#she was brilliant

[euthymiya]

I’ll never forget that one alhaitham fic I read ages ago with probably the smartest reader I’ve ever seen in a fic ever. And to this day I wonder how that writer was so smart to write such a smart reader like. How. Are. You. So. Smart. Wtf man

[ileftherbackhome]

Like, here is the thing that I haven't seen anyone really pick up on with the glass onion.

Benoit Blanc is the world's greatest detective but he is shown to be suffering from the same belief that everyone else is around him: that Bron is not an idiot.

That's why it takes him so long to figure out the mystery, because he is the one who dismissed Bron as Andi's murderer from the beginning. The fact that a black woman suggested this to a gay but white man demonstrates a beautiful metaphor for how black women are the leaders of the damn revolution, and they always have been, BUT the systems at play have caused EVERYONE, including the black woman herself, to deter to other people's perceptions of reality over their own intuition.

Blanc is a great WHITE character but he's still white at the end of the day, and he is given this status and power in his world partly because he is a white man. Helen figured out the fucking mystery from jump, she said Bron killed her sister and Blanc is the one that refutes that.

That was 100% done on purpose and nobody can convince me otherwise because it's so poignant to how black women are belittled and demeaned, even when they are objectively right about stuff, because it's inherent in ALL OF US!!!!!! these systems are inherent in all of us, in blanc himself, because most of us dismissed Helen's idea as ridiculous along with Blanc.

The depth this movie has is fucking incredible, the writing is so good and realistic and poignant!!!!

[heloise-marianne]

i did finally get so see florence and the machine live, though, so, silver linings, I guess?

[misandriste]

ELOISE BRIDGERTON + being mistaken for a suitor

[noxcheshire]

I just think

It’d be really neat if Danny looked more like Martha Wayne than Thomas Wayne.

LIKE

I love the Danny Fenton looks like Thomas Wayne or Danny Fenton is Thomas Wayne reincarnated — but the BEAUTY of Martha??

Of Alfred interacting for under five minutes with Danny, dabbing his eyes and going, “That is indeed Martha,” I WANT IT. I want Martha who was spunky and sassy and wanted to do good for her town the same way Danny wants to do good for Amity Park.

I want Martha who loved to take Bruce and the family out to star gaze because her baby had never seen the stars before, and the way his eyes light up like a mini galaxy takes her breathe away the same way that Danny feels when he turns his head up to the sky yearning for something he knew loved but doesn’t know what.

I want Martha who would literally find trouble in a paper bag because she can’t help her curiosity the same way Danny can’t help tripping over his own ghostly tail and making a mess of things before he figures things out.

I want Martha who would fight men who thought they held power, going absolutely feral from stress the same way Danny does when he’s tired of not being able to do his homework or pick up a vacuum against the wall to clean because ghosts.

I want Martha who loved the pearl necklace that Bruce had picked out for her birthday, and Danny reaches towards his neck and startles when his fingers only touch skin when he is certain there was something supposed to be there. I want Danny whose eyes linger on whites and pearls when he passes by open window stores in the mall, fingers itching to flick a nail against the smooth surfaces.

I want Martha who died bleeding underneath the hand of a gun, hoping to everything above that her boy would be safe, and Danny whose body burns at merely looking at the makeshift guns his parents create in the lab, his heart pounding desperately with a yearning to save there was someone she wanted to save the ghosts.

[manny-jacinto]

SANDRA OH as Dr. Cristina Yang 'Grey's Anatomy' #2.09

[nat-20s]

I fucking LOVE that Donna is not immune to being a little starry-eyed over The Doctor in the way that many of us get a little starry-eyed over our best friends but she IS immune to being that way in front of them lmao. Double love that this appears to also be Catherine Tate and David Tennant's dynamic

[wrongspacetime]

The Fall of the House of Usher 1.08 | The Raven (2023)

[novelconcepts]

Keep seeing people confused by Agatha letting the world believe she traded her son instead of telling the truth, but…kinda tracks, tbh. Not for the rational mind, of course. Not if you’re looking at it clearly.

