#perfectly flawed humans

[alittttlebitofeverything]

Normal people❤️

[itspileofgoodthings]

the most flattering comparisons made about me of all time (mostly looks based; a little bit vibes based) are:

1) that I look like Nancy Wheeler

2) that I look like young Helena Bonham Carter in A Room With a View

3) that I look like the girl in this painting

[unpopularvivian]

"Rio Romeo's Over & Over isn't MC Edward coded at all"

Me:

[mrthology]

People treat the books as if they are accurate. They are flawed and we need to discuss the flaws. He has butchered mythology and all of his characters and as a fandom we have a responsibility to fix it, not let inaccuracies and the other terrible things he has put in the books slide. As mods of a server, you and @ashilrak have the responsibility to do so.

I've answered asks related to this several times, here, here, here, and here, so won't bore you with repeating my thoughts again.

I've never claimed the books are accurate, and have mentioned before people shouldn't treat a children's fictional series as if they are. I've also never said the books are without flaws, as I am well aware they aren't. But at the end of the day, I'm still in this fandom, and still adore many of the characters. That says something.

Discussing flaws is a valid way to interact with media. But I've been in this fandom on and off for a long time, and I've seen a lot of the discussion again and again, and find it exhausting. I choose to focus on what I enjoy, and know it's better for my mental health to do so. Both @ashilrak and I understand if that's not the server environment that you want, and that's absolutely fine. No server is going to be for everyone, and people aren't going to all interact with media in the same way.

Take care of yourself and interact with fandom how you want to. At the end of the day, it's escapism for so many of us, and that's pretty needed.

[coquelicoq]

oh no this reality dating show is really sweet actually. this was not supposed to happen. crap. crap. i didn't sign up for this!

[maretriarch]

the idea of adoption as an alternative to pregnancy because you "don't want to pass on your mental illness" to your child is incredibly laughable when you know just how mentally ill kids in the adoption/foster system are

[lesbianpegbar]

next therapy sessions gonna go crazy i can already tell

[askshivanulegacy]

THIS.

There's some super ultra weird fad going around that wants to sanitize the heck out of stories and relationships. "Oh no, this person was "toxic", this person didn't react like a self-aware therapist, this person had their own emotion about something that wasn't their business!!" Heaven forbid characters act like people (or like themselves).

It's especially bad in the female-character-worship world. [Insert your fave] female character can do no wrong, owes nothing to anyone because we can't have expectations or wants in social relationships, therefore when the male love interest isn't therapy-level yes-man supportive or dares to have an emotion of his own or a "flawed" (but perfectly in-character) reaction, then they're villainized.

The entire point of the stories and characters is to HAVE conflict and HAVE "flaws" (aka be relatable and normal and human). People are going around critiquing character reactions against fake non-real perfectionism, in complete blindness to the point of the story, characters, and conflict. At that point, I don't know why you wouldn't just find a new, tamer story if you can't handle interpersonal conflict (which is GLORIOUS, the more conflict the BETTER).

They want a Ken doll to their ideal Barbie-fied fave, but they won't bother to go make an OC about it.

And we saw how well forcing someone to be a Ken ended up. 😂

it actually makes me so sad that people consume media where every character is kind of an asshole and they just entirely overly sanitize every character and every problem thats caused by the being kind of an asshole thing. i loooove conflict i love people who suck. i love people who are good people but also still kind of suck in some ways because they are a person. most importantly you all do not understand the comedic potential of characters being kind of shitty to eachother.

[malakkc-poetry]

Invisible Poets weekly challenge honors my poem: Karma

[fried-eggs-benedict]

Body: Oh Wat's dis? Stress? Dat's very bad, we know juuuuust wat to do to make us allllll better! :)

*proceeds to make your guts go to war with itself, causing more stress*

[ogeneral8]

interesting how fords been surrounded by triangles his entire life. looks like ford and bill were always doomed to meet each other

ford did seem to think that he is destined to be in gravity falls, destined to be part of greater things, and bill also thought he was "destined for so much more"

to quote on alex, "that's ford's great flaw, is arrogance. is he believes that there's special people, and everyone else. that human attachments are actually weaknesses. and the song and dance that he’s giving dipper right now, is the song and dance that he gave mcgucket, back when they were younger… ‘you and me are different, we’re better than everyone else. we have a path that no one else can understand, and only us can do this.’"

i think at some point bill really thought ford was the one that UNDERSTOOD him (well, ford did think "why did rudolph not simply kill the other reindeer? he shouldve burned his workshop to the ground"). some of his henchmaniacs didnt seem to actually like bill at all

quick edit for something ive found:

this is from "dreamscaperers", and apparently ford had been dreaming about the cipher wheel for weeks before he even found the cave. enough times that he was even able to perfectly draw the wheel on the journal. bill didnt even know about ford yet.

