#oh my gods why was this so hard

[namisweatheria]

I feel like we don't discuss Nami's relationship with gender enough. Her entire character is so deeply informed by being a girl in a male-dominated pirate world and it's so interesting and so worth talking about.

The background creepiness of Bad pirate crews, which are most of them, how they tend to not have any female crew members at all, how they beckon any pretty young woman around to come play with them and join them. It's real bad. It's also like, a totally 2 dimensional portrayal of evil that is reserved for the most background of background characters.

However I think their ubiquity says a lot about how piracy is meant to be perceived by the public in One Piece, and is one of the strongest indicators of how prevalent misogyny is in-world.

It's very normal in One Piece for regular island inhabitants to have never met a Different class of pirate in their life. There's no reason for them to withhold judgement that maybe these pirates won't be like every crew that attacked before, and to wait and judge them by their actions. I mean frankly that would be irrationally weak self-preservation.

There are people who live peacefully under the flags of Yonkos who protect them, and feel loyalty and gratitude to them for it, but that seems to only be thing with very big name pirates. The East Blue, being the weakest and least populated, has no such plethora of powerful people and resulting turf wars.

So. Nami. Is very clearly implied to have never met any Different pirates before. I'm thinking about what that means. About how every group of pirates she stole from were creepy, dangerous men. How she started going out stealing when she was still a young child. How she didn't have a mother anymore to guide her or comfort her. How Arlong would grab her chin inappropriately, talk about her as a "human female", as property, and god knows what else.

How all the men in Arlong's crew treated her patronizingly, pretending they're all friends, teasing her and playing at respect when really not a single one of them ever stuck up for her or hesitated to accuse her of betrayal. Who were always ready to kill her if she refused to cooperate. Who grabbed her and intimidated her when they felt like it.

That's what she had to come back to after a close call with stealing from other predatory men, instead of the relief of home there was a dark, cramped room filled with endless hours of misery and isolation and blood. Where any one of her captors could barge in and demand new maps, work faster, where did you go, you took too long again this time. Endless threats and incursions.

I'm thinking about that her fight scene in Alabasta, where she tumbles and rips off her cape and uses it to catch her enemy's spikes, before leaping to her feet and running out the back door, all in one moment. How it makes her enemy reconsider her and think, "so the girl's not a total novice at fighting after all." What that implies about her experiences as a young thief. The times she wasn't fast or clever enough and had to fight and claw her way out. Why she always carried a staff and a knife. Why she was the only one before Chopper who had any medical knowledge or experience.

You know she was stitching herself up. And the weapons, how do you think she learned to use those? If any of the Arlong Pirates helped her it wasn't out of kindness and it wasn't gentle.

Then I think about Nojiko, and Bellemere's memory, and the only softness in a hard life. How easily Nami connects to every young woman experiencing hardship that she meets. How completely she dismisses the struggles of men unless they mean something to her and are going through something terrible. The way that Nami only has sympathy for women and children is easily noticeable in-text, but it's also something confirmed in those words by the author. And it's clearly because of the life she lived, the men who had all the power and only abused it, who saw her as nothing but a girl to take advantage of, without anyone aside from her sister clearly knowing and caring about any of it.

Nami clearly isn't bitter, she doesn't think the world owes her recompense, on the contrary she knows she is far from the only person in the world to suffer the things she has suffered. She is endlessly reaching out and kind, but only to those that she isn't sure would get help without her. Certainly, before Luffy, Usopp, and Zoro, no man ever reached out a hand to her without an ulterior motive.

I think when she sees a girl in trouble, a girl biting her lip to hold in a scream of grief, a girl running in the woods away from a monster, a girl captured by pirates, she sees someone who no one is coming for. Who no one will stick up for. A person without allies in a world against her. Whether it's actually true in this case or not, she runs straight for that girl anyways every single time.

[cubbihue]

So…. Are Changlings like robots then? Just going through the motions? Also, has anyone come close to figuring out C!Timmy is not real?

Changelings are autonomous. They only do what is normal and expected of them. They know better than to doubt or question. They are unable to do anything but that.

As for the closest someone's gotten at figuring him out...

...nobody of importance or significance! Why, Timmy's so perfectly crafted, nobody's noticed at all!! Let's move on shall we?

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[maddyscrsideblog]

[ID in ALT text]

In honour of the comments I got last year on a drawing of Orym eating an ice lolly that I (without thinking about the potential implications) made blue

[lazylittledragon]

ok i swear i'm not going to talk about my breakup forever but the thing that just keeps bothering me:

i know that not getting what you need in a relationship is a COMPLETELY valid reason to end it but also. i feel like having a very vulnerable moment where i opened up about my struggles with intimacy and being relieved that i didn't have to keep doing things i wasn't comfortable with, then being dumped a YEAR later because of my lack of intimacy. is something i should be allowed to be very hurt by???

