#man fuck ever specifically

[astracora]

Man EVER really cut corners on Caleb's rebuild because like... even modern day prosthetics have sensory capabilities to help with relearning the use of your limb again and preventing phantom pains.

EVER really said specifically, I know it's the super future with magic and high technological advancements... but fuck you Caleb, not a single bit of sensory input from your prosthetic, except for pain.

Edit: actually I am thinking about it more and if it's not just PG not knowing how prosthesis work. Then EVER basically built something that Caleb cannot receive sensory feedback through, so he's essentially just. Able to use it through the brain sensors or muscle nerve endings, but is fully incapable or receiving feedback. Which means.

They've handed him a sword, to make it easier to destroy or kill or harm, with no acknowledgement for the humanity of it.

In reality he'd probably struggle to cook without a HUGE learning curve of having to WATCH for what his arm is doing, to relearn how much pressure to input.

Killing becomes easy, harm becomes easy, becoming readjusted to his LIFE? That becomes far harder. EVER gave this man the realignment of his life, because they wanted a weapon not a person.

[thetrinitytest]

[variksel]

"blake lively is nordic and his favourite food is potato and his second favourite is sulströmming" EVERYBODY SAY THANK YOU FREDDIE WONG!!!!!

[discordghost]

gem is crazy good at this thing where when a build is in process you look at and it's like eh it's alright then she puts on the finishing touches and BAM most gorgeous thing you've ever seen

[good-to-drive]

Abuse, Silence, And Why Kevin Can Fuck Himself

I recently finished watching Kevin Can Fuck Himself on Netflix, and, aside from being the most brutally honest portrayal of domestic abuse I have ever seen, I discovered a beautifully written examination of narrative as power and silence as abuse and how this manifests in our larger culture. 

Without going into too much detail, the show is filmed in two distinct styles that are interleaved throughout each episode to tell a cohesive story. Allison and Kevin’s relationship as seen by the rest of the world is told through a multi-cam, laugh-track sitcom that depicts a very typical “goofy husband, shrewish wife” mainstream comedy. Allison’s life through her own eyes is told through a single-cam drama/thriller about Allison planning to murder Kevin to escape his abuse. 

It’s an absolute masterclass in screenwriting, but more than that, every episode explores the difference between truth, fact, and reality, and how none of these things are quite as much or as little as story. But while the process of transforming the chaotic and plotless reality of life into a story is as involuntary and essential as breathing, misogyny and the degradation of women is just as ubiquitous in our society, and a story that exists at the expense of another person’s lived reality is a refutation of their humanity. 

It's also just a great show for anyone who likes to engage with history (or reality TV or true crime or “real life stories” in general), because while we have to tell ourselves stories about her own lives, we have to tell ourselves stories about other people as well. Eternal silence is narrative death, and the perpetual silence of an unspoken narrative is often the last death we can visit on someone whose story we’d rather ignore. 

I also pulled up some books – Lolita and Disgrace – that dealt with similar themes, but from the perspective of the abuser. And what strikes me the most is that, across three beautifully written stories about narrative and silence within a culture that normalizes abuse, Allison, who began her story within a state of narrative death, was the only point-of-view character who had any chance of surviving. 

One of the main themes of Kevin is that a compelling story is often a story that reinforces what we already believe or like to believe, and while the story may be factual and true it often also exists at the expense of someone's lived reality. The exact same series of events can be a silly joke or a harrowing tale of abuse depending on the lens through which we view it, but historically we've only been willing to see the multicam, laugh track, sitcom perspective on unbalanced relationships.

The alchemical process of turning a series of disjoint facts and experiences into a narrative creates something new and compelling, and erases much of what previously existed. In this way, it’s entirely irreversible. We spin our experiences into a very thin thread, a story we can tell ourselves that elicits something within us, something we need in order to live with the complex, uncertain, and unsatisfying reality of life. In think in many ways the thing we elicit in ourselves is truth. But truth is both more and less than fact, often more a reflection of our own beliefs and desires than the events of our lives. And in telling that truth we may never stray from the facts, but we almost by definition cannot give voice to another person’s reality.

There's a scene in season 2 of Kevin when Allison is hit by a door – a la the classic excuse – because of Kevin’s carelessness. And while he absolutely did not hit her, the way it's written is such an incredible allegory for how Kevin has curated their story and curated their friends' and family’s perceptions of their story such that even if she tells everyone the exact, unvarnished truth of what's happening to her and begs for help, they will only be capable of seeing the laugh-track, sitcom, “Kevin is a harmless goofball and his wife is a total shrew” perspective on the events of their lives. 

As so often happens with abuse, their friends and family saw Allison being hurt because of Kevin. But the alchemy of creating a narrative around Kevin and Allison is irreversible, and the series of events they witness can only be spun together to a joke, an accident, a silly, childish mistake. Allison’s reality, Allison’s pain and fear, is completely elided. Like a lost sound in the middle of a sentence, her experience goes silent, and their larger understanding of her relationship never has to change. And you feel so acutely how Allison lives her entire life in that silence. 

