#rather than ordering people around

[emberfaye]

I can't take "Kim is rude to wait staff" "Kim treats the bodyguards like shit" "Kim is awful to strangers and has to learn basic manners"

Because it's fucking canon that in the middle of a fight for chays life, a fight he already knows is going to cause some damage, a fight he's outnumbered for and no one even knows he's there, he still keeps yok from losing an entire shelf and mirrors and alcohol. He knows she is a small business probably knows her entire Financials what with him being Mr. Mcsnoopy face.

[sledge-in-space]

John Seed is a comfort character for some people. Folks like to ship him with their deputies or craft redemption arcs for him.

There's nothing wrong with that, obviously.

But I just can't wrap my head around it.

There's nothing comforting about the way John Seed treated Joey Hudson. I don't understand why the ordeal she went through doesn't seem to matter to fans of his.

She was bait for the rookie deputy and nothing more, because she wasn't going to give in and join the cult.

He terrorized Joey and the rest of Fall's End, stooping to the lowest, most inhumane levels to get his way. Some even theorize that he hurt the "sinners" in his care just because he wanted to, for malicious, sadistic reasons that didn't have anything to do with the cult. At worst, some people go as far as to speculate that he raped Joey.

It's easy to see why someone might come to that conclusion. The way he acts is deplorable and he makes everything feel extremely personal, sometimes in ways that can be interpreted as sexually charged. He'll do anything in order to get his way because "no" is antithetical to him. He regularly flies off the handle, so much so that Joseph is threatening to cast him out. All the touching and getting right up in the player's face is so uncomfortable and obsessive (which is the point, but I digress).

So why does he get to be redeemed and venerated by fans? Don't his actions warrant consequences?

Are people willing to let him off the hook because he's attractive? Because he had a horrible, abusive childhood? Obviously he's got a lot more lore than most of the cast. Is that something people are interested in exploring for him over other characters?

I'm not trying to come after anyone personally. There's nothing wrong with liking villains and Jacob, Faith, and Joseph have also done terrible things to innocent people.

Which is like, fine. It's a video game.

And I know that John, like Joey, is a victim of Ubisoft's choppy, inconsistent writing and storytelling. Things got changed and swapped and cut during development that got us to where we are, with the story we have. Flaws and all, not like it was ever going to be perfect.

But in my opinion, I feel like the adoration for John does a huge disservice to Joey. People make thirsty edits of him while she's literally tied up behind him. It's tasteless and makes the optics of her situation look even creepier.

Her pain has largely been ignored for as long as the game has existed. I can't for the life of me figure out why.

[bibleofficial]

bath is such a tourist trap 😭😭 the roman baths were neat but that’s literally all there is

[hey-that-hurt]

Another contract au thing

At first when Beetlejuice is allowed back into the house, the Maitlands avoid Beetlejuice. Charles backs them up and orders Beetlejuice to stay out of the attic. Eventually they start willingly spending time around him, communicating that they won’t order him around, but they expect him to respect their boundaries. After a bit they even revoke Charles’ order and let him come into the attic, though they expect him to ask permission.

The Maitlands are the safest people in the house for Beetlejuice to be around. They don’t give him orders, and will revoke orders upon request if they don’t think they’re going to step on anyone’s toes by doing so.

Beetlejuice does his best to comply for a while, but eventually the stress of his whole situation starts to wear on him and he starts to feel irritated about the Maitlands, too.

The Maitlands, he thinks, want to avoid the guilt of ordering him around directly while still reaping the benefits. What’s the difference between their requests and everyone else’s orders if he has to obey them all the same?

Angry about their hypocrisy (and maybe they really are being hypocritical, I’m not really sure yet. At the very least they’re complicit), he reverts to his behavior from the musical and then some. He goes out of his way to harass them and make them uncomfortable, giving them as little peace as he possibly can. When they ask him to stop, he tells them to make him.

Eventually Barbara has had enough and does, finally, order him to stop harassing them, and tells him to stay out of the attic for a while so they can have some space.

Finally, Beetlejuice is satisfied. Once again, he got the perfect Maitlands to snap.

He goes to the roof and feels sick, gnashes his teeth and curls into a ball and wants to claw at his skin, but he doesn’t cry. He hasn’t felt capable of crying for a long, long time.

[cruelsister-moved2]

i also don’t think ‘security in your masculinity’ functions as a cure for violence against women. in fact, the cure is (put simply) compassion and empathy for women, the recognition that women are human beings, which is something masculinity is explicitly constructed against. because masculinity isn’t a biological reality, it’s a social construct defined against a feminine ‘other’ and associated with power. traits/behaviours/embodiment that one culture and time period associates with masculinity are associated with femininity in another.  In that context ‘security in your masculinity’ means... security that you don’t have to behave like [insert racialised/class-prejudiced portrayal of stereotypes male violence here] to preserve the privileges you expect to be surrounded by as a member of the dominant gender class. the irony in the ‘secure in my masculinity’ brag is that it makes the men with genuine cause to fear for their place in masculine hegemony (disabled men, gay men, trans men, men of colour, jewish men, immigrant men, working class men, etc) more of a threat than the men who are most secure within it. and now, under this framework, striving for inclusion within the privileged class, fighting to maintain its definitions, and subscribing to its values, is... feminist praxis?  and of course, in all of this, men’s experiences are centralised in the conversation of violence against women. violence against women becomes a tribal issue between groups of men, a.k.a 'feminist’ men are taking fundamentally the same perspective as the 3750 year old code of hammurabi.

