#reject the fuck out of anyone that doesn’t exceed your standards

[the-angel-hare]

Omfg. I just realized that if he rejects you at the party it’s probably the first time in 2 centuries he’s been ALLOWED to turn down sexual advances. No fucking wonder he’s so mean about it, he’s making up for every single time he couldn’t say no

they're besties 😌 ✨ my sketch commissions are open! ✨

[whetstonefires]

d gray man liveblog part 5! (part 1)(part 2)(part 3)(part 4)

Love the amount of personality Allen conveys by code-switching into different formality levels. the translators here are doing an excellent job conveying that, though i suspect the foul language there could have been legitimately punched up.

asserting that his oath to mana and the love that underlies it are his even though he can’t know that is...what makes Allen main character material i guess.

XD I want to ask when ‘being a total maniac with a personality whose internal contradictions are never entirely resolved’ became the shounen protagonist standard but i’m paging through mentally and it basically goes all the way back.

Ashita no Joe was like this. it’s always been like this. only the details change.

I will give Cross Marian .3 points for the possibility he predicted that offering Allen no mercy would inspire him to pull out his hardshell rage against the whole situation rather than crumpling under the weight.

stg allen walker is composed of 93% layered trauma like fine lacquerware and 4% mental invasion. the remaining 3% of his personality is what’s subject to contest. when XIV exceeds 7% encroachment is when shit is going to get real.

oh woo there is Politics afoot and Bookman is...actually intimidated by them, that scares me.

also he and Lavi keep conversing through thought bubbles and i can’t tell if we’re meant to understand they have a telepathic link or this is just an idiosyncratic method of indicating whispers.

lavaliere thinks allen is funny. or that komui’s attempts to reframe shit in allen’s favor are funny.

he’s not actually wrong that the XIVth can’t be trusted, but you want to insist he is wrong somehow because he’s already demonstrated that his standards for treatment of people who even might be compromised are inhumane as fuck.

i want to keep making Pope jokes but the recurring phrase ‘the central government’ just. it really does emphasize how much this organization is modeled on a modern Japanese concept of hierarchy rather than an early-modern European one.

...i am reminded that early European accounts of Tokugawa Japan recorded the shogun as the Emperor and the Emperor as the Pope.

labubibir just smirks when komui asks if his unilateral ‘we’ll tell everyone all about this in the morning’ decision has the pope’s imprimatur behind it.

srsly if we get to a twist that the current Pope is like. an animated corpse or a stuffed bear or a wooden statue or something run by a committee, i’m not even going to be shocked.

oh look it’s Link in that outrageous papal magic ninja getup. XD the role of Timcampi in this story is so weird. and great. he’s like. magic floating R2D2 stg, only if Luke threw R2 at Yoda’s head at some point.

...the point would be when Yoda actually explained about Vader before Vader could, but did it in the most assholish and unhelpful way possible

which you know i would believe would have happened.

Cross Marian it is so completely in character for you to turn up dead and thus useless at such a politically vital moment i almost don’t believe you’ve actually been killed.

only the fact that you actually shared significant information last night makes it seem reasonably likely this is not a fake death.

the disappearing body is a good trick. the guards sleeping and not dead is suggestive either way.

i like the juxtaposition that made it look link Link was blowing shit up by playing chess. (instead it is the marginally less ridiculous ‘playing chess at the site of a battle while ignoring the fighting’)

are those things even akuma? they’re fighting them in a graveyard and either the fight is non-serious enough or the chess is important enough that Miranda’s multi-tasking...

if she needs to use reverse on the board then presumably it...got spilled? but then they could just memorize the positions and let her let it go...

lol yeah okay allen scold the monster for its lack of manners toward a lady.

lmaoooo okay the chess was to win an Innocence-infused ring back from the ghost of its chess-master previous owner! normal duties have resumed in spite of the massive loss of personnel and allen’s identity issues, and apparently Link is now contributing to team efforts. this won’t divide his loyalties at all of course.

the chessboard didn’t decay with the ghost, so i still don’t know what Miranda was reversing time on it for.

+1 sassy old lady.

wow they’re actually building Order operations around use of the Ark, which only Allen can pilot. i guess anyone can use the doors he’s established so once he’s got a solid network running they can axe him but....

...Miranda it is rude to crush on a priest, though he has very pretty hair. (i mean, i’m assuming he’s catholic, since he’s with the Order, which works for the Pope. all indications really are that England is a catholic country in this universe.)

...it’s also a country where the Noahs are installed at high levels of government I don’t understand how no one in the Order has noticed that.

‘even if only for the moment’ ffffffffs link shut the fuck up.

