#rather than something that is deserved

[dogsliampaynedoesntinstagram]

I really feel bad for harry cause people are ripping into him again. I saw a joke tweet with a movie exec asking harry to star as a leading man opposite a female and asking for audition reels. Harry showed the pics of him kissing Olivia on the yacht and Emily and the exec was like ewww no thanks. And then people wonder why he's still in the closet. But then I've seen harries who are into the fantasy boyfriend harry saying they have an ick from him after the video. And then the fans who are supposedly supporting him as a closeted artist are upset with him for stunting again. I honestly don't know if what he's doing is the correct path for him if he wants to maintain selling out the stadiums long term. Elton john is an out gay man and selling out stadiums. Do you see a path for him to do this? He's an incredible musician and I understand the gossip keeps his name in the paper but I wish it wasn't this way. I wish the world was different and not homophobic and for him to have the career he wants and I think rightfully deserves without all this other stuff.

I wish the world was different too.

It's worth remembering that Harry is 29. Elton John was 29 in 1976. That year he answered a question about being bisexual. Eight years later he would marry a woman he really didn't seem to want to be in a relationship with. 16 years later he would describe himself as 'comfortable being gay'.

I've no idea if Harry will be selling out stadiums in 2069 - but I also don't think that's a very good way of evaluating the present or the future. There are a lot of things that can happen to a pop star - and people being mean about them kissing doesn't really register in ways that things can go wrong.

[inkskinned]

you were raised in comparison.

it wasn't always obvious (well. except for the times that it was), but you internalized it young. you had to eat what you didn't like, other people are going hungry, and you should be grateful. you had to suck it up and walk on the twisted ankle, it wasn't broken, you were just being a baby. you were never actually suffering, people obviously had it worse than you did.

you had a roof over your head - imagine! with the way you behaved, with how you talked back to your parents? you're lucky they didn't kick you out on your ass. they had friends who had to deal with that. hell, you have friends who had to deal with that. and how dare you imply your father isn't there for you - just because he doesn't ever actually talk to you and just because he's completely emotionally checked out of your life doesn't mean you're not fucking lucky. think about your cousins, who don't even get to speak to their dad. so what if yours has a mean streak; is aggressive and rude. at least you have a father to be rude to you.

you really think you're hurting? you were raised in a home! you had access to clean water! you never so much as came close to experiencing a real problem. sure, okay. you have this "mental illness" thing, but teenagers are always depressed, right. it's a phase, you'll move on with your life.

what do you mean you feel burnt out at work. what do you mean you mean you never "formed healthy coping mechanisms?" we raised you better than that. you were supposed to just shoulder through things. to hold yourself to high expectations. "burning out" is for people with real jobs and real stress. burnout is for people who have sick kids and people who have high-paying jobs and people who are actually experiencing something difficult. recently you almost cried because you couldn't find your fucking car keys. you just have lost your sense of gratitude, and honestly, we're kind of hurt. we tell you we love you, isn't that enough? if you want us to stick around, you need to be better about proving it. you need to shut up about how your mental health is ruined.

it could be worse! what if you were actually experiencing executive dysfunction. if you were really actually sick, would you even be able to look at things on the internet about it? you just spend too much time on webMD. you just like to freak yourself out and feel like you belong to something. you just like playing the victim. this is always how you have been - you've always been so fucking dramatic. you have no idea how good you have it - you're too fucking sensitive.

you were like, maybe too good of a kid. unwilling to make a real fuss. and the whole time - the little points, the little validations - they went unnoticed. it isn't that you were looking for love, specifically - more like you'd just wanted any one person to actually listen. that was all you'd really need. you just needed to be witnessed. it wasn't that you couldn't withstand the burden, but you did want to know that anyone was watching. these days, you are so accustomed to the idea of comparison - you don't even think you belong in your own communities. someone always fits better than you do. you're always the outlier. they made these places safe, and then you go in, and you are just not... quite the same way that would actually-fit.