[storybounded]

Where does your power lie?

The Lungs

breathe, just breathe. whether it's to calm yourself or raise your voice, your control has always been your strength. in, out. you feel, you observe, you hold it in, and you release that which you cannot use. and you sing. and you sing.

tagged by: @yxllowstcne

tagging: @streetslost

[netscapenavigaytor]

actually i feel like a whole essay could be written about "Random Humor" and how it did not really go away so much as get rebranded and change its presentation somewhat. tumblr especially loves its absurdist non-sequiturs but it is afraid to call it as it is (random humor) and quite frankly some of the posts on this site WISH they could be as funny as a ytp from 2009. i havent the braincells right now (or maybe ever idk) to write such an essay though

[my-thoughts-and-junk]

going through my dream daddy saves and when i first played i did the routes in order of which i thought would be my least to most favorite

[fionnaskyborn]

one day when i am not busy dying on the inside and out i will write an honest-to-god essay about how people are, for the lack of a better descriptor but simultaneously for the lack of a more perfect one, too edgy about five.

[daydreamerdrew]

More Fun Comics (1935) #59

[theresa-of-liechtenstein]

still wrestling with don giovanni event left 25719 injured

[jaythelay]

Ye... it doesn't surprise me some are already starting to celebrate Palestine's Genocide, which they were no matter who won, but Losing gives them good credence to feel good in dropping the mask that they always were Pro-Genocide since it now allows them to feel completely justified in alienating voters permanently out of entirely cultish inspired spite.

Look, ya'll gotta quit dividing your wide umbrella, easiest way is drawing the line at Genocide which is Right By Your Foot.

Regardless, "i told you so" Yeah-huh, and so did I, it was tight, you needed the votes, ya pushed them away because it looked bad for Dear Leader to...listen to our demands for better...

Anyways,

glad we're past "It's not a genocide bro" and finally can talk about it like Functional Adult Human Beings- starting at:

Genocide Bad No Matter Who

[mbat]

its really funny changing the events of WoW for my OCs version of things because im just mangling the entire thing into something completely nonsensical just to be like. yeah i like that :]

[gallusrostromegalus]

Might I inquire as to what, precisely, a Mustain't is? (Aside from a string of letters I hesitate to Google in that order.)

In October 2014 I went on a road-trip to the Dryest Place In America.

I was having a rough year, very depressed from having dropped out of college for the third time. I decided a road trip was in order to re-set my brain and get a little distance. Being that it was October, and therefore all the campgrounds in the American Southwest were filled with people who have the good sense to camp in reasonable temperatures, I elected to take my parent's minivan so I could car-camp anywhere suitably isolated, and looked up some of the southwest's geographic extremes- the highest place I could drive to (Pikes Peak), the lowest place (Badwater Basin), and for fun, the Dryest Place in the continental US, which turned out to be the Pinacate Volcanic field just west of Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. It gets rain maybe twice a century and has no standing water, despite being less than 100 miles from the gulf of California.

It's a startlingly beautiful and alien place. The ground is a deep chocolate brown to black volcanic sand, and in mid October, the rabbit brush is turning bright yellow as it shifts to autumn, the organ pipe cacti are a dark green and stand, partially concealed in the brush at exactly human height. The air is alive with birds and insects and bats at night. The stargazing is like looking into the eyes of God.

You get there by driving down a little dirt road called "El Camino Del Diablo", or "The Devil's Road".

I drove out about three hours from Glendale, AZ to get there, arriving at sunset, and felt a profound sense of peace. I stargazed, listening to the bats hunt and sing, and slept peacefully for the first time in months.

I stayed out there for three days, sketching and painting the landscape, taking strolls through this almost alien landscape, and enjoying the light and sound and total absence of human intrusion besides myself.

On the fourth night, it was a new moon, and I awoke in the middle of the night. Something was amiss, and it took me a while to realize it was because I could NOT hear the bats. I was sleeping inside the van with the rear windows rolled halfway down rather than trying to set up the tent, so I when I sat up, I looked out of the van's reflective windows to discover what at first appeared to be A Horse.

It was something between pale gray and bright white in the starlight, standing maybe a dozen feet from the van, sniffing curiously. It made sense- I was in the middle of mustang country and there was quite a bit of foliage in the area for it and it did look like a truly wild horse- lumpy where the bones were jutting out, dusty about the hooves and face.