Which Agatha isn’t.

She did the worst thing, in her mind. She fell asleep. She fell asleep, knowing Death had bookmarked her son for later, and when she woke, found him snatched out from under her. She failed him as his mother. She let go. And all the power in all the world wouldn’t be enough to bring him back.

So does the wildly grieving woman who has just lost her only child (to presumably her greatest love, but that’s a city-sized suitcase for another day) let herself go through the process of coping with and adapting to that grief? Fuck no! What is she, common?? She goes on a power bender! Even though the kid she prized in her heart of hearts seemed less than into that very thing! Even though that kid may have been able, given enough time, to convince her to stop! So now, not only did she fail him, but she also opted to speed race down Murder Road! For power! That she still won’t ever be able to use to get him back!

It gets muddled, after decades and centuries of this feeling. It grows teeth. In a way, she did trade him for power. In a way, she’ll always have that sitting on her chest. Never mind that it’s not true. Never mind that she wasn’t a bad mother at all (in this respect, anyway). Never mind that he was sick, and this was always coming. For Agatha, who has been stewing on this story she’s been telling herself for centuries, it is what happened. She traded her son. She did the unforgivable. She fell asleep.

[irenespring]

I will return to not stanning politicians tomorrow but watching Kamala Harris destroy Donald Trump is like a religious experience to me. She's leading him into traps to distract him into saying nonsense about crowd sizes, pointing out how he is an adjudicated rapist and convicted felon, and just nailing every question.

I am smiling So Much after a really shitty day.

Now I understand why some people start riots when they win at sports.

This is the woman who made Brett Kavanaugh cry and she is here to break Trump like he's a glass at a Jewish wedding.

[llamahearted]

what's worse -- feeling the depths of your desire for the first time, or having all your closest friends around to witness it?

prints ♣︎ song

[akumanoken]

Aaaaah so don't crying over my beautiful river song sometime send us stupid anons I'm all up in my feels rn

[localvamp1re]

“i needed you. my coven” “i loved being a witch”

[wherewolf]

the responses i’ve seen to shiv’s ending seem very quick to write her off as just another sad victim of the cycle, which isn’t without truth BUT!!! that is not even remotely the summation of shiv’s story.

i don’t think she votes yes to “save kendall” or to try to finally set her brothers free. and i don’t think her main concern was that ken was becoming their dad. she absolutely noticed and didn’t love it, but that was not her motivation in betraying him. she was thinking about herself.

it’s tempting to make a martyr out of her as she is the only female child and we see her suffer the onslaught of misogyny that comes with that. but to make her into a saintlike figure who got beat takes away the power and intelligence behind her decision.

at this point she’s stuck between two non ideal choices, but she recognizes that they have accidentally made her the single most important player in the game. because while she can’t have the outcome she’d prefer, she has the power to decide the fates of everyone else. the written off lone woman now holds in her hands the fate of every man in her life.

so she thinks about the long term benefits of both options and realizes that one side leaves her completely without any leverage.

her brothers have proven to her multiple times in the last few days alone that they will cut her out and walk all over her the first chance they get. siding with them leaves her nothing to bargain with. she would just have to hope that ken would actually take care of her. and that level of vulnerability is not only unacceptable to her, it’s stupid. and shiv fuckin roy is not stupid.

so she thinks about the other side and about what she actually wants for her life. and against her better judgment, it’s becomes unfortunately clear that she wants tom. the way she wants him is not altogether loving or even good but it is necessary to her. she sees relationships as having winners and losers and she chose this man specifically so that she could be confident in her ability to win. except now he’s grown some balls and made himself unavailable to her.

she may not like the way her husband is evolving but she already placed her bets on him, so she’s sure as hell not losing to him now. there’s also a part of her that feels intrigued by this new man she’s married to. it’s interesting to have a sparring partner in him instead of having to looking for excitement outside of their marriage.

so for maybe the first time ever, she processes what tom has said to her and thinks about what he actually wants.

he needs her to prove that she cares. he needs to know that she is capable of sacrifice. if she can’t find it within herself to do this for him, then she will lose him, and by extension, she will lose.