Storytelling is human, it’s essential, there’s no other way to engage with our own lives. And it’s not lying. It’s never lying to tell the truth. But it doesn’t reflect every reality, either, because another person’s reality can’t be reflected within our own narrative, because that’s what it means to be another person. To spin two different threads.

And because narrative is the essential process by which we understand our reality, denying someone their own narrative, or denying that this narrative be heard, is inherently abusive. To allow someone a voice is to give them humanity, and to suppress it is to strip that humanity away. 

Disgrace, by J.M. Coetzee, follows the story of a professor, David, who rapes a student and then fails to protect his daughter, Lucy, from being raped by intruders in their home. He destroys his daughter’s life  – not through failing to protect her, but through twisting her rape into a story about why the rape of his student wasn’t wrong. The main theme of the book is generally considered to be exploitation, but Coetzee doesn’t deal with the exploitation of the rape. That’s too direct, too immediate, too easy for the reader to understand as misogynistic and wrong. Rather, Coetzee delves into “the innocuous-seeming use of another person to fill one's gentler emotional needs” (Ruden).

The rape is how we understand David as a fundamentally exploitative person, a person who denies others their humanity by converting them into a vessel for his own desires, who erases their voice in order to speak through them and give himself the things he needs. And that’s how we recognize that the way he absorbs and claims the stories of his daughter and his student is another kind of violation of their humanity. Another way of turning women into vessels for men’s pain and fear and need. 

What’s fascinating is that David's student finds her voice – files a complaint against him – and is eventually able to continue with her life. The woman he raped is less damaged by him than his own daughter, because she was the woman he couldn’t permanently silence. 

In Lolita, another brilliant novel about abuse, dehumanization, and storytelling, Humbert turns to the reader at the end and says, “Imagine us, reader, for we don’t really exist if you don’t.” 

It’s not that Humbert knew he was fictional, but that he knew everyone was fictional. Believed the entire world only truly existed in his own mind, because anything beyond that was irrelevant to his needs. He coped with the collapse of his ability to dehumanize Dolores (who he called Lolita) by demanding that his voice be resurrected. Demanding immortality. Demanding his narrative exist in another person’s world, and thereby be given the existence and humanity that Allison and Dolores and Lucy and David’s student were denied. 

Pushing his needs, finally, onto the reader, because we are the only person he has left, and a person like him can only exist through the use of another. In that way, Humbert was powerless. In that way, Kevin and David were powerless, too.

In Disgrace, David’s dream is to write an opera, and at the end of the book he realizes he’ll never finish his magnum opus. He’ll never be able to terminate the process of converting himself, his world, into a story. But he does learn to decenter himself in that narrative. And it’s when he loses all fear of death, and any conception of the self, that he gains the ability to give dogs – who he generally equates to women – a voice within his opera, his life’s work. 

It’s in death that we discover our true unimportance as human beings, that we learn to let go of vanity and our conception of the self entirely. And David had degraded women so thoroughly in order to justify how he used them to meet his own emotional needs that it was only in losing all value for his own life that he could gain the ability to see them as equal voices. To actually put those voices into his own life story. It's at the cost of himself that he allows other people to truly exist, in the death of the self that he finally allows the world to exist outside of himself. It’s almost a positive character arc. Almost.

When Kevin finally loses the ability to abuse Allison, he, like many abusers, loses all desire to live. His world was built on a structure of superiority and inferiority, on beings and vessels, on the inherent value of men and the inherent meaninglessness of women’s lives. The system on which he based his entire reality has been destroyed by Allison’s declaration of the self. And, if he was a being because she was a vessel, then in losing the ability to treat her as a vessel, to fully and completely dehumanize her, he has lost his own humanity. 

It may be perfectly summed up here: “Become major. Live like a hero. That's what the classics teach us. Be a main character. Otherwise, what is life for?” (Coetzee).

If you’re not to be a main character, if there indeed is no split between major and minor characters, between people and the paper dolls that populate their story, between living beings and the vessels into which they pour their need – what is life for?

Nothing. At least, not for people whose narrative must exist at the expense of another. 

And that’s why I say that only a narrator like Allison could survive this kind of story. Despite beginning her story trapped in eternal silence, her reality fully elided no matter how immediate and obvious it became, Allison was the only point-of-view character of any of these three stories who didn’t establish her power through the degradation of another. Who didn’t conceptualize the world via being and vessels. Whose narrative didn’t exist, by necessity, at the expense of another person’s humanity. Whose thread could exist in a larger tapestry without destroying her sense of self.

Don’t get me wrong, she’s not generally a likable character. She’s misogynistic, cruel, selfish, jealous, desperate, afraid, and in pain. Like anyone in an abusive relationship, she’s not at her best, and she’s often pushed to do things that are ugly and disturbing because she’s simply been pushed too far. 

