#okay just one more

[dejasenti99]

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[polkadotjohnson]

[codecicle]

whatever. 15k note post of me being crucified

[source 1] [source 2] [source 3] [source 4]. final art is a physical drawing hanging on my wall

[crumb-crumblet-s-crumbington]

elita pep talk

[hinata-boke]

why is his smile so radiant

[nat20critfail]

Why are all the restaurants just givin pickles away like that

[pokimoko]

Asexual bird? Please

How about two asexual birds?

[stromblessed]

Mizu, femininity, and fallen sparrows

In my last post about Mizu and Akemi, I feel like I came across as overly critical of Mizu given that Mizu is a woman who - in her own words - has to live as a man in order to go down the path of revenge.

If she is ever discovered to be female by the wrong person, she will not only be unable to complete her quest, but there's a good chance that she'll be arrested or killed.

So it makes complete sense for Mizu to distance herself as much as possible from any behavior that she feels like would make someone question her sex.

I felt so indignant toward Mizu on my first couple watchthroughs for this moment. Why couldn't Mizu bribe the woman and her child's way into the city too? If Mizu is presenting as a man, couldn't she claim to be the woman's escort?

However, this moment makes things pretty clear. Mizu knows all too well the plight of women in her society. She knows it so well that she cannot risk ever finding herself back in their position again. She helps in what little way she can - without drawing attention to herself.

Mizu is not a hero and she is not one to make of herself a martyr - she will not set herself on fire to keep others warm. There's room to argue that Mizu shouldn't prioritize her quest over people's lives, but given the collateral damage Mizu can live with in almost every episode of season 1, Mizu is simply not operating under that kind of morality at this point. ("You don't know what I've done to reach you," Mizu tells Fowler.)

And while I still feel like Mizu has an obvious and established blind spot when it comes to Akemi because of their differences in station, such that Mizu's judgment of Akemi and actions in episode 5 are the result of prejudice rather than the result of Mizu's caution, I also want to establish that Mizu is just as caged as Akemi is, despite her technically having more freedom while living as a man.

Mizu can hide her mixed race identity some of the time, and she can hide her sex almost all of the time, but being able to operate outside of her society's strict rules for women does not mean she cannot see their plight.

It does not mean she doesn't hurt for them.

Back to Mizu and collateral damage, remember that sparrow?

While Mizu is breaking into Boss Hamata's manse, she gets startled by a bird and kills it on reflex. She then cradles it in her hands - much more tenderly than we've seen Mizu treat almost anything up to this point in the season:

She then puts it in its nest, with its unhatched eggs. Almost like she's trying to make the death look natural. Or like an accident.

You see where I'm going with this.

When Mizu kills Kinuyo, Mizu lingers in the moment, holding the body tenderly:

And btw a lot of stuff about this show hit me hard, but this remains the biggest gut punch of them all for me, Mizu holding that poor girl's body close, GOD

When Mizu arranges the "scene of the crime," Kinuyo's body is delicate, birdlike. And Mizu is so shaken afterward that she gets sloppy. She's horrified at this kill to the point that she can't bring herself to take another innocent life - the boy who rats her out.

MIZU'S ONE MOMENT OF SOFTNESS AND MERCY, COMING ON THE HEELS OF HER NEEDING TO KILL A GIRL TO SPARE HER THE WORST FATE THAT THIS RIGID SOCIETY HAS TO OFFER WOMEN, AND TO SPARE A BROTHEL FULL OF INNOCENT WOMEN WHO ARE THE CASTOFFS OF SOCIETY, NEARLY RESULTS IN ALL OF THEIR DEATHS

No wonder Mizu is as stoic and cold as she is.

And no wonder Mizu has no patience for Akemi whatsoever right before the terrible reveal and the fight breaks out:

Speaking of Akemi - guess who else is compared to a bird!

The plumage is more colorful, a bit flashier. But a bird is a bird.

And, uh

Yeah.

I like to think that Mizu killing the sparrow is not only foreshadowing for what she must do to Kinuyo, but is also a representation of the choice she makes on Akemi's behalf. She decides to cage the bird because she believes the bird is "better off." Better off caged than... dead.

