#nothing is ever black or white

[iclimbtreestofeelalive]

in reference to your tags; i firmly stand against "both sides bullshit", actually! i don't disagree that we should be supporting politicians who want to make things better for everyone. however.

there has been a trend for decades if not hundreds of years of discounting poor people of all races in america, especially in the south. poor people living in the south are discounted as stupid on a regular basis in the news, in popular culture, and in the cultural consciousness. think "inbred people from alabama", think mater from cars, think southern accents being universally used as a shorthand for "stupid, illiterate hick". because of this, liberal and leftist politicians have repeatedly discounted and ignored the south, despite its history of coal unions, mutual aid, and disenfranchisement.

i never said that all politicians are old money (though most are) and i never said they were out of touch (though most are). "politician" is a career path that lends itself to people with financial stability, to people with free time, and to people who are willing to lie to get power. it's a fault of the lack of accessibility; people with money and time are more likely to win elections because they have more time to campaign, to advertise. that's why you don't see politicians who work retail while campaigning, that's why they're largely older, whiter, maler.

and therein we find the problem. if politics are only accessible to people who *already* have money, and time, and wiggle room to fail, then we have a political system wherein the upper class are the only ones who have any say. poor southerners recognize this, but not everybody is fancy and eloquent, or had the time and energy to spend all day reading political theory jargon; ergo, "all politicians are shady" or "i don't trust that man". they understand the problem, probably better than you do, but people discount them as conspiracy theorists and pessimists.

the issue isn't that democratic politicians are wrong or bad. the issue is that they overlook a vital demographic of voters when they discount the south as a bigoted wasteland. it's classism, and it's why democrats consistently fail to win the south's votes. republicans make their media free, they appeal to the genuine sense of abandonment by a system meant to protect them that poor people experience. if leftists recognized this and finally started to tailor their campaigning accordingly, we would see an unprecedented social shift in america.

but what do i know. i'm just a dumb hick who grew up in the woods and read too many books for his own good, who has a good vocabulary because his dumb hick parent taught him greek and latin roots to give him a leg up in the piss-poor southern education system.

okay i'm gonna say something and you all have to give me a chance. ready?

we need to stop making fun of poor american southerners who distrust the government. it's real easy to call them all conspiracy theorists and dismiss them, but half the time, its built off of a genuine feeling of being abandoned by the infrastructure meant to keep them safe.

in appalachia, a lot of people lost their homes because of coal mining operations. a lot of people worked in those mines, and then when the mines stopped being profitable, they got tossed out with the bathwater. a lot of appalachia is poor, malnourished, and i don't blame them for not trusting rich politicians who dismiss them as stupid and lower class.

if yall actually listened to half the things poor southerners say, you'd realize that a Lot of common leftist complaints are virtually identical to the rural grandma who doesn't hold with electronic money and politicians. it stems from a genuine feeling of abandonment and ostracization by the people who run the country. functionally, someone living paycheck to paycheck in the city in a tiny apartment has infinitely more in common with someone from rural appalachia than a politician. high rent, high taxes, food insecurity, feeling lied to by those in power, a general sense of frustration. it just sounds fancier coming from a city mouth than one with shitty teeth and a southern accent.

tl;dr stop dismissing southern people as stupid. they're absolutely right not to wholeheartedly trust politicians, because they've been fucked over by them time and time again, and honestly, id rather talk to a southern person who openly distrusts their representatives than someone from the city who wholeheartedly believes that Frederick Jamestown OldMoney III genuinely cares what people think and can be convinced to change his ways.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Thank you. I'm sorry.

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[luck-of-the-drawings]

OOH YEAH BABY ITS THE SURGERY EPISODE BABY!!! ME AND THE HOMIES NEED SOME NEW FACES FOR OUR NEW PLAN, AND WHO BETTER TO GET THE JOB DONE THAN THE TWO MOST EVIL PEOPLE WE'VE EVER HAD THE MISFORTUNE OF HAVING OUR LIVES VIOLATED BY? I MEAN IT WOULD BE FUNNY. IT WOULD BE FUNNY.

[etherfall]

N in the Octopath Traveler artstyle

[xaviers-school-dropout]

I think the ideas that

“Raven is a bad parent”

And

“Raven loves their children”

Can and should co exist. I will never sit here and say Mystique is a good parent, but I think acting like they don’t love their children is just being willfully ignorant of their characterization since the 80s.

I see a lot of people try to claim Raven doesn’t care about their kids. I actually think they care a LOT, it just, doesn’t deter their actions. And they’re not a good parent, don’t get me wrong, but that doesn’t mean they don’t love Kurt and Rogue and I think trying to claim they don’t actually does away with a lot of Raven’s character nuance.

A lot of the tragedy and depth of their relationships come from the fact that Raven DOES love their children, but it’s not enough. And Kurt and Anna Marie know that, and that’s part of the tragedy of it too.

I’m not a Mystique defender, but I am a Raven Darkhölme characterization realist. A lot of people flatten their character to add more sympathy to Kurt’s story especially, which feels kinda iffy to me. But that’s for another post.

From a storytelling perspective, it adds so much more depth and tragedy to all characters involved to not make the relationship so shallow and one sided as “Oh Mystique doesn’t love them”, and even to juxtapose Raven’s relationship to them with Irene’s is a whole other thing I may talk about one day. But like, you do the story injustice to flatten it down to just “Oh Mystique sucks”

Tl;dr - Raven Darkhölme is a shitty parent but they do love their kids. And that’s the whole tragedy of the thing

[gaypeople]

“lestat’s love for louis isn’t pure/louis wasn’t made out of love” they literally got married in a church in front of jesus christ himself who officiated their wedding no less (and who lestat can’t even stand)…some of you do not understand the greatest love story of all time and it shows

[artofrolsch]

Fairest of them all

[seagreenstardust]

Anyone still calling late game Katsuki an abuser in 2024 is just not paying attention. Full stop.