you watch the little white ocean of your numbness lap at your ankles. the tide has been coming in for a while, you need to do something about it. what you want to do is take a nap. what you want to do is develop some kind of time machine - it's not like you want your life to stop, not completely, but it would really nice if you could just get everything to freeze, just for a little while, just until you're finished resting. but at least you're not the worst you've been. at least you have anything. you're so fucking lucky. do you have any concept of the amount of global suffering?

a little ant dies at the side of your kitchen sink. you look at its strange chitinous body and think - if you could just somehow convince yourself it is enough, it will finally be enough and you can be happy. no changes will have to be made. you just need to remember what you could lose. what is still precious to you.

you can't stop staring at the ant. you could be an ant instead of a person, that is how lucky you are. it's just - you didn't know the name of the ant, did you. it's just - ants spend their whole life working, and never complain. never pull the car over to weep.

it's just - when it died, it curled up into a tight little ball.

something kind of uncomfortable: you do that when you sleep.

[anghraine]

It's interesting (if often frustrating) to see the renewed Orc Discourse after the last few episodes of ROP. I've seen arguments that orcs have to be personifications of evil rather than people as such or else the ethics of our heroes' approach to them becomes much more fraught. Tolkien's work, as written, seems an odd choice to me for not wrangling with difficult questions, and of course, more diehard fans are going to immediately bring up Shagrat and Gorbag.

If you haven't read LOTR recently, Shagrat and Gorbag are two orcs who briefly have a conversation about how they're being screwed over by Sauron but have no other real options, about their opinions of mistakes that have been made, that they think Sauron himself has made one, but it's not safe to discuss because Sauron has spies in their own ranks. They reminisce about better times when they had more freedom and fantasize about a future when they can go elsewhere and set up a small-scale banditry operation rather than being involved in this huge-scale war. Eventually, however, they end up turning on each other.

Basically any time that someone brings up the "humanity" of this conversation, someone else will point out that they're still bad people. They're not at all guilty about what they're part of. They just resent the dangers to themselves, the pressure from above, failures of competence, the surveillance they're under, and their lack of realistic alternative options. The dream of another life mentioned in the conversation is still one of preying on innocent people, just on a much smaller and more immediate scale, etc.

I think this misses the reason it keeps getting brought up, though. The point is not that Shagrat and Gorbag are good people. The point is that they are people.

There's something very normal and recognizable about their resentment of their superiors, their fears of reprisal and betrayal that ultimately are realized, their dislike of this kind of industrial war machine that erases their individual work and contributions, the tinge of wistfulness in their hope of escape into a different kind of life. Their dialect is deliberately "common"—and there's a lot more to say about that and the fact that it's another commoner, Sam, who outwits them—but one of the main effects is to make them sound familiar and ordinary. And it's interesting that one of the points they specifically raise is that they're not going to get better treatment from "the good guys" so they can't defect, either.

This is self-interested, yes, but it's not the self-interest of some mystical being or spirit or whatnot, but of people.

Tolkien's later remarks tend to back this up. He said that female orcs do exist, but are rarely seen in the story because the characters only interact with the all-male warrior class of orcs. Whatever female orcs "do," it isn't going to war. Maybe they do a lot of the agricultural work that is apparently happening in distant parts of Mordor, maybe they are chiefly responsible for young orcs, maybe both and/or something else, we don't know. But we know they're out there and we know that they reproduce sexually and we know that they're not part of the orcish warrior class.

Regardless of all the problems with this, the idea that orcs have a gender-restricted warrior class at all and we're just not seeing any of their other classes because of where the story is set doesn't sound like automatons of evil. It sounds like an actual culture of people that we only see along the fringes.

And this whole matter of "but if they're people, we have to think about ethics, so they can't be people" is a weird circular argument that cannot account for what's in LOTR or for much of what Tolkien said afterwards. Yes, he struggled with The Problem of Orcs and how to reconcile it with his world building and his ethical system, but "maybe they're not people" is ultimately not a workable solution as far as LOTR goes and can't even account for much of the later evolution of his ideas, including explicit statements in his letters.

And in the end, the real response that comes to mind to that circular argument is "maybe you should think about ethics more."

