#rather than you want to share an idea with me and see My interpretation

[teenyweenyeenymeeny]

I am Aware of how. rambly n incomprehensible I am when I respond to asks but you See tha thing is. I am Not a content creator I am Just a little guy !!

If you ask me “oh what do you think of x” my answer usually will be like. things you have reminded me of and Maybe I will cleanly connect that To x but maybe it will seem unrelated !! and Also sometimes what I think of x is. not much !!

newayz um. yea like I Like to talk to you and I like to answer asks but I don’t want you to think of me as. a content creator I guess

[aeskairo]

I mean... I am a person without a lot of attachments. I don't have a lot of trust in people, and I generally view people as simply everybody on their own path.

So then when I read other people's interpretations of gk, I'm often confused because I don't really understand where they're coming from.

For example, the idea of loyalty seem to be really important to a lot of other fans. Ogata is interpreted by almost everyone as a untrustworthy, with no loyalties.

But I don't understand why anyone in this story needs to have loyalties or why loyalty is even a good thing.

Everybody has completely different motivations and wants.

Tsurumi wants to split off a piece of the military, and use it to regain territory in Russia Where his wife and child are buried.

Hijikata says that he is looking to revive the Republic of Ezo, but actually he doesn't have the resources, or the time to do that so really he's looking for one last great battle and to die under that banner rather than to set up and new independent political entity.

Shiraishi has no real goals and just likes his friends and would love to get some money out of it. He later takes on Boutarou's goal.

Ogata has no real concrete achievable goal and is looking for an abstract sense of worth.

Sugimoto also has no real concrete goal and is using the gold hunt to avoid confronting the fact that he really has no place to return to. He says he has to get the money before he returns to ume, but this is just a prerequisite he set for himself, to delay returning. Ume isn't waiting for him, has no idea that he's out trying to get the money for her, and doesn't even know if he's alive. Despite all of the importance that he places on returning to her, he is a non-entity in her life, in the same way that Ogata is a non-entity in his father's life. The similarities and differences between Ogata and sugimoto is best left for another post.

Asirpa...... is a 12-year-old girl and is still trying to make sense of the world.

Many of the soldiers don't have any goals of their their own other than following orders or impressing their commander. People like Inenaga, ushiyama don't really have any aspirations for the gold. They just seem to be along for the ride since they have map tattoos.

My point is....

These are all clearly people with individual and completely different goals, to which the gold is just a means to an end. So I don't understand why loyalty is considered important, in fact I don't understand why it's a thing at all.

So given that ..... I don't understand why Ogata is considered a disloyal betrayer....

When I read comments by other readers, it really feels like there's an expectation that these groups be a found family of sorts. A place of trust and loyalty where people support and mentor each other and it makes no sense to me.

Like that's something you expect from the military. Members of the military are supposed to be brothers in against a common enemy led by a father figure and it is explicitly pointed out that this is not the case.

People bully each other, sometimes severely. The father figure is self-interested and the only sees his men as pawns. There are shifting loyalties and factions with their own goals in the same unit. The military is not a family substitute. Gold hunt groups are not a family substitute. Even family do not present the kind of loyal loving support that people seem to expect.

So I just..... I straight up have no understanding of why Ogata is considered to be a betrayer, because I don't understand how loyalty is a thing here. I mean to me, the very concept of loyalty in this story seems to be a lie used to manipulate people seeking identity and belonging, and have them be willing to die for the group.

When I look around on forums and discussions it seems like most people do not share this interpretation. People interpret media and events is through the lens of their own experiences. And I actually keep wondering if I'm missing something huge. Like if other people interpret loyalty in a totally different more meaningful way, what are their experiences that support this belief?

Just Curious

TLDR: this is not a story about found family as much as you want it to be. Instead it's about each person finding a place for themselves....not everyone is looking for a family.

Edit: I guess this is sort of meta. The reason I have this interpretation because I have a long history of working for corporations, and despite the found family culture that they try to create and all the team building exercises, people are constantly gunning for each other, trying to get people fired, taking credit for other people's work, making people look bad in front of management to elevate their own status, trying to jump ship and go to other companies in the same industry with proprietary knowledge... so my take on this whole story is that..."this is simply how people operate."

Like I've been on team building exercises with the company where everybody an outdooring trip and bonds over canoeing, and then immediately the next day people get back to trying to get each other fired.

That's just how people are. People form connections over all sorts of things, but that doesn't mean that they aren't out for themselves or that the connection will always exist, or that the connection is deep or that the person is loyal to you.

[adickaboutspoons]

Mostly I was responding to the points raised in @scarrletmoon's response, but you raise some excellent points to which I'd like to respond. Feel free to ignore if you're tired of my bullshit. I completely understand the impulse. 1st, you're absolutely right; I was coming across as gate-keepery by saying that I find Stede's eccentricities charming as though that ought be the default experience. For that I apologize. I ought to have taken more care. When I said "And that's valid, but I would say that those are the parts that the crew and Ed grow to love once they embrace those parts of him instead of cringing at them" what I meant to convey is that the experience of 2nd-hand embarrassment when Stede does something that recalls to the viewer times when they have felt ashamed/were made to feel shame because of something they did is absolutely understandable, but we can take heart in Stede being accepted & loved for those parts of him, & find hope that so too may we be embraced for our own quirks & foibles. My intention was to encourage others to be more gentle with & accepting of their own perceived failings, but I can see now that I failed to adequately express that, & for that I am sorry. I do take issue with the suggestion that I am strawmanning, though; I would argue that how one views Stede's motivation & framing absolutely informs the extent to which/moments in which one finds his behavior cringe-worthy. In your original post, you contend Stede is "pretending to be this macho pirate captain who totally knows what he's doing" & your response above adds he's a bad manager & a jerk because he's praising himself & chiding his employees, whom you interpret as him treating as stand-ins for his own children. If that's how you're framing the scenario, then, sure - I can see how his behavior comes across as cringe to you. But that's not at all how I perceived it. I will grant he is pretending more expertise than he actually possesses, but he IS a pirate captain, & as to the attribution of "macho" I absolutely disagree, specifically because he is textually interested in a form of piracy that is not that. Because that is my understanding of the scene, in the debrief scene I see a person excited at the success of what, if Black Pete is to be believed, is their very 1st raid, & doesn't understand why everyone else wasn't also chuffed. He then listens to Wee John' criticism & encourages him to clarify WHY he feels the way he does. When Wee John identifies the lack of a flag as a contributing factor to his disgruntlement, Stede provides materials so they can rectify the deficit. This isn't Stede forcing arts & crafts on these grown-ass men (& Jim) - it's Stede hearing a problem & supplying the means to a solution. Similarly, he hears out Buttons about the crew's dissatisfaction, & tries to rectify it by finding a more appealing target for a raid, even though he obviously feels unequal to the task himself. To me, that's the complete opposite of a bad manager (to me he's a bad manager when he's being dismissive of the crew's input, like the fuckery brainstorming, & even then he climbs down from his high horse & apologizes. Which? GREAT manager!). Where you see Stede infantilizing his crew, I see them taking part in activities that, while generally relegated to childhood, aren't implicitly childish, & of their own volition, & Stede sowing the seeds that will eventually blossom into a found family (not imposing an established family structure). For clarity, I'm not saying my interpretation is objectively right, nor that yours is wrong. I'm just saying framing is going to influence perception of whether Stede's behavior is Cringe, & that's kind of what I was getting at with my myriad examples of Stede behaving "authentically" or "inauthentically" & when that is a viable predictor of a general fandom perception of when Stede is being Cringe. Because I really don't think it is. This is going to continue in the notes because tumlr thinks they can cut my mic.

listen I love stede a lot - I think he's the bravest character in the show. he changes everyone he meets for the better. he embodies what I think of as the thesis of the show. if he wasn't the way that he is, the show would not be very good, imo.

but in ep one he gives his pirate crew notes on the raid they just did as though they were a community theater troupe and his notes were 1) complimenting his own opening speech as "very inspiring" and 2) complaining that that the crew wasn't sufficiently enthusiastic about robbing two poor fisherman of a single plant.

during the raid his narration went "some men are born to be pirate captains, others learn on the job. me? well I'm a pretty solid mix of both" as though he has any idea what he's doing.

and AFTER the raid Olu has to gently point out to him that piracy isn't a game to the rest of the crew.

There's a reason that Rhys Darby was the only person capable of playing Stede without making him seem like a total dick. And I think that's bc Rhys was able to convey the idea that Stede's behavior in the first few eps is coming out of this deep sense of insecurity - he's doing some Stede-y things (flag making! paying the crew! bedtime stories!) that are great but he's also pretending to be this macho pirate captain who totally knows what he's doing. And it's the pretending that makes people cringe with second hand embarrassment. While also, often, seeing themselves in it and feeling a great deal of sympathy for Stede about it.

