#people can just. yknow. know each other

[epicfirestormer]

What I love about Hellboy and Abe Sapien's dynamic in the comics is that, if you came into this blind, you'd expect Abe to be the voice of reason or the straight man to Hellboy's impulsive and hotheaded personality. But no, Abe is more often than not the crazy one. Hellboy would deal with fighting evil monsters and bad guys by just sighing and getting it over with, while Abe is going rabid over tearing the creature apart when he does get into a fight. Hellboy acts like it's a 9-to-5 job and will reasonably talk things out with a guy that had nearly killed him before, Abe acts like a madman in a slaughter house and his first instinct is to shoot first kill second and ask third. They're both insane, but on completely different levels.

[partiallypearl]

sorry i think abt the valley kids pre meeting miguel and i get weepy

[ambyandony]

mutually overprotective

[my-thoughts-and-junk]

thinking about superheroes unfortunately

[obstinaterixatrix]

went along to get groceries for my pal’s salmon(/charcuterie) party (actually I just looked up charcuterie to check if I spelled it right and apparently it’s specifically for meats?) (can cheese and jam and crackers be considered charcuterie…?) and we got two packs of salmon which made three plates of salmon… we all demolished 2 plates but it was mostly 3 of us eating lol, we’ll finish off the rest tomorrow. we also went to an art fair before the party, saw some cool stuff. blue cheese is actually really good with fig jam on a cracker, I was obsessed with the combo

[aidenwaites]

Man. It's only been three months

[dragonairice]

Life becomes so much better when you realise that you can just send a 'happy birthday' message instead of an elaborate gift every time if you're not close to the person

[constantvariations]

I remember someone saying "there's no such thing as a good racism allegory" and it's been bouncing around in my head for a while. I'm someone who typically thinks anything can work if given the right circumstances, but then I really started thinking about it and I believe they're right

Because if you want to talk about racism, you should just talk about racism

(This is unpolished and ramble-y, so strap yourselves in)

Racism is deeply ingrained into our society, no matter where you live. Imperialism and colonialism has ensured that no corner of Earth has been left untouched. Choices from hundreds of years ago are still being felt today. There's practically no end to the discussion of its effects on the world and its people

So, why should anyone feel the need to dress it up in cat ears?

I've consumed a lot of media where writers have consciously echoed in part some aspect of racism in their fantasy story: Bright 2017, Dragon Age, RWBY, the MCU, Harry Potter, Detroit: Become Human, etc. The biggest thing they have in common is that the narrative is told to side with the victims, but it somehow always ends up against them

It always sides with the status quo

It's confusing, maddening even, because the narrative oft goes out of its way to show how horrible the system is and how these folk don't deserve their treatment, so why are we going back to normal as if it's a good thing? Why are the people actively working to improve the system decried as annoying at best and monstrous at worst?

Then you look at the people who write these storylines. The beliefs they hold, the people they vote for, which charities and organizations they give to, and it all makes sense. Centrists (at best) trying to look progressive are the ones who need to dress racism up in cat ears and rainbow freckles. They set aside the long, brutal histories and crushing systemic realities to play pretend that racism is Not That Bad and is only done by Those Bad Individuals

That's why Velvet's ears are tugged instead of culled. That's why the Mantle drunkards say mean things to Blake instead of attempting to assault her. That's why everything surrounding the SDC's labor practices is so vague as to be useless while the biggest evidence of their malice is hand-waved away by a writer who says the victim "had it coming" as if someone can deserve being branded by being too much of a brat

These stories aren't meant to make the audience question why our society works off the bloodied backs of the exploited or demands we take good, hard looks at ourselves and how we've been duped into believing so much garbage about entire swathes of people. They're meant to satisfy the people who only feel bad that these things are happening because they (white folk) look like the bad guys. It's a self-congratulatory wank about how "I'm not like THOSE guys, therefore I'm a good person!"

And then there's the characters meant to convey this story in the first place: always inoffensive, mostly aimless, "not like the other girl" types that pander to that delicate palate. Blake - a conventionally attractive, pale skinned girl in fashionable clothes - used to be passionate about equality but only in the right way, and demonizes anyone who does not conform to this mindset despite having no reasoning to back it up while never once demanding better of the privileged people around her even when they do racially insensitive things

The biggest downfall of these racial allegories, be they about cat girls or orcs or elves or robots, is that they do something that marginalized folk have been forced to endure since the dawn of time: literal dehumanization. There are tangible differences between humans and whatever the allegory is, which undermines the very fundamental fact that black/asian/queer/neurodivergent/disabled/whatever folk are unapologetically, undeniably, exceedingly human. By dressing up their plights in cat ears or spottled blue skin, you're creating theater not for the people who actually live through these struggles as a means of connecting with them and providing them a safe outlet for their feelings, but giving the people who benefit from passively allowing the system to enforce said struggles a pat on the head for not being the grand wizard

I don't really know where I'm going or how to end this, so I'll just sign off with if you're going to talk about racism, just talk about racism

[tea-with--honey]

Schmigadoon enthusiasts, please reblog this post with whether you preferred s1 or s2 and why 🙏 I've seen really mixed reactions and would love to know why the opinions seem to differ so greatly

[pikachu-deluxe]

been thinking recently about how i play games (in general but also a bit on the competitive side on some)

turns out i don't particularly care about winning, i just want to have fun, but obviously i do like winning i just try to do win by doing very stupid stuff

it's way more fun for everyone involved when you do things against the meta or common sense and end up winning anyways bc it's so weird that it takes others by surprise

[meowmedusa]

sometimes its nice to check in on people you no longer speak to and see they're doing relatively well its like !! woah !!! fuck yeah !!!! we may not be friends anymore but i wish the best for you !!!!!

