#me going on another tangent

[eddith]

How it pains my heart when people talk about the Straw Hats disbanding and "settling down" after achieving their own personal dreams and finding the One Piece.

Like, what do yall mean?? Are we watching/reading the same story??

The strawhats are together because this is their family.

The Thousand Sunny is their Home!

Robin has spent most of her life alone why would she “settle down” away from her family??

This sea is so vast, if im not mistaken, the one piece earth is 6x times bigger than ours, just the strech of land of the grand line is enormous and people keep talking about the crew “settling down” when we have SO MUCH to explore yet? like, don’t piss me off.

There is so much land, so many cultures and stories to explore in this vast world.

When we see other crews like the Roger pirates, the ONLY reason they disbanded was because Roger was fucking sick.

And it’s the SAME thing that happened with the Whitbeard pirates, they literally grew older together, traveling, exploring for their WHOLE lives ultil their captain was killed.

Like, are we not seeing the pattern here?

(And fair enough, if you think Luffy is going to die at the end of the story, you might as well think about the crew being separated.

But ever since Gear 5, it feels like Oda has created this character in Luffy where he can do absolutely whatever he wants, so I think it would be appropriate for Luffy to just decide he's not going to die, lol.)

But it genuinely pisses me off when people talk about Robin and Nami going away when like…

Sure Nami has her family, Robin has the revolutionary army, even Chopper has the sakura country, Sanji has the baratie and Franky has his family

Yes, they do indeed all have family ties outside of the crew.

But that doesnt mean that the crew is less of a family to them, they chose this, to be each other “Nakama” to be in this journey together.

One piece doesnt feel like the type of story that just “ends” after we accomplishes our dreams, with everyone separating and living “normal lives”.

It's not just about Sanji finding the all blue, he has to explore new fish, cook for his family, like, it's the start of something bigger, you know? And i can say that for any Straw Hat.

To me the end of one piece feels like “What will life be like after we accomplish our dreams?”

Pirate king is not a tittle that you gain and then that’s it, you know?

You need to LIVE as the freest man in the World.

Roger lived a life of piracy, and at the end of his journey he was named King of the Pirates.

But for fucks sake, Luffy has the power of the Sun God.

(Is it really that crazy to think that because of this ancient power he awakened, he might not be affected by all the times he shortened his life expectancy to protect people?)

It just doesn't feel like a story where the hero gives up his life to save others at the end.

It feels like the kind of story where you always fight with every ounce of strength in your being to live as hard as you can.

[trans-axolotl]

my gendered experience growing up as an intersex person was overwhelmingly defined by my responses and resistance to everything that got me labeled as a failure: failure to quickly get a gender assigned at birth, failure to go through a normal puberty and grow up into a woman, failure at meeting the standards for "complete womanhood" because of my intersex sex traits, and yet simultaneously failing to ever be acknowledged as a "real man" and being treated as a threat when I expressed I wanted to transition.

before i realized i was a man and came out as trans, the ways that girlhood was denied to me was very often humiliating and painful. locker rooms filled with other girls were a frequent source of shame. there were many big and small ways that i was told that my intersex body made me insufficient, incomplete, broken. i was forced onto estrogen, forced into shaving my body hair, and was constantly being told to change myself to better fit this mystical idea of a "normal woman." and even though I ultimately ended up becoming a man, the denial of girlhood was painful.

but i think that these things would have been even more difficult to navigate as an intersex girl if on top of everything I already said, i was having to cope with the denial of my girlhood while i was forced into boys locker rooms. if my doctors were forcing me onto testosterone hrt and refusing to even discuss estrogen, if all my legal paperwork had "M" on it and was a logistical nightmare to change, if every support group for my intersex variation labeled it as a "men's support group," if the LGBTQ community spaces i tried to join were misogynistic towards me often to the point of exile, if my self determination as an intersex girl was denied in most spaces of my life, and on and on and on. while listing all these things out i also don't want to make it seem like it's all about suffering and pain--so much of transition for me has been about joy in my self determination and how much it feels like a reclamation of autonomy to decide what I want my body and self to be like--i know this is an experience i share with so many of my trans intersex friends.

as an person who was AFAB, although there were many ways that trying to grow up as an intersex girl were a painful, logistical nightmare, many times and places that i was excluded from woman's spaces, etc. however, there was a simultaneous affirmation that i was right to strive for that in the first place. which is logic rooted in some fucked up compulsory dyadism, but also which would have made some things slightly easier or even possible at all if i had wanted to embrace being an intersex girl within this fucked up system.

pretty much every time i've seen people on tumblr talking about "afab transfems" in an intersex context, people seem happy to collapse these experiences and act like there's no meaningful distinction or point in distinguishing between different types of intersex embodiment. it seems incredibly extractive, to be perfectly honest with you--taking terms already used by a community to make meaning of their experiences and to expand and dilute that term enough that it means something pretty different than the original.

