#or maybe it's empathize idk

[lunarflux]

People are attracted to villains who are similar to themselves — but only when they are fictional. New research suggests that people are attracted to negative versions of themselves, so long as their self-concept is not under threat. x

Oh.

Fictional stories of villains may provide a safe haven for you to explore a darker side of your personality. This sense of safety may come from the fact that there is a psychological distancing between you and the villain. x

OH.

Sigmund Freud believed that no matter how civilized we are, no matter how much we have developed our conscience, ego and superego, our id is still there, and we have certain wish fulfillment for our undisciplined id to get pleasure and wish for selfish things. (...) For me, that will be impossible because I’m too nice and too much of a pushover, but there’s a part of us that empathizes with the villain because in some sectors of life and of our relationships, we are the villain. x

OHHH??

“Our research suggests that stories and fictional worlds can offer a ‘safe haven’ for comparison to a villainous character that reminds us of ourselves,” said Rebecca Krause, a PhD candidate at Northwestern University and lead author on the paper. “When people feel protected by the veil of fiction, they may show greater interest in learning about dark and sinister characters who resemble them.” x

Oh, good god I am way more messed up psychologically than I thought.

[youmakemestrong]

i hate continuously reverting back to denial but dear fucking god i just CAN'T believe it

such an important part of my life for over 12 years and he's just gone

i was here for him when he was 17 and loved green beans and i was here for him when he was 31 and trying to get his life together and i have always loved him all the same

i'm going to be plagued by the what ifs of the rest of his life for the rest of mine

[blue-thief]

im the biggest kiis shipper out there but cmon. isagi wouldn't cry if he found out about kaiser's backstory 😭😭

if anything he'd just be like "ohh. oh shit i accidentally took things too far didn't i 💀"

[toupee-or-nottoupee]

my new rot is making sharp & ronen take in sebastian at the end

[cynicalmusings]

grrrrrrrr i need to write something but i don’t know what

[envahisseurzim]

i am making my friends watch underverse season 1 tonight. they were blessedly absent for the sans au craze. any words of advice blingee

you have to make them read the wiki pages of all the main sanses back to back. that's their mandated homework in preparation for the evening of their lives

make sure to show them this picture also

[chernabogs]

Maybe it's a good thing malleus doesn't rlly get sick bc I don't think that man would last a minute in the ER wait system

[givehimthemedicine]

El has nightmares. they both do, it's no surprise. Max knows all the classics, and can sometimes tell which El is having by what she murmurs in her sleep. lots of Starcourt and lab ones. Max dying is easily the most common one. for all those, Max can wake her and comfort her and tell her it's okay.

a rare one that Max hates the most is when El cries mama? like a lost child. that's the one that always makes Max cry, because there's not a thing she can do about it. all the love in the world is no replacement for what was taken from El. she will never recover, and there are no real words of comfort to offer.

for those, Max tries to gather her up gently without waking her, and hold her close, and hope that El's dreams might shape her arms into the ones she needs.

sometimes, when El tightens around her and breathes more softly, mama, Max likes to think maybe it's working. she kisses her head and tries her hardest to cry silently.

[cabeswaterdrowned]

thinking of scrapped Blue Sargent plots… the og draft where she had empath powers… the way I definitely feel like the tapestry with the women with Blue’s face in BLLB was obviously meant to foreshadow Gwenllian, a woman with Blue’s powers being found showing she’s not alone in her type of power, but also feel like in context of td3 this might have been where Maggie first started thinking about playing with the doppelgänger trope… are the women Blue’s doppelgängers? are they Blue’s ancestors since Artemus is old enough that he knew Glendower? Gwenllian telling Blue that they’re witches? none of it going anywhere…

[hotmess-exe]

it's not my story to tell, so i won't be writing it, but i sincerely hope to see an interactive fiction someday where the protagonist is a felon. specifically, i'd like the protag to be someone who has served their full sentence and just gotten out.

there is so little respect and empathy for that perspective, so i just would love a well-written IF about it

[ofpd]

95% of the time when someone's argument for anything is "i just don't get why [x]" it's like. well yes indeed you don't understand it

[catgrandpa]

I am a staunch supporter of Hawks x the Todoroki family. That sounds bad but I promise it’s not in a weird way.

Obviously it would be separately and also not illegal for Shouto.

