been used against mothwing her entire life. her clan used it (inadvertently) to keep her from her purpose, hawkfrost used it to maintain his control over her, and mistystar used it to again keep her from her purpose and passion. (and yes, i have strong feelings about what this does to willowshine, but i'm trying to stay on-topic.)

and then, the first tangible proof she has of starclan is the dark forest. and her brother. attacking the nursery. and her.

and then mudfur has the audacity to say, "yeah sorry we don't know anything! but like why are you still rejecting us?"

(makes me want to rewrite the ending of "if you love me any, let me know it now" actually, i'm angry. not going to, but i want to.)

adfskjl mothwing is my new purpose for existing. i may actually consider changing my blog title from "in this house we lovewing dovewing" to something mothwing themed. i love her. expect a mothwing focus sometime soon-ish.

right, so, i don't think mothwing's perspective needs to be explained here. but...she is very self-aware of her position. she struggles with it. she doesn't want to talk to willowshine about her beliefs — she's grateful when willowpaw just accepts it and doesn't discuss it with her.

mothwing as a character has always been appealing to me. but. again, trying to keep focused, her brother is manipulative and cruel.

(i'm not saying abusive because i don't know if he really is. i'd want to do a proper analysis for that, not just ramble in a blank document for a while. he's toxic, but i try to reserve abusive for abusive characters. i think he is, but i don't know how i would defend that, ergo, i'm avoiding it for now.)

just. her whole life.

she spends a long time trusting others, looking to starclan for answer and salvation, and it keeps letting her down, and others keep using it against her, like a weapon. there's a lot to mothwing, but i'm really trying to stay on topic.

before i get to my closing arguments, some honorable mentions for characters i didn't talk about, but could have:

squirrelflight

feathertail, stormfur, and mistyfoot

dovewing

briarlight. okay she's such a good honorable mention i just have to explore this for a second, but the scene in bramblestar's storm where she's afraid of falling trees is good. i don't know, she seems fairly functional, but she's definitely not "over it."

anyone captured by twolegs.

tawnypelt

bramblestar. before you gasp, he too trained in the dark forest and was manipulated by hawkfrost and tigerstar.

probably a lot more.

so anyway, if you hung around for nearly 2k words to listen to me talk about cat trauma, here's my closing statement:

i think ptsd in clan cats is definitely going to be a thing, but i think, more often than not, it's not going to come from the battle. we looked at several examples where the incident happened during a battle, but i think it's the betrayal that's more shocking than the actual fighting.

i didn't address ptsd from cats killing each other, other than mudfur, and that's...frankly that's because i don't know. it is very hard for me to sympathize with those characters long enough to think critically about it.

like, i can write villain pov, but i don't think i can actually say, "what if XYZ feels bad for killing someone?" even if i was going to write about like, firestar killing scourge, i don't think i could.

not in this context, anyway.

similarly, i think a lot of what we'll see is trauma. cats are already extremely vigilant, and while it's possible to get hypervigilant cats, i'm not sure how often it's going to come out. cats are good at hiding physical pain, ipso facto, i imagine they're good at hiding emotional pain.

which isn't to say that they...you know what? you know what? if you want to come argue with me about human ptsd, you can do that on my main. but i'm talking about cats, and i say that they probably don't experience ptsd because they probably shove away a lot of the external symptoms, and that's mostly how we identify ptsd. this is not an end-all be-all, nor does it apply to people, but i don't know how to begin couching this, and i'm tired.

alright, well...

tl/dr: yes, trauma and maybe ptsd occur in clan cats, but i think it's more likely to be from betrayal than fighting.

dkjl this was a lot if u have follow up qs or just wanna discuss this my ask box is open! <3

[adurowrites]

Geomagnetic Reversal: The relationship between God, Satan, and Lil Nas X

(Spoilers for the Montero music video by Lil Nas X if you haven’t seen it yet.)