siding with tom gives her the opportunity to once and for all make a grand-stand gesture of love, but more importantly, it creates leverage for her. never again will he be able to hold the moral high ground over her head. never again can he say she doesn’t love him. never again can he call her selfish or uncaring. above all, he can never betray her again, because she just removed all of his moral justification for turning on her. he doesn’t realize it yet, but she’s just taken back all the power in their relationship. just in a more subtle way than she’s used to operating.

and just like that, she has the ceo of a multi billion dollar company in her pocket, while situating herself as the only descendant of logan roy to still be playing the game, having removed her brothers from the equation permanently. she may still be far from the top but she’s creating a path for herself to climb.

so yes, she’ll let tom play king for a day, and she’ll have his baby and say “congratulations,” and play the gracious wife, but tomorrow is a new day with lots of room to maneuver. and when her husband puts out his hand, she’ll place her own on top. but she won’t grasp it because she doesn’t need to.

[cenvast]

"Toshiro Is Sexist," "Toshiro Owns Slaves": What's Really Going on With This Guy?

I've seen a lot of debate on whether or not Toshiro is problematic because he's a slave owner or because he's sexist in the context of his crush on Falin. While I do want to examine his relationship to Falin, I'd like to take a few steps back and unpack his upbringing first. We'll dive into the gender and class dynamics he was raised with and how it impacts his behavior in the main storyline.

Like all people, Toshiro is shaped by the environment he grew up in. Toshitsugu, Toshiro's father and the head of the Nakamoto clan, is the most impactful model of authority and manhood in his life. Toshiro does recognize some of his father's flaws and tries to avoid replicating them. But whether or not he emulates or subverts his father's behavior, Toshitsugu is often the starting point for Toshiro's treatment of others, particularly marginalized people.

The Nakamoto clan exists under a patriarchal hierarchy with Toshitsugu at the top. As noted by @fumifooms in their Nakamoto household post, his wife has more authority than Maizuru. She's able to ban Maizuru from parts of their residence, but despite disliking his infidelity, she can't divorce him or stop him from cheating on her. Their marriage is not an equal partnership.

On an interpersonal level, Toshitsugu and Maizuru also have a fraught relationship. While she does seem to care for him, she's often frustrated by his thoughtless behavior.

For example, he drunkenly buys Izutsumi for her — without considering how she'll have to raise this child — and invades her room in the middle of the night. When he cryptically says, "It's all my fault," she replies, "I can think of a lot of things that are your fault." She calls him an "idiot" and "believes that [Toshiro] will grow up to be a better clan leader than his father," implying that she takes issue with Toshitsugu's leadership.

Because Maizuru and Toshitsugu are described as being "in an intimate relationship" and "seem[ing] to be lovers," Maizuru appears to be a consensual participant. Still, this doesn't negate the large power imbalance between them as a male noble clan leader and his female retainer. This imbalance introduces an insidious undertone to Maizuru's frustration with Toshitsugu. Like Toshiro's mother, Maizuru doesn't have the agency to do as she pleases in their relationship; he has the ultimate authority. For instance, she doesn't seem to want to raise Izutsumi, but she has to anyway.

While Maizuru's role as Toshitsugu's mistress is significant, she's also the Nakamoto clan's teacher and Toshiro's primary maternal figure. She cares deeply for Toshiro: tailing him, feeding him, and taking responsibility even for his actions as an adult. While it might seem sweet that she cares for him like a son at first, Maizuru was notably fifteen years old at the time of his birth. In the extra comic below, he's six years old and has already been in her care for some time. Even if we're being generous and assuming that she didn't start raising him until he was six, she was still only twenty-one at the time she was parenting her boss/lover's child with another woman.

Maizuru's roles as mistress and maternal figure, in addition to her role as retainer, demonstrate the intersection between gendered and class oppression in the Nakamoto household. Despite her original role being a retainer trained in espionage, Toshitsugu presses her into performing gendered labor for him and eventually, Toshiro. She's expected to be Toshitsugu's lover, perform emotional labor for him as his confidant, care for his child, and carry out domestic tasks like cooking. She says, "Even during missions, I was often dragged into the kitchen." If she was a male servant, I doubt she would have been expected to perform these additional tasks. She can't avoid these tasks either, stating that her "own feelings don't factor into it."