But because Mizu doesn't know Akemi or her situation, she of course doesn't realize that the bird is fated to die if it is caged and sent back home.

Mizu is clearly not happy, or pleased, or satisfied by allowing Akemi to be dragged back to her father:

But softness and mercy haven't gotten Mizu anywhere good, recently.

There is so much tragedy layered into Mizu's character, and it includes the things she has to witness and the choices she makes - or believes she has to make - involving women, when she herself can skirt around a lot of what her society throws at women. Although, I do believe that it comes at the cost of a part of Mizu's soul.

After all, I'm gonna be haunted for the rest of this show by Mizu's very first prayer in episode 1:

"LET" her die. Because as Ringo points out, she doesn't "know how" to die.

Kind of like another bird in this show:

[ikiprian]

Ghost Kitchen (brought to you by criminal entrepreneur, Red Hood)

Danny’s got the easiest job in Gotham.

He works as a fry cook at a shoddily-run, independent burger joint. Hardly anyone comes in, despite prices being criminally low, and portions insanely large, and while the manager looks like the average tough-as-nails ex-con, he lets Danny mess around in the kitchen whenever the place is empty. (Which is often. This place has to be the city’s hidden gem or something!)

Mr. Manager’s the only one ever there with Danny, except for sometimes when his buddies come over to smoke and play cards. Danny would find it shady, except part of his job is not to ask questions. Literally, he was told during the interview.

(It was a weird interview. Why would they need to hire someone who’s been in a gunfight before? Like, he has, but Gotham’s idea of “hirable qualities” is so bizarre.)

So instead he whips up some killer burgers with the frozen ingredients, and basks in the praise as the guys tell him he shouldn’t have, he does too much for this joint, ain’t that friendly!

Now, Danny’s a chef on the newer side. As a teen he’d preferred the look of Nasty Burger over anything with Michelin stars, and he only really took up cooking after Jazz moved out for college. But just like ecto-exposure used to turn the groceries sentient, Danny’s low-level ecto signature imbues all his food with something historically haunted Gothamites just love! And Danny’s never been one to half-ass a job when it makes people happy.

With fresher produce, real meat, Danny’s sure he can take his dishes to the next level. It takes a couple months of badgering, but his manager finally agrees to contact the mysterious store owner, who keeps the place going, despite profits Danny knows have to be in the red.

Danny spends the morning prepping. He pours his heart into his food, eager to impress. The big boss will be here soon, and he wants to prove that despite the dangerous location, this place has real potential!

It isn’t until the Red Hood shows up that Danny realizes he’s been working for a money laundering scheme.

[egophiliac]

HAPPY HALLOWEEN here's some seasonal guys! 🎃

[apocryphalfemme]

The following passage excerpts the opening spiel to a panel talk, entitled ‘Empyrean Interstice: Analyzing Heavily Armored Kinesosuit Pilots As An Evolutionary Stepping Stone,’ delivered by Associate Professor Oussa al-Kotfari as part of the Institute of War’s latest ‘New Horizons’ event at the Armstrong Academy, Mare Tranquillitatis, Luna. The Institute stripped them of their position shortly thereafter.

“Our soldiers speak of Angels. But… what even is an Angel, anyways? Ostensibly, HAK pilots should not count amongst their number. The Interstellar Federation of Imams, the Neo-Catholic Ecclesiastics, most Hindu gurus, and more or less all other major practiced religions tell us this to be true: they disavow the idea that macro-scale kinesosuit competency represents any sort of intrinsically divine quality. I must profess, however: I am not certain I concur with our figureheads of faith. You see, I have had the privilege of interviewing multiple such pilots and they are… different. Different in a way that, I feel, poses a substantial challenge to our very understandings of what it means to be human.

The sheer magnitude of training and modification a pilot must undergo to operate these colossal weapons platforms is staggering and, I argue, positions them far beyond standard ontologies of ‘personhood.’ This is due to the fact that, per my research, a given HAK pilot’s conception of their subjectivity is not limited to their cognitocorporeal self: you see, I have found that every single pilot with whom I have spoken who has served for any significant period of time has been functionally unable to differentiate between their experiences of self qua body and qua HAK. Their subjectivity has been indistinguishably blended between the two. They have, if you’ll forgive me a colloquialism, alloyed with the heavy metal heartbeat.

