#like ugh he's so frustrating

[grimandghoulish]

.

[drowningmoon]

Why are there like no parallels or mentions of Lydia and Aiden in thiam fics where pack acceptance is one of the main themes? Like seriously you're telling me Aiden DIED saying that Lydia never believed that he was one of the good guy and it DOESN'T haunt her? Lydia Martin would actually be one of the first people to accept Theo because this time she's going to believe that someone is a good guy who just made bad choices because she regrets whatever wrong she did with Aiden and it's her attempt to make peace with his death

[3416]

Bruins @ Leafs | 12.02.23

[vultures-and-scavengers]

in this weird place where i do think its plausible cullen has worked through a lot in the 3-4 years between da2 and inquisition but i also think he's 100% not done fixing his shit.

he accuses the mages way too quickly in haven, and then when the templars are throwing their hissy fit (and remember, the inquisition has no idea what's happening) while the mages reach out he still wants to go talk to the templars instead.

he gives the templars the benefit of the doubt, continually, and like. idk, i just wish DAI gave us a moment to hammer down either

we had to save the order from red lyrium and we keep seeing templars refuse to question their orders and refuse to consider their own actions or

the order has glutted itself on poison and power and serves a blighted tevinter magister and not a single deserter from therinfal showed up at our doors. they followed their orders and marched into living death.

i need that confrontation where he has to finally stop giving them the benefit of the doubt. and without him saying, "i was wrong about [specific action]," like, i can't blame people who dislike him. there isn't really a satisfying confrontation in DAI regarding his past. i wish there was, but its kinda been left to fanfic writers at this point, lmao.

[zuzu-draws]

Jjk ending in 5 chapters.... 🥲🥲 I thought...we had more time.... All i wanted was a heian era flashback arc, however small it is, even like 2 or 3 chapters is fine... I don't know how to feel about this....

[honeyvettel]

soooo hard to talk to people about motorsport outside when they clearly don’t— grasp the whole intricacy of it all. like how can i explain that i don’t particularly like pecco but i feel intrigued by his loser self-deprecating personality and the psychosexually implications of his relationships with the other racers? ‘so you like him?’ people ask. for which i have to settle with ‘yeah’. and go on with my day

[oceanwithouthermoon]

saiki is such a fucking loser when it comes to romance (and also in general shh) that no matter who it is hes trying to date, he ALWAYS waits for THEM to confess. he will NEVER be the one to confess first..

i dont think he even CONSIDERS the fact that he could confess first, even though he can read their mind and knows exactly how they feel about him.. he waits and waits for a confession and when he doesnt get it, he gets really frustrated and is like 'i guess they just arent serious about me 😒🙄' BRO YOU HAVENT CONFESSED EITHER ?? YOU HAVE THE CAPABILITIES TO DO IT TOO WHY ARE YOU A HYPOCRITE ??

[pangzi]

can we just talk about how incredible wandee goodday is with their narrative devices though? the foreshadowing is incredible. there's symbolism everywhere. the oyeicher/yakdee juxtapositions are so good. even though their words and actions might contradict each other, everything gets spelled out for us so clearly, it's beautiful.

[solitaireships]

Actually I’m going insane bcs what do you mean that since I let Wyll choose for himself what to do in the future and didn’t want Karlach to die, the ending of the game where I romanced and got engaged to Wyll focuses more on Karlach than it does him. What do you mean that I had double the opportunities to tell others about what I’ve been up to with Karlach than I have with Wyll. I knew the devs did not like Wyll or his fans but good lord. He doesn’t even get an ending to himself with the way things shook out

[pushing500]

I didn't know that the anxiety trait gave colonists panic attacks. Aw, poor Vu. At least Candlelight was there to help calm her down.

Irwin wants everyone in the colony to have a good time, which is all good and well, except that the food we're binging on is only edible by about three colonists. Everyone else is gonna be living off tea and coffee for two days.