But, for me, the power in her character is in how her last scene never felt like a final scene. Her story didn’t have to be killed, her conception of the self didn’t have to be killed, in order to reveal the brutal reality of stories twisting and intertwining without any inherently superior truth or narrative among them. Allison’s story was one of declaring herself. And that’s why it didn’t feel like it ended at the end. Instead, this felt like a beginning.

[wellijustfinnihedoneofthebooks]

I understand why everyones so mad about five x lila (i dont like it either) BUT i do think the setup of it (lost in time with no one else to rely on, protecting eachother, ect) would probably make five fall in love with just about anyone. Just like, this is kind of what he always imagined having with deloras. So i dont fully agree with the wide consensus that its out of character for him to fuck his brothers wife (in this specific scenario)

That being said, he absolutely wouldnt give up on his family over it.

[oneminutefiftysixseconds]

[wu-wakfu-undertale]

Re-watching wakfu for the first time in years and s1 Yugo was so silly???

dude discovered he could make portals at will and his first thought after actually acknowledging it is "i can do so many cool pranks with this"

[bananonbinary]

the transandrophobia discourse is fucking stupid and bigoted and the same old exclusionary hat we've seen over and over again

but what really gets me about it is how STUPID it is?? i mean, no, i haven't experienced EXACTLY what any other trans person has experienced, but the idea that trans men and women don't have BASICALLY the same experiences is insane. the differences between me and a trans woman are imo about the same as, say, a non-op and a post-op trans person. or a trans person deep in a red state and a trans person that lives in new york. honestly i think either of those differences actually matters MORE for shared experiences. i've spoken to lots of trans people of various gender configurations and SOMEHOW we all know wtf is going on with the others.

also im not going to argue about this if you think trans men are significantly privileged then just block me now man. and also get off the internet and interact with real society, which hates all of us pretty equally.

[kayvsworld]

LIVES WERE CHANGED

[monkesupreme]

Love this body type post SOOOO much. Thinking of this rudeass that tried to fight me how inaccurate bruces height and weight was (6’5/250lbs) in the replies of my OWN post, and how he needed MORE weight to be considered a brick house (bc they themselves were 220 and 6’2 and in their words ‘had a little bit of muscle’), then immediately ignored their own statement and got upset when i mentioned i wanted jason to be slightly taller and 40 lbs heavier. Suddenly thats TOO fat and im stupid. Fucking moron.

[vulpinesaint]

the movie censored her. they wouldn't let her speak. they took away her origins and her agency... because they hate women...

[vasito-de-leche]

transwoman Druvis and gay Forget Me Not ruins my life and makes my head bang the walls (lovingly)

RIGHT???? RIGHTTTTTTTT??????? I love that ship so much when there's always something irreconcilable between them and when they're extremely divorced

[vivitalks]

more adhd jason grace or die by my sword

[mokeonn]

yeah tell us about sean the ugly baby

okay so,

back in february I got bored and wanted to draw a character of mine from an rp group, but I didn't have any ideas. So I simply put him into the sims and drew what happened and posted it to the group. I chose Sims 2 for the variety, and went in. Making a 2000's version of my oc, Frankie, to do silly things for me to draw and my friends to giggle at:

And it was silly and fun! But during this, he ended up getting abducted by aliens, which was absolutely hilarious at the time.

However, in the sims series, there's an odd little thing that happens. Male sims that were abducted by aliens have a chance to come back pregnant. Well in the Sims 2: male sims were guaranteed to come back pregnant, only in later expansions did they introduce the possibility of it not happening.

So he got pregnant. whatever, just a bunch of mpreg jokes. Right? Well it turns out there's a small chance that Alien babies end up with their human parent's eyes! Which wouldn't be so bad with the base eyes, but I happen to use custom content.

So I was expecting this:

and I got this:

which was SO HORRIFYING and not what I was expecting. It took all my willpower to not name this baby something mean like "Beebo the Ugly child". So I named him Sean. Because that was the first non-mean name I could think of.

Of course, my character loved and cared for him. After all, he was a kind person who would love his mpreg baby no matter how ugly he was.

I however, did not.

I hoped that he might just be an ugly baby, and that he'll grow out of it as he gets older.

He did not.

he got UGLIER.

This horrifying Benjamin Button ass space creation haunted my home for 4 sim days. We prayed once again, that he was simply an ugly duckling. That he was simply going to grow into more age-appropriate features.

Sean once again, disappointed me.

It was torture having to care for a sim I hated so much, but couldn't be cruel to because it was simply out of character for my ocs to hate him. Sean got treated with the utmost kindness. He got everything a child could hope for.

Didn't stop me from making jokes though.

[lilacsandlillies]

The cognitive dissonance that reading Batman comics right after watching Batman the Animated Series gives me is insane. Those are Not the same people. Like at all.