It is a phenomenon that, however indirectly, has very much entered the sociocultural consciousness: soldiers whisper prayers to what are, from the outside, barely comprehensible unions of person and machine that wade through blood and fire to seize victory in otherwise unwinnable operational theatres; reactionary commentators virulently harp on how the Angel-figure transgresses acceptable paradigms of security and being thanks to the proprietary blackboxing of HAK technology (we’re looking at you, TruthFight); rumors percolate of engineers on hinterland planets who have not just seen downed HAKs but actually touched and spoken to the otherworldly operators within them; the list goes on. The point is this: these pilots have, through their integration with HAK platforms and their machine minds, come to be articulated in space in ways that transcend everything we once thought possible of the human experience.

And that, I think, is the kicker: pilots aren’t alone in there, are they? They do not exist in isolation. Equilibria Algorithms, Integrated Mechanical Personalities, Non-Human Persons: whatever it might be that’s facilitating a given connection, pilots are bridged by mechanical agencies such that they come to occupy a new form - an inarguably superior form - that transcends even the most wild imaginings of us mere mortals. So, I ask again: what is an Angel? I say: an Angel is a messenger. An Angel is a messenger and the HAK pilots thus bring us messages from a life lived in twain: a life transformed from mundane humanity into something so beautiful it makes soldiers weep, the fearful cower, and the righteous stare in awe. A transformation so fundamentally powerful that, sometimes, the pilot loses themselves in the process, be it to terminus, technosymbiosis, or some other seemingly tragic loss of singular self to the collective machine. But again, I must challenge this idea, too - the idea that to lose oneself as such is a tragedy - for is such not the ultimate act of becoming? Of redefining one’s being? Pilots are inarguably something more - something greater - than the rest of us, engaging in divine acts of ontological re-creation of the self. Is it any wonder, then, that so many of us are thus beginning to worship the transcendental pilot at the alter of the holy HAK?

Anyways, I’m getting off topic. I call this phenomenon of bodily transcendence Dual-Body Metacognition Theory. In this talk, I will begin by contextualizing the history of ontological philosophy as applied in kinesosuit development programs between the years of…”

You get the point. They call al-Kotfari a lunatic hack nowadays, but, you know what? I think they were right. The pilots are different, because… because… look, man, because they’re just so beautiful. I’m not exactly religious myself, but, hell… look at one of ‘em out there in the field and tell me you can’t believe in a higher power. In Angels. They fact that they exist at all, that they’re out there is just… fuck.

The Corporation is distinctly opposed to calling pilots "angels". They've released several statements recommending that officers silence any such language, saying it "threatens the integrity of the forces", and that HAKs and the pilots who control them are "tools, not deities". But I mean, when you see the way a suit's holoprojectors form a pulsing ring around a pilot's helmet, or when one slumps forwards out of its cockpit to reveal that thick mass of wires creeping from its back, it's impossible not to see the resemblance. And when, like most of the men stationed here, you've found yourself pinned down by heavy artillery fire from two directions with no chance of survival, but out of the heavens a Bishop-class rig emerges and razes the enemy with what can only be described as holy flame? I mean hell, that's enough to make anyone a believer (pardon my language).

I have a buddy who deals with the HAKs directly. He works in biomechanics, combat simtech or whatever. I asked him once what he thought about the whole "angel" thing. He got real quiet, and he looked directly at me and said, "you don't even know the half of it." And I stared right into his eyes and I could see that same heavenly flame burning in there and I knew that he had seen something he couldn't quite understand, but that he loved with all his heart.

[stil-lindigo]

warmth.

a comic about not being alone.

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creative notes:

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[favoure]

"do the opposite of what people tell you to do"

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

None of our hands are clean

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[thebrainrotsreal]

Drew this real quick because I fucking love these two so much ???? Especially Bee. I wish they interacted more so badly. PLEASE.

Also learning how to draw these guys.. slowly.

[shaniacsboogara]

liking dnd is so funny because yeah you play the actual game sometimes but mostly you just think about the game and watch other people play the game and slowly go insane thinking about how much you wish you could play the game and hoping that buying more shiny rocks will fix everything