[spiltcandycoatedpunkblood]

so was that legitimately fake outrage at Watcher being "greedy capitalists" that people are now gonna go watch the try guys who are doing the exact same thing?? where's the outrage at their wealth and how they spend their money? why does Keith get people just watching him eat at expensive restaurants, but it's terrible seeing Steven go to expensive restaurants to eat food? it's got nothing to do with "the try guys did it better!!!" it's the fact that you got so outraged because of how much the economy is in shambles and people can barely afford food, let alone another streaming service, and now suddenly it's a great thing seeing the try guys be able to improve their situation with one!! I thought the whole point was that we didn't need another one!! what is it???

it's just obvious that they've both done similar things, but people are taking more issue with the creators of colour for daring to grow and move forward. EVEN AFTER THEY ALTERED THINGS AND GENUINELY APOLOGISED even whilst being fucking eviscerated online. and instead of being helped and understood by their white friends, they get fucking shaded by their friends with a sofa joke and "not to name names" bullshit

what is it with people of colour being left in the dirt by their white friends and/or costars???

[dykedvonte]

RE: Your post on the AU of Jimmy being in the cockpit rather than Curly.

I think that Curly would think that Jimmy was reaping what he had sown, but in a way would feel a twisted sense of relief that Jimmy was brought down by his own actions rather than Curly himself having to be the "executioner" in the situation, so to speak.

With "taking responsibility" and the fix-it mentality that he and Jimmy share being the overarching theme, compounded with Jimmy flat out insinuating that all of his crimes on the Tulpar will be "Curly's tragedy" in that one scene, I think Curly would almost find comfort in the irony that the choice was forcibly taken away from him. Which in itself is messed up, but it might be a bit cathartic. There's an interesting polarizing dynamic within Curly's relationship to his own responsibility in that it's his greatest burden and the thing he, too, avoids the most.

I don't think Curly would find any relief in this actually. While Curly didn't/doesn't like the responsibility he had, he defiantly doesn't avoid it, he just goes about it in a weird way.

A thing I noticed is that its less about taking responsibility with Curly and really what that responsibility meant objectively and then subjectively to Curly. The leniency that he applies to Jimmy also applies a bit to the others as well. He thinks his responsibility is more towards keeping the peace and things in order more than dolling out punishment. He has even more choices to make and responsibilities as he literally has to make sure they survive/ration long enough to be saved. Or figure out how to save them himself. The correct issue with Curly and responsibility is the prioritization in his head. He sees the big picture and prioritizes that. He doesn't notice the little things that he should but it's not a active dismissal, perhaps not even conscious despite how dismissive he seemed. He takes too much responsibility, espcially in regards to Jimmy, and I think this situation is when he realizes that is also a bad thing as he can't "fix" all of his wrongs.

I think he'd regret not making a choice, because in the end this happened because he wouldn't directly choose who to comfort and help. He tried to help both and ended up doing nothing for either and letting Jimmy fuck them all over. In this scenario/au he's thinking about all the times he let Jimmy inadvertently make his choice, and how he chose to let it happen. He regrets all of it and would be so bitter that he was giving his choice up for so long. He chose wrong and it affected everyone. The only thing he'd find cathartic is the fucked up truth it will never happen again, not with Jimmy at least.

But he's not happy he's getting joy from that. I think it's a point not a single character other than Jimmy is depicted at deriving joy from another's pain. Even Swansea is being more sarcastic when he cheers on Curly about crashing the ship and ending his sobriety. He's happy Jimmy was forced to take responsibility, but this? He wanted him to learn a lesson and do something with himself, this is hollow in a way it's just embittering. Jimmy didn't get what he wanted, he can be happy about that but no one else did. This isn't justice or closure for Anya, he's stuck in a place he was so desperate to leave with even more pressure on his shoulders. Daisuke is just a kid and Swansea doesn't deserve this after all his year making himself a better man.

Like in his sections, Curly is preoccupied thinking about all the responsibilities he has, taking on things he shouldn't have to and trying to keep the peace when he doesn't have peace in his own mind.