The reason Stede is like this is because HE thinks there's something deeply wrong with him, a belief that has been solidified by everyone around him his entire life, and therefore he needs to do everything he can to hide that deeply wrong thing about him. When he unpacks that and embraces the things about himself he originally thought were embarrassing (being weak, pathetic, soft, etc), he can stop pretending. And that's when other characters grow to love him! And so people will sometimes call him cringe because they aspire to be cringe like him, to embrace the parts of themselves that they were punished for and live more authentically.

because he changes! that's the point! he moves from cringe (pretending to be someone he's not) to cringe (being true to himself, always a deeply vulnerable thing to be) and it takes a lot of hard work. that's what makes me LIKE him as a character. that's what I think makes him the bravest character on the show. because he doesn't start out perfect. he's a puppet who grows into a real boy and that means that for a period of time he was a puppet, and that's okay.

[signanothername]

I have a really stupid hc: nightmare takes better care of his minions than dream/ dreams actually really toxic. Like, yes he's the bad guy, but he takes really good care of his lackeys when they need help mentally and stuff, when dream is so focused on spreading positivity that he doesn't even realize he's hurting the others not caring for them and not letting them do basic things like eat and sleep properly

I’ve seen that headcanon around actually and I think it’s funny /pos

Like I love the idea of Dream being way too focused to realize the damage he causes while Nightmare has a better grasp on things

But also kinda gets into the shaky grounds of “asshole Dream” if not written well

I’m not really a fan of “bad guy” Dream, or the interpretation of Dream being that he’s an asshole who doesn’t care at all

The thing is, I’d love to see that headcanon actually be connected to the twins’ traumas, as I often see people portray them that way and only go for how Nightmare’s is kind and his trauma made him a better leader but Dream is just an asshole, and i’m here like.. WHY????

Like why make Nightmare a better written character just cause you sympathize with him? Why not sympathize with Dream too? Why is Dream’s trauma and the abuse he went through immediately ignored for the sake of making Nightmare kind? Making Nightmare the “better twin”?

Why not make both twins have both good and bad behaviors? Why simply reduce them to black and white?

Like I genuinely would enjoy the idea of Dream being toxic while showing that it’s not his intent, showing that he genuinely doesn’t mean to be toxic, it’s that his toxic behaviors are born out of how his trauma blinded him and how his actions are just the effect of a pre-existing cause, rather than just reducing Dream’s character to a bad guy or an asshole and that’s it y’know?

Like honestly toxic Dream for the win if it shows his vulnerability and how his trauma takes part of it

For me, when it comes to my own interpretation of Nightmare and Dream, I love to think of the opposite but only to an extent?

I like to think Nightmare would be abusive/toxic to his minions, but not to the point they collapse, (unless he was in a really bad mood and he had some sort of emotional outburst) but generally, he doesn’t care about what they do but he makes sure to make it clear that he expects them to eat and sleep and do whatever basics they need to do, as well as give them leisure/ down time for them to do whatever they want as long as they keep up, as he’s extremely practical and would not want to have them unfit for missions or plans he wants to carry (not out of the kindness of his heart but rather cause it would inconvenient him)

All while trying to show that Nightmare has a genuine sense of humanity (for a lack of better word) to him, show that he’s the way he is cause of the trauma he went through, show that he’s not all abusive and show that he has a kind side to him while showing how he squashes that kindness inside him due to trauma

While Dream is actually quite genuinely kind and loves helping people, and is genuinely trying his best to better himself every day, but is quite destructive to himself, he would not accept help from others, and feels the need to save others without saving himself, completely sacrificing his physical and mental health, and assuming he’s the only one who can fix things, a savior complex if you will, he’d work himself down to the bone without relying on his friends or anyone else, (this is a part of how he has his fallout with Ink in my interpretation) he’s too blinded to the fact others can share the weight with him

It’s completely unhealthy to his own self and by extension, he can appear overbearing and someone who gets his nonexistent nose into the business of others without considering their feelings or thoughts about it, and also appear as tho he thinks others are too incompetent to deal with either what he himself deals with, or what others deal with in their own lives, that he’s better than them in a way (it’s not his intent as he genuinely tries his best to be mindful of other’s feelings) but his self destructive behavior is something that Blue is trying to get through his thick skull, but Dream is too stubborn (a characteristic he ironically shares with Nightmare)

So I guess my interpretation of the two is the opposite to what is usually portrayed in the fandom, but I mean, there isn’t many interpretations I agree with in the fandom to begin with Hdhdhxhhd

[noyasmashing]

hear me out... noya gets dommed by his partner who is SOMEHOW shorter than him. (bonus points if he booked them a love hotel. like they spent the whole day traveling and sightseeing in tokyo only for his partner to find out his horny ass booked them a love hotel for the night.)

oh anon, as someone who is 4’11, I LOVE this idea. also my first time writing more than just a hand/blow job so sorry if it’s bad 😓

I’ll try to leave this gn reader since you didn’t specify gender! mentions of the readers “cock” but can be interpreted as a strap! (plz keep the requests coming i need more motivation)

You and Nishinoya had been dating for a year now, and he was eager to escape the rural area of Miyagi prefecture and explore new sights with you.

So, when you suggested spending a night in Tokyo and booking a hotel, he was thrilled! He insisted on handling the hotel booking to spare you the stress, but of course, there was another reason behind his eagerness.

After taking the bus to Tokyo, you spent the day wandering in and out of charming shops, picking up souvenirs and trinkets that matched your unique interests.

As the night drew to a close, you and Nishinoya enjoyed a romantic candlelit dinner, feeling content and ready to unwind in the comfort of a hotel bed.

As you hailed a taxi, Nishinoya quietly directed the driver to a specific location, causing the driver to chuckle. You eyed Noya suspiciously, but he avoided your piercing gaze, pretending to look around with curiosity.

The beat-up car halted to a stop in front of a rather sleek hotel, its planters and greenery framing the modern exterior. The streetlights illuminated the taxi as the two of you stepped out, carrying your overnight bags.

"Yu? What is this," you asked suspiciously, placing a hand on your hip, catching onto the situation at hand. He swallowed nervously, looking down at you.

"I-I... well, [name], I just wanted to spend a romantic night with you," he confessed, hoping to soften your reaction. To his slight surprise, you replied with a smirk as the two of you ducked into the discreet entrance.

Less than ten minutes later, you had him pinned against the door of your room, his hands clutching your shirt as he nervously looked down at you.

"Did you book this so you can be as loud as you want?" you asked in a seductive voice that made his knees buckle. Instead of replying, he half nodded, embarrassed at his own reasoning.

Without hesitation, you closed the distance between you, your lips meeting his in a passionate kiss. Noya responded eagerly, by moving his body closer to yours, practically climbing on top of you.

You pulled away way with a trail of saliva following, “You’ll be excited to see what I brought.” You told him mischievously.

Walking over to your bag with him trailing behind, you pulled out a bottle of lube and his favorite toy. His reaction was adorable with his face flushing red in surprise letting out a small whimper.

With a breathy, "Please," He moved closer to you once again. You couldn't help but let out a sadistic giggle at his reaction.

"Wow, are you already begging?" you teased playfully, holding the bottle of lube and toy in your hands.

Noya's embarrassment turned into anticipation as he watched you with eager eyes. "I-I just... I want tonight to be special," he stammered, his voice betraying a mix of desire and nervousness.

You smiled, appreciating his vulnerability and enthusiasm. "It will be," you assured him, placing a gentle kiss on his lips before moving to his ear, "I’m going to ruin you.”

You led Noya further into the room, the soft glow of the bedside lamp casting a warm light. The ambiance was perfect for what you had in mind, and Noya's bashfulness only fueled your desire further.

His spiky hair was now tousled as he lay on the heart-shaped pillow atop the circular bed that you both would be sharing for the night.

At this point, he wore merely a shirt, and his well-defined thighs were widely apart, exposing his cock, that oh-so desperately wanted attention. You chuckled at his vulnerable position, comfortably seated between his exposed legs, exclusively for your amusement. His faint "be quiet" response elicited a gentle coo from you.

He exhaled a surprised gasp as your two fingers, coated with the cold lubricant, gently penetrated his tight hole.

“N-not so fast [name]… we have all night after all.” He reasoned with a shakily voice, fearing he might reach climax too soon if you were too hasty.

"You won't be able to think straight once I'm through with you," you retorted sharply. A hint of disbelief was present in your tone, as you questioned, "Did you truly believe you could secretly book a love hotel without me finding out?" Your fingers, now more assertive, continued their rhythmic movements within him.

He instinctively tried to close his thighs, an attempt to escape the intense stimulation. However, you were swift in preventing that, maintaining control. His response was a feeble, " 'm sorry, please... slow down, slow down or I'll-" His words were cut off as a wave of pleasure overtook him, causing the white liquid to leak from his poor cock onto his abdomen.