...if anyone is inexplicably reading this without familiarity with the media property involved and picturing the hero from Legend of Zelda when i yell at link, please continue doing that, it’s basically correct except for being wrong in almost every particular.

oh good grief. So, they actually agreed with me about ‘can’t get rid of Allen’ for all the reasons i stated! they just announced to everyone he knows that they have an ongoing mission to kill him if he goes rogue.

that’s entirely reasonable, really, though depressing, but they had to be so viciously dehumanizing about getting there! wtf. “our very own pet noah” imma wring your throat.

...ten years has made Miranda Lott so much more relatable but never more than in this moment where she’s reminding herself she’s the only actual adult in this group.

also really feeling Allen’s “I don’t understand anything, but time keeps moving on.”

Holy shit the guy who knew Kanda when he was a small person now counts as foreshadowing of horrible things to come.

...how long have they left the bloodstained shattered window unrepaired so Rebeliel can sit here staring at it?

i don’t know whether i’m more focused on how absurd it is that this man does fancy baking (19th century! powerful! man!) or how terrifying it is that he’s offering Allen a slice of cake.

lmao apparently Reever is not a typical example of his role, probably because Komui isn’t. in fact, i don’t think i previously realized the ‘section’ he’s ‘chief’ of is the hq science section, because Komui acts like he’s Head of Mad Science and leaves Reever to be his chief minion.

also, this poor woman. her brother got horribly murdered working with these people and it traumatized them and now they’re treating her as a replacement goldfish because she looks just like him. that’s messed up on so many levels, though presumably she’s at least moderately okay with being misgendered or she’d dress differently. it being the 19th century and all.

...also i can’t tell if she’s meant to be a very pale black woman or if hoshino just did a ‘fat person’ character design around racist caricature visual tropes, but she’s got the blackface lip outline and a dreadlock ponytail, so welp.

wow Cross’ disappearance just gets more mysterious even as the evidence of his death mounts.

oh never mind Lebubble says it was definitely his bosses but he’s concerned because he was left out of the loop.

hmm okay that’s two women getting instant crushes on pretty boys and two relatively minor cases of sexual harassment in three chapters, all four times intended as humor, do not like this trend.

hmm now a trans woman being used as a visual gag. i’ve seen worse uses of this trope, but ugh.

the Ganimard expy is funny, tho. the amount of personality conveyed in a few pages is reliably high.

...i feel like he’s pointedly not given his prisoners any changes of clothes in order to maintain the illusion that it makes some kind of sense for there to be an entire gang of phantom thief that gets caught every single time.

that doesn’t actually explain why they’re all still wearing the outrageous hat.

aaaaand back to allen’s identity crisis.

wow, on the one hand cross is pressuring him from beyond the grave not to rely on Mana’s memory because that’s not his real self, but on the other hand he has to seriously consider that his recent lapses in the formality adopted in imitation of Mana were even less himself and in fact the result of a hostile alien consciousness breaking through.

haha this heist scenario is so exactly like a Magic Kaito one I’m guessing that’s a deliberate allusion and not just shared Phantom Thief tropes. (Though how do you tell in a genre like this, Ganimard-Nakamori-Galmar lmao.)

...the thematic element of speech-mode equating identity is really nicely used but lmao sticking out the tongue has sufficiently different connotation in Japan to make this possession sequence weirder than intended. which was already pretty weird.

daaaaamn link’s papal ninja moves are finally seeing some use. also way to signal your real identity bodysnatcher kid, allen’s like sixteen, an adult would definitely not call him niichan.

wow you can even use his papal ninja paper magic! somehow! that is a really high-tier bodysnatching skill. also lol of course kanda can recognize a papal ninja crow by skillset.

i am a huge fan of allen’s capacity for headgames.

oh my goodness is he seriously donating all the money from his thefts to an orphanage? specifically the orphanage where he lives?

and again with the boob grab.

...allen walker weeping that he’s bleeding is quite the hilarious sight but come to think of it if he can’t hold off one random crybaby bodysnatching kid his odds against XIV don’t look that hot, eh?

oh no evil undead nun.

oh that’s a great idea, ask komui for advice about what to do in the situation that an exorcist and his guardians are rejecting summary kidnapping. it’s not like he devoted his entire life to regaining contact with his sister after the Order kidnapped her.

oh no it’s another hideous potbellied angel monster and they’ve figured out how to jam allen’s curse radar. that curse was a present from his dad you bastards!