[trans-axolotl]

and this is also why i think that any meaningful community building/advocacy/support around madness/neurodivergence/mental illness needs to be founded on principles of liberation and abolition, and that we need to be able to distinguish between people who are allies based on our shared values + goals, and between people who use some of the same language as us, but are fundamentally advocating for separate things.

One example I see a lot of is the idea of "lived experience" professionals, people who have a career in the mental health system and who also have some personal experience with mental illness. These professionals oftentimes will talk about their own negative experiences in the mental health system, and come into their careers with a genuine desire to improve the experience of patients. But their impact is incredibly limited by the system they have chosen to work in: the coercive elements of psychiatry incentivize professionals to buy into the existing power structures instead of disrupting them. And as a whole, many lived experience professionals end up getting exploited and tokenized by their employers and used as an attempt to make carceral psychiatry seem more palatable. Professionals in this dynamic are not working to effectively challenge the structural violence of their profession: they become complicit, even if they do also have good intentions and provide individual support.

(I do know some radical providers who have found innovative ways to fuck up the system and destabilize and shift power in their workplaces, but this is a very small number of providers and is not most of the lived experience providers I've talked with.)

Another example I see a lot in our spaces has to do with the evolution of the neurodiversity paradigm. I feel a very deep connection to the original conceptualization of neurodiversity and neurodivergent as coined by Kassiane Asasumasu, but in recent years I've seen a lot of people using neurodivergent language in a way that feels pretty dramatically different than the foundational principles. This isn't saying that people should stop using ND terminology or that all neurodivergent spaces are like this--rather, I just want to point out some trends I see in certain communities, both online and in my in personal life. Although people will often use neurodivergent language and on the surface, seem allied with concepts of deinstitutionalization, acceptance, etc, the values and structure in these community spaces often rely heavily on ideas of classification based in DSM, and build very prescriptive and rigid models for categorizing different types of neurodivergence in a way that ends up excluding some M/MI/ND people. Certain types of knowledge are valued over other types of knowledge, and certain diagnoses are prioritized as worthy of support over others. There's a lot of value placed on identifying and classifying many types of behaviors, beliefs, thoughts, actions, into specific categories, and a lack of solidarity between different diagnoses or the wider disability community.

Again, this isn't to say that ND terminology is bad or useless--I think it is an incredibly helpful explanatory model/shorthand for finding community and will call myself neurodivergent, and find a lot of value in community identification and sharing of wisdom. I just feel like it's important to realize that not every ND person, organization, or initiative, is actually invested in the project of fighting for our liberation.

when thinking about our activism, as abolitionists, it's important to be very specific about what our goals, values, and tactics are. For example, understanding the concept of non-reformist reforms helps us distinguish what immediate goals are useful, versus what reforms work to increase the carceral power of the psychiatric system. And when building our own value systems and trying to build alternative ways of caring for ourselves and our communities, we need to be able to evaluate what brings us closer to autonomy, freedom, and interdependence. I need people to understand that just because someone is also against psych hospitalization does not mean that they are also allies in the project of letting mad people live free, authentic, meaningful, and supported lives, and that oftentimes people's allyship is conditional on our willingness to conform to their ideas of a "good" mentally ill person.

[bittercappuccinu]

tried drawing a wallpaper for myself :)

shadow alone below because i like how he looks more

[dw-flagler]

BLONDE WILDBOW CHARACTERS

Every wildbow character with hair color described as blonde or similar to blonde. Characters are listed in alphabetical order.

A character's category is determined by their debut appearance. Though Lisa Wilbourn appears in both Worm and Ward, she will be listed as a Worm character, and not as a Ward character.

WORM:

Ashley Stillons I (Damsel of Distress)

Ava ? (Cuff)¹

Brad Meadows (Hookwolf)

Carol Dallon (Brandish)

Crystal Pelham (Laserdream)

Dean Stansfield (Gallant)

Elijah Mathers (Valefor) (Later dyes white)

Elle ? (Labyrinth)

Emily Piggot

Eric Pelham (Shielder)

Gabriel Maxberry (King)

Glastig Uaine/Valkyrie

Greg Veder (The Worst)

Hero

Hoyden

Jaager Charles (Gasconade) (Appears ONLY in PRT Quest)

Jeanne Wynn/Brown (Citrine)

Jessica Biermann (Fenja)

Katherine Oldershaw (Grace)

Kurt Wynn (Harbinger/Number Man)

Leonid(?)

