#mac rambles

[macabrity]

all I want for Christmas is… a very special radish

[sam-winchesters-gay-lover]

in general i think sam is gayer than dean unless it’s incestuous in which case dean is far gayer

[shattersstar]

love the idea of jason and the came back wrong trope but more like. i came back Perfectly Wrong. everyone around him thinks he came back wrong and is falling apart at the seams but he’s like no <3 this is perfect, this is how i’m Supposed to be like i Feel right in the wrongness. for all his acquired strength is a certain level of strangeness he feels comfortable—home in. he believes he didn’t come back wrong bc jason never felt right before he died

[island-ofthelost]

Just measured myself today and I'm 5 motherfucking foot 7 with shoes on. Take that doctors who said I'd be short go fuck yourselves in the asshole till it rips.

[chronicspliffeater]

i think we should start making jerma985 dress up as peter white

[oh-surprise-its-me]

Me in a Walmart checking out these two at the same time

[anewgayeveryday]

whatever undiagnosed beast runs my motivation and attention span has decided that I should go back and format all of my old posts to the new format and organised tagging system I have now.

I have had this blog for just over 5 years. I was thinking of redoing some of the posts anyway to get more eyes on them. But no, we're doing this at 00:40am ✌

[macs-doodles]

it is 11 PM anxiety time.

related to. something ive drawn. (i fear that i transed another character's gender. i made he a she).

1 like and i'll post the art lol

[macatt4c]

No one asked, but my favorite dragon age game is dragon age 2.

I like how patchwork and simple is comes off as compared to origins and inquisition.

I like that you’re stuck only in Kirkwall and the mountains surrounding it.

I like that your only choice in friends/lovers are all these misfits with their own trauma and baggage that you literally just pick up off the streets.

But also, I like dragon age 2 bc it’s the single game with a hot default design for the player character that makes me not want to customize them into oblivion.

Santa (or God) if you’re listening I want Garrett Hawke for Christmas, please and thank you!

[depizan]

Nothing in fiction makes for nice, tidy, clear cut categories. Concepts bleed into one another and there's no escaping the subjectivity of it all.

As my recent post about [fantasy series that will not be named] said, I don't like special protagonists. I especially don't like Chosen Ones, but a character can be more low-key special and I'm still just whyyyyyy. But there are characters who are special, or special adjacent, or special depending on how you define it, that I do like. And I don't know where the boundary between arguably special character and ugh special character even falls.

Even if we set aside weird anomaly characters like James Bond (How is he not special, being special is absolutely his thing. Is it that he's special in a way I can't quite take seriously? Despite also kind of working as a wish fulfillment character? I mean, who doesn't want to be amazeballs at everything? Besides me, when I'm not watching a James Bond movie.), I have trouble putting that line into any kind of words.

Take MacGyver (original flavor. I have not and will not watch the remake. WTF) for instance. Is he special? You could argue either way. His ability to pull sciencey solutions out of thin air is pretty extreme. But he doesn't feel special, at least not to me. Maybe that's because he's really pretty ordinary in every other way - just kind of an average dude who happens to be absurdly good at applying things he learned in his college science classes. Maybe it's because it feels like anybody could be MacGyver. Take a few science classes and practice thinking outside the box and there you go. You, too, can pull wacky science solutions out of thin air.

What about other woman warrior with a magic sword, Kerowyn? She could be argued to be special. She's got a little bit of the pervasive Valdemar books magic nonsense, and there is that whole magic sword thing. But Need's magic barely comes up, and mostly she's just an ordinary woman who becomes a mercenary. She's very good at what she does, but it all feels very in-universe attainable rather than special. Still, if someone said she was special, I'd have a hard time arguing why she isn't, other than ~~vibes~~.

Hell, there are characters where one version of them is special and another version isn't. I like classic Doctor Who, despite its many flaws and a special effects budget that seems to have been what loose change the crew could find in their collective sofas. The Doctor of that era of Doctor Who doesn't feel special. He's just a dude who can't resist sticking his nose in other people's problems. He just happens to be a dude who comes from a place where they have time/space ships. But I've just never warmed to nu!Who because now the Doctor is special. And, like, I can't even argue with why they decided to make him special. I just don't like it. I don't care how much it makes sense that all his meddling would eventually get him a reputation. I want my random dude with a police box back.

(And, again, I can see how people could argue that the Doctor has always been special. And I'm not sure what my counter argument is, besides ~~vibes~~.)