...mana was a really weird person.

you know link, i’m pretty sure from you that was protectiveness.

oh! a twist! the nun is evil without being an undead monster!

meanwhile the nice nun and all the orphans have been turned into puppets.

daaaaamn the Papal Ninja Paper Magic is good stuff! why don’t they teach it to more of their staff, maybe they wouldn’t have such high turnover.

...Kanda just referred to Noise Marie as ‘she’ but I’m pretty sure that’s a translation error based on the fact that his surname is ‘Marie’ and ‘Noise’ sounds like a descriptor based on his hearing-based power rather than a first name.

it would frankly be awesome if Noise Marie were a woman, but considering the only two not-conventionally-boobalicious and also not elderly female characters we’ve had were minor visual gags (plus i guess Miranda during her initial nervous breakdown), and that hoshino was genuinely startled people thought Jasdero was a woman, presumably because of the lack of visible breasts, i reallllllllly think she would be unlikely to design a huge bald muscle woman, let alone treat her with this much casual respect, let alone while writing her as gay.

regardless, if Noise Marie actually dies imma be so mad. not that me being mad has had a perceptible affect on the death rate--though Kanda and Krory did survive the Ark Battle Arc so maybe i do have power. or rather we collectively as readers do.

hah he cut his own fingers off with wire, badass.

allen’s talent for inspiring compassion claims another victim in Bodysnatcher Timothy and holy cow Emilia The Nice Middle Class Girl is here with a handgun to menace the giant monsters, nice.

i mean, they’re not very menaced, but she’s shooting them anyway, because fuck you.

...holy shit that’s a powerful ability. the fact that it leaves his real body vulnerable is kind of a major drawback even with good teammates, but wow. also for some reason his Innocence has its own consciousness???

which can pilot his body for him while he’s walkabout, how helpful!

Bonne the the translady prison boss has joined the count of girls who see a cute guy and get an instant crush recently, but for some reason she’s really into Reever? I mean, he’s good-looking, sure, but he’s not one of The Pretty Boys.

Just realized that part of what’s vibing so weird is, this is a shounen series, but the specific way it juxtaposes elements of extreme shittiness with elements of brilliant concept and execution is more shoujo in style.

sameface isn’t normally a big issue in this series but Link-with-his-bangs-blown-back looks confusingly similar to Timothy’s Innocence Spirit, whom Timothy identified as his adult self with startling ease.

kneeling there out of options thinking you’re going to die and you dedicate your last thought to revellier, link? really??? that’s extremely sad. did he actually do anything to earn your loyalty or is this just brainwashing?

I feel like last time through I failed to absorb the political implications of the Order having managed to put together agents who can stop a Level 3 akuma with their hands and then eat it. with their hands. i think they’ve been spliced with akuma, because ‘nothing human can get through this barrier.’

Lenalee going one-v-one on a Level 3 was a nigh-self-destruct big deal a couple of months ago. This isn’t just sloppily managed shounen power creep this is the obsolescence of the excorcists.

which in theory would be a good thing, but the way these guys are made has to be awful and our main characters were already disposable enough in the eyes of their masters.

At least Allen’s getting Power Creep too! New tactic: drop sword. Stab enemy in the back with it while standing in front of them because it’s still part of your body somehow.

oh good grief allen you saw what happened to tiki myk! how did you not see this coming. ughhhhhhh. i know why. your current life plan is to Denial so damn hard the universe breaks your way. this is your god letting you know she’s not going to indulge that touching optimism.

i think it shocked me the first time, but i’m not sure anymore.

yeah, deeply counter-productive course of action.

...i’m now used to the way XIV uses Allen’s face but the akuma seeing him as a flaming skeleton monster i had forgotten about. wut?

with kanda it’s not a question of did he count on allen being able to dodge or did he not care if he stabbed him too, it’s both.

the cognitive dissonance of the story trying to treat Timothy joining the Order as a Good End to this episode, the same way it did back in early days when they recruited Miranda, when the prevailing atmosphere of the story has become one of institutional cruelty and corruption wherein the Order is a hellish slave-taking death trap that eats its people alive is just...fucking me up big time.

am i actually expected to accept the content here at face value?

...i mean, it’s a good end in that our heroes are spared having to forcibly kidnap him into indenture, but Emilia joining to look after him is just. It’s not funny or heartwarming or empowering.

we’ve recently gone over how komui doesn’t want lenalee to see his joining the Order for her as self-sacrifice even though it was, and also how much it fucks him up being accountable for how evil this organization is.

and not to be awful but lenalee’s his actual family and actually sweet, whereas timothy is a horrid brat with a habit of sexually harassing Emilia.