"Hmm, already cumming without my permission?" you inquired, detaching your fingers from his sensitive area, drawing a whine from him. Before he could utter an apology, you replaced your fingers with your member, silencing his words with a moan of pleasure.

His hands clung to your shoulder, his voice filled with desperation as you continued your relentless pace. "Too much, it's too much!" he cried, his back arched as you skillfully hit his prostate. Despite the exhaustion in your thighs, you continued your harsh pace not giving him a break.

He could sense tears forming on his eyelashes, an almost unbearable sensation accompanied by intense heat. His inner world was being invaded, as each thrust triggered his prostate.

You grinned, feeling a sense of accomplishment. In your view, it was a breathtaking sight. His eyes struggled to stay open, tears brimming, lower lip caught between his teeth. His legs twitched, hands tightly grasping the sheet. Oh, what a stunning spectacle it was. You couldn’t resist degrading him once more, “How is it that you tower over me, but right now you look so small?”

Leaning into your teasing words, he nodded, moans dripping from his lips as saliva filled his mouth, his mind not processing anything but pleasure.

You gripped his soft thighs and lifted them, transitioning to a missionary position. He felt the increase in your rhythm, his breath catching as he exclaimed, "Ah- gonna cum!"

However, just as he reached the brink, you abruptly pulled out, leaving him feeling empty as hot tears poured down his cheeks. He cried out a pathetic “noo”, his flushed erection twitching in disappointment.

"You can't expect me to do all the work. Why don't you ride me for a bit, yeah?" you directed in a husky tone, acknowledging the long night ahead.

[romanarose]

Banner by @winniethewife

Oscar Issac/Pedro Pascal Fan Art and Fiction Pride Event 2024

Hello friends!

Let's try this again and I'll try to be more clear to not invoke discourse. That being said, it is *my* event and if you'd like to run one a certain way, go nuts. However, this is how I'm doing it.

I had a lot of fun doing Dead Dove December and the Triple Frontier Anniversary Event so I decided I wanted to do an event for pride this year! I know it seems far away right now, especially given how many of us in north America are still cold af, but I wanna give everyone time!

Each week of pride will have a theme to write or draw for (you don't have to do all of them! Think of it like kinktober.) at the end, I will put out a masterlist (or multiple depending how many)so we can all share each other's work.

Why?

Oscar Isaac and Pedro Pascal are both allies to LGBT people, Pedro having played multiple queer rolls and having likened his sexuality to that of Prince Oberyn. Despite none of the characters being canon queer, Triple Frontier specifically lends itself to queer stories. Recently, theres been a rise in stories of Oscar characters in relationships or Pedro characters in relationships which I love.

What I'd really like to do is encourage people to think past x fem!reader or canon presentation of characters. I want to encourage gay, lesbian, bisexual relationships, trans readers, trans interpretations of characters etc. More content guidelines will be in the what section.

Where?

Primarily tumblr.com, our very own shithole hellsight. However, especially given tumblr's censorship vs. twitter, I am encouraging posting on twitter or wherever you'd like. If you post something elsewhere, send me a link or send me a post you made about it on tumblr and I'll promote the link.

Additionally if you only write on ao3, I'd love for you to participate too! Once again, just send the link!

When?

in order to do the week by week themes and hold all of June, there will be 6 weeks from May 26th-July 6th

Each week will have themes. I won't be policing the weeks and these so if you do the 1st week on july 3rd, that's fine. The themes are keeping in mind both artists and writers. I only got one artist for DDD, a great piece and I've love to see more! Ideas are just for spit balling, do your own take!

May 26th-June 1st: Coming out. Ideas: Coming out to family, lover, friend. Finding gender affirming clothes/hair, first pride

June 2nd-8th: Transitioning Ideas: Surgary, surgery scars, starting T or E, binding (safely!!!)

June 9th-15th: Sex/kissing First time together, first time with certain biology or the same sex, sweet kisses, smut showing scars,

June 16th-22nd: Food, fashion, fun

All things queer culture and culture of different religions, racial or country backgrounds, queer fashion, gender affirming clothes, Keshet (קשת), listening to Lady Gaga or Bruce Springsteen, watching a queer movie

June 23rd-29th: Struggles Rejection, reconciling faith and identity, missing family that rejected one, comfort, candlelight vigil, day of remembrance.

June 30th- July 6th:Strength Asserting ones or a partner/friend/family's pronouns, standing up against hate, being loudly and proudly yourself, pride events

Who?

Writers and artists in any form are welcome. I also want to encourage working with each other, writers and artists together!

For characters: Any Oscar Isaac or Pedro Pascal character has to at least be in the relationship. Other characters in universes can be done, such as FishBen.

Reader can be anyone, just properly tag! If you want to come out to Marc Spector as bisexual, do it!!! If you want Joel to take care of you after top surgery, do it!

YOU DO NOT NEED TO BE QUEER TO PARTICIPATE!

However! Please do your research if writing or drawing an identity not yours. There are trans, nonbinary, gay, lebian etc bloggers all over tumblr who write about their experience, please divert to first person testimonies rather than assumptions.

What?

A few rules

MUST contain more than male character x fem!reader. Male character x fem!reader x male character does not count unless the two male characters are romantically or sexually involved or one or the reader is trans. Any Q's, dm me!

This is not a dark event. I'm not going to be policing the content matter but I really want to primarily focus on the pride. However, as a bisexual, gender non-conforming person I know a lot of pain can still be involved. What we are not doing is suicide, death, self-harm, or non consensual activity. If you have questions or would like to make a case for something, just dm me!

This is not inherently NSFW, but there is absolutely NSFW allowed. Always tag everything properly.

The usual no's like bestiality, incest, underage nsfw etc

As far as minor characters, SFW MINOR CHARACTERS IS ALLOWED. You can write or draw lgbt themes because being LGBT is not inherently sexual. For example, teenage Santi coming out as trans to Frankie or your own version of Ellie and Joel's talk about Ellie and Dina kiss. That being said, I'd prefer to reserve this to teens. Again, any questions or ideas that don' quite fit into parameters, just ask!

As always, I am allowed to use my discretion. If I do not want to include something, I won't. However, I know that there are rifts in the fandom. I won't be excluding you out of personal bias. As long as I don't have you blocked and you haven't plagerized or done something really bad to people, you'll be included. I'm not letting petty beefs get in the way. Harmful actions will, however. I need to protect my peace and keep

NO REAL PERSON FANFICTION. Do not write about Oscar Isaac or Pedro pascal being gay or trans and do not make any assumptions about their sexuality or gender identity. Oscar is happily married to a woman and Pedro has expressed his sexuality is like that of Oberyn Martell but has not elaborated much further, nor should he have to. Just leave ‘em be. You can speculate elsewhere but that’s not what this event is for.

How?

Simply tag me, @romanarose and use the #OscarPedroPrideEvent2024 please please please use BOTH so it's easier for me to find!!!

When the event is over, much like DDD I will compiled them into a masterlist and posted. This is a chance for every blog, big and small, to get a moment in the sun and to share each others works! Remember, reblogging, comments, and interacting is what makes this a community! I want to create an environment that is welcoming and we all help each other.

Please feel free to reach out to me for any questions or clarification!

However, if you go issues with me writing men kissing, chracters being trans, queer readers etc, I'm not really open to debate.

~A nonbinary bisexual <3

[trans-axolotl2]

Fuck the DSM. Seriously, fuck the DSM.

The DSM is and always has been used primarily as a method of rationalizing mistreatment of the people it labels as "deviant." When you look at the history of psychiatry, it becomes clear that things like drapetomania, protest psychosis, hysteria, and homosexuality as a disorder were not just thrown into there randomly. Rather, it showcases the power of the DSM: labeling and categorizing ways of being as mental illness opens up new paths of incarceration, social control, and curative violence. I need people to understand that the modern DSM still works like this: these classifications of madness/mental distress/neurodivergence into psychiatric labels encourage society to treat madness/mental distress/neurodivergence with the apparatuses used to eradicate "deviance." Diagnosis is not neutral.

As mad/mentally ill/neurodivergent people, we deserve access to more explanatory models of madness/mental illness/ neurodivergence than what the psychiatric language of normalcy and disorder offers us. Whether this looks like rejecting diagnosis, embracing varying cultural understandings of mental experience, or any million different ways of interpreting our bodymind, we deserve the option to move beyond clinical language that tries to convince us not to trust ourselves. We deserve to view ourselves wholly, leaving room for all our experiences of madness/mental illness/neurodivergence--the meaningful, the terrifying, the joyful, the exhausting. We deserve to have our own relationship with our madness, instead of being pushed to view ourselves as an inherent "danger to self or others" simply by existing as crazy.

