#love yourself theory

[mossy-aro]

ultimately i think my insistence on aro positivity honestly is as much a political stance as a personal one.

when i say aro positivity is crucial and that i dislike doomer-ist posts that express sentiments like 'I hate being aro so much I wish I was dead instead’ it's not because I don’t think there can and should be a space for negativity and acknowledging self-hate, or the many ways being aromantic can really suck sometimes. i find that to be very important!

that being said. there is smth here about how self-hate posts are sometimes just arophobia that we inflict on ourselves. and when we put that out into the ether it (intentionally or not) can become arophobia that we inflict on other members of the community. i think there absolutely needs to be a place for negativity and the expression of anger and frustration and self loathing even - these are all good things to talk about because these are things that we experience. that being said, it can also be genuinely upsetting and triggering to people to have what is essentially arophobia shown to them and then have that be validated by other aspec people. your personal thoughts can affect your wider community on a level you may not anticipate. and i understand it i truly do! it took me so long to be able to recover from accepting being aroace - it threw my entire world off kilter and made me question everything about my place in the world.

but my insistence on aro joy and positivity is because ultimately i do believe that building is at the core essence of it all. that ultimately discussions and the purpose of community should be about construction, not destruction. and this is both a personal and a political stance. talking about how much you hate yourself and cultivating online discussions/spaces where negativity about aspec identity is the main and only theme is destructive - if that’s where we let the conversation end. these thoughts can and should be used as a vehicle to look for a path forward!

joy and positivity create a space where the focus can become on forging a path forward, on construction, on community building instead of tearing ourselves and others down with negative thoughts. it’s not productive or healthy when it stops at a place of negativity - it becomes actively destructive to the essence of community.

and i do think that this is especially poignant considering the fact that being any kind of queer, but especially aromantic (and/or asexual) means forging a path for yourself and making your own happiness where there is no obvious way forward. our communities exist mostly online (right now, anyway), there is little recognition of our existence in the real world, the effects of amatonormativity are both pervasive and actively dehumanising, and there are legal, economic and social structures in place actively making our lives more difficult. yes that all sucks! it’s good to acknowledge that. we need to in order to change it. but more importantly, that’s not the end. we are still here and our happiness, our future is for us to determine. even if we can’t change the laws or society, loving yourself and understanding aromanticism as a political identity (as well as personal), as a radical worldview, and as a protest against amatonormativity is essential for both community and personal well being. the personal is political.

tldr. i guess my point is that as a community, we should focus on building, improving, and nurturing ourselves and each other (construction) as opposed to destruction. we should recognise aromanticism and asexuality as political identities as well as personal ones and rely on community and self-love in the absence of anything else as a form of protest and political power. destruction (the recognition of everything that is wrong) is essential as a starting point - but where do we go from there? we rebuild.

[simonsezsewart]

My last two brain cells <3

(Timelapse + alt versions below)

Song: Long Long Long Journey - Bill Wurtz

Bruh I struggled for over two hours on WW’s sketch, meanwhile the entire Vash drawing took two hours total… whoops 💀

But hey! Look at all the colors in their hair! It’s like little rainbows… ;w;

(Sketches so yall can see what I’m talking about in the tags 💀)

[unnonexistence]

hermann thoughts: if i discredit newton and his approach enough, the martial won't give him the equipment for his kaiju drift, and i can protect him from himself. if he despises me for it, so be it. there is little i wouldn't sacrifice to see him safe.

newt thoughts: this is a Best Science competition and i have to Win

[alilarew23]

this is soooo loa-ditch-the-old-self-coded. i fucking love the phrase “tipped over in the middle of invention.” be brave enough to persist in your invention.

[timetomarvel]

Theory time!

I dove head first back into the Kingdom Hearts rabbit hole. And right now, I am convinced Sora is the next life of the Player character from KHUX.

(I am not sure if a post like this exists already but hear me out!)

So first of all: it is canon, that hearts can decide to be reborn. And we know, that the Player at least has a second life.