[ufogoo]

pip... pippa ingellvar... never posted her final look.... look at my queen

[mxtxfanatic]

I’m gonna say it once real clear so I have a post to refer back to the moment it happens again (cause it will). I don’t give a fuck about any other reader on a personal level when I am reading a book. I don’t care who you are, where you’re from, the people who claim you, the degrees you hold and in what subject. Not a damn. When I’m discussing the book, I am discussing the things the author wrote in the book. When I am discussing characters, your personal life experiences or cultural “expertise” factor 0% into my analyses except as an addendum to my thoughts if it matches what the novel or author has already said. That means that I will not automatically bow to a reader just because they claim to be Asian in general or Chinese specifically (cause I’ve had people try to flex with both, before). I am just as capable of reading and thinking on my own, and mxtx is just as capable of conveying what she wants us to understand from her story without the “cultural translators” acting as the unwanted, unasked for middleman. Especially when that middleman is directly arguing against what the book tells me. Heritage isn’t a “get out of jail free” card for intentionally shitty analysis and willful illiteracy.

So no, I’m not entertaining your argument that a child abusing character is just fine and dandy cause “I’m Chinese, my parents beat first and ask questions later and that’s called love 🤪” You’re Asian? You’re Chinese? So what? The author is also Chinese and disagrees with you. I also have Chinese friends who’d disagree with you. Are they less Asian than you? Do they not count because they don’t confirm your self-interested generalizations? Newsflash: Chinese people are not a monolith, and the continent of Asia definitely isn’t. Unlike in this cursed fandom, most people irl can think for themselves.

I can tell you one thing, though: mxtx damn sure didn’t write any of her novels so that a particular group of Asian diaspora readers can run to a majority-white fandom to play “cultural translator” about how “inherently abusive” Chinese culture is to a round of hehe hahas at their own expense. And for what? White validation? Western approval? Over a web novel??? Does that not sound demented to you? Is that not the definition of self-hate?

[coldslaws]

Drawing request:

Your beta AU N, natural harmonia posting N, and raising harmony N

i had several ideas for this and had to do all of them. ohhhh my god this was so fun thank you

[thelunarsystem2426]

"When you have your own car you can drive yourself to school and feel responsible and-"

Yeah yeah shut up we all know the first thing I'm doing in my own car:

Picking the motherfucking music

[agirlinthegalaxy]

It's been rolling around in my brain the last few days for some reason, but I still hate the family backstory reveals for Sophie and Eliot. I've seen some of the meta for it, but quite frankly, it still makes no sense. If it had been something actually thought of and intentional in the original, I think it could have been so fascinating. I mean, Sophie's willing abandonment of Astrid to contrast with Nate's loss of Sam or Eliot's adoption in contrast with Hardison's and Parker's? Could have been excellent! But they came out of nowhere in Redemption and don't work with these characters.

Sophie was still actively using the fucking alias that she met Astrid under! She met with someone from her past on the show! Like. Quite frankly, that one is unequivocally bullshit that they made up and threw in and pretended could fit with the established canon. (And I'm sorry, but the idea of Sophie abandoning Astrid and never telling Nate about her just... So much of Nate's trauma was rooted in the loss of Sam, and I think that introducing this element after he's gone and unable to respond to it taints Sophie and Nate's relationship in a way bc I'm not exactly sure how Nate would've responded to learning about this but I think that it's something he'd have needed to know. I don't know how to fully express my thoughts on that but yeah.)

As for Eliot, I don't like the adoption aspect literally at all. The way that he would interact with his family and the memory of his family would be different, and I think that it's flat out ridiculous to think that he'd have never mentioned it to the team in the original show, especially when dealing with the kid cases. (I also dislike the biracial adoption as its own element because if Eliot was actually raised by Black parents in the... idk what 80s/90s? That just. doesn't feel congruent with how they write Eliot interacting with PoC, not necessarily in a bad way, but babe, he's written like a white southern man raised in a specific kind of culture that does not jell with that. It also makes Eliot look... really bad that he was apparently raised with the knowledge of how fucked up the military was and his parents' history and made the choices that he did.) Like the show may not have explicitly stated it but the implication of that relationship was vastly fucking different throughout the original show.

Just. These were not backstories that were congruent with their depiction and characters in the original show, and they're also just moves that I don't particularly like or find interesting directions for those characters. There's also something to be said about how it was apparently unacceptable for a woman to not have kids or someone not reconciling with their biological family when that was something that the original show handled a lot better. Out of all the directions to take Sophie and Eliot's stories, that's just not really one that I think was a good idea.

[milkbreadtoast]

tbh i understand eunseo..... cedric is my fav chara but if he was straight i would hate him too MFNSMFNA

the difference..... what a gay/bi awakening does to a mf <3

[sanguinesorcery]

Casual reminder Fariah is technically a villain, depending on which side of history you stand on.

Rather, she is what I like to call 'lawful evil', in that she doesn't bat an eye to committing atrocities, but only if she sees such atrocities done for the good of her empire and her people. She does not destroy based on whim but on calculated strategy, or in response to the promise of threat.

But the killcount is still staggering with no moral code as to age group, gender, or caste, and the idea she has spoken in positive to straight up genocide says more than it should. She is careful about her destruction, but for her people and their livelihood and the empire's longevity, she would do anything.

It is good to be a citizen of Sidhe and the Three and Ten. But a good ruler is very rarely a good person on the outside.

[spotted-owl-sketches]

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