And that was before the war reached a point where we’re seeing 90% mortality.

don’t do this emilia. nooooooope.

on the upside, the nice nun and all the children survived somehow!

allen’s relationship with Link is weird.

i wonder if i was meant to be disturbed by how similar Mana’s body language was to the Earl’s for a second there?

okay so can we talk about how in this moment of extreme drama where Allen has sat up in bed possessed by evil, timcampi (who never communicates except via body language and is a floating orb) gets a speech bubble containing a picture of a toilet?

because it was really important to let the readers know that the little golem theorized that Allen needed to have a pee, in between cutting from the unsettling Symbolic Dream to the terrifying murder face.

and the thing is, it even kind of was! it contributes to the pace of the whole scene, it reminds us that timcampi is a conscious being with opinions even if he can’t communicate much, and is witnessing this incident. and yet. toilet.

the entire storytelling style of D. Gray Man revolves around creating cognitive dissonance and it does not suit my brain.

...i honestly don’t know what to think about Link being uncomfortable sharing a room with Lenalee flashing that much thigh, but i know i like him better for the fact that he let her drive him out of his own room by falling asleep on his bed, and just stood around in the hall like a chump waiting for her to finish her nap.

and he escalates from threatening allen with a formal complaint to threatening to tell komui he’s alone in a room with lenalee lmao.

he really is fitting right in.

oh hey. it wasn’t just timcampi who saw.

yes okay thanks for the tyki myk update good to know there are long-term consequences for running a noah through with Crown Clown.

aaaand North American Boobs Lady didn’t seem half this menacing last time she came up, but now she’s flanked by Hungry Hands Dude and his partner and komui is looking freaked out.

he does that a lot lately.

[yuppiefail]

Here's what's hard about right now

It’s hard to move across the country and also start a new relationship. Shocker, right? I mean yes we’ve been dating long-distance for two years but we weren’t very close and also a live-in relationship is completely different than even a close long-distance one.

First, let’s talk about what’s been easy. The practical aspects of my life have been easy. It’s easy to get to the grocery store and do laundry and socialize. It’s been fairly easy to make friends. It’s taken effort, but having made friends in a new city twice before, I have a much better idea this time of what I need to do, and good connections coming in, and have been able to do it. And it’s been working. One friend in particular, Robin, has been a real Godsend.

Sam keeps telling me to journal this time. He keeps reminding me that I’ll forget.

Here are a few things that are hard.

When you start a new relationship, ideally, maybe even generally, you come from a place of strength. You have friends, you’re secure in your job, you’re healthy. And you present those aspects of yourself while downplaying the loneliness, insecurity, and crippling anxiety.

In this relationship I have to twofold disadvantage of coming from a place of weakness and having difficulty hiding or downplaying it, as we live together in a not-huge apartment. Not that I’m trying to hide it. If there’s anything I’ve learned from my previous relationships it’s to sound the alarm about my unhappiness and unmet wants and needs early, often, and loudly. Because the alternative is pretending everything is mostly okay until I break and run away.

I’m surprised by how lame I feel lately. But lame isn’t the right word because you don’t generally choose to be disabled. It’s not your fault. I feel sad, boring, needy. I feel pathetic and uncool. But not the uncool I usually feel, where I can rest on the fact that I’m open and earnest. I feel empty, like I’ve willingly given up and let go the things that used to make me interesting and fun. I used to like my work, but lately barely meeting my deadlines has me feeling anxious and ashamed. I used to blog, but it’s hard to justify blogging for free when I’m barely meeting my deadlines for work. I used to go to cool parties and meet up with friends for happy hour and go to Black Pearl to smoke and watch Netflix in my underwear with Sam.

And now I have people over to our beautiful apartment next door to an olive oil store and around the block from an artisinal cheese shop and do yoga with Megan and go on dates with the Pirate and co-work with girlfriends on the boat and run into a Britney Spears-themed drag show at the club and go to wine country on the weekend and my high-earning, very supportive boyfriend takes me to see a feminist play that open with a trans performer doing a puppet show completely naked in a city that could not be more poly, queer, and liberal and the sun is always shining and the weather is always temperate.

It’s weird how cool/interesting/fun a life I can have, by my own standards, a life that exceeds my expectations in so many ways, and still feel so utterly uncool/uninteresting/unfun.

This will pass. I’ll meet my deadlines. I’ll blog more. I’ll form the relationships here that make life worth the hassle. Or, if I must, I’ll leave. Either way I’ll be okay. I am not intrinsically cool or uncool. I am what I repeatedly do. And I need to do what it takes to feel good about myself. To feel proud as well as grateful. But it’s hard. It’s about as hard as I expected it to be, though I didn’t know exactly what form the hard parts would take.