[gayemoji]

make up your own mind, mate, if you ask for people to tell you what was "good" or "bad", you're just going to get biased responses from both sides. People not thinking for themselves is why this whole situation ended up as big as it did and ended with people getting doxxed. No-one can tell you what to think, or at least they shouldn't.

anyway it is absolutely ok to still be indifferent, if that's your true thoughts, then that's your true thoughts. and brushing it off as 'bullshit twitter stuff' is also a point of view that a lot of other people have as well that you can also take on if you wish.

i just heavily, heavily encourage you to just. sit on the information for a day or two, take the time to really think about it and how you feel, you'll be better off, and so will everyone else.

ik you mean well anon but i was joking w the 'tell me how to think' :') it was hyperbole to try and bait some more perspectives, especially from people who actually HAVE opinions. poking the bear if you will.

i dont think 'seeking out biased takes' is inherently. bad ? i think taking the video at face value is honestly worse imo. as much as i dont care nOw id sort of like to care. i feel like i lack critical information, with exactly one (1) perspective from the sole guy trying to super prove he's not a piece of shit. i want a full picture. and while i wait for people to write their extensive overviews i can at least see what the kneejerk fanatics from any and all sides are saying, so i can go 'well thats interesting new info i wonder where it came from' or 'well thats obviously wrong because .....'

enjoy your day ! & cheers for looking out for me but i am capable of thinking for myself lol 🥂

[golvio]

Also helpful is reverse-engineering Nonviolent Communication to make reasons for conflict. Emotion-related arguments often start when somebody confuses their emotion-adjective (I’m angry at this person, I’m lonely, etc.) with an emotion-verb (I was betrayed by this person, everyone’s abandoned me, etc.), which externalizes the emotion and causes the person feeling it to look for someone to blame for it. They frame their emotion as an accusation about what the other person is doing to them, which puts the other person on the defensive, which can then escalate into a full-blown fight over something that, to an outside observer, isn’t really worth imploding a relationship over.

The reason why you should learn about communication techniques as a writer is so that you can build a better understanding of how communication can break down. That makes for complex and flawed characters, as well as more realistic conflicts that aren’t just “X character is mean to Y character because they’re an evil mean doo-doo head who’s an ontologically Bad Person who must toil in the Redemption Mines for 27 years to atone for their sins before the readers should even consider forgiving them, lest they also become Bad People for letting a Wicked Sinner off too easily.”

Also, I’ve got a whole other rant about “empathy” being equated to intrinsic moral goodness related to this. People who insist everything should feel like a therapy manual with no mess are often spectacularly prejudiced against low-empathy people (Cluster B personality disorders & other people who, for whatever reason, struggle with affective empathy even if they grasp cognitive empathy), as well as refusing to understand that empathy is a skill, and skills can be learned over time or suffer in performance when their owner is under extreme stress or even just too tired to put in the effort. Someone not being able to read emotions or read the room doesn’t make them evil, or totally incapable of acts of kindness or understanding (even if that understanding looks different from how someone with high affective empathy might express it).

Likewise, sometimes conflicts arise because the “Normal™️ person with Empathy©️” refuses to extend any understanding to the other person. Even 💖Empaths~💖 can struggle with understanding internal experiences that are completely alien to their own internal experience, as neurotypical people are wont to do. These misunderstandings don’t necessarily make either party Evil Bad People, but illustrate the Double-Empathy problem that’s common in neurotypical-to-neurodivergent communication. Sometimes a character who prides themselves on their “empathy” can be astonishingly unempathetic to someone who isn’t just like them/the people they’re already familiar with, and they’re the ones who need to go on a little emotional journey to learn compassion and genuine respect towards others.

That post that's like "stop writing characters who talk like they're trying to get a good grade in therapy" really blew the door wide open for me about how common it's become for a character's emotional intelligence to not be taken into consideration when writing conflict. I remember the first time I went to therapy I had such a hard time even identifying what I was feeling, let alone had the language to explain it to someone else. Of course there are plenty of people who've never been to therapy a day in their life who are in tune to their emotions. But even they would have some trouble expressing themselves sometimes. You have to take into account there are plenty of people who are uncomfortable expressing themselves and people who think they're not allowed to feel certain ways. It also makes for more interesting conflict to have characters with different levels of understanding.