In the end They become Xehanorts caregiver and die on Destiny Islands of all places.

But that is not all. In one of the (to me) most exciting sequences of KH3, Sora is being saved by the fallen Keyblade wielders from KHUX on the Keyblade Graveyard.

Those "lights from the past" how Ventus puts it later, are lead by Ephemer.

As great and exciting as it is to see Ephemer again.. why is he there? He didn't fall in this war, nor did he become a dream eater (as far as we know). So how is it possible for Sora to have a connection to Ephemer, strong enough to give him a face and a voice in this vision?

But even though Ephemer didn't die that day, like the others that help Sora in this battle, he was still there in the end. Surrounded by a blinding white light, saving Player.

I just love this! Especially since Union Cross is a lot about how the mind might forget but the heart remembers. So Sora's heart reaching back several lifes, tracing the connection to the person who saved him in this exact same place before.. it would be beautiful.

Oh and something else I stumbled across yesterday.

Lauriam asks Player to keep his sister in their heart. But that promise has no point or consequences. The player never meets Strelitzia if I remember correctly.

But guess who finds her in a different reality 👀😄

[that-girl-glader]

BACK IN MY WRITERS ERA JWCT/JWCC FANDOM COME FEAST!!!!

All you can eat Darius-centric angst buffet. Dw, it will have a good ending!!! Eventually. Ben and Darius will end up together eventually, but not after oodles of angst and hardships!!! This is the first chapter btw!!!!!! So excited to be creating this!!!

[sengoku-nadeko]

[flaticeball]

"mark stone, who loves hockey more than life itself and could not be kept out of it if he were capable of so much as walking up a flight of stairs short of handcuffing him to a radiator, is complicit in a years-running conspiracy to... use the cap rules as written in a completely legal way that multiple other teams have done constantly year after year, including being willing to simply miss months of games in the regular season despite his team sometimes being in a highly competitive playoff race that might see them miss the playoffs entirely. this is what i believe, because vegas is evil and everyone on it is a moustache twirling disney villain who is constantly scheming against the rest of the poor innocent league who never times things in a convenient way with the cap and playoffs and is being pushed around by the big bad evil gold team." please be so fr lmao

anyways, fuck yeah vegas w, i love you forever mark stone.

[ihhfhonao3]

Look, I love a good media theory as much as the next guy, but so many of them, especially theories for kids shows, are lowkey ableist.

“Dark things you never knew about Fairly OddParents! Number one: Timmy is schizophrenic!”

“Dark fact: Owl from Winnie the Pooh has NPD!!”

“Scary theory says that Sandy from SpongeBob has Borderline Personality Disorder!”

Like I’m sorry if you maybe overlooked the implications of what you were saying, but are you implying that disorders, disabilities and divergences are “scary” and “dark?” Because I’m not sure that’s a hill you want to die on.

[cryptidm0ths]

Vvvvvv messy doodles of magical girl au

[hayaku14]

kuroba toichi you need to stay dead or im going to fucking kill you myself

[enixamyram]

I'm sure this is a very unpopular opinion but I don't think Rue's death is necessarily the big breaker that I've seen some people say. If you think it is, that's totally fine, this is just my opinion. But I have seen a few people talking about it and it doesn't bug me or anything, I just strongly disagree.

I say this only for one reason really. And that being that Rue's death, while horrendous and tragic, is nothing new in the games. It's not nice, but nor is it uncommon for a 12 year old child to be picked and even her death itself wasn't especially bloody compared to others.

Her death was definitely one of the saddest and most tragic in terms of an innocent child being killed and I adore the scene in the films where they showed District 11 react violently in retaliation. But at the same time, I never saw that as their reaction to Rue's death. I always saw it as their reaction to Katniss reaction of Rue's death. Seeing another tribute from another District no less show such care, compassion and respect, even love, decorating Rue in flowers and doing what is considered a treasonous act towards the Capitol... I think that kindess allowed them to react to the rage that had been growing every time they saw one of their own sent to die in the games.