Here's another truth: I hate the DSM, and I still call myself bipolar, a diagnosis that came to me through psych incarceration. While I wholeheartedly reject the DSM and the system intertwined with it, I simultaneously acknowledge and believe that many of the collections of symptoms that the DSM describes are very, very real ways of living in the world, and that the distress that they can cause are very very real. When I say fuck the DSM, I don't mean "Mental distress, disability, and neurodivergence aren't real." Rather, I mean that the DSM can never hold my experience of what it is like to be bipolar, the meaning I derive from experiencing life with cyclical moods. The DSM can't hold within its pages what it's like to see my mood cycle not as a tragedy or disaster, but instead as an opportunity, a gift, to grow and shift and go back to the same place over and over again, dying in winter and blooming again in spring. The DSM can't hold the fact that even though I experience very, very real distress due to those mood cycles--they're still mine and I claim that as something that matters to me. I call myself bipolar as a shorthand to tell people that I experience many things both extreme high and low, but I do not mean the same thing when I say "bipolar" as a psychiatrist does.

When we build community as mad/mentally ill/neurodivergent people, I want us to have room to share, relate, and care for each other in ways that isn't calling to the authority of a fucked up system with strictly defined categories. I don't want us to take those same ways of thinking and rebrand it into advocacy that claims to fight stigma, but really just ends up reinforcing these same ideas about deviance, cure, control, and danger. I dream of the day when psychiatry doesn't loom as a threat in all of our lives, and I think part of that work requires us as mad/mentally ill/neurodivergent people to really grapple with and untangle the ways we label and make meaning of our minds.

ok to reblog, if you want to learn more about antipsychiatry/mad studies check out this reading list.

[lxmelle]

Sometimes people interpret Gojo’s “chasing after Geto” and the theme of “love” adopted from Yorozu as signs of Gojo trying to find love with Sukuna.

It is true they had fun and Gojo had an all-out battle, I think it was more of Gojo being true to Gojo: It was an extension of chasing Geto.

I say this with moderately reserved conviction because his Character Book pretty much confirms that there is no one particularly significant besides Geto. There is literally Geto everywhere. Everywhere. Some people on X were joking that Geto’s position in the relationship chart is comparable to a “wife’s position” and asking, “is this a Geto Suguru character book?”

In terms of preferences, too:

Even the preference for dogs - seems to point towards being due to Geto. Not a dog from Megumi’s ten shadows’ divine dogs. The picture shown was a dog Gojo never even canonically met. Linked to a person he also did not canonically meet.

I was probably slow on the uptake, but I only recently realised that Takeru (the dog) in that scene was actually Geto - mistakenly assumed by the old man, leading to his easy defeat.

What sorcery it was, we have no idea. The only best friend thing also seemed like a Gojo & Geto parallel.

Anyway. In this sense, Geto was Gojo’s Takeru. Seeing Geto got him sealed in the prison realm. Uhm, yeah. And it’s true that Gojo is said by Gege to seem more cat-like, being “pretty” and a little solitary, but is someone who likely prefers dogs, Gege thinks, so we can see how he has changed to become more of a dog person - even in characteristics, after Geto’s influence who had lived for others rather than for itself (as what a cat might do). Or, it could be that he just prefers dogs because Geto was once mistaken as a dog. Lol.

The beach - this is also something related to Geto. (The sheltered Gojo probably didn’t have much time to do leisurely stuff. We end up liking places based on experiences we had, and the best experiences he had were with Geto. Naturally, he loves the beach due to Okinawa.)

And the last Q pictured in the image above says Gojo changed after Geto left in that he became more responsible for the next generation. Killing the higher-ups was also related especially after what happened during his time in the prison realm. Not killing them before was related to Geto - he had committed to not killing without a strong meaning/purpose. So when strategy and meaning/purpose aligned, Gojo “chased after” Geto who had “left him behind” because he couldn’t afford to walk that moral path any longer - for the future generation of sorcerers that he and Geto fought so hard to protect with their literal blood sweat and tears. And Gojo never had a real moral issue with killing.

So yes. Doesn’t it just make sense that Gojo approached Sukuna’s fight with two motives - one for himself and one for Geto? To have an all out brawl that his monstrous side desires (I’ve said it before: it would be soooo unfulfilling to never ever find someone you can go all out with. Like, forced to walk when you were born to sprint?!?) and to reach him with compassion/empathy as was shown to him by no other than Geto (who was very much a part of him)? Gojo was far too single-minded to want a new lover. C’mon. Give the yearner some credit. Gojo really was loyal to the core… he felt left behind for years and the character song for Geto was literally Gojo saying he wanted Geto to return to him somehow before it was too late.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again... the place of a partner, cannot be replaced by that of others who are in the category of children, students, or even friends - especially if you have shared a connection so deep that you consider that person a special, “one and only” irreplaceable being.

Megumi has also mutually not placed Gojo as someone particularly special to him. It is really a relationship that is not more than their sensei. I’d be highly disturbed if my sensei or teacher of any capacity loved me to the degree of some of the headcanons out there. Sorry to say. If that is your fantasy, or a form of an AU - that’s ok - I just see it as not canon. That is all. The facts, signs and evidence just … plain & simply are not there. Gojo cared in the capacity of being a teacher. That is it. Some of the unfinished business he had in 236 was carried over from the HI arc and regarding his personal philosophy over death.

So yes, Gojo understood Sukuna as a monster who knew strength & isolation. But his battle and other desire to teach / reach him was another extension of catching up.

So, rather than trying to find a new “love” with Sukuna, I see it as an ultimate form of growth & character development for Gojo - he was changed and felt the empathy that Geto showed him & tried to teach it to someone else who was similarly, stronger than him (as Gojo was to Geto).

And of course Gojo did get a kick out of the battle and to be acknowledged by a peer (as a monster). Imagine you’re Serena Williams and you have to accept just being fulfilled by your husband and never play tennis? Some things are just separate. The fulfilment Gojo gained was not necessarily related to Geto. Just like how following his principles down his dark path had to be done on his own for Geto. It had no bearing on his love for Gojo. And vice versa.

Nevertheless, it seems apt that it was within Gojo to find the desire to resolve two halves of himself through the battle. His loneliness wasn’t quite the same as Sukuna’s I think. Especially since Gojo knew love and companionship.

I think Gojo matured rather well. Or at least, I headcanon that Geto would say so.

The lesson that Sukuna needed to learn is not comparable to that between Gojo & Geto, therefore it wasn’t something Gojo could teach alone. Sukuna had no backstory tied to Gojo and it wasn’t like Gojo was trying to do that with him. Otherwise Gojo would have that afterlife “talk” with Sukuna, rather than his soul heading straight for Geto. Even if it was a delusion, are you telling me that him dreaming of Geto to comfort himself isn’t significant enough to tell us something? Sob 😭

The rest is for Yuji & everyone to forge the revision of the jujutsu world. Yuji is the one with the relationship with both Sukuna and his vessel, Megumi.

Keep calm and carry on the good work, Yuji... Hang in there Megumi.

[chiffaust]

𝗖𝗢𝗨𝗟𝗗𝗡'𝗧 𝗦𝗟𝗘𝗘𝗣 𝗪𝗜𝗧𝗛𝗢𝗨𝗧 𝗬𝗢𝗨. — Amagi Rinne x reader

⸻ your overtime had forced you to stay back away longer than you'd like. Coming home past midnight, you were sure Rinne would be asleep already, but he wasn't — he was thinking of you, perhaps.

xx. c : fluff — no pronouns are used to describe reader, completely gender neutral. Soft rinne moment like he's really soft & he likes you a lot. the beginning is bit suggestive?

note . this has been rotting in my drafts since december last year, so apologies if there's some grammatical mistakes here i am not proofreading this :3

There are sleepless nights with him — perhaps on on a rainy day you'll often stay up late together, huddling close to each other for warmth in silence or during nights where he doesn't feel like sleeping — he'll make it your problem too and keep you up all night with him. (interpret that however you like.)

Yet today was rather different. He feels a certain emptiness inside his heart, all alone in the bed with his own thoughts forced to be kept to himself while the clock ticks every second he's awake. It isn't like him to feel this sad or sentimental, is it? The Rinne Amagi, the crazed gambler of Crazy:B, all alone with nothing but thoughts left keeping him awake at night.

Luckily, you came by just at the right time. Work had forced you to overtime more than you'd even like — it's way past midnight; at this time of the hour, you were sure Rinne was in the room, snoring loudly but you heard not even a sound from your shared bedroom and that rose an eyebrow of suspicion from you.

You didn't waste time though. You quickly put your stuff on the table and walked towards the bedroom — without hesitation twisting the doorknob open as you gently push forward into the room.

"Rinne...?" You called out, unsure whether he's in here or not because of how quiet he is. From the dimly lit light of the living room entering the room, you see him motionlessly in bed without even moving a muscle; what's even concerning is that he's still wide awake.