Toshitsugu disregards his wife's and Maizuru's desires and emotions to serve his own interests. Because he has societal power over them as a nobleman and in Maizuru's case, her master, neither woman can escape their position in the household hierarchy.

As a result, Toshiro grew up within a structure where men and male nobility, in particular, wield the most societal power. The hierarchical nature of his household and society discourages everyone, including him as a clan leader's eldest son, from questioning and disrupting the existing hierarchy.

The other Nakamoto household members also internalize its sexist, classist power dynamics.

For example, Hien expects that she and Toshiro will replicate the uneven dynamics of the previous generation, regardless of her personal feelings. She sees her and Toshiro's relationship as paralleling Maizuru and Toshitsugu's relationship; she is the closest woman to Toshiro and his retainer, so she's shocked when Toshiro doesn't attempt to begin an intimate relationship with her. Notably, she doesn't have actual feelings for him. Her expectations are centered around the household's precedent of placing emotional, sexual, domestic, and child-rearing labor onto the female servants without any regard for their personal desires.

Hien also probably knows that her position in the household will improve if she is Toshiro's lover because she's seen it improve Maizuru's position. However, the fact that being the future clan leader's lover is the closest proximity she, as a female servant, has to power further reveals the gendered, class-based oppression she and the other women live under.

It's important to note that the Nakamoto clan bought Benichidori, Izutsumi, and Inutade as slaves, so they have less power and agency than Maizuru and Hien. The clan further dehumanizes Izutsumi and Inutade as demi-humans; their enslavement contains an additional layer of racialization.

Toshiro isn't oblivious to the gendered, class, and racial power dynamics of his household. He tries to distance himself from participating in its exploitative power structure. He walls himself off from Hien, who he's known since childhood, to avoid replicating his father's behavior and making his servant into his lover. He disapproves of his father's enslavement of Izutsumi and Inutade, and he lets Izutsumi go when she runs away in the Dungeon.

But does any of this absolve him of his complicity in his household's sexist, classist power dynamics and racialized slavery?

The short answer is absolutely not.

Despite his distaste for his father's exploitation of his servants and slaves, Toshiro still uses them. He refers to his party as "his retainers," and he has them fight and perform domestic tasks for him. You could argue that Toshiro doesn't like to and thus, doesn't regularly use his servants and slaves. In the context of him asking his retainers to help him rescue Falin, Maizuru says, "The only time he ever made any sort of personal request was for this task." But it shouldn't matter whether exploitation is a regular occurrence or not for it to be considered harmful. Toshiro asking Maizuru to cook him a meal still constitutes asking his female servant to perform gendered labor for him. He's also very accustomed to her grooming and dressing him.

Maizuru sees feeding, washing, and even advising Toshiro romantically as fulfilling Toshitsugu's orders to care for his son. They aren't fulfilling a "personal request." But just because her labor has been deemed expected and thereby devalued doesn't mean that it isn't labor or that she isn't performing it.

Maizuru's dynamic with Toshiro is also complicated by her role as his maternal figure. She loves him and wants to take care of him, and she doesn't have a choice in the matter. During Toshiro's childhood, the onus was on Toshitsugu to cease exploiting his lover and release her from servitude, but Toshiro is now an adult man. Seeing as how Maizuru defers to his wishes and calls him "Young Master," they still have a power imbalance that he's passively maintaining. Ideally, he would not ask anything of her until he has the authority to release her from servitude.

Throughout the story, Toshiro acts as if he has no agency and quietly disapproving of his father's actions absolves him of his participation in maintaining oppressive dynamics. While his father still ranks higher than him, he's essentially his father's heir. He has much more power than Maizuru, the highest-ranked servant. At the very least, he could leave his slave-owning household.

