#post essay

[merwgue]

Cassian and Mor’s relationship is one of the more baffling dynamics in the ACOTAR series. The emotional and psychological complexity, combined with their outright failure to establish boundaries, creates a toxic cycle that affects not only them but those around them, especially Nesta and Azriel. Let’s break down the layers of dysfunction and toxicity in their relationship:

Cassian’s Conflicting Feelings for Mor

1. Cassian’s Obsession with Mor: Despite claiming to see Mor as a "sister," Cassian’s actions contradict this on multiple levels. He constantly defers to her, listens to her, and essentially worships her, giving her power over him that goes beyond a normal sibling-like relationship. This level of deference to Mor is particularly troubling when you consider his supposed bond with Nesta.

The Issue with Nesta: In 800 pages of A Court of Silver Flames, Cassian doesn’t tell Nesta that he ever had feelings for Mor or that there was a confusing dynamic there. Hiding this from Nesta, who’s supposed to be his mate, creates a deep foundation of dishonesty. If Cassian really saw Nesta as his equal and mate, why wouldn’t he be more forthcoming about his past with Mor? It’s a massive breach of trust.

2. Not Defending His Mate: When Mor suggested that Nesta be sent to Hewn City, a place she knows is hell for women, Cassian just agrees with her. The fact that he doesn’t defend Nesta, his mate, from such a terrible fate says a lot about his priorities and loyalty. If he truly cared for Nesta, he would have stood up for her against Mor, but instead, he goes along with Mor’s suggestion. This is not just a minor oversight; it speaks to his lack of respect and protection for Nesta, the woman he’s supposed to be bonded to.

Mor’s Manipulative Behavior

1. Using Cassian to Deter Azriel: Mor’s sexuality is complex, and while it’s understandable that she doesn’t want to hurt Azriel with the truth of her bisexuality, her continued use of Cassian as a shield is incredibly damaging.

Leading Azriel On: Mor knows full well that Azriel has feelings for her, yet she doesn’t put a stop to it. Instead, she uses Cassian as a way to keep Azriel at bay without having to address the real issue. This is manipulative and shows a lack of emotional maturity on Mor’s part. By leading Azriel on, she’s effectively psychologically torturing him, allowing him to believe there’s hope when she knows there isn’t.

2. Impact on Friendships: Mor’s behavior has ruined the dynamic between Azriel and Cassian. By constantly using Cassian to divert Azriel’s attention, she’s driving a wedge between the two friends. Azriel is left heartbroken and confused, while Cassian is complicit in the manipulation. The emotional toll this takes on all of them is enormous, and it’s a huge part of why this relationship dynamic is so toxic.

The Destructive Power Dynamic

1. Mor’s Control Over Cassian: Mor’s influence over Cassian is clear—he constantly defers to her, even over his mate, and prioritizes her feelings and opinions. This gives Mor an uncomfortable amount of control over Cassian’s actions, even when it’s to the detriment of his relationship with Nesta. This imbalance in power leads to further dysfunction, where Cassian is torn between loyalty to Mor and his bond with Nesta.

2. Lack of Boundaries: The fact that there are no clear boundaries between Mor and Cassian’s relationship is what makes it so volatile. Mor continues to use Cassian when it suits her, and Cassian is unable (or unwilling) to set boundaries that would protect his relationship with Nesta or his friendship with Azriel. Without these boundaries, the entire inner circle becomes entangled in a toxic web of unspoken feelings and unresolved tensions.

Emotional Fallout

Nesta’s Marginalization: Cassian’s inability to prioritize Nesta over Mor, or even stand up for her, marginalizes Nesta in the worst way. She’s left feeling unsupported and dismissed, while Mor continues to hold an elevated status in Cassian’s life. This is not the foundation of a healthy mate bond.

Azriel’s Pain: Mor’s manipulation of Azriel is nothing short of emotional torture. Azriel is left in limbo, constantly yearning for something that will never happen, and instead of addressing the issue head-on, Mor keeps him at arm’s length, leaving him emotionally fractured.

---

Conclusion: A Relationship Built on Dysfunction

Cassian and Mor’s relationship is rife with manipulation, dishonesty, and a lack of boundaries, creating an environment that’s toxic for everyone involved. Cassian’s failure to defend Nesta, coupled with Mor’s manipulation of both Cassian and Azriel, has created a destructive cycle that harms everyone around them. Rather than being a relationship built on trust or loyalty, it’s one marked by emotional confusion, power imbalances, and psychological damage. This dynamic ultimately undermines Cassian’s supposed bond with Nesta and Mor’s friendships, creating an ever-present cloud of dysfunction within the inner circle.

