#really shouting into the void with this one

[lurkingshan]

We have arrived at a mutual crush, people! And the way they did it makes total sense. Of course the thing that catches Jane's interest and starts those warm feelings toward Ryan is Ryan seeing him in a way no one else at work does. Just the fact that he actually asked Jane about the rumors instead of going along with negative assumptions was already notable, but to then follow that up by acknowledging that he sees how hard Jane tries and how much he's holding--of course Jane is going to want to keep someone like that close. Everyone else in this place just hands him burdens and then criticizes every imperfection in the way he shoulders them; he needs someone who is actually on his side.

Which is not to say he will do anything about any personal feelings he is developing for Ryan. Jane is a professional and there is no way he will be hitting on his intern, and I liked that despite inviting Ryan to his home, we saw that he kept an appropriate distance and kept the conversation focused on work. It was really nice to see him take a beat to recognize that he was unnecessarily rude to Ryan amidst his stress and actually apologize for that, and then take the time to teach him something properly. It's another characteristic of a great leader to recognize their shortcomings and have some humility about mistakes. Btw, I will be needing an analysis of every item in his home, that set was jam-packed with rich character details.

I also really loved the way we saw Ryan blossom under some proper mentorship and get excited about putting together a pitch deck once he had a better sense of how to think about it. His giddiness at getting to wear Jane's clothes to the office was also adorable, and I like that next week we're going to start dealing with the fallout of people noticing his crush. He is not exactly subtle with the adoring looks and radiant smiles whenever Jane is on his mind.

That all of this happened in parallel with Ba-Mhee finally starting to take her job seriously was also excellent. I was glad to get the backstory on her and Tae because it helped me understand her fixation on him a lot better. She was chasing him for years before he finally acknowledged her, and part of her must feel insecure about how mutual their feelings really are. But it doesn't seem to me like he doesn't care about her, he's just wired differently. I am now hoping that rather than a breakup, this is headed for Ba-Mhee finding herself outside this relationship and getting to a healthier balance.

[finniestoncrane]

my thing is, i want to talk to people. i want to be good at socialising. but i've never really had much practice, so i don't know how? i don't know how to carry on a conversation. it makes me nervous and anxious and makes my stomach hurt and it tires me out. i would love to have a constant back and forth. it'd be swell lmao

unfortunately. i cannot and it's confusing. i want to talk, but i can't. and i also don't want to? mental illness cocktail gets in the way

like earlier i was going to speak to people, i'd typed a couple messages out!! but i figured they wouldn't want to talk to me which is fine i know that's likely just the anxiety. so then i thought "i know, mitigate the risk!! i'll ask if people want to chat about a specific topic with me so they have to opt in" and then panicked because that would mean people would talk to me? which is what i wanted? LMAO

confusing and irritating, so i made a meme

[lunalikestowriteanddraw]

I think Frost and Torbek’s relationship would be…idk the right term for it. Soft? Domestic? Like, I know the fandom is generally pretty horny (At least, most of the fics on ao3 are), but I just wanna read about like soft and domestic moments between the gay furries

Like. I imagine that Frost would teach Torbek how to read and write (or, at least the basics of which). I also imagine that Frost is also weirdly in-tune with his friends emotions (kinda like irl house cats), and since Torbek is a walking whirlwind of bad emotions, I imagine Frost would give Torbek Calming Cat Cuddles whenever they have downtime (also whenever Torbek has a nightmare or something)

Idk, i think my desire to just watch them be cute and soft is partially because i just. Torbek deserves all the cuddles. They all do, but especially my sad baby boy. He deserves the world and then some. And I know Frost is capable of being soft and compassionate, even if he’s gotten significantly more murderhobo-y upon entering the Feywild.

Idk man, I just want these two to cuddle, is that so much to ask?

[rose-void-789]

Ah Caleb changing stuff till the end. He took away the childhood friend line and the heart of it 😭😭😭

At least he didn't change Katsuki having a big part in in. They had to emphasize it

[iliadeleart]

[daydreams-and-honeybees]

Been thinking about Atlantis: The Lost Empire lately so what if Milo x Kida but Huntlow

[xavalav]

people who fill my notifs by going on reblog sprees on my acc i love you btw

[kyliafanfiction]

I sometimes feel like characters who do truly monstrous things while also having been victims of some pretty insane shit themselves are sort of an exercise in empathy. Or at least, should be seen as such.

Like, in real life, if a person who has been horribly broken by their experiences and failed by society than proceeds to rape someone - it's hard to feel the justifiable sympathy/empathy for that person (without excusing their rape, never do that) because well, you can look at this actual human person they hurt, or worse, and it feels gross and disrespectful to the rape victim.

And this is understandable. (And applies to more than just rapists/rape victims of course, that's just the most visceral one and thus picked for that reason)

But a fictional rape victim is... fictional. You can't 'disrespect' their trauma, and while obviously rape/whatever else is real, and people may related to the rape victim and thus see your comments about the rapist also being a victim as somehow being about their experience...