Endeavor/Hawks is like hero worship and falling into bed together a few times after a rough fight. Enji insists it means nothing and it’s just a way to deal with the excess adrenaline and it’s not happening again. It happens again. It happens a lot of agains.

Now…. Rei/Hawks? Hell. Yeah. Not romantically, this is purely sexual. Hot Young Hero Gets Pegged By Sexy Milf Divorcee. I can see the hub logo already. Idk how they’d meet tbh maybe he saves her or she divorced Enji rather than… what happened:/ But they meet and sparks immediately fly, and he takes her back to his penthouse and they freak it.

Dabi/Hawks. Classic. My favorite. Sweet and spicy. The tension and the romance is unparalleled. I don’t even need to type any of this out because what happens in canon is already perfect enough. If all of these ships happen in the same universe, this is endgame. But also, if these all happen in the same universe, the first family dinner where Touya brings his bf home and the room is just full of people hawks has slept with… delightfully awful.

Fuyumi/Hawks is where we start to get some sweet innocent dating. Maybe they met while Hawks did a press assembly at her school. Maybe the kids staged a meet cute or smth, parent trap style. They date for a few months, and spend a handful of nights together, but ultimately decide that neither of them are in a spot in their lives where they can pursue a serious relationship. They part on good terms, and occasionally still talk as friends.

Natsuo/Hawks. Baby’s first one night stand 🥰 buuuttt it turns into booty call for sure. Natsu is freshly 18. He’s finally his own person. He’s in university, he has his own apartment. Things are good. So he goes clubbing and meets the youngest hero to reach top 10, and he just so happens to want to go home with him. They toe the line of booty call and friends with benefits, but they don’t really hang out much because hero work and university are Very time consuming.

Shouto/ Hawks. Stop side eyeing me, I said it wasn’t weird or illegal. I intentionally put a space after the slash, it’s unrequited. Hawks was simply Shouto’s sexual awakening, just as I’m sure he was many other kids that age. Shouto never had any sort of attraction to anyone until Hawks showed up in the hero scene. At first he saw his press debut and was just ‘oh wow that man is very attractive. Guess I’m mildly attracted to boys now.’ And then he saw Hawks on tv, covered in soot, walking out of a burning building while holding a baby in one arm and a kitten in the other and he decided then and there that he would never look at another man in his life because no one could ever compare.

[batsplat]

oxley bom pod was talking about the friendly atmosphere in the paddock today and they brought up vale as someone who would make himself hate his opponents in order to beat them. they mentioned biaggi before saying vale didn’t need to make up a reason there lol, and the gibernau, stoner, lorenzo, marquez. thought it was interesting to hear them say that especially since oxley specifically had a particularly close working relationship with vale!

got around to listening to the podcast rather belatedly + had a chat about this general topic that helped me organise my thoughts on this a bit. I transcribed the most relevant comments - probably some small errors because of cross-talk and like... I'm a fast transcriptionist but can't be bothered to properly do it, here:

O: One is because racing is so fucking complicated now. [...] They've got so much to do, so much pressure - to have the negative energy of anger and hatred is actually - B: It's a waste. O: It's a bad thing, you're just wasting your energy. I mean it depends on the character, okay - B: So maybe Vale was the last who really needed to hate somebody to give him - and now even Vale invites Casey to his ranch to ride with him. But he really needed to - It was not difficult for him to hate, but he - Some riders he really looked for a reason to hate them even more, because then he could dig deeper in himself - because he was just a happy chap - in order to beat them. O: Max Biaggi. B: But it was easy to hate Max! That was not very difficult. Sete Gibernau, basically he needed to try - O: Casey Stoner. Sete Gibernau. Marc Marquez. B: He hated Vale probably before Vale hated Casey! But that's another podcast. O: Yeah, I think so. No, definitely, definitely, definitely. [...] Some people - they get fired up by hating other people, and that's fair enough.

so yeah. I mean, qualified agreement, I guess? they're definitely right about casey hating valentino before valentino hated casey lol. if valentino ever really hated casey at all. which is not necessarily a mainstream take, so it's nice to hear it!