"Rinne, are you okay?" You ask again, slowly walking towards the bed and kneeling down besides on the floor beside it while gently poking his cheek.

"Rinne." You called out again when he didn't respond. You don't know whether he's doing this intentionally or not, but you're really not enjoying it very much.

"Rinne!" You whisper yelled, and finally he seems to respond. A loud sigh escaped his lips as he slowly shifts to his side to turn and look at you.

You look straight into his eyes and your eyes narrowed; softening at the sadness you saw the beneath blue ones. You weren't sure exactly why he's this sad, but it made you feel guilty about it even if you've done nothing wrong. Seeing him who is usually so loud and annoying sad in the middle of the night makes you uncomfortably shitty.

"Took your sweet time comin' home, did you?" He asks, his hand reaching out to gently tuck a strand of hair behind your ear.

"Are you mad at me for coming home late...?" You ask, your body tenses up slightly at the uncertainty guilt you felt, but you swallowed it all, not wanting to make it seem like you're getting the wrong idea yet.

"Not really, 'm really glad I have someone reliable like ya to call my sweetheart." His frown then suddenly itched into a smirk as he wraps his arms around you in a surprise attack and dragged you into bed with him without even thinking about letting you at least change into your pajamas first.

"Rinne, come on...!" You giggled, trying to squirm away from his tight hug that kept you still with him on the bed.

"Ya kept your boyfriend waiting for so long and have the audacity to complain when he wants to spend time with you?" Rinne replied, squeezing you tighter in his affectionate tight hug while he presses soft kisses all over your face.

"At least let me change clothes first..." You tried to compromise while being suffocated with his overbearing kisses. On an occasion; on nights when he couldn't sleep — he'll give you all of the affection you could ever asked for that it becomes overbearing. But he is an overbearing person from the start; just as annoying as the first time you've fallen in love with him you can't help but let yourself melt into his affection. This is really what you needed after a long day at work.

"So, just stay with me for a while, 'kay? At least until I fall asleep. I couldn't sleep without ya by my side." His arms only tightened around your waist as he pulls you closer to his body and rests his head on your shoulder, inhaling your scent happily without complaints anymore.

Neither do you have any complaints left to speak of. It felt too nice, having him this affectionate towards you like this. Maybe... You'll stay with him for a while.

[mi-spark]

3, 8, 10 for pmd ask game :3

HI RUPI!!! :D YAAaay

3. fave partner character? RAAAHH IT'S A TOUGH CHOICE i truly love them all ;v; but if we're going off solely the game's characterization of them instead of my own interpretations, it's gotta be psmd partner!!! just the fact that they're a kiddo already makes me soft, but also the way they're so silly goofy and passionate and ND-coded makes me go feral noises bitebitebite scampering off the walls CRAZY!!! and don't even get me STARTED on their backstory at the end of the game... OAUUGHRRRRRGGHHGGHHHHHHH blows up

8. if you're an artist, how do you draw grovyle? same for dusknoir too. and why? since i haven't shared very many of my drawings of those characters here yet, i will sketch something right meow ^_^

ok i kinda cheated and grabbed a grovyle from my sketchbook but I'M DONE

oh i have to say Why i draw them this way... idk LOL i just draw what looks good to me. though i'd like to note that these drawings aren't to scale, dusknoir would be way bigger if it were up to me, and it Was up to me BUT I STOOPY <3 anyway i do need to draw future trio more, i’d like to refine how i draw them and u can only do that by doodling them endlessly

10. opinion on nuzleaf's character? also were you surprised by that twist? the moment i found out nuzleaf was a father figure i had high hopes because i'm fucking insane about father figures in media, BUT after playing Super i ended up not caring much about him... AT FIRST. NOWADAYS he and partner are my reasons why i would play through that game again !!!! ***also if there is anyone who hasn't played Super yet and wants to stay spoiler-free SKIP THIS NEXT PART

sadly i was spoiled about nuzleaf before playing the game, but seeing his actions leading up to the reveal (my personal favorite being his frequent "outings" and i have a comic idea related to that) was fun. i need to stop yapping soon BUT i also enjoy how his character never feels like it's fully dishonest. even while under yveltal's influence, he takes you in and puts a roof over your head, yes to keep an eye on you bc you’re a threat to his plans, but also bc he still has a good heart deep down. but he also undeniably has darkness within him– it was just amplified by yveltal. his efforts to redeem himself to hero and maintain a relationship with them at the end of the game make his expressions of affection in the main story feel like they were real all along rather than just a facade 🥺

RUPI THANK YOU FOR YOUR ASK seeing it in my inbox helped me get out of bed!!!! sorry these got kinda long tho i swear i’m normal

[carlyraejepsans]

Oh! What are your headcanons for frisk? I know we don't know much about them in canon so it's hard to extrapolate but I'm still curious

oh sure! mind, these are all personal headcanon, as there isn't all that much canon info i can go off of, HAHAHA

obviously I don't think frisk had a happy home life, just like chara. but while chara's abuse was more active, i think frisk's abuse came from neglect rather than outright hostility or violence from the people around them. maybe they were a single, unwanted child. maybe they were among the last of many, many siblings. too many to be notable... or missed. so they left.

by the time the game starts, they've already been living on the streets (of the city that became of the village of the humans that chara was born in) for a few years. they get by with their wits. i think they're VERY clever, unnaturally so for their age, and judging from their ability to talk/charm themself into and out of anything in the game, they probably refined that skill for survival (you make yourself liked enough, people are quicker to show you kindness. leftover food, a dry shop window to sleep in at night, some used clothes).

undertale itself raises the question of why frisk climbed Mt Ebott. i like the idea that it was a force outside of themself. like a sudden, SOUL deep tension that would only release if they followed the call. an intrinsic certainty that, somewhere, somehow, someone really needed them. maybe it was fate. maybe it wasn't. maybe they were tied to chara's spirit long before they ever fell (by blood, as a long descendant? by magic? both?) and they were reacting to flowey calling out for them. point is, they felt the instinct, and they followed it.

because here's the thing: in my take on this, frisk desperately wants to be needed. that's what ties them so closely to chara. going with the more literal interpretation of them as a ghost, chara still has unfinished business in the underground. they haunt their former home, much like flowey did, and they NEED to see more of it, they just can't let it go. and they can't do it without frisk. they need them. so frisk goes along, because FINALLY, they're needed. that's why they reset at the end and try again, that's why they keep returning to the underground. but of course, chara isn't the only undertale character who needs frisk. the entirety of monsterkind does, and the entirety of monsterkind gets better thanks to their intervention. flowey, too. asriel, too. that's what resolves chara's unfinished business and allows them to finally let go (i mean... as long as YOU do, too, of course :])

and this is precisely the reason I'm not a fan of making frisk traumatized by their experiences in the underground. having leftover baggage from before they came? love that. but the whole point of their journey, to me, is that they were the single most powerful being in the entire story. the amount of liberties they could take, with their actions, with their words, with their own person, due to the sheer scale of power they had on everything else.. sure there was violence, and fear, and adventures and misadventures and betrayals, but when you can literally control time, i think that was almost euphoric for them.

after the life they used to lead, i like to think frisk saw their experiences in the underground as positive. no more powerlessness. no more loneliness. finally in (shared) control of their life. was it maladaptive as hell? yeah! but it was better than nothing! and if you've been following me for more than a month, you'll know by now that i am obsessed with the idea of a post pacifist, reset-heavy frisk freaking out AFTER their happy ever after, when chara doesn't follow them out of mt ebott and takes the SAVE power along with them (which is... kinda what happens in the game). being back to square one would mess them Up. fortunately, they now have a whole support system of family and friends who love them to make them feel needed and safe. it's gonna take some work, but man. it's gonna be worth it.

[herefortheships]

I guess Bj wouldn't be as kind and selfless to let Lydia marry someone else, so is the dream theory more realistic?

I guess it depends entirely on interpretation, but my take on it is that for Betelgeuse to be selfish and possessive enough of Lydia to intervene in her relationships it would depend on the person she's involved with and how the relationship is going. Like I mentioned before in this post, he simply might not have had the power to intervene or even reach Lydia beyond just projecting flashes of his presence around her, when she was with Richard, but I can also believe that he just let her go and be happy during that time. However, he definitely wanted to intervene in her relationship with Rory, because Rory was a toxic partner and would eventually destroy Lydia. He was already destroying her, as a matter of fact. So in this case, Betelgeuse would never allow this man to have his Lydia, no way. He'd have done anything possible to get in the way.