Lisa Wilbourn (Tattletale)

Marissa Newland (Sundancer)

Melody Jurist (Cricket)

Mike ? (Lightstar)

Missy Biron (Vista)

Mrs. Knott

Neil Pelham (Manpower)

Nessa Bierman (Menja)

Oliver ? (Oliver)

Principal Blackwell

Riley Grace Davis (Bonesaw)

Sam ? (Prism)

Sarah Pelham (Lady Photon)

Tammi Herren (Rune/Scribe) (last name presumed)

"Tom Moss" (Acidbath)

Victoria Dallon (Glory Girl/Antares)

"White Fairy"²

Blonde Adjacent:

Alabaster (white hair)

Kamil Armstrong (white hair)

Madeline ? (Winter) (white hair)

Paige Mcabee (Canary) (yellow feathers, hair unknown)

Polka (white hair)

Scion (gold hair)

Scrub (white hair)

The Simurgh (silver hair)

Worm has: 38 blonde characters, and 8 blonde-adjacent characters, for a total of 46.

WARD

Ashley Stillons II (Swansong)

Ashley Stillons III (Damsel of Distress)

Axehead? (Presumed)³

Bianca ? (Goddess)

Harbinger V (Limerick)

Hunter ? (Mincemaid)

Jay ?

Kathlee Rosenthal (Monokeros)¹

Lachlan ?

Lionwing

Moose

Mr. Drowsing

Nate ? (Reconciliation)

Paris

Rain O'Fire Fraizer (Precipice)

Ryan ? (Cradle)

Samuel Vasil

William Giles (Scapegoat)

Blonde Adjacent:

Anita Vera (white hair)

Christine Mathers (Mama Mathers) (silver hair)

Coiffure (silver hair)

Colt (Colt) (bleached hair)

Dino (silver hair)

Egg (yellow hair)

Engel ("glowing" hair)

Enyo (silver hair)

Foggy Idea (gray dyed hair)

Nailbiter (bleached hair)

Presley ? (gray-white dyed hair)

Vince Crowley (poorly-bleached hair)

Voltrage ("pale" hair)

Ward has: 18 blonde characters, and 13 blonde-adjacent characters, for a total of 31.

PACT:

Blake Thorburn

Chloe Duchamp

Diana Thompson

James Thorburn

Joanna Duchamp

Lea Duchamp

Lola Duchamp

Paul Thorburn

Penelope Duchamp

Peter Thorburn

Rose Thorburn Jr.

Rose Thorburn Sr.

Roxanne Thorburn

Sandra Duchamp

The Briar Girl

Blonde Adjacent

Malcolm "Fell" Atwell ("light" hair)

Pact has: 15 blonde characters, and 1 blonde-adjacent character, for a total of 16.

TWIG:

The Baron Richmond

The Duke of Francis

Duncan Lambsbridge

Emily Gage

Gordon Lambsbridge(?)

Helen Ibott

Jamie Lambsbridge

Jessie Ewesmont

Lord Carling

Lord King

Lord Leeds

Marcella

The Duke of Francis

The Twins (counts as 2)

BLONDE ADJACENT

Lady Glora ("pale of hair")

Lara (white hair)

Nora (white hair)

Twig has: 15 blonde characters, and 3 blonde-adjacent characters, for a total of 18.

PALE:

America Tedd

Anthem Tedd

Avery Kelly

Edith James

Eloise Miraz

Freak (of Freak & Squeak)

Gillian Ross

Liberty Tedd

Reggie the Composite Kid

Snowdrop

The Family Man

Ulysses Miraz

Wallace Davis

BLONDE ADJACENT

Mrs. Schaff (white hair)

Crooked Rook (white hair)

Gemma Duchamp (Grey hair)

Luna Hare (white hair)

Pale has: 13 blonde characters, and 4 blonde-adjacent characters, for a total of 17.