[hinamie]

i have so much band!au content in the pipeline my brain is Rotting but enjoy these two for now

jjk band!au

[ghost-proofbaby]

can y'all please come into my humble abode and imagine something with me i don't yet have the wits to write a full fledged fic out of (yet)?

so, everyone knows how when you get a tattoo, part of the healing process is the itchy phase, right? and for obvious reasons, you can't scratch it. favored method, in my experience and fellow tatted friends, is to just give it a good old slap.

perfect. so now, with this in mind, can you imagine having gotten a large hip/ass piece, and how mortifying it would be to smack your own ass to soothe that itch? and it's just plain painful. you want your new ink to heal properly - it's gorgeous and you put a lot of time, pain, and money into that damn thing - but it just sucks.

enter best friend eddie.

he loves your new ink. thinks it's fucking sick. nearly creamed his damn pants when he found out you were doing a hip/ass tatt (because how can he ask to see it without being weird? how can he react to that without being weird when he's spent the last several years with the world's most pathetic crush on you?) at first, it's fine. you show him the tattoo in a totally friendly, totally platonic way. he hypes you up, he calls you 'the most metal person he knows'. flourishes you with all the compliments and looks at you with starry eyes out of sheer awe at the way he's managed to snag a person into his life who is just so. damn. cool.

but the days pass by, that new ink begins to heal, and it fucking itches.

when you first proposition him, you're even more embarrassed than he is. stumbling over all your words, the request coming out contorted every wrong way. you don't want to make things weird, but is it really that weird for a friend to help a friend? it is really that weird to ask your best friend to smack your tattoo to help with that itch you can't even really properly reach?

it's just friends helping friends.

and that's the mantra you both repeat to yourselves - as you request the embarrassing favor of him, as he agrees almost too eagerly, as you find yourself face-planted in your bed wondering how deeply you can bury down your shame as he tries to make jokes to make it all a bit less awkward.

it's just friends helping friends, until eddie's hand lands down on your ass with a resounding smack, and that first little whimper escapes your lips.

[lacebird]

please... i am but a mere mortal woman i literally cannot handle this right now

[justuraverageweirdo]

Have I ever mentioned that I love them?

[turtletoria]

i want to smash her with hammers

[k1tkatzzz]

the line

“I don’t know what’s scarier, the fact that everyone in this kingdom wants to drive a sword through my heart,

or that sometimes i just wanna let them”

GOES INCREDIBLY HARD FOR SOMETHING FROM A ANIMATED PG MOVIE OH MY GOD???

[leenfiend]

we were like - rivals, you know? lance and keith neck and neck!

[milkweedman]

Knitting a freehand bag and started wondering how often people even use patterns, anyway. So--how often do you use a pattern when you make things ? This include knitting/crochet/sewing/weaving/nalbinding/bobbin lace/tatting/etc but also things like woodworking, cooking, and baking. If you want to just pick the thing you do most often that's fine.

I personally do not use patterns as I find them far more confusing than just figuring out the construction of an item and simply making it. I do very occasionally browse ravelry for inspiration but have downloaded maybe 2. In the 5 or so years since I joined. And have followed exactly 1, which I modified every single aspect of. In my defense, dyslexia.

[lilithofpenandbook]

Seriously how can M*r*uders stans like random Slytherins (who tf are Evan Rosier, Pandora (is that Luna's mum and why tf is she Evan Rosier's twin in half of these), and I don't even want to discuss Regulus) and make them Actually Misunderstood Good People Who Were Forced Down That Path when at least one of them *coughreguluscough* was obsessed with Voldemort

And then turn around and make Snape an awful person?

[pseudophan]

i'm so extremely irrationally annoyed by people not knowing what various terms mean and using them incorrectly like i feel like that's such an asshole thing to care about but oh my god stop

[gaycrittercentral]

SMOOCH SMOCH SMOCK SMONCH SKORCH AMORCH SMROHCBHDNDHSH

teehee filled up the whole bottom of a page with just smoochin, thought y’all might wanna see. Also I have a day off tomorrow so I can finally draw requests and stuff jfhkdhsjhdgs

[jovieinramshackle]

Art trade with @oya-oya-okay !!!

Hehe ShuZul my beloved...🐿️🐙

(Oya's art here!)

tagging: @ramshacklerumble @thehollowwriter @summerspook @scint1llat3 @skriblee-ksk

@cyanide-latte @twistedwonderlandshenanigans (lmk/dm if you wanna be added)