Well, it's not.

Because the rapist here, didn't actually hurt a real person. Fictional characters are objects. They're objects that often grab us by the throat and refuse to leave our fucking heads, yes, but they're objects. They are tools used by writers to tell a story, and readers to tell a story.

And one of the things fictional characters are good for is allowing us to consider experiences we never had, and imagine ourselves in other circumstances and lives. (Also just fun and fascinating and interesting to watch their stories).

It's very easy to feel for the rape victim in fiction, and rightly so. That's Level 1 Empathy there. Granted, some people IRL fail that, but that's not really what we're talking about here.

Advanced Empathy, hard Empathy is feeling for the rapist. Not for the rape, of course, even if they feel guilt about it, but if someone really was failed on multiple levels and was broken and damaged and went through the sort of psychological wringer that would leave most of us here on tumblr catatonic - they do deserve the same Empathy any human (any person) who went through all that.

Even after they also do the bad thing, critically they still deserve Empathy. And that is fucking hard. I very often have a hard time feeling bad for truly awful people who also deserve empathy and sympathy, real and even fictional (despite all this, yeah, I'm not perfect on this) for what they (separately) went through.

It also becomes even harder when what they went through is utterly bound up with what they did. How what they went through and experiences is in part responsible for what they did - because they still made a choice. The circumstances may have left them not in their right mind, may have left them feeling without choice, may have driven them to things they normally might not think of or do, but they still chose to do that bad thing. And that's not okay. They still hurt someone.

And yet - one cannot remove the action from the circumstances. So you can still feel empathy, and elucidate all the factors and circumstances as to what led up to their choices and why, and it doesn't change that they did the horrible thing. The rape, or the murders, or whatever.

But circling back - with a fictional character... they didn't hurt a real person. There's no one who is real that suffered. The things the character did IRL are bad because they hurt real people.

So you're not being disrespectful to the victim by feeling that empathy, or sympathy. By exploring the things that they were a victim for. Even by wanting to focus on those things - fictional characters should be compelling in all their aspects, if they're written well.

And yet, of course, if you do that empathy and do talk about what the bad person went through and all that context, people come at you. They call you evil, just as bad as the (again, fictional) character, or they say that you're treading dangerously close to the arguments people use to defend the real people who do these things in real life. Or you're disrespecting all the victims of these crimes IRL. Especially of course, if the person coming at you has a reason this comes close to home.

But again - fictional.

In an ideal world, we'd all feel sympathy and empathy when it's called for, regardless of what the person did. Even the worst most monstrous people deserve human treatment in prison. And if you don't have empathy, that's hard. Even if you do have empathy, that's hard.

So if you look at a fictional character (who doesn't hurt a real person by virtue of being fictional) that does horrible, vile things, but went through so much, and you still can't empathize or sympathize with them... I mean, it doesn't make you a bad person, not even close, this is still fiction, and there's people I should empathize with in fiction that I don't, but...

It's still a failure of your ability to be empathetic. And we're all humans. We're all failing at that, among other things, all the time. But... it's good to be aware of that. at least?

At the very least, bear that in mind when other people are talking about that context, and that victimization. And please, for the love of god, don't fucking pretend that the victimization didn't happen, that this person who did do terrible things (in fiction) suddenly didn't also (in fiction) experience awful shit, as if doing a bad thing erases all the bad things done to you.

Again - it doesn't necessarily make you a bad person, but like... the horrible state of prisons in our society is a real, actual problem. The way we as a society dehumanize people who do bad things is a real actual problem for a lot of reasons (not least because it creates an incentive for authority that wants to dehumanize a person or a group to expand the definition of 'did bad things' to make their dehumanization now acceptable, among other things).

So yeah. Fictional character who suffers but than also makes others suffer - that's a useful exercise in Empathy. And doing that doesn't make you or anyone else a bad person, or actually defending the sorts of crimes, IRL or Fictional, that this character did. Contextualizing is not whitewashing, empathy is not erasing, and humanizing is not disrespecting the victim(s).

So yeah, they fictional character did bad things. But there's more to them than that. And you can say but and talk about what comes after but without disrespecting the fictional victim. Because the fictional victim... is just as fictional. Just as not real.

Is it possible for this to end up being taken too far? Yes. But that's a reason to be mindful of yourself when it comes to real people, not to never do it. And when it comes to fictional people - again, fictional. Nobody was actually, really hurt.

(I really do want to make clear, before people read the tags, that this applies to all crimes these sorts of characters do, rape was just picked as the one to use as the example.)

[lurkingshan]

Shen Wang speaks entirely in code but Jiang Tian has found the decoder ring

[finniestoncrane]

it might not be like a super popular sentiment to express as someone with 400 requests in my drafts but there's something so mischievous and freeing about looking at all of them and going "fuck it i'm going to write something no one asked for instead" like it brings the joy back to do it every so often u-u 💚

[funnyjokespunperson]

i really do need to post on here more. share my thoughts. maybe i really should do all my kabru heavy kbms ideas. give the world what it needs.