Every 450,000 years (approximately), the Earth’s magnetic poles switch places. The last switch, the Brunhes-Matuyama reversal, occurred about 780,000 years ago, so the Earth is ‘due’ for another one (except, averages don’t quite work like that.... but that’s a tangent we won’t explore at this time). But another reversal is happening, this one in society. A recent Gallup pole shows that for the first time in American history, the number of church-goers has dropped under 50% of the population. 

While this is certainly frightening for the religious community, it appears more of them are frightened by Lil Nas X’s recent music video for his song Montero (Call Me By Your Name) in which the singer descends to Hell and seduces the Devil. Now, for the American Conservative Christian, anything dealing with the Devil, demons, or Hell is pretty disturbing. Many of these families don’t celebrate Halloween (as it’s the Devil’s day) and will even avoid books, movies, and tv shows if it involves anything deemed Satanic. This includes magical powers as they are “of the Devil” and anything “of the Devil” will corrupt the person who engages in the story. 

And yet, in modern American society, media portrayals of the Devil appears to be at an all-time high. Not only does the Devil (or his various demons) appear in a variety of shows and movies, but he’s also played sympathetically. Or at the very least, far more nuanced than the earliest iterations of him. In the 1980s, 1990s, and even into the early 2000s, the Devil was portrayed as genuinely evil. Films like the Devil’s Advocate, The Last Temptation of Christ, and Angel Heart cast the Devil quite firmly into the role of villain. And not just villain, but creepy, manipulative, psychologically-disturbing villain. We begin to see a more complex take of the Devil in the 00′s and on, and it’s sort of culminated in the TV series Lucifer in which the Devil is sort of a good guy. (Not going to lie, I like the show - and yes, it’s based on a DC comic character).

But if the media has given the Devil a character redemption arc, God has suffered from the opposite. In fact, He’s begun a descent in villainy. Or, at the very least, He’s become the ‘absent parent’ who neglects His creation. 

However, I would argue that this character devolvement has not been due to the media, rather it has been due to the institution of the Church and the harm that the Church has done to recent generations, specifically millennials. 

Most millennials were raised in some form of church, and there were widespread issues across the different denominations. The Catholic Church was covering up its child sexual abuse scandal. Mega churches were preaching the lie of the ‘prosperity gospel’, all while taking money from their parishioners to buy private jets. And independent, fundamental churches were bashing gays, denigrating women, and promoting toxic purity culture. Oh, and denying science. This was understandably harmful to the kids being raised in these churches.

(And shout-out to all the Gen-Z’s out there who are going through/went through similar experiences. It didn’t stop with millennials. However, if the Gallup poll is right, a lot of the flight from Church is due to millennials noping out of there). 

So with all of these problems, is it any wonder that the image of God took a hit? Gandhi (as problematic as he was) said it best when he said, “I like your Christ, but not your Christianity.” And as most evangelicals will tell you, the word Christian literally means ‘Christ-like’. So... yeah. How Christians behave really does influence a person’s opinion of who God is. 

What’s interesting about God and the Devil is that they are literary foils for each other. One is good; one is bad. One is kind; one is cruel. One will save you; one will destroy you. But if one of them changes sides, it forces the other to change sides as well. 

For a lot of LGBTQIA+ folks, and minorities, and poor people, and people struggling with mental illness or substance abuse, the Church was not a good place to be. Or a kind place to be. Or even a place of refuge and safety. It became... well... sort of like Hell. And therefore, God became the Devil. (Not literally, obviously). And if God is bad... well, the Devil becomes good by default. After all, someone that rebels against cruelty and evil, can’t be purely evil themselves.  

Now, after watching the music video for Montero, I don’t think Lil Nas is saying that the Devil is good (do correct me if I’m wrong though). And I do think a lot of the outcry about the video from American Conservative Christians was because the video features a gay man expressing his sexuality. BUT, I think it is yet another sign that the societal poles are starting to reverse. If the Christian Church continues to harm the people it is supposed to serve, and if it continues to stand in the way of progress, more and more people will consider God to be the evil one. And they might find themselves with some... how best to put it.... well, Sympathy for the Devil. 

(Yes, that was a stupid attempt at a pun. I’ll see myself out.)