[squishe]

seeing features i have that i dislike on myself as beautiful on others is really like. changing how i see myself

[artbyblastweave]

There's a question which the west coast Fallout games are quietly litigating, which is that age-old gotcha about what you do with the remaining orcs once you've deposed Sauron. In the original Fallout, the Super Mutants are basically universally aligned against the quote-unquote "good guys," for whatever value of that term is applicable to the wasteland at large, but subsequent games make it clear that this was an ideological thing, and a product of the political moment of the mutants creation rather than an ontological quality that they have. The game is very aware that this is something that was done to them, and the tragedy of that; the first mutant you're likely to run into is dying scared and alone.

Fallout 2 presents super mutants who've broken in every direction ideologically in the aftermath of the Unity's collapse; the peacemakers under Marcus at Broken Hills, Gond as a member of the abolitionist NCR rangers, reactionary remnants of the original mutant army, genocidal self-hating fascists like Frank Horrigan. Fallout: New Vegas iterates on this beautifully. The mutants dovetail perfectly with the theme of how every faction in the wasteland is trying and oftentimes failing to reckon with the weight of history. Their utopian movement imploded outside of living memory, closer to the apocalypse than to the present day. The survivors- who can only dwindle in number due to their sterility- have been left to reckon with that in whatever way they can. And they have their backs to about a hundred and twenty years of that reckoning not going particularly well, of being the bugbear and boogeymen for bullies and ideologues whose grandparents weren't even alive to suffer from the Unity's actions. The lack of a collective future for mutantkind casts a pall over even the best ending for Jacobstown; humans are collectively resilient within this setting, but through violence, and accidents, dementia and senility, the day will inevitably come when there are no mutants left. And worse still will be the day before that, when there's only one mutant left. Finding some form of satisfaction or contentment within that dwindling window, with the world against you, is a task that falls to the individual mutant. (Take Mean Sonovabitch, for example. He seems to be doing alright for himself.)

Then we slide on over to the east coast games, where the mutants are.... morons. Cannibals. Marauders. And when you meet one who isn't, the game throws itself a ticker-tape parade for containing such an audacious twist. To go back to the orc thing, it's like if The Hobbit had contained a lengthy, empathetic subplot about the rich internality and fleshed-out-if-deeply-flawed ideology of the orcs, and then there was a pivot to treating them like a monolithic block of ontologically evil marauders in LOTR. While staring you straight in the eye the whole time, unblinking. Daring you to say something

[ultrafangirlishness]

The Barbie Movie.

A small, non-comprehensive list of things that stood out to me (spoilers? Kind of?)

The soundtrack

All the jokes that played off of what it was actually like to play with barbies (the pool & ocean being flat, the cups having no drinks in them, the shower having no water, etc.

TRANS BARBIE

The choreography

The "I Am Kenough" tie-dye sweater

Barbies of many shapes and sizes! All very beautiful!

THE ENDING, OH MA LORD. Both the way the story concluded really beautifully, but also the ending joke that no one was prepared for—

Just... everything about Ryan Gosling's performance

Kate McKinnon playing the deranged, "ugly" Barbie

In the same vein, that movie would NOT have been complete without representing the kids who played with their dolls "too hard" (cutting their hair, bending them in weird ways, etc.)

Acknowledging that Barbie did in fact mean a lot to some girls. This movie was geared towards everyone, whether you grew up loving Barbie or hating her.

The mom and her daughter

The fact that when Barbie was starting to become "defective" and/or when she was in the real world, you could start to see her ""flaws"". Like I noticed in some scenes her eyebrows were unplucked and no longer perfectly sculpted, or her skin no longer perfectly smooth with foundation.

It was clear that SO much thought and research was put into this. I couldn't believe how many references there were to specific clothing items, certain playsets, etc.

The fact that Barbie and Ken DIDN'T end up together, and that Barbie DIDN'T indulge Ken in his flirtations (is that a word?) even once

THE FACT THAT I WAS SO CLOSE TO ACTUAL TEARS LIKE SEVEN TIMES???? LIKE WHAT????

The weird dark humor coming out of nowhere

The fact that Barbie never once looked at the human women (who were "imperfect" in comparison to her) with disgust

......the moment between her and the woman on the bench 😭😭😭

The mom's rant about how hard it is being a woman (esp a mother) and how you can never win 🙌🙏

The misogyny in the Real World was so well done. It wasn't overexaggated or over the top it was just NORMAL EVERYDAY LIFE

THE JOKE ABOUT HAVING A MAN SIT YOU DOWN TO TALK ABOUT THE GODFATHER ASDJGKDLW

The moment where I went "OH so THAT'S where the mugshot memes came from"

Ruth Handler <3

The fact that everyone came to the theater dressed either in pink or Barbie-like attire :)