[onlyrainbowshipstbh]

Earth!

Source: Earth’s Insta

[friend-dogor]

actually wait in relation to the last post about ghibli and how it is aestheticized into bland and toothless images of comfort, it's got me thinking abt Ursula K Le Guin again

The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe a happy man, nor make any celebration of joy.

(from The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, 1973, top of pg.2)

i think that the original post is guilty of this to a degree, seeking to refute the idiocy and simplicity of focusing on the "happy" themes of ghibli movies my instead shifting attention to the horrors and pains contained within the text—those which could be seen as intellectual, needing perhaps a more sophisticated understanding of environmentalism and geopolitics.

but, furthermore, i think i'm guilty of it even in trying to defend miyazaki's often returning narrative commitment to hope and environmentalism and anti-war sentiment and kindness—after the last tag, i wanted to add something about "i know that putting kindness above pursuit of power feels like a baby theme for babies" because it Does, to me. "be kind" is, like, the first and simplest rule most of us are taught as children, be kind, don't hit your brother, be kind, share, be kind.

i don't refer to this as one of his more challenging themes, of course, because why should i? we all know to be kind. of course, i refer only to topics of war and environmentalism and grief as challenging. kindness is simple!

(nevermind that one of the biggest challenges for myself and a lot of people i know is how to stop being cruel to oneself after decades of practice and learned examples and instead to learn to be kind and forgiving with one's own mistakes and failures and perceived flaws)

and i wonder two things: 1) is it possible that the self-aestheticization of miyazaki's movies (for example, the rapturous visual attention paid to food, the attention paid to soft chairs, pillows, small and pleasantly cluttered environments, with plenty of natural light, lush plantlife and endearing creatures) contribute to miyazaki's more "challenging" messages, and if so, that there's a degree of success in people remembering the thick-cut bacon and eggs on toast from Howl's Moving Castle before they think of Sophie Hatter's town on fire because of the king's war? Has Hayao Miyazaki succeeded in making war and destruction at once horrifying and banal, but a simple good breakfast fascinating and compelling? ——not to say that people who simplify the movie to Only the aesthetics are right. they still aren't. they exist in dialogue with the destruction and it's ridiculous to sever the two. but is it possible that the majority of people thinking first of the "cozy" elements of Studio Ghibli's work is not nonintellectual and reductive, but rather contributes to a larger point of attention?

2) i ought to find other examples of media which do not treat "happy" themes or "light" themes—(i struggle even to talk about the category i mean without dismissing it entirely as Simple, or mischaracterizing it. i mean things like kindness over power and compassion over fear, things like that) which do not treat the themes as childish or nonintellectual, but also do so without fetishizing violence and suffering as Special and More Deserving of Thought than Simple and Stupid Good Feelings so that i can kind of investigate this concept a little more

[jennegatron]

that MOMENT when theobald's trust and confidence in amethar is totally shaken and destroyed because of the rocks family withholding information. when he decides he chooses magic over the crown, because that was his real first love. it wasn't lazuli or the country of candia, it was magic he fell in love with. it was lazuli's vision for candia that he loved. that's that good shit. that's that shit that i loooooove. delicious juicy painful character growth. the shedding and actualization of 30+ hours of role play. the stepping into who Theobald truly is and always has been. that's that good shit. that's that shit i like.

[yeonslayjun]

GUOSHI IS THAT PRINCE FROM THAT KINGDOM AND WHEN HE SAW THAT DREAM WHERE HIS PEOPLE DIED HE DESCENDED AND TRIED TO MAKE THINGS RIGHT BUT FAILED TO DO SO MAYBE THAT'S WHY HIS GUOSHI BACK THEN WAS SO ANNOYING AND HE REACTED WEIRDLY AND HOW HE SAID EVERYTHING WAS XIE LIAN'S FAULT BECUSE HE WAS PROJECTING HIMSELF TO XIELIAN IT ALL MAKES SENSE

I HAVE CONNECTED THE DOTS

i think?