When it comes to Lydia, Betelgeuse is just different. Lydia is special and he does love her, so he might just have been putting her best interest and her happiness first when she was with Richard, even above his own feelings, which is big for someone like Betelgeuse if you ask me. I don't know for sure how long he was like trapped in the model before Barbara and Adam dug him up (probably since the moment Adam built the model?), but my assumption is that even before he was bound to the model he was strapped down some other way by Juno in the afterlife (and if I add my own little headcanon, even before he was stopped by Juno he was an aimless spirit unable to move on, bound to the ritual of marriage), so Lydia is definitely the first woman he loved since Delores (don't think there were other ghost ladies in his afterlife, is what I mean), it would be natural that he became possessive of the one person he made a connection with in hundreds of years. Lydia is the first woman he's fallen in love with since Delores. This is confirmed in the wedding dance scene. That said, if he loves her truly, part of loving someone is letting them go if their happiness depends on it. (Once Lydya is free after Rory, though, the story is different; now Betelgeuse has a shot and I don't see him letting her go any time soon 😉).

I already shared my thoughts about the Dream Theory before, but I can add a little more here to answer the question more completely. While I personally have a different interpretation of the events in the movie, I do find the Dream Theory very intriguing and interesting to read. I can say in some ways it can be more realistic, considering Betelgeuse's nature, and looking at Lydia as a character. Lydia is attracted to the darkness; she likes the strange and unusual, and she described herself as such in the first movie. She might have at some point called on Betelgeuse after the Maitlands moved on, and opted to live with him rather than to live with another living person. The first Beetlejuice movie doesn't really go into Lydia's head when it comes to Betelgeuse. It could be that any persistent negative ideas she had about him were all put in her head by Barbara. As she grew older she might have changed the way she viewed him and even be intrigued by him. The Maitlands were definitely more her parents than Charles and Delia ever were, and Lydia always connected more with the dead than the living (we can throw in Astrid's resentment about this fact here as a reflection of guilt in Lydia's subconscious about it, if Astrid truly is a dream figure existing only in the dream). This is all speculative, of course, but yes I don't think it's unrealistic to conclude that it was all a construct of Betelgeuse's power. I have a different interpretation, which I talked about in the post linked above.

When it comes to Lydia, Betelgeuse is softer, and I think he would do pretty much anything for her. Whether that is being selfless and allowing her the freedom to love someone else, when he failed to reach her, or building a dreamverse for her to experience the things she can't have while being his forever partner.

[thenightfolknetwork]

As a person of evident good judgement, I'm sure you're familiar with the works of the late, great Sir Terry Pratchett. He has the rare skill of mixing philosophy and politics into his comedy, it's quite delightful.

One such example is in his novel 'Going Postal'. He introduces the idea that, “A man’s not dead while his name is still spoken.” It's a beautiful sentiment. But I must confess, some of the shine has worn off it for me in recent years.

I'll cut to the chase: I died of typhoid fever in 49CE. And I mean died. I was done and gone and passed, leaving no more ripples on the surface of the world than any other Joe Nobody. My name had been long forgotten, the stone marking my grave long since worn away.

And then, to my surprise, I returned.

It started slowly, a gradual stirring of awareness. Then, in a great crashing wave, I arrived – full and real and vibrant, as alive as I had been before my sickness.

I've since learnt that there was an archaeological dig near my old home a few years ago. They discovered the stone, deciphered it despite the wear. My name returned to the world - and I returned with it.

At first I was just being mentioned in academic circles, cited here and there. Nothing dramatic.

But then hen, a writer named a character after me in a miniseries about Roman Britain. My name was on millions of lips - apparently I'm something of a fan favourite.

But I've seen the programme and it's all wrong! The character is nothing like me, for starters. And the life they've painted… Well, it is a good effort, I suppose. But it is not my life.

This is to say nothing of the fan interpretation. They barely seem to care about the text of the show at all! They extrapolate wildly, especially about my relationship with a certain centurion. The two of us share barely more than a minute or two of screen time!

I don't mind being back, per se. I enjoyed being alive, and I'm enjoying being back - especially the chance to catch up on my reading.

How can I correct the people's misinterpretations of me and my life? Or should I just let it go and enjoy my resurgence - however long it might last?

First of all, reader, congratulations on returning to this plane of existence. Unexpected as this return might be, I'm glad you're still finding ways to enjoy this new lease on… not life, exactly, but something rather like it.

I can well imagine how frustrating it might be to see people attaching your name and identity to an otherwise fictional character. But I think emphasising that difference is the first step in coming to terms with the situation.

This writer has shown a remarkable commitment to authenticity by choosing the name of a real Roman Briton to use in their screenplay. But seeking to create authentic fiction is a very different ambition than seeking to create a fully accurate representation of past events and the people who lived them.

I wish I could tell you that the viewers of this programme will understand this difference. Many will, but it is an unfortunate truth that people often take historical dramas at face value and may not fully appreciate just how much of what they see has been at most tenuously inspired by historical research, and more likely invented whole cloth by the writers themselves.

But this is a misinterpretation of a television programme, not of you. These viewers are engaging with a piece of fiction, not with you as a real, historical person. This is especially true of those viewers who “extrapolate wildly” about the relationships between fictional character. They aren't misinterpreting you – they're creating their own fictions, inspired by the fiction they've consumed.

With that said, many fans of historical fiction are also interested in actual historical research. If you really want to educate people about life in Roman Britain, the fans of this programme might be a particularly receptive audience. You could try posting on social media about your experiences, using the events in the programme as a jumping off point for your discussion of real history.

Do tread carefully, though. You need to keep a clear distinction between yourself as a real, historical figure and the character who bears your name. You aren't trying to “correct” the television programme or criticise its portrayal, but rather offering your reflections as additional insights for anyone who might be interested.

Please remember though, you are under no obligation to engage with this fan community at all. I see no reason at all why you can't simply leave them to their extrapolations, and concentrate on enjoying yourself for as long as you're with us.

[For more creaturely advice, check out Monstrous Agonies on your podcast platform of choice, or visit monstrousproductions.org for more info]

[nat-seal-well]

I am, once again, thinking about N Sewell and one of their favorite books, Great Gatsby (which is also one of my favorite books). This is also partially inspired by the bonus content that was posted a few days ago! It's been on my mind ever since. Because of that, and because it’s more of a ramble than anything else, I’m putting the rest of this post under the break. 

One big part of N’s character that intrigues me is the way they cling to their humanity. Or rather, whatever is left of it. They’ve spent so much of the last three centuries holding on as tight as they can to what they used to be, and it carries over into their love for reading and stories—which is also one of the main themes of Great Gatsby: holding onto the past, even when it kills you. Gatsby has spent years stubbornly holding onto the memories of the relationship he used to have with Daisy that his perception of the truth has been completely skewed. All he cares about is stopping time and turning back the clock. (There’s even a quote about it. “Can’t repeat the past? Why, of course you can!” And the tea scene, which is a personal favorite.)

He’s hung all of his hopes on having her again; we all know she’s the green light he keeps reaching for. (And the color green symbolizes so many things: wealth, prosperity, envy, to name a few that fit.) To Gatsby, Daisy is the living embodiment of all his desires. He isn’t in love with her so much as he is in love with the idea of her; she’s become a sort of status symbol to him. Something to project his desires onto. If he can have her, it means he’s achieved all he’s ever wanted. The wealth, the high-class life, the privilege, all of these things he’s been hungry for and has devoted himself to obtaining. 

Similarly, turning was something that N never wanted. Having their mortality taken from them is a wound that has never healed, even after all these years; partially due to their own avoidance. N enjoys cooking. They eat human food. They lose themself in their books and the stories they adore so much, and all because they can’t handle the truth of their reality. N dives into their beloved stories with so much romanticism because it’s easier than facing what’s real, just as they play at still being human. 

Which is part of what makes their relationship with the Detective in the romance route so interesting to me. Time and time again, we’ve seen the way N latches onto the Detective’s humanity. N makes off-hand (and presumptuous) comments about the Detective becoming a vampire in the future, and yet at the same time admits to themself that they don't want them to turn. N treasures their mortality and it’s easy to interpret part of that as them projecting onto the Detective; they don’t want what happened to them to happen to their partner. It is, in a way, N’s own method of stopping time and fixing the past. That isn’t to say that N doesn’t love the Detective, because they do, but there are definitely some parallels between the relationship they share with the Detective, and the one Gatsby and Daisy have. Green is even N’s color; we see them wearing it all the time. 

N’s inability to face the truth is also reminiscent of our iconic narrator, Nick Carraway. Though he claims to be “one of the few honest men he has ever known,” he has an enormous blind spot when it comes to himself and to Gatsby. Despite how he insists on giving an unbiased opinion on the events that unfold, there’s an undeniable favoritism to his neighbor. Nick also plays a hand in setting up the affair between Gatsby and Daisy, and judges the people he interacts with throughout the book. Setting himself up as “honest” and unbiased—merely an outside spectator, nothing more—in the beginning only makes it easier for him to swallow everything that happens later on, even when they become unacceptable. Especially when this clearly isn’t the case, and he’s involved far more than he’s willing to, or capable of, admitting. 

