#personal battles

[in-tenebris-et-in-solitudine]

I hate that you broke me, I hate that I have trust issues because of you, I hate that I hurt people, but most of all, I hate that I'm still not able to hate you.

[hinamie]

to moving forward

[sleepysebris]

:) 🖤

@mlsecretsanta gift for @thequeenofspace! happy belated holidays and apologies for the delay, had a serious family emergency followed by sickness! I had so much fun making this though, was so excited to finally draw these two 🖤 hope you enjoy!!!

[lemonlimestar]

do angels wear blue jeans?

[phantasmicfish]

So I saw Dune Part 2 yesterday and I was initially super crushed because of the deviation from book canon but the more I think about it the more I sorta like it…

So without further ado here’s a list of stuff I liked about Dune Part 2:

- all the scenes initially of Paul growing closer to the Fremen. You can clearly see that they become friends, accept him as a Feydakin, that they’re laughing, joking, hanging out. (And contrast that to the end of the movie, where Paul has no more Fremen friends, only followers. In the book, this is echoed, where Paul recognizes that he has lost his friends to the Muad’Dib religion. Take book Stilgar, who truly embodies this… by the end of the book, Paul says: “I have seen a friend [Stilgar] become a worshipper.”

- giving Chani explicit rejection of Paul’s messiah status was an interesting choice. Chani’s main thought over part 2 is that they don’t need religion to save them, that through Fremen power and desert power, the Fremen can save themselves. She recognizes that this fanatical worship can be a vehicle to control and enslave her people, and I sorta wish we saw Paul lean into that more… that they found a way to stay together and ‘fight’ the prophecy together based on Chani’s ideals…

- also, I love how engrained this rejection of religion and prophecy is in her character. Book Chani takes no issue with her Fremen name, Sihaya (desert spring), but movie Chani hates it “because it’s part of some prophecy.” Later, we see that despite her rejection of prophecy and religion, that the prophecy does indeed come to pass— the tears of desert spring save Him aka, Chani saving Paul after he drinks The Water of Life. (Interesting how Jessica has to force Chani to save Paul using the Voice… another example of Jessica explicitly forcing Paul to become the messiah).

- adding more depth to Fremen culture— the South being the more religious fundamentalist tribes vs the North being more secular. Early on, the movie paints this immediate divide between the tribes of Fremen who accept Paul and Jessica versus those who treat them as offworlders (who murdered Jamis). In the books everyone accepts Paul and Jessica after Paul bests Jamis and Jessica quotes some scripture, but I think it makes more logical sense that there’d be friction over these two random offworlders coming in

- I love love loved Paul speaking at the meeting of the Fremen tribe leaders in the South. He fully accepts his messiah status, exercises his power of the Voice + his prescience as a way to command all the Fremen under his name

- I’m a big fan of omitting the two-year time skip, so with that I’m glad Leto II was skipped over entirely. I always felt that Leto II was an unnecessary character addition to the book, especially when he just dies and everyone sort of goes “oh well” and moves on, so I’m glad it’s omitted.

- another interesting choice was to paint Jessica as a straight up villain in comparison to the way her book counterpart was not. The movie Jessica we see here is seemingly corrupted by the Water of Life: she walks around talking to herself (Alia) and scheming Paul’s ascent to Lisan-Al Gaib. She knows about the Holy War, which is the very thing Paul is trying to prevent, yet she expresses no concern about bringing it to fruition. (Probably because Jessica knows it’s impossible to prevent, but still.) The very last line of the movie, where Alia asks Jessica what’s going on and Jessica says “The Holy War has begun” is just total villain in my mind— explicit acceptance of the Holy War, like it’s just another stepping stone in her plan. Plus, the fact that Paul has visions of Jessica leading him into this period of great starvation totally cements her as a villian.

- going off of that, I like that we see Jessica undergoing actual agony when she takes The Water of Life. When book Jessica and Paul take The Water of Life they accept it calmly and without obvious pain (book Jessica was sitting with her eyes closed, as if sleeping), so this physical reaction that Jessica has to the poison adds to the idea that The Water of Life did change her in a negative way.

- I feel like so far we’ve been introduced to Alia as just a weird talking fetus who’s been consorting with Jessica, so Paul’s vision where Alia says “I love you” really strikes home, that she really does care for Paul which we might not have understood otherwise

[radbelinda]

One of the things that strikes me about the whole Neil Gaiman thing is that people really want to portray Amanda Palmer as being a remorselessly complicit figure, when a lot of things that are very obviously fucked up and menacing when you put it next to the actual assaults going on - are perfectly normalised and accepted within poly/ENM world. All of these things are fucked up and menacing, but the bubble of pseudo-feminist poly world is incredibly effective at making you totally oblivious to the fact that you're opening the door to abuse and emotional damage.