I also agree with this general take about... y'know, the creeping professionalisation of the sport and how that affects how likely you're going to get fun drama. goes beyond just hours spent looking at data and also about... having a bit of a life, having time to actually form a personality. and as I've said before, it's the fans! clickbait news + social media featuring partisan fans, who aren't just going to read every statement but also react to every statement like it's life or death shit. pecco and jorge have gotten push back for some incredibly, deeply, ridiculously mild comments these last couple years. they HAVE to phrase everything they say as inoffensively as possible while still getting their points across, and even then they'll generally be jumped. like, forget valentino, how do you think casey would have fared in this current media environment? up against a fanbase as partisan as valentino's - or marc's nowadays? not well is the answer! I think to some extent you can get away with this stuff more depending on people's perceptions of you, so marc and increasingly pedro will generally be fine... but on the flip side, the pecco's, the casey's, the jorge x2's of this world... everything they say gets read in the worst possible light, but now everyone's just so much louder about it

but this ask was more about valentino than the current landscape, so I'll get back to him. I do think it is a bit of an issue if you frame it as a completely either-or issue - at the end of the day, most competitors will probably motivate themselves through their enemies at least a little. pecco definitely uses negative emotions to fire him up, people criticising him and the like. casey absolutely used them, often directed at valentino. all the comments from the haters to fire them up right, to show everyone how wrong they are. on a psychological level, there is not something *fundamentally* different between using your rivals or the fans or the press to motivate yourself - it's still the same underlying motivational process (and indeed the podcast references lawson's distaste for the press). casey signs off his first every grand prix win by saying how nice it was to beat a spanish rider sponsored by the circuit, like are we calling that pure love for the game? he and mostly martin and to a somewhat lesser degree pecco do share a tendency to... believe the world is out to get them, and use that to fire themselves up. idk if casey strictly needed to do that or if it was just ingrained at a young age and became a stable self-perpetuating way in which he viewed the world but also, it doesn't really matter, right. maybe in both valentino and casey there is a pure unpolluted soul who could have enjoyed winning just for the sake of winning, but in practise it's clearly more complicated than that. as has been recently discussed in quite some depth in this parish, late 2007!casey was getting sympathetic interview write-ups that described his mentality as informed by 'bitterness and rejection'. including bitterness at valentino, who at that point in time was not meaningfully reciprocating any of that stuff!

so I do have a bit of a bone to pick with this idea of 'the last guy'. valentino didn't 100% motivate himself by hating his enemies, the blokes after him didn't do so 0%. I think of the aliens casey is probably the most similar to him by this metric... some are definitely less inclined to do so. lorenzo's a bit of an odd case where at times it felt like he was better at making other guys hate him than necessarily hating them himself... complicated guy but I think he actually really did want to mostly fuel himself in a positive manner, except then for various reasons both external and internal he needed to also draw a bit more from. the darkness. marc is more likely than either valentino or casey to just fight to win for the sake of winning... then again you do have cute little incidents like misano 2019 where marc - off the back of two back-to-back last lap defeats - miraculously happened to find an extra bit of motivation through a spat in qualifying after duly harrying the yamaha's all weekend. again, it's a question of degree, right. marc is just inherently less restless than valentino and less inclined to think the world is out to get him than casey, which are all contributing factors

with valentino, I think I disagree a teensy bit in terms of framing more than I do in substance. first off, not to be a broken record on this, but obviously all of these feuds were very different, involving very different emotional landscapes. I don't think it's correct to say valentino needed an enemy to fire himself up, but he did always need something. some mission to dig his teeth into, some way of making the whole thing exciting. of making it fun! I'm not all that convinced of this happy-go-lucky characterisation of valentino - a lot of the time he had to go to an awful lot of effort to keep himself entertained, and when that didn't work he could get pretty miserable. he needed to keep himself stimulated, he needed to stop himself from feeling lonely, he needed to give himself a purpose to work towards. hatred did help him in a motivational sense, and he's talked in his autobiography about how anger has made him ride faster. it's useful... up to a point. it's just not a uniform thing across rivalries