That kind of denial can be dangerous—not unlike how the idealist and romantic parts of N are equally enchanting as they are a concern. In their own way, N is just as unreliable as Nick. (Remember the, “Not with my own hands, no,” answer they give the Detective, after being asked if they’ve ever taken a life?) N prefers the dreamy notions found between the pages of their books and the denial of the part they ever played aboard The Queen’s Sabre over the cold and unsavory truth, even three hundred years after it happened. Just as they continue to pretend to still be human. 

But you can’t hold onto the past forever, and you can’t keep lying to yourself. Blatant denial can only go so far, especially not when you have an eternity to live. Sooner or later you have to let go—or they will drown you. I’m just very interested in seeing the path N’s route takes in the future books. Their intentional avoidance could very well lead to their undoing (or at least a very fun read). They can learn how to face the truth, face the facts of what they’ve done and what they are… or they can let their stubbornness destroy them, and bring the Detective down with them. 

[that-ari-blogger]

Content. Warning. (Poison)

Hazbin Hotel has a predicament that I haven’t really come across anywhere else. The episode that I would use to recommend this series is also the episode that I would use to recommend people away.

I would recommend another tale for the characters and the storyline and how the writers weaved in a dissection of subject matter more nuanced than I expected. But Hazbin Hotel is, in my opinion, at its best when it deals with that material front and centre.

There’s a reason I have titled this post what I have. Episode four of this series isn’t shy about what it’s talking about. But there’s an interesting difference between the idea of something being subtle and something being nuanced, and there’s also another weird thing about this episode and especially the first song contained therein.

Masquerade feels like it is written by a comedian, and I mean that in the most straight faced, complimentary way possible.

Let me explain.

CONTENT WARNING: (Mention of Abuse, Mental Health, Sexual Assault, Addiction, Bodily Harm)

SPOILERS AHEAD: (Hazbin Hotel, Six)

I am an absolutely awful judge of the cultural zeitgeist, but I have observed that the music I like rarely gets described as “pop”. Partially, this is because I see a bunch of people liking a specific thing and I walk in the opposite direction, but partially this is because my musical taste isn’t limited to any specific genre.

My main musical tastes are centred around the emotionality of the song, rather than the musical distinctions. I will look at Harry Styles’ Watermelon Sugar and think it’s nice to listen to, but I will gravitate towards Olivia Rodrigo’s Vampire because of the emotional journey that song takes me on. The former of those two makes you want to dance; the latter makes you want to shout your rage at the sky.

Naturally, this leads me to ballads, songs that tell a story. The Crane Wives are particularly good at these, Curses is the archetypical example of a tale of personal guilt. But, for the sake of a constant thematic, let’s talk about Bitter Medicine for a moment.

“I bite my tongue to keep the worst of the words in So they don’t hurt nobody but me Swallow the poison I wanna spit Bitter medicine I think it’s making me sick Don’t look up to me I’m not as tall as you think You see, I talk a big game But it’s bullshit”

Bitter medicine is about bad coping mechanisms, kind of. The Crane Wives excels at exploring powerful emotions but leaves the scenarios open to interpretation. It’s not how you got here that matters, but where “here” is.

This is why the same few of their songs have gained popularity in Asexual spaces as well as in spaces for those recovering from their own actions. Reformed abusers and aces don’t tend to share much, except for a feeling of guilt.

It’s an unfortunate part of the ace experience that the realising of who you are feels like a betrayal. It feels like you have strung someone along with promises you can’t keep. I’ve been there, and it feels awful.

I do want to stress that this isn’t betrayal in reality. Being ace does not make you a bad person, you haven’t actually strung someone along. You are valid, end of argument.

The issue is that the mind isn’t always a rational thing. Sometimes it internalises things in an unhealthy way. Odds are the partner who you think you betrayed wouldn’t agree with you on that. People that like you have a habit of supporting you.

Essentially, part of being ace is that self-imposed guilt. Not every ace goes through it, but for those who do, that feeling is difficult to overcome.

But that idea of being the reason a relationship fallen apart has a lot of other applicable situations, hence the diversity of popularity.

Bitter Medicine isn’t about that, its about guilt for feeling bad. Its about the type of trauma response that is selfishness masquerading as selflessness.

The emotion on display is pain, with a song about bottling up everything until it explodes. You can’t be angry, you can’t be sad, you can’t let people help you because "there’s nothing wrong". You just have to keep things tight to your chest and let other people suffer. This is a song about becoming distant from those who can see you hurting and can’t do anything to help you.

It's about how bad coping mechanisms act as a poison that can’t be escaped, almost like an addiction.

The music video centres around the idea of others getting caught up in the crossfire of internal emotions. It’s monochromatic so you can see the stains left behind even more starkly, and those stains get everywhere. The protagonist has to be rescued by these others, but she has to let them.

You will notice that ballads don’t usually tell you the events of their stories. Everything is a metaphor; everything is a symbol. Sometimes a song will tell you outright what’s going on. That’s a strength of the medium, not a plot hole.

Which leads me to a song called Poison, a ballad that is entirely centred around the metaphor of its title.

Poison was written by Alice Cooper (with help from Desmond Child and John McCurry) and released in 1989 as a single, and it is surreal.

It’s about Cooper’s alcohol and drug addictions, which is weird considering the lyrics are ostensibly about someone he’s in a relationship with, and that’s the point.

The song depicts Cooper’s addiction as an abusive relationship, dedicating the song to that part. It’s singing to “you”, as if he’s in conversation with it, telling it to its face all the damage that he has taken.

This is personification, ascribing a will to an inanimate object, although its more than that. In this case, it’s ascribing an attraction to the object, a seductiveness. He blames himself for falling for a trap and frames the song as his own realisation of his agency. He got himself into this situation, he recognises what the problem is, he decides where to go from here.

I want to highlight that the central metaphor is used differently in both songs mentioned above. That’s part of the fun of literary analysis. Everything works together to provide context for everything else.

Poison is a song about alcoholism, so it uses the titular concept to focus on the realisation and consequences. Bitter Medicine focuses on how the poison masquerades as a cure to emphasise its point about bad coping mechanisms being traps. Hazbin Hotel’s Poison is the opposite of all these things.

The song in Hazbin Hotel is about an abusive relationship, and it uses the poison to step in for the addictiveness of that. It’s a reverse of Alice Cooper’s song, comparing a person to a drug rather than the other way around.

It is also gloriously unsubtle in a way that is really difficult to explain, so I’m going to have to use another, wildly different example.

I recently read a book called This Gilded Abyss. It’s by Rebecca Thorne (@rebeccathornewrites), and it struck me as a book that was graceful in the same way that a person can be “cool”. It’s not pompously dancing around clever wordplay. The book feels like the art is in the tale, rather than the telling, and I mean that in the best way. It’s more art than form.

The reason I bring this up is because that is the same feeling I get from listening to Hazbin Hotel’s Poison. There are cool details in the presentation, sure, but they are outshone entirely by the emotion on display. I don’t listen to the song or read the book to dwell on the fine details, not because they aren’t there, but because the story has me in a death grip and I am too enthralled by it to pay attention.

I could talk about how Poison uses high notes to ground itself, I could talk about how the songs instruments imply a fakeness. But that doesn’t seem like the point to me. Instead, I want to elaborate on what I said earlier about this song and comedy writing.

The song isn’t funny, per say. If you were insincere, you could point out that this is about a spider singing to a moth, so haha jokey joke joke. But that’s the key. Sincerity.

The golden rule of comedy is “commit to the bit”. It’s less funny to draw back and undercut yourself than it is to subvert expectations or do something dumb and go for it, despite seeing it coming a mile away.

I was a theatre kid (if you are shocked by this, welcome to the blog), and I remember being told by the theatre sports coach that for a joke to be funny, it can never be acknowledged as such. I don't know how much I agree with this, but it's a useful idea.

Hazbin Hotel does this in a big way with its entire design. It’s set in hell, and the main character is the most optimistic person you will ever meet. Pentious is a villain, and also a goober, and the show does not acknowledge the inherent silliness of this for a moment.

As such, the punchline of Poison is the final verse, which is a tour de force of Blake Roman’s acting skill. Everything cuts away and you get the emotional centre of the entire song. It’s like the dick joke you can see coming, but instead of making you laugh, it destroys you.

This is how the final scream in All You Wanna Do works. The song part of the musical Six, which I hope to cover on this blog at some point and follows the breaking down of Katherine Howard. She is seeking a kinship without any preconceptions, but everyone around her views her as nothing more than a vehicle for sex.

At the end of the song, she screams out into the stage:

"Bite my lip and pull my hair as you tell me I'm the fairest of the fair."

