#oh well can’t have everything :’)

[fumifooms]

Chilchuck analysis speedrun: As a hardworking half-foot who grew up poor and discriminated against and had his gullibility taken advantage of multiple times in his early adventuring days, Chilchuck thinks optimism is a dangerous flaw. He’s stressed and strict all the time because his job is noticing details like traps that could get everyone killed before anyone knows it, he takes the lives of everyone to be on his shoulders, and with the way he speaks about it that probably partly reflects how he felt about taking it upon himself to provide for his family too. His life’s always been pretty centered around work and has become even moreso now that his wife left and everyone is independent, and due to past events he’s very iffy with bonding with coworkers. He thinks feelings and job are a disaster mix. Like with his wife or with parties hiring him as sacrifice, being open or having good faith is vulnerability which can get you hurt, so he processes and shows all his stress as anger instead of worry. Doing strict dieting probably isn’t helping the irritability what with hunger, and on top of being a hunger suppressant alcohol might be the main stress reliever he has.

His grey hairs are so earned

[gruesome-beauty]

woke up with julien baker’s badlands cover stuck in my head 💜 (x)

[luuxxart]

royal college trio 🍂🍁

[krispiecake]

tell me why i can hear another tenants fucking music from my flat. HE DOESNT EVEN LIVE IN MY BUILDING. HE LIVES IN A COMPLETELY SEPARATE BUILDING ON THE SECOND FLOOR AND I CAN HEAR HIS MUSIC FROM MY FLAT. MY FLAT WHICH IS IN A DIFFERENT SEPARATE BUILDING.

[edge-oftheworld]

yeah I know Luke’s been running around saying he ‘can be a bit of a pessimist’ but I just wanna give him a little bit more credit than that. he’s been through so much and yet we’ll hear him talking about times that are ‘marred with trauma’ but still he can’t ever regret for getting him to where he is today. this whole year he’s been making an effort to do things that scare him and he even finds hard, he’s been pushing himself out of his comfort zone and doing 1000 solo interviews as well as his shows and last year he went to bogota to film 7 music videos in 2 days and believed he could do it and he did. he talks about mental health related things in such a way that’s filled with acceptance, not complaint or bitterness but dare I say even optimism, dropping horrifying little descriptions to already heartbreaking songs since 2021 and then turning around and saying writing songs is what gets him through it, he ‘wouldn’t have a good relationship with anything’ if he didn’t make them but he’s super proud of himself after and wasn’t put off by how much work it was gonna be even though it did make him apprehensive and he goes and mentions how it wasn’t easy. you look at everything we know of him for the last decade and a half and realise, maybe it was never easy. but someone once described optimism as curiosity + resilience rather than being naively happy all the time in denial of everything going on around. and with that active brain and all the things he figures out while writing all his beautiful songs there’s definitely curiosity there. and with everything he’s been through to keep choosing to be himself and do whatever he needs to do there’s so much resilience. and I’ve seen this spirit in the songs of sounds good feels good and 5sos5, as well as littered through wfttwtaf and boy; every project being a quiet, kinda emo, statement of survival. I’m just one fan with too many opinions but this is something I’ve always loved about the band, and a decent portion of it was always brought to the table by luke and idk I just think we should acknowledge it

[transmascbutcher]

why is everything happening rn can we all just have a chill time for 5 minutes PLEASE amazon original show

[mars-ipan]

don’t trust your brain after 7pm (winter mode) don’t trust your brain after 7pm (winter mode) don’t trust your brain after 7pm (winter mode)

[scottruemelshi]

WOE

Tango Melshian be upon ye

[heartual]

had such a good experience with surgery today i can’t even fully explain

[chibishortdeath]

Great googley moogley it’s all going to shit! Every day becomes exponentially more terrifying!

And all perfectly timed to just right at the start of what’s supposed to be my adult life where I get my shit together and be useful and productive!

[kinos-fortress-2]

miss pauling WOULD NOT SMELL FINE.

[the-obnoxious-sibling]

One day I will cry long enough to make you feel so sorry for me you will write that meta about heteronormativity of marines

aw, you don’t have to cry! asking nicely is all it takes.

so, when i say the marines are a rigid, heteronormative institution, what do i mean by that?

they work in the service of a heteronormative government and society—the world government, and the world nobles, who consider themselves superior to the rest of the world because of their bloodlines

they have heteronormative values—among them strictly defined gender roles and prioritizing relationships based in blood/deprioritizing all others

they use those values to dictate how the ‘civilized’ world should behave and assume that everyone shares those values, marking those who do not as uncivilized, criminal, and rebellious

more details below the cut.

any kind of royalty or nobility that defines itself as superior to the masses because of their bloodline, ancestors, etc. is going to be particular about having proof of that blood connection. if you think your blood makes you better, you better have documentation of it, family trees going back eight hundred years so no latecomers can doubt your importance.

they’re also going to care deeply about the “sanctity of marriage”—not because it’s actually sacred, but because if wives are cheating on their husbands then you can’t trust your family tree. and if your family tree is a lie, then maybe you aren’t actually superior to all of those dirty, common masses. the horror!

lastly, they have to care deeply about children. because, until someone develops some kind of immortality elixir, the only way to keep your very important family going (and it has to keep going, or what’s the point of any of this?) is to have children. and you’re going to prioritize biological children over any other, because if the child doesn’t have your blood, they aren’t really superior to the masses.