my sense is that it comes down to two things. 1) he needs something to motivate himself and get excited, be it a rival or whatever. and 2) he needs some distance from his rivals. motivating yourself through a rival is not quite the same thing as motivating yourself through an enemy. for instance!! casey was only really his enemy once they were no longer on-track rivals - it was unrelated to actual competitive calculus, and was in some ways more about casey than it was about valentino. when valentino did that shit to casey at laguna 2008, he's not like... mad at casey. he doesn't hate him. he's gleeful at least in part because of how obviously pissed casey is, but he doesn't hate him. because he doesn't need to hate casey to want to beat him! casey is already so considerable a challenge that beating him is reward enough in itself - he's this super tricky puzzle for valentino to work away at... and when he comes up with the answer at laguna 2008, he's delighted. he doesn't really hate jorge in 2009 either - dislike, yes, hate, no. he's already plenty stimulated by the challenge of beating his feisty young teammate... he doesn't need anything else. he gets through 95% of the 2015 season with barely any animosity with his title rival - there, he would have seen it as distracting from his primary mission of winning his tenth in a way that was entirely disconnected from any particular rival. he also runs into the problem that it feels like any psychological warfare feels like it's getting aimed more at marc than jorge - but that's entirely accidental, he isn't TRYING to fuck with marc in the middle of the season. why would he!! and jorge refuses to be fucked with on the track because he's just never in the same postcode as valentino, and valentino isn't attempting to fuck with him off the track. he's barely even doing like,, mild mind games, like they're quite actively friendly the entire year

(I do sometimes think you can do a bit of displacement here where you don't necessarily need to hate the person you're actively fighting to get the job done - cf marc at misano 2019, also... tbh casey 2011-12 kinda had that vibe where he was getting all that energy out of his system in valentino's direction and could then keep things civil with his actual title rival. there's a LITTLE bit of that 2015 even pre phillip island but mostly valentino does have a more early 2008 'we move in silence' vibe or whatever that pecco tweet read. this is the restlessness thing, right - he kinda needs to fill his brain with SOMETHING)

which brings us to the second element: needing some distance. zero problem with biaggi, which is kinda the training wheels feud in that it takes a bit of a life of its own before valentino REALLY was intending it to. he's a kid (literal eighteen year old) who's kinda snarky about biaggi in the press and biaggi takes it EXTREMELY poorly and confronts him about it and it kind of spirals from there. with casey + jorge, valentino ensures that they never GET too close. I do think there is an element of... y'know, not wanting to be close friends with the guys who are your title rivals, because it's harder to beat people you care about and deprive them of the thing they want most in the world. which I actually think is pretty normal!! valentino's problem is that on a few occasions he has ended up in rivalries with blokes he was at some stage close in - and either he preemptively withdraws as with marc and... ? probably...? melandri...? - or the relationship deteriorates and then blows up as with sete and also marc. the 'preemptive withdrawing' bit does suggest a degree of self-awareness with regards to his own competitive process - and as has been previously argued in this parish, valentino's relationship with marc developing as it did was in large part due to his competitive situation 2010-14. the two of them falling out was probably always going to happen if they were competing, the two of them falling out that badly required valentino's stint in the competitive wilderness to let him lower his guard to such an extent

so that's the argument in broad strokes. yes, valentino can use enemies to motivate himself - he certainly enjoys having rivals, he enjoys fucking with them, he enjoys figuring them out and measuring himself against them and also a little bit of competitive edge. that doesn't mean he needs enemies per se, or certainly he wouldn't have seen some of his rivals in quite such extreme terms (casey in particular of course felt differently). he did need SOMETHING to motivate him... rivals, definitely - enemies, perhaps. and he also needed a bit of distance from those he was competing against. which post-sete he tended to preemptively enforce, except that one time when he didn't, and when it wasn't preemptively enforced it did have a tendency to blow up rather spectacularly. so in essence, you still end up at the same conclusion, right - valentino did get a lot out of having enemies, did motivate himself with them, did need to beat someone. but the working process is a bit different as I see it. sometimes making enemies is about emotional regulation, y'know. feuding as a healthy outlet for competitive tension. as it should be

[doubleedgemode]

There's a post that explains it way better than I do but. I'm currently thimking about A.B.As frankenstein influence

Aside from the obvious "concept art refs frankenstein by name, so one could assume the head key worked as her electrodes/bolts" I don't see many people mention how her strive boots are black platforms a la creature's movie depiction's (roadworker if I'm not mistaken?? I probably am) boots. Also yknow they have lil bolts

[aritany]

y'all.... i'm supposed to go on sub tomorrow👀

[aroaessidhe]

2023 reads / storygraph

The Poisons We Drink

YA urban fantasy

a girl who brews powerful potions is coerced into making potions to interfere with D.C.’s most influential politicians in an attempt to stop a dangerous Witcher Registration Act from passing, and will do anything to protect her sister after their mother is killed

bi MC, nonbinary love interest

arc from netgalley