The thing of 'oh we just slept together and I took a consensual nude of you, now can I have your consent to send it to my husband' is a feature of poly culture, not a bug. Suggestive and inappropriate comments to a woman about how hot your husband will find her are completely normalised. A statement from your husband like 'I don't get to play with my Dom side with you, so I need to be with other women who are natural subs' (which I suspect is the reason he gave when he kept having affairs when she was eight months pregnant, after agreeing to be monogamous) is something that culture will expect you to be completely Cool Girl about. Being blasé when a woman comes to you and says 'your husband made a pass at me' is also the expected Cool Girl reaction. Bringing women into your circle that you think your husband will find hot is completely par for the course in those mindsets and part of being a good and fun and sexy partner - no one doing that in poly culture thinks of themselves as 'feeding him women to rape' or grooming. Lots of people seem to find Amanda telling Neil that he couldn't hit on Scarlett, but still leaving him alone with her, to be jawdropping - but, as someone who has had people in ENM relationships exhibit poor boundaries around me and try to insinuate me into their sex lives in inappropriate ways, I know that that kind of thing is seen as due diligence and an appropriate way to navigate a situation. My experience of people immersed in that kind of culture is just this general assumption that words and agreements are magic - that all you need to do is communicate and agree terms and everything is fine, and if an agreement is violated you just need to communicate more and agree terms and everything is fine, pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

What a lot of people want (and have wanted all along when they were making jokes about how understandable it was for Neil to 'fly across the world to escape having lockdown with her') is for Amanda Palmer to have been a truly abhorrent person, when the truth is that the whole culture around poly/ENM/open relationships - not necessarily the stated rules everyone claims to be abiding by, but the actual culture itself - encourages this stuff, especially from women.

I'm not suggesting Amanda is a victim in anywhere close to the same way as any of the women profiled in the reportage, and I do think her learned obliviousness enabled her complicity in creating a situation like Scarlett being left alone with Neil, but she has clearly been manipulated as well. Think of how insanely manipulative it was for him to wait until she was in late-stage pregnancy to start violating the terms of their marriage, how he surprised her with a lot of 'dark' elements of his personality after they were already married with a child, how we don't even necessarily know how much control she had over the marital pursestrings, how (as covered in the Tortoise podcasts) he would pressure the woman who lived on his estate into sexual activity by saying that Amanda, not him, wanted to sell the house and kick her out - and that if she kept him sweet he'd be her advocate against his evil wife. He is so clearly a profoundly manipulative person and it's just lunacy to suggest that none of that manipulation will have been targeted at Amanda.

[biggest-gaudiest-patronuses]

put me back in the oven i am NOT done baking

[corpsentry]

pick your battles

[shalom-iamcominghome]

It's absolutely true that delusions can take on religious elements and be fueled in part or whole by religion, but dear l-rd, do I hate when people blanket all religion under this whole "it's all delusion, anyway!!!".

No it is not, and I know that because I know what it's like to have gone through delusions! I was reminded of that difference recently, and I'm religious. Not everything that you personally disagree with is a delusion, a narcissistic power play, or anything else. Sometimes you disagree with others. I am pretty religious, but I am more than willing to agree with non-theists about their opinions because they come up with good ideas and we are equal human beings. In fact, the atheist has strengthened my own religious beliefs because I am challenged by them to actually think things through. My whole issue with this is the - funnily enough - holier-than-thou, stigmatizing attitudes that are necessary to say things like that.

As someone who has a vested interest in mental health and accurate information about it, this stuff unironically angers me. The human in me wants to educate people, but the ape in me wants to take away the terms delusional, narcissistic, gaslighting, and every mental health term under the sun away until people learn how to properly use and apply them. The only people you are hurting are people who are already hurting.

[froody]

you heard it here folks, no fault divorce is the main reason men kill themselves

[in-tenebris-et-in-solitudine]

Is this what life is supposed to be? Is it just full of pain?

[vimylove]

[didyougaming]

[royaltea000]

POV they just told their da shixiong on you

[egophiliac]

I saw comments that the new butler from Ridekamens look like Sebek

He...kinda does

I wasn't gonna say it, but. that was kind of my first thought when he was revealed. :') maybe this is what Sebek's older brother is doing these days? he ran off to buttle for secret agents at a superhero cafe? actually wait that would be rad as heck, I'll accept this headcanon

[darqx]

Bought the most expensive Pencil™ of my life to test out drawing on an iPad whilst I was on hols