(the exception: note that the child sabo’s parents adopt when he runs away is chosen for his aptitude in school and his higher status biological family. bringing fresh blood into your family that improves your status is always beneficial, whether it’s through marriage or adoption.)

so. special bloodlines, preserved by marriages that produce biological children. until someone develops alternate methods of reproduction—which is not out of the question in one piece—all of that requires heterosexual relationships. they have to be the priority, in order for the superior bloodlines to persist.

thus, the prioritization and normalization of heterosexuality by the world nobles—and therefore the world government that serves them—and therefore the marines that serve them.

.

what about those heteronormative values?

well, look at female marines. there aren’t many of them; even if you’re only thinking about named marines, women are outnumbered nearly ten to one. and the unnamed background guys are always guys, so actually it’s an even greater disparity. why? because a woman’s place is in the home. she should be a homemaker and mother, because continuing the family line is the point of a woman, according to the nobility’s heteronormative view of the world. going against that is to set yourself up for a struggle. and a number of these ladies do struggle.

bell-mère had to leave the marines to keep her kids, taking on a job with a highly variable income that left her nearly starving at times; men in the marines have no such trouble, though whether that’s because of narratively invisible wives or these men not caring if they raise their children well is unclear.

tashigi has an enormous complex over being treated differently because she’s a woman, and it’s not a complex that comes out of nowhere—she is treated differently. most of her opponents beat her easily and then let her live for no good reason; as a captain she’s idolized, not respected, by her crew.

then there’s characters like hina and tsuru, whose presence high up in the military structure is acceptable because they have powers that put their opponents into submissive, humiliating positions. you don’t see a female marine with one of those elemental devil fruits; no, they have to have a fruit with a power play component to it. because god forbid women hold positions of power if they don’t have a bit of a dominatrix energy to them. (actually it’s because they’re being subversive in service to the state and the status quo, which makes them acceptably quirky rather than rebellious, not unlike members of SWORD, or our single female warlord.)

.

and then there’s the prioritization of bloodlines.

we see that value most clearly in the paramount war, where ace is executed not because he’s the second division commander of the whitebeard pirates, not because of any crimes he’s committed, but because of who his father is. a man who died long before ace was born, a man ace hates because of the awful opinion the civilized world has of him (and therefore his kin), a man who had no influence on ace in any way but blood. that’s enough reason to kill a man, by the marines’ logic.

and the man ace does call father, who embraced ace and gave him a loving family? well, that man, as far as the marines are concerned, only took ace in to put him on the throne of the pirate king, making himself the power behind the throne. (because naturally a king’s son should inherit his throne! never mind that whitebeard’s power far outstrips ace’s—surely pirates would only bow down before their king’s rightful, blood heir—and the marines can’t allow for the pirates to unify under one man’s leadership like that.) to the marines, ace only has value as roger’s heir, and so they expect that to be all the value he has to anyone.

and this backfires on them. the betrayal from within the whitebeard fleet (which the marines orchestrated) operates on the assumption that whitebeard will prioritize ace over the rest of his fleet. but all of the whitebeard pirates are his children, and he makes that clear when he gives them an out, allowing them to abandon him to his death if they so choose. the marines wanted to show the world that even this benevolent father figure of a pirate captain was a monster deep down, but they couldn’t pull it off. they don’t believe whitebeard is sincere in his affections for his ‘sons,’ and that costs them the narrative they wanted for the paramount war.

.

there’s also this one-off line that i rediscovered while rereading impel down/marineford to prep for this post, which in retrospect explains garp’s manic insistence on his grandson becoming a marine.

in chapter 530, hearing that luffy’s broken into impel down, sengoku shouts, “if you weren’t called ‘the navy’s hero,’ i’d make you pay for the sins of your entire family, garp!” as a counterpart to it being just and lawful to kill people for the crime of being related to a sufficiently dangerous criminal, garp and others like him believe that if you serve the state well enough, you can be forgiven for the crime of being related to a criminal.

if luffy (and ace) had just become a marine, garp thinks, then the identity of luffy’s father wouldn’t matter.

which strikes me as very naive. of course it would still matter; blood is the only thing that matters to these people.

[butnotbubblegum]

using the tags to vent my current emotional state into the void bc ig story feels like a bad plan for this, read at your own risk.

[hella1975]

i’m still not over the last episode

[flashhwing]

I’m here to say that you may absolutely express negativity about veilguard to me as long as it’s not stupid. hate on it for real reasons, of which there are plenty, most of which I’m ignoring because of the hype but would be glad to discuss in a civilized manner. no forced positivity in this zone this is a safe space. unless your criticism is dumb as fuck then I will point and laugh

[cetoddle]

okay what i have to say is lowkey embarrassing but i wanna bitch and it’s probably only embarrassing to me bc im shy about this stuff anyways the moral of the story is i wanna bitch and u should probably just ignore me. god bless