CLAW:

"Valentina's Mom & Sister"

Claw has: 2 blonde characters, and 0 blonde-adjacent characters, for a total of 2.⁴

Notes

¹ Both cuff and monokeros are noted to have dark hair in Ward while having blonde hair in their original appearances (Worm and WD Helena respectively).

² White Fairy is Mr. Gladly's girlfriend and a prolific redditor who is seen during the leviathan battle and the PHO greg interlude. deep cut. As a mortal enemy of greg veder, please treat her with appropriate respect.

³ Axehead is never seen in ward. However, Titan Skadi (who forms from Axehead) is described as having golden hair. I am presuming that this is from axehead the human having blonde hair.

⁴ Literally 1 person told me any characters from claw. i haven't read it. there's more than 2, but i haven't seen anything.

[spr1ng]

i feel so at peace but at the same time so chaotic and drained

[dirtytransmasc]

Alicent, exhausted, being forced to present her son to Viserys, panic in her eyes, hoping he is good enough for her husband:

[martyrbat]

habeas corpus – detective comics #1086

(ID in alt!)

[infernothechaosgod]

the husband has been found going through wife's magic chamber without permission, the husband shall be punished in the form of the grand air jail

me? going back to my old WIPs and accualy working on them? more likely than you think

[bthump]

idk if it is wrong of me to say, but ppl's love for gtsca is very strange to me. guts has known her longer in her elaine state than when they talked to each other, i think. it is hard to find it heartbreaking in the sense that we haven't seen him interacting with casca in well over like 250+ chapters. so i question whether fans self-insert or really just keep rereading GA over and over. it is like guts recycles the same moments they had years ago, but even if those moments were the peak of romance (they were not), seeing the same flashbacks gets stale after so many years. i truly wonder what keeps fans invested lmao

Idk, to be fair you can make pretty much the same criticisms of griffguts lol. They've barely interacted since the Golden Age, Griffith is no longer his human self, Guts always thinks of the same moments when he thinks of Griffith, etc.

People like what they like. There's virtually nothing that appeals to me about gtsca, and I do definitely think griffguts is about 100x more engaging and interesting, but if people got emotionally attached to Guts and Casca's relationship in the Golden Age it makes sense to still root for them now, especially since the manga does still tease the fans of their relationship occasionally.

lol sorry btw, I know you were probably expecting agreement since I'm not a fan of gtsca at all myself and I do think they're boring and all the post-GA content makes their relationship even worse in my eyes, but idk I feel like it's best to express your dislike of a ship without making assumptions about why other people might enjoy it. And even if it is true that a lot of fans self-insert (and based on how people discuss Berserk on eg reddit and stuff, and the fact that it's just a very common way of enjoying stories) I don't think that's inherently a bad thing as long as they don't make it other peoples' problem.

Anyway, yeah. Totally agree that Guts and Casca's relationship is lacklustre in every way and pretty close to nonexistent after the Golden Age, but I think it's still fine for people to enjoy it. We can't all have the same taste in entertainment.

[kashilascorner]

Oh ok. I get now why a lot of people didn't vibe with the ending.

All and all: excellent manga, overall very good final act, too rushed final 2-3 chapters but weak and honestly mediocre epilogue, which makes the high of the ending kind of leave a bitter taste. I think Noda had a good steed and suddenly he had to finish and had to rush all. So the ending in the sense of the final arc was good but the ending proper (final couple chapters) + epilogue......... Not so much

[kariachi]

Midnight Rant #5 billion and 12 on Charmcaster and Kevin- That woman's fucking AF premiere.

Because we have Kevin, very obviously in a very bad place. He's being retraumatized, his girl's cut back hard on spending time with him with no explanation, our boy is going through it. And then he makes a friend, according to WoG over the course of a few months, in a grown woman. And it's great, it's fine, and then she starts macking on him. And then she plants a kiss on him despite him shutting her down. And while doing that she literally takes control of his damn mind, just fucking harpoons that poor boy's bodily autonomy, forces him to turn against his loved ones. All because she never actually gave any sort of shit about him and from the very start was using him to get to and hurt his girl. This relationship that he thought was forming for months was all a ruse, her using him and then abusing him. And this is

So painful for poor Gwen. Can you believe that Kevin didn't have faith that her pulling back with no explanation meant she was working hard to fix him, after the whole three-odd months they'd been together? And to have Charmcaster come back starting problems. Oh poor Gwen, everyone is so mean to her.