it's making me think about the concept of epistemic injustice, which is a term coined by Miranda Fricker to describe oppression related to knowledge, communication, and making meaning of the world. There's two subtypes of epistemic injustice: testimonial injustice and hermeneutical injustice. Testimonial injustice refers to the dynamic where marginalized people are labeled as not credible, excluded from conversations, and their testimony and knowledge is labeled as unreliable, even when they're the ones who are experts and have first hand experience of what people are talking about. (this is why i probably won't make this post rebloggable--i've noticed this pattern on tumblr many times where trans men speaking about transmisogyny get lots of notes and are given a lot of grace, where trans women are silenced, attacked for not having perfect wording, and otherwise delegitimized.)

the second type is called hermeneutical injustice. it describes how marginalized people are denied the right to make sense of the experiences in their own lives. this can look like preventing people from building community, terminology, a political understanding of themselves, and the interpretive resources needed to process how you live in the world.

this is a form of injustice that I think almost all intersex people are very familiar with--we are denied community and interpretive resources to the point that we're told we don't even exist, that intersex isn't a real word, and so many more examples that leave us isolated and with very few options for understanding what we're collectively experiencing. as an intersex person i really intimately understand how frustrating, confusing, and painful it is to not have words for your experiences, your identity, your life.

so it makes me really sad and pissed off when it seems like intersex people seem to be replicating this exact same type of epistemic injustice towards transfems and specifically towards intersex transfems. pretty much every time recently i see people talking about "afab transfems" they're doing so in a way that seems to deny that trans women even have the right to make sense of their own experiences in the world. there seems to be this mindset that these political frameworks, these interpretive resources that transfems have built up are just up for grabs for anyone. and then on top of that has come with it a lot of cruel, hateful language and direct attacks towards many intersex transfems who are facing so much harassment right now.

an important value to me is this idea of reciprocity as a foundation for solidarity. to me reciprocity means that we're prioritizing the ways we care for each other, we're thinking about how we can uplift each other, and we're watching out for extractive or exploitative patterns where one group is constantly expected to be in "solidarity" with another group without getting the same respect and care back toward them. i think that there could be so many ways that intersex people of all genders could share our overlapping experiences and actually be in true, meaningful solidarity with each other, but i barely ever actually see that happen on tumblr. and that pisses me off, because i do think that there's so much we have in common that we could celebrate and support each other with. i feel so much kinship with so, so many of my trans intersex friends, and ways where i see our lives converge. but i don't think that can happen in an environment where there's no acknowledgment of the ways that our experiences will sometimes (often) differ from each other, and the ways that we have unique needs.

another frustration i've had based on this most recent couple months of transmisogynistic intersex posting on tumblr is how intersex people have been mostly ignoring intersex community resources and devaluing the existing intersex terminology that people created to try to meet our needs. so much of what i've seen people describing on tumblr seems to really line up with the term ipsogender. Ipsogender is a term coined by an intersex sociologist Cary Gabriel Costello, and is used to describe intersex people whose gender matches the gender they were medically assigned at birth, but who might not feel like cis or trans fits them, might experience dysphoria, and who might feel like they've ended up transitioning medically or socially in some ways. this is a word that exists that an intersex person put time into coining because they wanted other intersex people to feel seen, embraced, and have ways of understanding themselves and communicating to others, and that's something that's super meaningful to me! and yet, i've rarely seen anyone reference it, and also seen multiple people making fun of it in other spaces online.

there's also intergender, which is another intersex specific gender term used to describe when your gender is inseparable from your intersex traits, and that your intersex identity is intertwined with your gender identity in some way. some people just identify as intergender, others use it as an adjective and exist as an intergender man or woman. intersex terminology like this is really important to me, especially because we're so often denied the right to make sense of our own experiences.

i think ultimately what i wanted to say with this post is just that when i think about intersex community, some of the most important values of intersex community for me are solidarity, care for each other, and affirming our right to define our own existence. and i don't think that can happen in a community where people are acting in extractive ways, harassing and attacking their fellow community members, and being dismissive of the realities of other intersex people's lives.

[a-very-sparkly-nerd]

I want to say that Callum undoubtedly thinks Rayla is so freaking cool, but that isn't all. He makes it clear that he thinks she's awesome without disregarding any of her other traits. Not once when she puts herself down has he said "But you're ___" (at least that I remember, with the exception of Midnight Desert, which I could argue fits the rule if I wanted to) and that is EXACTLY what Rayla needs because she's never been the cool kid- she's a prodigy, but not cool (the girl Naruto runs and prefers being alone and/or training to hanging out with other kids, for gods' sake). But she's also never been cared for the way Callum does. He also (probably) knows that only results were cared about for Moonshadow elves, never merely efforts, and he always makes sure to compliment her on not only those, but everything because he doesn't just want to make her feel good, he likes making her smile and reminding her that she's so important. He surpasses needs she didn't know she had.