Ty @litnerdwrites for letting me use your post as inspo❤️❤️❤️

[valeriehalla]

I am so utterly fascinated by “Saki”, the 18-year-running mahjong manga in which you, the reader, become gradually, frog-boilingly aware (over the course of nearly two decades’ worth of mahjong tournaments) that none of these girls are wearing underwear and most of their boobs are slowly expanding.

I need you to understand that I have, like, an anthropological level fascination with this comic. From the perspective of someone who is also a comic artist and writer, two things delight me about it:

the fact that I understand completely how an artist gets from “the fans can have a little hint of skirted asscheek” to “the pussy is completely out on center page” over the course of 18 years; and

the way in which the pussy being out is treated by the characters and diegesis as being utterly unremarkable.

Okay. Point 1. The frog-boiling.

Let me put this in perspective for you. There was already a meme about how the characters in “Saki” don’t wear underwear when I was in middle school. I am thirty now. Okay? And it’s still going.

In the time since, this has stopped being a joke. It is now indisputable canon. This is not because anyone outright says it at any point. It’s because the underwear ran out of places to hide. I’m obsessed with this thought: somewhere in the over 20 volumes of “Saki”, there is a panel in which underwear was objectively deconfirmed. And it would be so hard to figure out where that panel actually is. Maybe the artist didn’t even realize it when she drew it! The frog? Boiling!!

And of course there is also the breast expansion. I don’t know how to put a spin on this. They are just expanding. Like, this happens a lot with artists: you define a character as being, in your mind, “the one with the big boobs”, and over the years you emphasize that trait further and further so that the signal doesn’t get lost in the noise. It’s just that normally—in like a wildly popular manga series about mahjong published by literally Square Enix, for example—normally there would be a point at which the boobs stopped getting bigger. Like, an editor would step in or something. Or you would get to the point where you cannot draw the character in the same panel as her mahjong tiles without her breasts spilling over the tiles, and you’d go, “Well, this is now untenable.”

That did not happen. There is no ceiling. The frog is soup.

Point 2. The complete and utter mundanity of all of this.

It’s like this, okay: there’s no shortage of trashy ecchi manga out there. There’s a million other comics doing wildly bawdier things with wildly more improbable bishoujos.

The vibe with “Saki” is different.

It’s hard to explain this, but it feels like the world of the comic is fundamentally uninterested in the fanservice happening on the page. I cannot describe it as “leering”, because I cannot conceive of a person in the story from whose point of view one would leer. I think the artist is probably into it—I can’t imagine anyone is making her do this—but “Saki” the comic has no opinion on the matter.

There are essentially no male characters in “Saki”. Like, there was one guy? Kind of? At the very beginning? But he is gone now. They put him back in the toybox. He does not exist. It appears to be some level of canonical that in the world of “Saki”, almost all humans are women. Those women are sometimes romantically into each other. According to comments the artist has made on Twitter (which I cannot source), they have lesbian baby technology, so it’s no problem. It’s so much not a problem that the story is about mahjong, instead of any of that.

So, like, the fiction here appears to be this: this is the, like, meta-narrative of the fanservice of “Saki”, right: it’s just normal that they don’t wear underwear and their boobs are arbitrarily big. It’s been normal. It was normal before the story of the manga began. It’s just how things are. Nobody bats an eye about it, and if they do, it’s in sort of a lesbian kind of way so like what’s the problem, we love lesbians here. This is literally normal for girls.

The fanservice simply diffuses into this all-encompassing aura of disembodied, ambient sluttiness. The framing of the panels demands you acknowledge it, and the story demands you already be over it, because it’s mahjong time now, and we’re playing mahjong.

Do you get??? why I’m so fascinated??? Are you not a little enraptured???

Anyway, I have no idea how to end this weird post. I guess the conclusion is that women stay winning????

[francisforever2014]

how it feels knowing that loneliness is still time spent with the world

[monsterfactoryfanfic]

if I've learned anything from grad school it's to check your sources, and this has proven invaluable in the dozens of instances when I've had an MBA-type try to tell me something about finances or leadership. Case in point:

Firefox serves me clickbaity articles through Pocket, which is fine because I like Firefox. But sometimes an article makes me curious. I'm pretty anal about my finances, and I wondered if this article was, as I suspected, total horseshit, or could potentially benefit me and help me get my spending under control. So let's check the article in question.