And it's not just in the fucking show, it's in the fandom as well, this idea that the shit Kevin goes through matters in how it affects Gwen and not in how it would have to affect him. Just, that had to be such a fucking painful if not straight up traumatizing event. Charm fucked with his goddamn mind. She made him think she cared about him only to hurt him.

Congrats, Charm, I'd say you were only a few steps below Servantis but he at least let the kids have a degree of autonomy and wasn't on screen macking on them. Slow clap, you're even keel.

Just, I sometimes remember that we have a whole episode surrounding Kevin, already openly in an awful headspace, being groomed and straight up mindcontrolled, and the big take-away is how much the situation hurt Gwen and how bad a boyfriend he is for not reading her damn mind. And it drives me up the fucking wall.

Especially when you remember that he spends that season in his underwear, I'm sorry but the parallels to the treatment of imperfect SA victims write their damn selves.

And when you also keep in mind that when Mike is pulling the 'charm them and thrall them' bit it's treated, by the show and fandom, as him being an irredeemable predator and his victims have every right to hate him forever and wish horrible things on him, but Charm gets to have the 'oh poor Charmcaster' treatment and Kevin's thinking she can go fuck herself is treated as a flaw in his character by the show and ignored by fandom.

Because in the end the disparity comes from the same place as the repeated physically abusive acts Gwen commits against Kevin, as Looma's threats being treated as humor, as Gwen's thinking they're romantic being treated as humor- plain old misogyny. Mind the misogyny isn't all of it, but the age old belief that this sort of shit committed by women against men isn't a concern, and in fact may even be treated as ridiculous, because women are too weak to hurt men plays a big role. Doesn't matter if it's a grown woman grooming a mentally ill teenager or a teenage girl shoving her boyfriend into freefall- she's just a girl so of course what she's doing isn't actually dangerous or harmful, because women aren't capable enough for such things. Which then plays into the age old sexist bullshit that men are simply too strong and rough to be hurt, and to be hurt by a girl especially- physically, mentally, however- is funny because it means they're weak.

And that's not even getting into the 'a guy is always eager' bullshittery.

Just, for the love of fucking christ...

[dykedvonte]

I could see Jimmy's struggles on Earth being more about keeping a job/supporting himself. I definitely agree he's had some issues with police, but it's minor stuff like getting into fights at bars or petty thief.

Especially with his horrible personality, it's probably was hard not only finding a decent job, but one he felt comfortable in/believing he was a part of the team.

Giving him a laundry list of crimes makes it seems that predators like him are easy to spot when that's completely not true.

This exactly!!!

I’m not saying that Jimmy is like someone who slips under the radar completely, he does and says shit that’s weird, abrasive, threatening even but it’s never to the extent of outright suspicion. He’s just before that category and that’s part of the struggle. You have people like Curly that see the parts that aren’t all bad, even if they aren’t great, and those that don’t want to be involved when he steps over the line. On Earth, him crossing the line was seen with a sort of inevitability, people like Curly are much farther and fewer between.

He has a bad record but not an horrible one. He’s rude and abrasive but not outright violent. He’s bad with people but not in a way they stay away from him, he can’t keep them around outside of like Curly and non-comital pals, they probably don’t see enough of him to care. Jimmy’s in the perfect situation where he can just scrap by on his own but he’d be miserable. He’d always be on the cusps of comforts and stability someone like Curly or Swansea or Anya are stable enough in.

It’s why it’s easy to see why he could be given the benefit of the doubt. Why someone would pity and try to give him a step up or even try to find him a way out when he fucks up. He’s already pretty fucked in life why make it harder? But it’s the exact reason why you kinda shouldn’t. It can embolden the worse parts of him but he isn’t naturally trying to get away with the worse, it’s just he will if he starts to realize he can.