There's just something that grounds the characters I like and keeps them from feeling special (to me). And I don't know what that thing is, because everything I try to plug in there either should push some of the not-special characters into special or says something too extreme about the special characters. It's not about whether they have powers or whether they're good at their job or whether they're fallible or any of that. It's...

It's how the world and the narrative interact with them.

Yeah, people notice MacGyver's skills and make use of them, but for the most part, he is just a guy. He can't show up and introduce himself and have the bad guy go "oh no."

A few of the enemies on classic Doctor Who have beef with the Doctor specifically (mostly Davros and the Daleks) but that's never helpful. And the vast majority of the universe is just like "who the fuck is this weirdo and why did he offer me a jelly baby or pull out his recorder in the middle of a tense situation (or whatever)".

Yeah, there's an in-universe song about Kerowyn's first act of heroism, but it doesn't really have any effect on her life. She's just a dude. A dude who happens to be a skilled mercenary, but just a dude, none-the-less.

It even explains why Luke Skywalker inhabits this weird place between just a dude and special. Obi-Wan and Yoda keep saying he's special, but the rebels think he's just a dude. And the narrative can't make up its mind.

But as soon as a character is chosen by a god/dess or so famous that their very name can be used to make enemies go away or people act on them being the Chosen One,* or everyone knows that they're the best of the best, or... it still kind of ends up sounding like I'm saying that special characters are Mary Sues, but that's not really what I mean. They can be if it all goes too far or the universe starts turning into a pretzel around them, but there's this whole space long before that where characters are just better than normal people in some kind of way that I find off-putting and other people are on like catnip.

It's the difference between vanilla SWTOR and the expansions. At least for the non-Force Using classes. (It's more complicated with the Force Using classes.) The player character is really good. Characters may know who they are. They do some impressive things. But they are still, largely, just a person. (And you can play into that more or less. The player has a bit of agency over how much their character is special and how much they're just doing their best.)

But in the expansions, more specifically the KOFEETS, suddenly the player character is important, and important for reasons than have nothing to do with who they are as a person. (FFXIV and Guild Wars 2, as the game goes on, do this also. And I hate it. I just want to be a dude. I don't want to be the Chosen One. Please, just let me be a dude!)

Everyone is just like "you're special" and things happen that prove you're special and nothing will let you stop being special and dear god it's exactly why I hate all the specialness. Please stop making me relive being supposedly "gifted" in school. This is not my idea of a good time.

Okay, that's drifted into complaining specifically about Chosen Ones. That's specialness plus dehumanization and that horrible crushing sense of needing to kill yourself (literally or figuratively) in order to meet the bare standard of good person. Except it's not a sense, the narrative literally agrees with it. God I hate Chosen One stories.

Hem. Anyway, the circle of special doesn't just contain that. Doctor Who isn't a chosen one, but the reboot kind of made him a demigod. There's this unattainablely beyond the ordinary aspect to special characters. They're not just good, they're the best. They're more than. And, on the one hand, I get it. It's a power fantasy. But on the other hand, I really don't. I like my characters to feel attainablely good.

And that's about half me not being inspired by the unattainable. And half me hearing Spider-Man say "with great power comes great responsibility" and going "cool, don't want great power then."

*I had to specify acting on it, because Anakin is the Chosen One, but no one really acts on that. It's kind of just angst icing on what actually happens. You could delete the references to his being the Chosen One and nothing would change. I'm not saying he's exactly just a dude, but he falls more into the same category as Luke where some aspects of the narrative and some people treat him as special and others don't.

[macabrity]

so funny that saiyans are were-kaiju. carefully blindfolding Raditz on the full moon so he doesn’t transform accidentally and wreck our house.

[sam-winchesters-gay-lover]

half way through season 3 and really not comprehending how destiel could ever begin to compare to whatever the fuck sam and dean have going on

[shattersstar]

meier link, fallen.

unmade - thom yorke // vampire hunter d: bloodlust - yoshiaki kawajiri // persephone - tamino // i, carrion (icarion) - hozier // the fallen angel - alexandre cabanel // meier link art - mindy lee

[island-ofthelost]

How to indicate to my peers that I use the gender neutral restroom, not because I am a gay fag, but because of drugs and sex and weed as well.

[chronicspliffeater]

debating whether or not i want to post my henchman 21 doodles hrrrrrrrrrrmmmmmmm ….

[tinygarbage]

listening to creep at 5 am before work has to be unhealthy