It mostly seems like common sense. "...track expenses and income for at least a month before setting a budget...How much money do I have or earn? How much do I want to save?" Basic shit like that. But then I get to this section:

This sounds fucking made up to me. And thankfully, they've provided a source to their claim that "research has repeatedly shown" that writing things down changes behavior. First mistake. What research is this?

Forbes, naturally, my #1 source for absolute dogshit fart-sniffing financial schlock. Forbes is the type of website that guy from high school who constantly posts on linkedin trawls daily for little articles like this that make him feel better about refusing to pay for a decent package for his employees' healthcare (I'm from the United States, a barbaric, conflict-ridden country in the throes of civil unrest, so obsessed with violence that its warlords prioritize weapons over universal medical coverage. I digress). Forbes constantly posts shit like this, and I constantly spend my time at leadership seminars debunking poor consultants who get paid to read these claims credulously. Look at this highlighted text. Does it make sense to you that simply writing your financial goals down would result in a 10x increase in your income? Because if it does, let me make you an offer on this sick ass bridge.

Thankfully, Forbes also makes the mistake of citing their sources. Let's check to see where this hyperlink goes:

SidSavara. I've never heard of this site, but the About section tells me that Sid is "a technology leader who empowers teams to grow into their best selves. He is a life-long learner enjoys developing software, leading teams in delivering mission critical projects, playing guitar and watching football and basketball."

That doesn't mean anything. What are his LinkedIn credentials? With the caveat that anyone can lie on Linkedin, Mr. Savara appears to be a Software Engineer. Which is fine! I'm glad software engineers exist! But Sid's got nothing in his professional history which suggests he knows shit about finance. So I'm already pretty skeptical of his website, which is increasingly looking like a personal fart-huffing blog.

The article itself repeats the credulous claim made in the Forbes story earlier, but this time, provides no link for the 3% story. Mr. Savara is smarter than his colleages at Forbes, it's much wiser to just make shit up.

HOWEVER. I am not the first person to have followed this rabbit hole. Because at the very top of this article, there is a disclaimer.

Uh oh!

Sid's been called out before, and in the follow up to this article, he reveals the truth.

You can guess where this is going.

So to go back to the VERY beginning of this post, both Pocket/Good Housekeeping and Forbes failed to do even the most basic of research, taking the wild claim that writing down your budget may increase your income by 10x on good faith and the word of a(n admittedly honest about his shortcomings) software engineer.

Why did I spend 30 minutes to make a tumblr post about this? Mostly to show off how smart I am, but also to remind folks of just how flimsy any claim on the internet can be. Click those links, follow those sources, and when the sources stop linking, ask why.

[eggwishing]

I ONCE TRIED TO WASH THAT SCUFFED OLD THING WHILE HE WAS TAKING ONE OF HIS NAPS, BUT WHEN I TOOK IT OFF HE WAS WEARING ANOTHER IDENTICAL ONE UNDERNEATH! AND ANOTHER! I GOT THROUGH TEN MORE LAYERS OF THE SAME THING BEFORE HE WOKE UP. I WAS SO FRUSTRATED! WHERE DID HE EVEN GET THOSE FROM? THEY ALL EVEN HAD THE SAME STAINS!!

[throesofincreasingwonder]

"A story doesn't need a theme in order to be good" I'm only saying this once but a theme isn't some secret coded message an author weaves into a piece so that your English teacher can talk about Death or Family. A theme is a summary of an idea in the work. If the story is "Susan went grocery shopping and saw a weird bird" then it might have themes like 'birds don't belong in grocery stores' or 'nature is interesting and worth paying attention to' or 'small things can be worth hearing about.' Those could be the themes of the work. It doesn't matter if the author intended them or not, because reading is collaborative and the text gets its meaning from the reader (this is what "death of the author" means).

Every work has themes in it, and not just the ones your teachers made you read in high school. Stories that are bad or clearly not intended to have deep messages still have themes. It is inherent in being a story. All stories have themes, even if those themes are shallow, because stories are sentences connected together for the purpose of expressing ideas, and ideas are all that themes are.

[blueskittlesart]

i think we all collectively moved on too quickly from hyrule warriors

[misscammiedawn]

Just read The Strange Case of Harley and Harleen and my god I needed a little bit of positive plurality in my life this week.