I doubt I will move back anytime soon because I am very committed to making a life here with my partners. But shit happens. No matter what, though, I do not regret moving out. Not just because it’s not that hard, but because I feel strongly that I had to know. I had to try, otherwise I would have continued to wonder. Because knowing is worth the effort. Because accurately predicting your own future isn’t a testable skill but trying big, bold things in order to build a meaningful life is. It’s a skill I’m demonstrably better at today than I’ve ever been before.

Part of a meaningful life, for me, is close relationships. And those require honesty. They require being real with myself and others about how unhappy I am. How anxious I feel. How rejected and stupid and uninteresting I sometimes believe myself to be. I don’t want to be a whiner. I hate how much of a downer I am right now. But this is real. This is hard. This is worth remembering, and sharing. Because I’m not alone. I think about all the people who move across the country to start lives with someone. And then because it’s new, because shit happens, because you can’t really know until you’re there, you have to prove you are worth living with and loving while you are at your least fun, secure, and interesting. Your least worthy. That sucks! How cruel! How ironic. But actually it’s the exact opposite of ironic.

I saw this coming, kind of. Anxiety gives you distorted previews of coming misfortunes. Two things kept me from coming out for a year (or two depending on how you want to measure it). 1. How good I had it in D.C. 2. A fear that he didn’t really want me. That he was settling for me. And that once I was out and he lived with me and saw me for who I really was and believed he had better options he’d realize he had settled and pull away emotionally. He didn’t want me when I wanted him when we were kids and he still doesn’t want me now. He just wants someone who is pretty enough and smart enough and pleasant enough and who wants him and I fit that bill.

Ooh man I’m getting real!

And I know it doesn’t matter. What I mean is that that in this case there is no actual “objective” difference between my worst fear and my best possible reality except how I see it. What does “wanting” me even mean? By lots and lots and lots of very objective and subjective measures he loves me very much and wants me desperately. By a few, mostly subjective measures I could gather evidence, and sometimes do, to build a case that this relationship cannot be what I want it to be.

It’s what I worried about when he said early on that he wasn’t in love with me. That was early but today there are things I expect someone who is in love to do and say that just aren’t being done and said. And I, humiliatingly, keep asking for them to be done and said and it’s still not happening and it’s like, well, if you have to ask. He can potentially change his behavior but if he doesn’t feel it, behavior change won’t meet the need. I need to be with someone who is in love with me. I need my partner to anticipate spending time with me and getting me off and is almost as eager about these things as I am and demonstrates that eagerness through words and action. I need a partner who is genuinely curious about what I’m doing and demonstrates that by checking in throughout the day and who cannot wait to talk at length about it in the evening.

Maybe if I sucked less he’d do it and say it and feel it. I’ve been saying this to myself a lot.

All that said, reality is what I make it and I’m responsible for making it a good one. The thing about my fear of being seen for who I really am is that it’s not possible because there is no “real” me. Insecure, lonely, terrified, and boring are feelings, not character traits. That is true of me and of everyone else. Ruminating on slights, assuming the worst, calling myself names, and indulging in self-pity, these are habits. Meditating on gratitude, taking an active interest in others, buying my motherfucking sisters motherfucking birthday presents like a motherfucking decent person, these are habits too.

This is objectively hard. I’m not crossing the fucking Rubicon, but it’s a thing I was afraid to do, for good reasons and for dumb ones, and I did it anyway. I’m proud of myself. I’m glad I did it. I’m grateful for all the effort my partners have put into making it as easy for me as possible. I’m grateful for the experience. Maybe for right now that’s enough. Maybe I don’t have to have a wide network and to be invited to do cool things every night and blog every day and have the close friendships it takes years for most people to form right this second. Maybe I don’t have a lot to talk about other than work being frustrating, my romantic relationships, and my efforts making friends but that is okay because trying to get established in a new relationship in a new city and freaking the fuck out about not being fun to live with because I’m boring and sad and anxious takes up a lot of my bandwidth.

The only thing I can do is try to suck less.

It’s hard knowing that even when I suck less, things won’t happen just the way I want them to. It’s hard to remember that things are always generally pretty objectively awesome overall anyway.

I am worth loving. I’m worth checking in with. I’m worth being excited about. Not because I’m awesome but because I know how to improve. I know the secret is there is no secret it’s just loving others and providing value as best you know how over and over again and that it does get easier every time you do it.

All I can do, all anyone can do, is to be real about it being hard, to be real about how hard it is, and to choose to do the next right thing anyway.

Here’s what’s hard about right now was originally published on