We all headed down to the riverside for the feast, which was very eventful and lovely (well, lovely for some people- Candlelight couldn't walk for a few days, but that's what she gets for getting into a fight with someone who is actually capable of melee combat).

Why does nobody want to take the only colonist I actively dislike?? I don't want to deliberately accidentally get him killed, but it's getting to the point where I think it might be my only option...

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[sotc]

It's Friday and some things to note:

1) I sent out a comm update early to enjoy an early start to my weekend yayy!!!

2) received an HOA violation email with a pic of my front door of my empty cat bowls!!!!! EMPTY CAT BOWLS. NOTHING ELSE IN MY YARD. I am taking care of a stray cat you fucking petty heartless bastards. I'm killing you with my mind. You are stepping on Legos for the rest of your life. I wish they knocked on my door instead of being cowards I'd give them a piece of my minddddd mannnnn

to calm down I'm just. Gonna draw some Lucinda and Heinrix being cute. I am so ughhhh

[philosophiums]

there's a conversation happening on tiktok right now about why there has been such a sharp rise in people wanting to watch female-led anime instead of being so focused on shonen and the girl who posted the video listed her reasoning as shonen constantly fucking up "power creep" (her words but i'm pretty sure she meant power scaling).

anyway i'm going to subject you all to my thoughts on this because i refuse to post anything on tiktok. (i'm also putting this under a read more because it got longer than i thought it would SKJDBVKJDBVJ).

now, i don't think complaints of power scaling in shonen is a bad thing, but i also don't think it's actually the problem with shonen (nor do i think it's the reason that there's an increase in interest for female leads bc i think that's literally just people wanting to see more female main characters which is not new or surprising or weird, but that's not the point of this rn).

i think the problem with shonen (most of the time) is the lack of actual story content - like fucking... plots and themes and motifs.

her two examples were mha and jjk because to her they sit on opposite sides of the spectrum in regards to power scaling (in mha the villains are so weak that children can defeat them, and in jjk the villains are so strong that no one can defeat them), so i'm also going to work off of these two examples.

mha's problem is not that the children are the only ones who can fight the big bads, it's that we don't get to see proof that the kids are actually stronger than the adults. sure there's evidence of adults fighting the villains and losing vs the kids fighting the villains and winning, but there's no setup for like a mentor/mentee moment of the mentee finally besting their mentor and us the audience getting to see that they're finally stronger. in fact it's... typically the opposite.

mha shows us multiple times that even the strongest characters in the main cast of kids are not stronger than, say, kids who are two years older than them or their teachers, let alone the best and strongest professional heroes in the verse. and that's not a power scaling issue, that's a storytelling issue. because you can set up stories where kids are stronger than the adults in their verse, and you can write it in a way that makes sense, but mha does not do that.

and of course mha has multiple other storytelling problems, not the least of them being the fact that it set itself up to be one of those "if you believe in yourself and try hard enough you can do anything" stories only to immediately undermine itself by giving the mc the most powerful ability in the verse free of charge, making the entire opening sequence have zero emotional payoff (a problem that continues on and on forever in the anime/manga).

jjk, on the other hand, set itself up to be a story about cycles, about the past repeating itself, about the inevitability of curses and hardship and never learning from past mistakes, but all of that was completely abandoned somewhere in the middle of the shibuya arc and was never touched on again.

all of the main characters in jjk have direct mirrors within the main cast - yuji & geto, fushiguro & gojo, nobara & shoko, maki & toji, nanami & mei mei, the list goes on - and it had the perfect opportunity to either be a story about the inevitability of trauma cycles OR a story about breaking those cycles, but instead half the cast is now dead and it's become a manga that's just about cool-looking fights.

the problem with jjk is not that the villains are too strong/unbeatable (i actually think there could have been merit to making jjk a story where the villains win, but that would have required focusing on the theme of cycles which, again, has unfortunately been lost) - it's just that there's no fucking plot anymore. there's no meat. there's no point. even if the goal of jjk from the beginning was to subvert a lot of typical shonen tropes, it's so so hard to care about that anymore because there's no reason. the plot is gone, the themes have vanished, the emotion is no longer in the room with us, and it has absolutely nothing to do with (im)balances of power within the verse.