[aeoris4lovers]

i hope verin doesn't fight essek to let him touch him. i hope he respects his boundaries.

i think it’s worth keeping in mind that, while i see a lot of people headcanon essek as touch averse, that’s never actually established as canon. we see him act annoyed or put out by physical affection (the group hug at the blooming grove), not really know what to do with himself when he gets it (jester hugging him at the outpost), and reject it when it’s being used to manipulate him (caleb squeezing his arm while trying to persuade him), but we never really see him outright reject it or express that it genuinely bothers him.

so i don’t think he really dislikes being touched in and of itself, i just think part of him sees it as silly and unnecessary because he saw love and relationships in general as silly and unnecessary for a long time, and i think verin would say “fuck that” and do it anyway just like jester and the rest of the nein do because he knows essek well enough to know he doesn’t actually dislike it, he just avoids it on principle. it’s less that he hates being touched, and more he hates that he doesn’t hate it, you know? and i think verin would be the last person to care about letting essek uphold that cold, i-don’t-need-anyone facade.

not to mention, i don’t know if you have siblings but i do and i can tell you that a certain amount of boundary pushing is basically a sibling love language — when you know a person that well, you know what will annoy them versus what will cross a line and how to tell when their reaction goes from being annoyed to being genuinely upset, so you can fuck with them a lot without really hurting them. essek might roll his eyes and go stiff and complain the whole way when verin hugs him, but verin would know him well enough to know that’s not what it looks like when he’s actually upset so it’s safe to keep doing it anyway.

i imagine verin always knew essek enough to know he secretly enjoyed the affection verin showed to him, even if he acted like it was the stupidest thing in the world. so when i say essek doesn’t fight it anymore, i don’t mean there was a time when verin would literally force essek to take the affection, i mean essek always accepted it but had to put on a show of hating it while he took it because he felt like it went against the person he was trying to be and he couldn’t let anyone know he liked it.

[songofwizardry]

hey there's a lot of shit out in the world but like. there's also 300k fanfics written as labours of love and exuberant comment threads on art that point out and gush over little details and there's people who spend hours sewing tiny details on their cosplays and there's fragments of poetry that get shared over and over and bring emotions over and over and there's entire communities of people built around 'we loved a story together' or 'we made a story together' and there's people poring over every line in a work and building theories together and there's getting together with your friends to have ridiculous fantasy adventures every week and yeah. there's some good stories here too yknow.

[smol-tired-binch-blog]

hate how im now at a point where im legit like kicking my legs and grinning like an idiot over fictional characters SEND HELP

[feinstone]

Congratulations on graduating! That must be an amazing feeling.

thank youuuu <3

technically i won't be graduating until the end of the year because i finished past the cut off date for my uni's mid-year graduation ceremonies, but i'm happy to have finished regardless.

it's been a really difficult and long process, and i had to delay finishing my degree by 2 years due to a long string of Life Events (Not Fun) that got in the way of me completing the last 2 courses i had left in my degree as of mid-2022, so i'm glad i finally managed to get to the end of a semester without some random bullshit stopping me for the first time in several years lmao.

i dropped out of high school after i got sick, and i thought i was gonna have to drop out of uni too, despite all the work i've put in to pull my life together. it really means a lot to me that i managed to make it through to the end this time, even though it was tough to keep my head above water sometimes.

[foxgirlmoth]

I don't talk about this stuff on here pretty much at all, but a past relationship really broke a ton of bits and pieces of my brain and heart in weird ways (I'm finally thinking about him almost never but the shit he pulled was abusive as hell and still affects me sometimes). Being in love with my current girlfriends for a while felt almost. Painful? Almost like I should be ashamed I can fall so deeply in love with people, and especially how quickly that can happen sometimes too. Thats how it kind of felt. I tend to get overwhelmed with emotions if I'm feeling them very strongly, and that has been extremely embarrassing and also felt almost like I was being a burden to those I love (which love is the main emotion that can 'get dialed up to 11' for me). It IS debilitating in some ways!!! It hasn't gotten bad enough I've been nonverbal in a really really long time but that happened this past week and it was wild to me.

Things are getting better now though! Therapy in the past has helped, and honestly having such patient and understanding partners has made a world of difference ;w;. my wife is someone who was one of my best friends and I had a huge crush on and now I can ask for cuddles and we can nap together and I've fallen so much in love. Her and her presence are literally heaven for me, I don't know if anything has ever made me happier than just laying next to her and feeling her warmth.

Worries of course flare up and I feel like I need to lean on her a lot during those moments, but I don't feel like too much of a burden to her. I love seeing the posts that say stuff like 'Its okay to be a burden' or 'its okay to be annoying' because really truly I think I need to be those things to survive sometimes. I can be 'a lot' and I can be a little bit obsessive and those things aren't inherently bad or evil of me. I just make sure I'm feeling okay during and after and make sure I'm checking in on myself often. I'm a bit of a broken girl, but that doesn't mean I'm not extremely happy and living a life I love. I've written poems and everything about how it feels like it must hurt to love me and my broken jagged edges, but hey, even if it does a little bit, it doesn't mean someone like my girlfriend/wife won't go through a little bit of burden to love me, and I'm more than happy to return all of this and more for her as well if she's ever in need or feels broken ;^;