[authenticcadence18]

I honestly think the final update of chfil will be my last posted phinbella fic

[floral-hex]

woke up at 4am feeling the weight of my life crushing me, so I’ve been sitting out in my car for the last couple of hours because I just need. to. be. somewhere else.

[rose-void-789]

Man Soriel is so queer. Fandom wise what queer relationship isn't like weirdly hated when anyone does any little analysis on them being potentially cannon. Get it's a really popular ship that people got tired of but man it's the funniest shit so many loved this ship so then people came up with an essay on why they could and would never be a thing and in fact was unhealthy and weird. It's so much funnier to with a good canonical friendship. Like I'm in the mha bakudeku space, it's crazy going from that where stuff is a lot more nuance but still see less people being upset with it then Soriel it's insane. I feel like I'm a time traveler in the trenches day after the war.

People insisting they are just friends and that a relationship will ruin them as if relationships can't just be very good friends who happen to sometimes go on dates sometimes is such a queer ship argument to have. Toby apparently confirmed Sans as AroAce even apparently Toby then said to not use his tweets for this but hey if true this is an actual queer relationship. And honestly, I'm sure after everything with Asgore Toriel is also not that keen on all that.

But can we talk about that because man I stumbled across a post that made me realize these bitches are so queerplatonic. They remind me so much of one of my friend's relationships. They just talking for ages doing flirting through puns to pull each other up. Like yes this is cannon Soriel. The first time they talked though that door they would have been there till the next day if Paps didn't need a night story. On the surface if the post pacifist interactions are anything to go by I'm sure they nabed a house together. Maybe everyone living together but in every ending where Toriel is alive, he always seems to live with her. There such good friends in the surface these two would totally be joking flrting that might turn to actual flirting but no one not even they know yet I don't think they'll go for anyone else. Toriel certainly isn't going after Asgore any time soon and Sans isn't going to go find someone when he's content. They'll be content on the couch watching some shitty comedy joking around cuddling even. They'll go to Grilbys or some random place once a week for some reason and people will just assume that date night for them. They'll see something in the store and buy it for a prank and cause it reminds it of them. They'll get married as a bit or only because of the tax benefit. If Frisk stays with her you know he's secondary guardian on school stuff. These two are just pure fluff with angsty talks they can only understand sprinkled in. Yeah maybe they won't be an a traditional relationship but honestly these two will definitely be in some weird romantic platonic limbo.

[quantim]

*

[missskzbiased]

A nugget from a WIP that I'm excited to write, cuz I can make everyone suffer and reconnect the way I want to

"Penelope..." Portia pinched her brows, sighing once more, feeling like she had aged ten years in one night, "Don’t play games with me. I’m not daft and neither are you, so take this chance to tell me the truth or I’ll uncover it myself," Her mother's gaze pierced through her soul, and Penelope felt her resolution yielding little by little, "What has happened in here?" She asked one last time, stern enough to earn an honest answer.

"Eloise" Penelope stated simply, resignation sinking upon her as her legs weakened beneath her. She sought her bed, sitting down, eager for some support, "Eloise has happened"

"Elaborate" Her mother ordered, her tone commanding as she closed the distance between them.

"I reaped what I sowed" Penelope managed to articulate through a whisper, her voice trembling with a mix of desperation and sadness, "Eloise saw me in a new light, in a way no one else had ever seen, and she hated it. She hated me. All of me"

And then, the realization came.

Penelope fought to restrain her tears, but it was proven futile as one solitary droplet trickled down her cheek, swiftly followed by another, and another, and another. Soon, an unstoppable stream poured down her face, each tear a testament to her overwhelming emotions. Then, there was no turning back. Her sobs echoed, unrestrained and incessant, a symphony of distress, painting a vivid picture of her rotten insides. Tilting her head back to halt the flow, her throat clenches and strains, instead, suffocating her. The intensity of her feelings gurgled its way down her lungs and knocked the air out. For a fleeting moment, she is convinced that she was dying, that her heart would burst out of her chest or stop altogether, that she would drown with her feet planted on land. Instead, air kept flooding into her lungs, blood kept pumping through her veins, and the crushing sensations kept slaughtering her.

Only when the realization settled in, and she was certain that she would live to see another day, that she curled in on herself, pressing her palms against her eyes, surrendering to her sorrow. Wailing like never before, she let it all out while Portia stood still, shocked into befuddlement. Then, Penelope felt an awkward pat on her back.

For a moment, she wasn't even sure she felt anything. It could have been anything, really, so light was her mother's touch. The moment was fleeting, but it returned a few seconds later. This time, Penelope could distinguish the shape that the brief, firm collision had — a hand. The third time, when the pat was heavier and even more awkward than the first two, she had no doubts —  Portia was comforting her, or trying to. The fourth time, her hand slid from one shoulder to another, and then her chest was pressed against Penelope’s face, and her mother was embracing her.

A hug.

Her mother was hugging her.