The way Pam and Harl's relationship adapts to accept the Harley/Harleen split makes my heart swell.

The way Pam sees the difference between her girlfriends.

And assures her that she accepts and loves all sides of her.

And does what she can to accommodate Harleen's memory holes.

The core relationship of this book is just so sweet and positive in accepting things as they are without judgment or pushing. Just acceptance and love.

And after finding that in our own life, I know what a powerfully positive thing it can be.

But the Harley/Harleen relationship is well handled too. There's friction and denial at the start but the two develop and trust one another by the end and Harley takes a seat as my favorite kind of character, the morally ambiguous protector.

I love the way Harley's protectiveness of Harleen is depicted and how she tries so hard to keep her from interacting with the criminal underworld of Gotham.

It's just saccharine and kind.

Highly recommend the book to anyone who just wants soft and kind plurality vibes. Heaven knows the majority of the fiction involving split personalities are flooded with angst and darkness and though this book contains a few dark plot beats like DV it never feels painful or sorrow inducing.

I'm so happy I read it.

[arcanegifs]

ARCANE LEAGUE OF LEGENDS: 2x08 - “Killing is a Cycle” ↳ "Some people are really misunderstanding the dialogue before the scene in the cell" | (essay link)

[maigetheplatypus57]

Do you think Evbo learned how to do those jumps and thought "oh this is so sick what's the best way I can show off my parkour skills"

[dateamonster]

"top ten movies about Girlhood" whose girlhood? whose girlhood? what kind of girl are these movies about? answer quickly.

[liimonadas]

randomly rememebered a very silly maya content creator AU i came up with like 2 years ago. its just dumb fun haha

[setaflow]

Gay pride happens in June and gay wrath happens whenever hbomberguy drops a 3+ hour video essay about a specific topic

[cup-o-stars]

I'm definitely going to redraw this one day, but for now:

Zeff and Sanji is something I dearly appreciate 🙏

[joicecubes]

the implications of ford pulling this photo out of his trenchcoat in the last episode you guys… THE IMPLICATIONS.

look at the state of this thing!! look at its rips! the stain in the bottom right corner! it’s dog-eared, the color is faded, the paper has browned… he’s kept this photo of them since they were kids. through all the years he stubbornly swore to hold a grudge, all the years he and stan never spoke, he kept this photo.

and we can assume he probably didn’t have it dimension-hopping, since i find it hard to believe he would’ve had it on him when he initially got sucked in, but ford pulling it out of his trenchcoat here!! implies!! that he had been CARRYING IT AROUND WITH HIM for some time after he got back!

imagine if he found it in some of his old stuff the night he returned, after punching and yelling at stan, after being sure to keep as much emotional distance between them as possible, and he finds this photo. would he have stared down at it? for a little while? smoothed the creases out on his desk? thumbed the torn, loved edges while he mourned a simpler time? then pocketed the thing to always have it with him?

i dunno. maybe i’m looking too far into it. but i can’t help but wonder if ford kept it because, against all his big dreams and ambitions, deep down he always wondered what his life might have been like if he sailed away with his brother when they were teenagers. never able to throw it away because doing so would symbolically destroy the last remnants of a childhood fantasy, the last piece of him that remains young and hopeful of a future at his brother’s side.

[wheatormeat]

If there's anything I've felt about ace attorney since playing through the original trilogy, it's how cheated I've felt about the fandom interpretation of it. Y'all were so caught up with your gay boys and your Miles Edgeworths I didn't realize how much of this game was about WOMEN. THE CORE OF ACE ATTORNEY IS IN ITS FEMALE CHARACTERS. From Mia jumpstarting Phoenix and guiding him throughout the whole trilogy even after her death, her presence being the primary connecter of Phoenix and Maya, Maya and Godot, heck even Dahlia and Iris and the whole lot of them. From Franziska's earnest faith and consolation of Miles Edgeworth, even begrudgingly, pulling him out the trauma of his childhood with the face to face confrontation of a bullet wound in the same spot as the man who killed his father. Lana and Ema dragging Phoenix back into the thing he does best. Lana and Ema who's tragic story lies in a pair of sisters ruined by the heinous law system and their unconditional love for each other. Dahlia and Iris with a different version of sisterly tragedy, struggling through generational trauma in separate settings and support systems. The matter of the Fey tradition looming over the entire narrative and all the legal and social terror that comes with it. CAN WE TALK ABOUT THE ACE ATTORNEY WOMEN.