Unfortunately, his refusal to confront injustice is consistent with his character's major flaw: he does not express his opinions, desires, or needs. While this character trait obviously hurts his friendships, it also furthers his complicity in the injustices his household runs on.

Toshiro's relationship with eating food — the prevailing metaphor of the series — also parallels his relationship with confronting injustice. Maizuru mentions that he was a sickly child, so the act of eating may have been physically uncomfortable for him. As an adult, his refusal to eat crops up during his rescue attempt of Falin. Denying himself food might have been punishment for not accomplishing important tasks like rescuing Falin and/or a way to maintain control over something in his life when he felt like he'd lost control over the rest of it, again in the context of losing Falin. (Note: I suggest reading this post on Toshiro's disordered eating by @malaierba.)

But he cannot and does not avoid consuming food forever.

Similarly, Toshiro keeps his distance from his retainers and tries not to use them until the Falin situation occurs. His efforts to avoid exploiting his retainers amount to inaction — things he doesn't ask of them or do to them. But his inaction does nothing to dismantle the existing hierarchy that places his retainers under his authority, denies them agency, and often marginalizes them as not only servants or slaves but as women, and he ends up using them as servants and slaves anyways.

Returning to the narrative's themes of consumption, Toshiro cannot avoid eating just as he cannot avoid perpetuating the exploitative system of his household. The Nakamoto clan consumes the labor and personhood of those lower in the hierarchy. The retainers' labor as spies and domestic servants is the foundation of the clan's existence. Thus, the clan consumes their labor to sustain itself.

Within this hierarchy, the retainers' personhood is also consumed and erased. As Izutsumi describes, they are given different names and stripped of their agency to reject orders or leave. Maizuru and Hien also say their feelings are irrelevant in the context of Toshitsugu's and Toshiro's wants and needs. Both women are expected to comply with whatever is most beneficial and comfortable for the noblemen. Clearly, despite Toshiro's detachment from his household's functions, these social structures remain in place and harm the women under him.

Although we know the Nakamoto clan has male retainers, the choice to highlight the female retainers seems intentional. We're asked to interrogate how not only being a servant or a slave in a noble household impacts a person's life and agency, but how being a woman intersects with being a member of some of the lowest social classes.

Toshiro only distances himself from his father's behaviors of infidelity and exploitation so long as it doesn't take Toshiro out of his comfort zone. He doesn't free his slaves. He's far too comfortable with his female retainers performing domestic labor for him, and he barely acknowledges their efforts; they're shocked when he thanks them for helping him save Falin. He hasn't unpacked his sexist (or classist or racist) biases because he perpetuates his household's oppressive hierarchy throughout the narrative. Considering all of this, he inevitably brings this baggage to his interactions with Falin.

Falin is presumably one of the first women he's had extended contact with that isn't his relative or his family's servant. Because of his trauma surrounding his father and Maizuru sleeping together, he understandably falls for a woman as disconnected as possible from his father and his clan. He seems to genuinely like Falin, respects her boundaries, and graciously accepts her rejection. His behavior towards her is overall kind and unproblematic.

But if Falin had gone with him, she would've likely been devalued and sidelined like the other women of the Nakamoto household. No matter how much he loves Falin, simply loving her cannot replace the difficult work of unlearning his sexism. Love, of course, can and should be accompanied by that work, but by the close of the narrative, we gain little indication that Toshiro acknowledges or seeks to end his part in exploiting and devaluing women and other marginalized people.

A spark of hope does exist. Toshiro expressing his feelings to Laios and Falin suggests that his time away from home has encouraged him to speak up more. Breaking his habit of avoidance may be the first step towards acknowledging his complicity in systems of injustice and moving towards dismantling them.

Special thanks to my very smart friend @atialeague for bringing up Toshitsugu's relationship with Maizuru and the replication of dynamics of consumption and class! <3

[aquitainequeen]

People are bemused that other people are finding the Ghoul from Fallout 2024 sexy. 'But why??? He looks like a corpse! He has no nose!!!!!'

My friends. My friends. Clearly you have not encountered the fandom for The Phantom of the Opera.