#precarious life

[philosophybits]

Those who commit acts of violence are surely responsible for them; they are not dupes or mechanisms of an impersonal social force, but agents with responsibility. On the other hand, these individuals are formed, and we would be making a mistake if we reduced their actions to purely self-generated acts of will or symptoms of individual pathology of 'evil'.

Judith Butler, Precarious Life

[nickcolecio]

Judith Butler — Precarious Life

[ernestdescalsartwok]

VIDA SOLITARIA-ARTE-PINTURA-INTERIOR-CASA-PERSONAJE-VIVIR-ESTADO-PRECARIO-FOTOS-PINTANDO-PINTOR-ERNEST DESCALS por Ernest Descals Por Flickr: VIDA SOLITARIA-ARTE-PINTURA-INTERIOR-CASA-PERSONAJE-VIVIR-ESTADO-PRECARIO-FOTOS-PINTANDO-PINTOR-ERNEST DESCALS- Fotos pintando la vida de un personaje en el interior de su casa, estado de precariedad, vivir con lo que se puede, el hombre sentado y de espalda con sus pensamientos, pintura social de nuestra actualidad. Oleo sobre lienzo de 97 x 130 centímetros, aquí en un detalle del cuadro.

[professionalnooneatall]

"One of the most important feelings in politics is *grief*... the big political question is 'whose life is *worth* grieving?"

[canisalbus]

I'm not too certain but based on your posts it seems like Vasco and Machete's relationship might not work out in the end, which is sad but understandable. What about the modern day versions of them, though? Less crazy circumstances to lead them to ruin, right? Maybe I'm just being naive and hopeful 😅

.

[distressed-bird]

Kalina is the most interesting character to me because of all she has going on…

she is Cassandra’s familiar, she is simultaneously a pet and a friend and a servant and a family to a goddexx that is simultaneously her owner and friend and creator and parent and her god and reason to be—Kalina’s relationship to Cassandra is hard to put a name or label on (since what does being a familiar even mean?) but the bottomline is that this cat loves her deity enough to put everything and everyone on the line for her…

And adding in that she is a child of divorce. So to speak. I am extremely normal and haven’t been driven mad by the detail that baby itty bitty kitty Kalina was at Cassandra’s wedding to Ankarna and is remembered to have been toddling after her as she walked down the aisle…

Kalina will be the death of me /lh

[mushroominaforest]

I have two ap art prompts to do tonight, I just finished the first one!

prompt was “fruit in a precarious situation” lmfao

It’s very rushed and bad but I’m hoping to get to bed by at least 2am, so I am declaring this one done and moving on to the next!

sorry for the lack of rw posting, school has me in a chokehold rn lol

[quietwingsinthesky]

i know what tattoo millie doesn’t have, because during the short period where lucifer’s possessing her, she keeps taking the wheel of the vessel to go and get herself the ugliest cartoon devil tattoos money can buy. lucifer is wasting precious grace getting those off of her body because he can’t stand them, and then she just goes and gets another one in a couple days time.

[aviangrian]

[nenekobasu]

really think like, isagi is someone who got his destined hero's call and dutifully set out on his journey and along the way it was revealed that he's actually the offspring of a demon, while kaiser is someone who got the hero's call said "fuck that shit" and tried to villain his way out of his duty

[lesbiansanemi]

Officially deciding I shall not be going to work tomorrow because of the snowstorm so…. Yay? Extra day off?

[nicopilledbrainrot]

watching blood of zeus from the hospital bed and everyone is hot

[dungeons-and-dragon-age]

varric's death is actually great for the rook!addie agenda

[not-poignant]

would you say omega on omega “rivalry” is considered a normal trait? we haven’t seen that much interaction between more “ordinary” (considering the setting ha) omegas. ef is quite unique and flitmouse is older and would be more mellow)

i keep thinking of that time faber was reacting to efnisiens presence, and then his interaction with i forgot his name it was french coded haha.

i was curious to know if faber represents more of the “classic” omega traits you would expect from both a regular but also traumatised omega or if faber is just being his usual unstable self.

im thinking if caleb or even gary and temsen were to recognise fabers omega nature and revisit past encounters, what would those behaviors be?

i guess this will be explored in the actual fic so i dont want to ask you to spoil anything if but i love when you give us world building content here especially the scientific/medical side of things youre really the first one to go so in DEPTH and its sooo satisfying

thank u have a good day sir

Hi anon!

Omega rivalry is very normal to a point. This is not a world where omegas have a strong drive to befriend each other in general, until after they've been claimed by an alpha. And after that point, if they are in an insecure relationship, they will not want to befriend other omegas at all. This includes characters like Flitmouse, and also Nate. (We'll see that as their stories progress).

It's also why omegas aren't cleared to even hang around other omegas for a long part of their healing period. It's why Efnisien in Underline the Black never ever sees them hanging out together, the rare times he sees them, and it's a huge part of why Hillview actually has to be such a large property in the first place (that and keeping alpha pheromones separate).

In a healthier society, omegas would have more of a drive to bond inter-generationally (i.e. at points where they wouldn't feel threatened because of age-gaps etc.), but this society isn't healthy and hasn't been for a long time. So it's popularised in movies, television, and in reality, that omegas do not like each other and do not like to socialise with each other. An omega is considered "radicalised" if they bond with another omega as a friend.