And Callum would expectedly be told he's awesome at stuff, being a prince and people wanting to gain favor (Soren is the exception. Shoutout to my baby boy), but Rayla has never lied to him about what she thinks of him. She's down to earth and she doesn't build him up to be things he's not, instead making him feel as amazing as he deserves about the things he is good at. And her desire to care for him and protect him doesn't come from a sense of duty the way it does from, say, the Crownguard, but from love that Callum never really got because he was always the one protecting Ezran, was distant with Harrow, and doesn't really remember Sarai. Rayla doesn't care about what he lacks, which is what everyone else seemed to care about. Everything she does for him is fueled by love, never duty.

Just- GODS, they're so perfect for each other WHILE simultaneously learning and growing and giving each other grace and I LOVE THEM OKAY-

[lovesickeros]

lord its so dark in here the sahara desert of tsaritsa content you are like a shining oasis. your characterisation of her compels me & mihoyo would be hard pressed to top it imo.!! caaaaan i humbly request yr thoughts on her first meeting w a reader of any kind, or maybe even multiple kinds (sagau, sagau god au, isekai, etc) if you so desire...

it really is like a desert here. being the fan of a character we aren't getting until the last damn nation is driving me up a wall but i will persevere bc if nothing else i support morally bankrupt women in media. we r in a severe drought over here but i do my best. unfortunately nothing i say is ever coherent so pull out your translation notes its abt 2 be messy

also this got out of hand but thats bc first meetings w the tsaritsa are tricky to write + a LOT of her characterization lies in deeper exploration then just surface level yknow...NOT A DIG AT YOU this is just my excuse for rambling. gently pats the tsaritsa she can hold so much complexity i do not have the word count to delve into it completely :]

gonna talk cult au for a bit here though because that's 99% of my content. and honestly? she thrives in sub au's of the cult au like villain au + imposter au. it's basically made for her. i mean, early days, the imposter au had been going around for a little while but one of the first few ideas was the Fatui taking reader in so like. it kinda technically actually was. pretty sure cult au Tsaritsa popped up because of the imposter au. a lot of it's writers kinda left though which. man am i getting old or.

anyway.

there isn't much of a chance her first impression is all that positive. at best it's usually neutral, imo, but rarely if ever positive. specifically because i view the Tsaritsa as someone who isn't as fanatical as most of the acolytes typically are towards the creator. she's not exactly going to worship the ground you walk on unlike a certain geo lizard. which is partially why i think she thrives in the sub au's i mentioned.

imposter au, for example. she meets you at your lowest. there's no gaudy extravagance or pampering from the acolytes waiting for you because your own acolytes have turned on you. for all intents and purposes you aren't a "god" at all. which is why i don't think she meshes well with normal cult au reader. the Fatui are made up of outcasts, basically, and imposter au slots right in just perfectly. you're weak, at your lowest, when you meet the Fatui in the imposter au. and the Fatui can help you, too.

a mutual exchange, really. the Tsaritsa sees a tool she can use to one up the rest of the nations and especially Archons, and she has no qualms about you using her and the Fatui in turn. you both want something out of it, after all. whether you just want to be safe from the rest of the acolytes, or you want revenge, or whatever else..she'll give you the power to fulfill it, and she gains the strongest piece on the chessboard when all is said and done.

the best way i can describe the first meeting is "practical", i suppose. she sees an opportunity in you. the ultimate gamble. because if she "saves" you, and you dont trust anyone else because they tried to kill you, well..she holds all the cards, doesn't she?

but the Tsaritsa, imo, is just as capable of being just as fanatical towards you as anyone else. she just won't worship you as the creator. but as yourself? clawing your way back to your divine power and taking back what belongs to you? the Tsaritsa is, to me, a character who's character flourishes in long-term fics more because she changes a LOT between "just met reader" and after having been with reader for some time. she's practically apathetic at the beginning but a lot of her character, in my characterization, shines through LONG after the first meeting.

[phantomsies]

literacy, empathy and nuance are dead fucking arts and there really is no coming back from it.

[a-literal-toaster-wtf]

anyone ever think about how collectively the aces ultimate goal is to die because . boy do i

[muninnhuginn]

Writers tag game

Prompt: share some writing

Thanks for the tag, @miyamiwu!