I was instantly seized by the sort of paralytic fear Sleep paralysis is made of. I couldn't move. It wasn't quite looking at me because it couldn't quite see through the windshield into the shadowy into the shadowy interior, but I had the distinct impression that if I looked away, it would know, and get me.

I already had problems with horses. My beloved Aunt Helen's Prize mare tried to kill me on two separate occasions, and the year before I had to carry my sister-in-law backwards out of a slot canyon whilst reciting the Saint Crispin's Day Speech as loudly as possible to keep a mustang from trampling us to death.

This is approximately what it should have looked like:

Instead, it was... off. like trying to draw a horse from memory.

The waist tapered in.

The legs were slightly too long or the torso slightly too short, probably both.

The ears were Triangular.

The head wasn't quite right- Too narrow and the jaw wasn't heavy enough.

The tail was too long and arced unnaturally away from the body.

The neck arched.

The nostrils were too high and close

The mouth too long.

Whatever this is, a Mustang it Ain't.

I watched it from the back seat as it sniffed around the front of the van, curious with about the side mirrors. It moved around the van, nibbling experimentally on the front door handle. It came up to the side windows, sniffing like a dog, and it's breath didn't fog up the glass.

Finally, it came up to the rear window, which was rolled halfway down to let the fall night air in. Not even half a pane of glass and two feet of air between us, and I could clearly see it's bright blue eyes.

Horses have Elongated pupils to give them a wide field of vision, and eyes that rotate sideways in their sockets so the pupil remains parallel to the ground. Rather creepy to watch, especially the ones with blue eyes.

A real horse that was curious about the interior of the van would have come up to the window more or less sideways, and looked at me with something like this:

Instead, the damn thing walked up and faced the back window head on, staring back at me with this:

I'm not sure how long we watched each other like that, eyes locked. My eyes burned. I couldn't blink. My mouth was dry. I couldn't swallow. My throat began to ache. I couldn't make a sound. My skin began to twitch, like I was severely dehydrated. I couldn't move. My lungs burned. I couldn't move. I couldn't move. I couldn't move. I couldn't move.

Something was touching the side of my hand on the seat next to me. It's my water bottle.

The realization must have broken the terrible paralysis in the lower parts of my brain first, because by the time I consciously realized I could move again, I was already flinging my water bottle out the window at it.

The top was open, and splashed out the window at the Mustain't.

I've never heard such a scream out of an animal. Something halfway between the sound of unquenchable rage vibrating in someone's chest and the way rabbits cry out to God when the dogs catch them.

It jumped back, pivoting away from the van, snarling at the water bottle. I don't think you're supposed to be able to see All of a horse's teeth at once, no matter how angry it is.

I watched it run into the night for some distance, it's pale body visible against the black sand and the dark gray shadow of the ancient volcanic cone it was headed for.

When the blood stopped pounding in my ears, I could hear the bats again.

I debated leaving right then, but I didn't want to get out of the van with that thing in the area, nor litter by leaving the water bottle out there. I also had the awful idea that if I left now, it might somehow be able to follow me home. I ended up staying up three hours to watch the sunrise, shaking and trying to figure out if I'd woken up from a vivid dream, if my meds had stopped working, or if that had really happened. I didn't dare move until I actually felt the temperature rise, before stepping out of the van to grab the bottle. I had my camera ready- I was still using a DSLR back then- to take pictures of the hoofprints, to show how close it had gotten to the van.

No hoofprints.

Beetle tracks in the soft sand around the van, and the clear foot-and-wing prints of a bird that had hopped around then taken off. But no hoofprints.

I went over the entire campsite with the tent broom, to make sure I removed every scrap of evidence I had ever been there, including my footprints, grabbed my water bottle, and drove the three hours back back to Glendale, then decided to do seven more hours of driving to Moab, Utah just to put more than 500 miles, the state line and at least nine things that could be considered "running water" between me and the Mustain't.

-

I still have that water bottle. It has a dent in the bottom from hitting something, but that could have happened at any time. Strange thing though. I can't drink that bottle dry. I'll have it on me, drink whatever I've put in there- water, juice, iced coffee- and eventually feel like I've drunk the whole think and that it's empty. But I open it up and it's still at least a quarter full. I drink that. I get thirsty. I open it up again. ...and there's always a mouthful left.

Not sure what the side effects of drinking from a bottle cursed by a Mustain't to always have some left are, but it lives in the Emergency Breakdown Kit in my car now, just in case I meet another one.

---

(I'm a disabled artist and make my living telling stories, please consider supporting me on Ko-Fi or Pre-order the Family Lore book on Patreon)

[dutybcrne]

Think abt Huffman & Kaeya having a Jean-Mikasa moment when they first met

[disk-and-horse]

man why are people so bad at being anti-israel. why is it so hard to be against palestinian genocide and also not anti-semitic. it is in fact possible to think that the current far-right israeli government is morally repugnant without getting mad at unrelated jewish people in other countries.