There's scenes that will sort of indicate this as the story goes on. But Flitmouse is considered unusual for the way he can bond with other omegas, and it's definitely not how he's always felt. We're going to see more of his...connections to omegas in Underline the Gold. Even in Underline the Blue we see that Christian's new omega is by default automatically cruel and mean to Nate, simply because Nate was a previous lover and he wants to make it clear that he's hostile to Nate. And he's just a voice on the phone. So we're not just seeing this from omegas within the Hillview system, we're seeing it from omegas who have never been to Hillview.

As for Faber and his behaviours, and what the alphas around him will notice, you'll have to find out! That'll definitely be explored in Underline the Red. That being said, I do think it's important to note that Faber's case is complicated not just because he feels he is an omega. He's been raised as a beta with strong elements of self-hatred and self-loathing, with internalised beta bigotry to boot. Like, 'a little of column A, a little of column B, and some secret third thing' are more realistic as an answer vs. 'is it this one thing or this other thing that makes him like this.'

But yeah rivalry is absolutely considered normal. The degree itself can become pathological (Lucien is heading towards murdering other omegas before he comes to Hillview), but it being present at all is considered completely normal, in the same way that alphas posturing around each other or being possessive of their omegas, or not wanting any other alphas around their omega and that being a problem, is considered completely normal.

[sophieeee0105]

I was thinking about the parallel of Joel building the relationship in double life and then a submarine in limited life…

and it’s almost like the relationship burned and then the remains sunk under water and got repaired into a submarine. (Except for the fact that the relationship was on land and now the submarine has ascended to the sky)

[daisyachain]

Restorative or Transformative?: Homoerotic Subtext, The Closet, and Ciphers in Pop Culture. The nature of commercial art is that it’s sometimes bad and inconsistent. Notably it’s also misogynistic. One way in which audiences try to reconcile massive plot holes or gaps in character motivation is by reading secrets or hidden information into a plot.

Commonly, male characters are interpreted as closeted gay or bisexual to reconcile the absence of women from commercial narratives with the generally stunted and poorly-written male characters that form the focus on said texts. This reading has become especially common among a non-heterosexual milieu. Rather than transforming the original text into some radically different new form, this closeted interpretation seeks to make the original text stand on its own as a story rather than a Swiss cheese of dumb writing decisions.

This interpretation only works for a specific type of pop, usually genre fiction. Any story in which tortured male leads eschew women in favour of male-male bonds (because female characters are constantly killed off, written sparsely, or written out, because the production team keeps casting their male buddies, because actors demand to keep having scenes with their bros, whatever) can become a sounder structure if you put one of them in a closet.

The gay interpretation is the natural consequence of shoddy misogynistic writing from ventures like Supernatural, Naruto, all the biggest hits. It’s also the natural consequence of more benignly misogynistic writing like The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes or The Lord of the Rings, where women aren’t necessarily rejected but are simply absent from the worlds of the protagonists. When the emotional crux of the story falls on male-male interactions, this reads as romantic because society at large priorities (definitively heterosexual) romance as the pinnacle of human connection. Two forces are in conflict, the primacy of heterosexuality (read as: romance) and the primacy of men.

Anyway. All that is to say that the typical gay or bisexual reading of male characters in pop fiction comes from a very real place. But, in some places, that’s the default interpretation. Angst, insecurity, secrets, double lives, fatigue, disappointment, restrained passion, stunted personal growth, anyone living in the closet can tell you that it impacts and defines your whole life to know that you live in a way fundamentally incompatible with The Proper Way that life is structured around down to tax law and superstore prices (which assume a heterosexual nuclear family unit). Characters in fiction also tend to have personal problems because that makes them interesting and tasty.

If you’ve grown up on stories with the specific type of misogyny that can be papered over with a closeted interpretation of the male leads, carrying this interpretation over to any male character will make sense more often than not. Even a bit of angst or insecurity? Well of course that makes sense if a character is closeted.

Except that’s hurt a normal part of fiction, and sometimes the closeted interpretation takes away from the point of a character. If a male character is on another axis of marginalization, the closeted interpretation imposed by the slash reading community downplays or trivializes the effects of that marginalization in the plot by overwriting it with another type of marginalization. Alternately, sometimes a character’s heterosexuality is a part of the story. There are some sorts of critiques or investigations of misogyny or masculinity that don’t work if the character has an ‘opt out’ of the cisheteropatriarchal perspective. Not that gay/bisexual men aren’t except from misogyny, but misogyny masculinity and heterosexuality are so tightly linked that it sort of defeats the point if you interpret that character outside of heterosexuality.

All that is to say—the closet interpretation is a quick and easy spice to apply to the weaker parts of action-adventure genre fiction to make it taste better. It draws from a large enough sample of art that it’s pretty widely applicable. Because of that, it’s part of some people’s [my] default interpretation package just because the semi-dull macho show at least gets less dull if you imagine there’s a reason for there to be no girls besides simple hatred. That then forms its own problem where the interpretation that works with your average genre work gets then blanket-applied to all genre works and obscures the places where the closet interpretation doesn’t fix the work, and actually makes it less interesting.