So, I'll be honest, I don't actually have any WIPs I'm intending to do anything with, but I have some oldish abandoned stuff I managed to relocate. It's back from 2021 so in my Untamed era and this bit was specifically set during Fatal Journey*:

Nie Huaisang woke blearily, cold seeping into his clothes from the floor. It was dark and it took several seconds to remember where he was. He could hear the muffled sounds of clanging and voices. As he lifted his head off the ground, they slowly resolved themselves into the clash of swords and yelling. [...] He didn't know what to do. What would his brother do? Xichen-ge? San-ge? He had his flute with him– he could try Cleansing. This was what it was for, right? Before he could doubt himself further, he started playing, pouring all the qi he could muster into the tune. He'd practised for hours the night before, long after San-ge had left, but despite that, he hadn't truly thought then that he'd need to play so soon. Was that so naïve of him? As he watched, Da-ge began to slow in his movements and Nie Huaisang felt himself start to relax. He kept his lips to the flute, trying not to let his relief fool him into making mistakes. Still, he knew he only had to play a little longer and then they could all escape. Him, his brother, his cousin. They could flee far away from the darkness that haunted these halls. And then Nie Zonghui's head hit the floor. He stopped playing.

And then I had this other bit:

He'd messed up. He must have played a wrong note. Maybe he'd misremembered the entire thing? And now Nie Zonghui was dead and his brother - what looked like his brother - was stood, Baxia dripping blood to the floor. [...] The sword was pointed at him. He tried to hold himself steady as he looked down the blade. Tried to blink away the tears that kept escaping without his permission. He could tell he was failing, unable to stop the trembling, but he forced himself to meet the eyes at the other end of the sword. He couldn't die here. He refused to die here. After all, he was the only family his brother had left.

*(it was meant to be part of a short time travel fic where post-canon characters went back not long before NMJ died. It would've had flashbacks to Fatal Journey interspersed with the "present" up until the point at which future NHS tipped off past NHS about the poisoned music. I actually got as far as figuring out where I wanted all the characters to be at the end of it, but I ran out of motivation pretty quickly so there's only this WIP stuff and the intro part written in the end.)

Ahh not sure who to tag when it comes to writing stuff. I know @roseofcards90 and @floofiestboy write some stuff? And anyone else who sees this who writes, feel free to consider yourself tagged ^^

[popponn]

i'm this close to opening discussion whether (is it possible that) kaiser is a playboy or not

[rosenfey]

🌿💀 no spoilers but emmrich romance is everything to me as someone who grew up playing in graveyards because she enjoyed the quiet and as someone who has been perhaps oddly fascinated with death ever since she was a child and someone who spent a lot of her academic time researching death rituals and imagery and someone who always cries when she thinks about how we are so different from those who came before and yet so similar and how history is the closest we can get to connecting to the dead and how reading what they left behind is the closest to magic and resurrection and most importantly how incredibly freeing it is to feel seen and understood and to realise that I might be odd and weird for my fascination with death yes but that it is okay and and and-- I need to lay down 💀🌿

[todayisafridaynight]

puffer party inspo'd by the fact i've had this fic rotating in my head for the past week

[kingwaino]

i have done...an absolute deep dive into blues and folk music tonight. it was 100% one of those blink and three hours have passed type of deals. worth it though.

[westwiiind]

“rahh they shouldn’t have sent the dragons away for their own safety! they were giving up and admitting defeat! they can easily take any threat!” first off, no they can’t, hiccup basically fell to his death like two seconds before sending the dragons away, and the year before that the fight over dragons cost him his father and berk its chief, not to mention how many homes were destroyed and how many ppl were hurt in both the second and third movies. drago’s bewilderbeast’s ice destroyed the village. grimmel burned it down a year later. that kind of perpetuity of violence is so irresponsible for a leader to allow to continue indefinitely???? just bc “we can win though probably!” ?????? things are different in the earlier movies and tv shows BC THEY SHOW THE PROGRESSION OF VIOLENCE. after the first battle, they’re not gonna give up trying. after the third battle, they’re not gonna give up trying. after six YEARS of trying to change the world for the better (and the TWENTY YEARS hiccup knows valka spent trying to do the same thing), only to find that his island of people and dragons is in just as much (or really, even more) danger than before? yeah, excuse them for maybe considering “giving up.” in the first two movies and the shows, they hadn’t lost enough for it all to amount to such a drastic decision. by the time of thw, they had lost so much, and u guys apparently can’t comprehend the toll that takes. hiccup’s goal was always to protect dragons. how is leaving them vulnerable protecting them???? how is letting them continuously battle for their lives protecting them??? do u guys think these ppl and dragons have an endless battery for war and violence?????? the point was that violence was unavoidable, and no good leader of humans or dragons would let that continue even if there’s a noble cause.

[savage-rhi]

*insert pink color here*

[squuote]

im a stanarrator liker. im a stanarrator hater. im best of both worlds while also your worst indecisive nightmare. those two got the queer tension but it sure ain’t palatable romance I’ll tell you that much.

[averlym]

"oh my soul, is it here? or is it rotting somewhere with my head?"

[poor-ciceros-voring-again]

I really need some gravity falls friends I think :(