but of course this is not a new problem in shonen. it's so incredibly rare for shonen to have a good story that maintains from start to finish in a satisfying arc, and that's almost a staple of the genre now - training arcs and a war arcs and lots of fighting and very little actual substance. the ones that do have it are gold mines. but again, this is not a new problem and it's not a new conversation, and i don't think it's the heart of why that girl posted that video or why all those people agree with her.

i truly think the actual reason this conversation is happening is because there's a new set of people who have recently turned twenty-something and are realizing that they don't identify with shonen protagonists anymore because they're no longer teenagers. and i think those people are upset that the characters/stories aren't aging with them and are finally looking at all the shows they like and are realizing that they're constructed around a trope of, essentially, child soldiers fighting battles that the adults in their verses cannot. and these people are realizing that they maybe don't like that anymore.

because when you're a teenager, shonen is escapism or a power fantasy or both. it's more relatable because it's made for that age group. but when you're an adult you start going "hey... where are these kids' parents?" because you realize that it's unfair and unreasonable in real life to put so much pressure on literal children. (i always think of that post that went around tumblr a few years ago that was a gif of this character in a tv show saying something like "i'm 13. i'm practically an adult." - bc when you're a 10 year old watching that, you go Yeah That's Right She's So Old, but when you're 30 watching that, you're just internally groaning because you have been a full legal adult for this child's entire life and they're barely older than a baby to you).

but of course shonen (and YA lit and superhero cartoons/comics and the list goes on) is not meant to be "realistic."

but just because it's not crafted as realism doesn't mean it shouldn't have story elements or themes that can reflect reality and/or be applied to real life. it also doesn't mean it can't have a fucking plot SKJDBVJKDVB

[thebitchbehindtheslaughter]

Day 2,569,364 of being called evil for liking Dottore, and having my favourite character be slandered because some are too big of pussies to just say “I don’t like the character” like normal people

[todayisafridaynight]

tbh I really wanted the 3jimas to win that fight, to have Kiryu realize that his actions have consequences and that maaayybeee the people he keeps disappearing on to only reappear briefly to make demands of are finally sick of it and the rose tinted glasses of admiration have come off

no absolutely i really needed kiryu to just. //shakes him//

another thing i really wish we got from IW was daigo going off on kiryu- like he STARTED to but i needed that Y4 shit RIGHT NOW. if Y4 did anything right, it definitely helped broaden daigo's character in how having the chairman title pushed onto him was stressing him out and having him express this to kiryu was SO cathartic, even if daigo's words ultimately mean nothing to kiryu (or at the very least, kiryu did a bad job on understanding daigo's grievances and helping him afterwards)

it really is agitating that the jimas ended up going to the tower anyway too. i get that saejima and majima are kiryu's ex-colleagues and daigo's practically his son, and the fight was supposed to be a 'wake up call' for them. but it just diminishes the anger we saw from daigo in that first scene (and as if i have to say it, daigo becoming angry is a rare thing so that when it does happen its so jarring and it's meant to be serious) and it continues to excuse kiryu's general disregard for others if it means he gets what he wants.

its unfathomable to me that after nearly two decades of holding a position daigo didnt want for the sake of his idol, he finally gets to break away from it. and now his idol's just waltzing back into his life- after acting like he was dead for three years- asking for ANOTHER favor. and daigo's just supposed to accept it. if kiryu wasnt literally dying i just know he'd keep doing this until his last breath and no one would punish him for it because despite how many times he claims to understand daigo's woes, it's evident he doesn't care enough to leave him out of things

[waitingfortheloginwalltobedown]

I don't think I've seen a character in any piece of media as infantilized as hunter is

[sillypinkboy]

So normal about vic's identity issues.