Six is a tragedy that has already happened. The characters know their fates, but the audience gets to learn them in real time, and is powerless but to watch with joy that turns rapidly into horror.

In this case, Howard hasn't been allowed to complain. She's been something pretty for people to look upon, and she has to be happy, right? She's married to the king. But she isn't, because nobody has at any point asked what it is that she wants.

So, she screams, letting all that rage and frustration out, letting the audience know how she really feels, and displaying her complete vulnerability in the face of history, and then she is gone, and there is nothing you can do about it.

Poison also does this with each chorus. There are mini punchlines, mini beats that make you react and keep you interested.

“What’s the worst part of this hell? I can only blame myself.”

This forms a bridge to the chorus, drawing you back like an arrow in a bowstring to send you rocketing forwards into an aggressively upbeat flurry of music. The same thing happens later on in the song.

“So far beyond difficult, To resist another gulp.”

This is use of the titular metaphor, but its also ascribing blame. Angel has been abused and sexually assaulted by Valentino, and this is the song about how he has internalised that. Namely, through condemning himself.

There are two things to note here, and I think the series disagrees with Angel on both accounts.

First up, there is the importance of proportionality. Falling for someone with more red flags than a beach in shark season wasn’t a good decision, I think we can all agree on that, but it doesn’t condemn someone to abuse.

Especially since this is the internet for Pete's sake. You only have to imply that a character is attractive, and you will have a collection of people who will defend their every move. Part of this is the "I can fix him" mentality and the fact that fictional characters aren't real, but still. Come on.

Second up, is Angel really to blame? More to blame than, say, Valentino? The victim is blaming himself for his victimhood, in order to deflect from the person who has put himself in that situation.

Episode four has one scene in it that is both my favourite and my least favourite, the one in which Charlie sets fire to the set.

This was a scene that made me reflect on the difference between something being good craft and something being enjoyable, as Valentino’s switch in tone when moving between Angel and Charlie is so viscerally uncomfortable that it made me pause the episode to sit back and take it in. It’s intentionally jarring, and it's not trying to present this character as benevolent.

What it is trying to do is present Valentino as seductive, someone who has two modes that he can switch between. Angel fell for the nice Valentino who got the gifts and was kind and charming and was blindsided by the more aggressive version of this character.

In other words, the highs were what he was drawn in by, the lows caught him off guard. Valentino is like a drug.

This truly is the opposite of Alice Cooper’s song. Where that personified the drug to give it agency, Angel dehumanises Valentino to place the agency on himself and take the blame.

“Because I know you’re poison, you’re feeding me poison. Addicted to this feeling I can’t help but swallow up your poison. I made my choice and every night I’m living like there’s no tomorrow.”

If we focus on the line I put in bold, there’s some similarity to another song, previously in the musical.

“Hell is forever, whether you like it or not. Had their chance to behave better now they boil in a pot”

The idea that choices are final and that everyone gets one chance that they must then commit to is a key antagonistic force in the series. The show is about hope, and the desire for things to get better, but Heaven and Angel say that if you make a decision, the rest of your life must be dedicated to the follow up of that.

If you got into a bad relationship, sucks to suck, you’re stuck there. If you got into a bind and had to do dark things to stay alive, sorry, no redoes.

There's a word for this: "Damnation".

Committing to the bit here is making the bit your entire deal. The theme is the dichotomy between change and stagnation, and every source of conflict comes from that one concept. It’s milking the joke for all its worth, but again, repurposed.

Although, there is one other advantage that comedians have in storytelling, an advantage I like to call the “What’s My Mother’s Name?” Moment.

Sam Riegel is a voice actor and a regular cast member on Critical Role. He is famous for being incredibly funny, but also for his relationship with humour. Several times across the series’ three campaigns, it has become clear that Riegel was being fully serious, and neither the audience not the cast saw it coming until far too late.

There’s an obvious example here but let’s get topical and talk about the latest episode of the series, as of writing this.

“He had a perspective and a goal and he laid it out very clearly. He wanted to get his family back and assume power. He did not set out to kill a city, to destroy a city. He wanted to get back with his family. The others prevented him. He gave them a choice to sit down at a table and they said, ‘No, we'd rather kill a city.’”

Riegel is playing Braius Doomseed, a minotaur champion of an evil deity, and in episode 102, there is a discussion of what has gone before. Braius starts to make a case for one of the villainous deities, and the rest of the cast assumes he’s just joking and committing to the bit. Instead, Reigel commits to the bit so thoroughly that he bypasses humour and plays it straight. This is someone genuinely making a case for the lord of the hells.

The question isn’t about when Reigel started beings serious because he’s always been that. The question, is “when did he stop being funny?”

Hazbin Hotel does this with Poison, and it causes the audience to reflect on what has gone before. All of Angels’s actions up to this point have now been recontextualised, and it's far too late to do anything about it. Angel has always been serious, the show has always been aware of this character as a damaged person, but now the lighting is different, and you aren’t shielded by the joke.

The punchline is the commitment to the bit.

Final Thoughts

I’ve seen a lot of praise online for this song, and while I agree that this song’s grip on you is unbreakable, I think that it gets outdone by the very next number.

I also want to point out why, in my opinion, episode four is the best in the series.

The show has a pacing problem, it’s in a hurry to tell its story because it’s had artificial constraints put upon it. But Masquerade takes its time and gives you a story without compromises and without outside input. In my eyes, this is a flawless episode of television.

Next week, we will stick with the episode, and look at Loser Baby, and how hope becomes triumph. Stick around if that interests you.

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[drawinglin]

Hello. Regarding Hellraiser III, I seem to recall you making a comment about how you believed Elliott and Unbound!Pinhead to be physical manifestations of Freud's model of the psyche - super-ego and id respectively. I am in total agreement with you there, and I have believed this same thing for a long time now. This would also make normal 'Bound' Pinhead that we meet in the first two films, and the films following Bloodline, to be the actual Ego itself. I think this makes the third film, and the characterisations so much more interesting, rather than doing what the early 90s HR comics did, which was to have Pinhead be an Aztec 'demon' who possesses Elliott, making them separate people altogether. That's boring and predictable, and just goes against everything that the movies established in the earlier films for Pinhead. By having Unbound and Elliott be one and the same, just different aspects of the same man, which is basically what HR is about - our deepest, darkest desires explored and enhanced, it builds on the HR mythology. This is why I've always loved HR3, and why I don't think it's a bad film, and why I just adore Unbound as a character. This is Pinhead off the leash. I still believe that Unbound would still be very fond of Kirsty, and still would be driven to protect her in some way. Even without his human side. But for the most part, he would be super eager to have her join him. Though he'd treat her much differently than he did the club patrons. I don't think the love/lust for Kirsty comes from just his human side. It comes from all of him.

Anyway, I thought I'd share my thoughts on the matter with you. I found this online regarding id, ego, super-ego, and it reminded me of the boys even more so. Maybe you could draw something out of this? It's an idea. I love your art. Keep up the good work! :)

Your analysis of Unbound and Elliot is exactly what I was thinking. It almost makes me cry. I’ve always found it hard to dislike HR3 for this reason. After watching the HR1 and HR2, I felt that human desires and darkness are what truly terrify us. So when I discovered that HR3 split the Hell Priest into two characters, I was super excited.

The human version of Elliot is relatively mature; after all, he carries the memories and burdens from his time as a human, as well as the PTSD of being a survivor of World War I. He is also someone who adheres strictly to rules. I guess this leadership quality and personality is what attracted Leviathan to him, eventually leading him to become the priest managing hell. In the moment of their separation, the repressed desires, dark sides, and nature of the human were individually extracted, like a newly born child without constraints. They both possess things that the other lacks. I’m really looking forward to their journey of hatred and self-destruction gradually turning into understanding, culminating in a new interpretation of a single person. It’s amazing! But unfortunately, HR3 didn’t delve into their complex psychological relationship in detail. This regret has made me want to doodle their story.

I was shocked to learn that the comic had mentioned the demon's setting before; I had no idea about that. Thank you for sharing! Like you, I’m more inclined towards the idea of the id and superego!

I agree that Elliot and Unbound have an obsession with Kirsty and surely hope that she would join their ranks as a Cenobite.

But to me,I tend to see their relationship as a complex ambiguity; I imagine it as a sense of distance rather than a romantic interaction. Their conflicts would actually bring them closer together.

For Kirsty, the Hell Priest undoubtedly intervened in her life and indirectly destroyed her family. Even if it started because of someone else’s involvement, he still cast a huge shadow over Kirsty. In their contract relationship, the Hell Priest has let her go multiple times, and Elliot himself has said that Kirsty is his friend. Therefore, I believe they share a relationship that is both contradictory and beautiful!

The existence of their relationship is so enchanting, which is probably why so many people like it!

And thank you for the pictures you provided. I love your thoughts every time you share them; they truly inspire me!🥰❤️ ❤️