#societal structure

[jbfly46]

The people who cause the most problems in America come from money, because they act like children and money amplifies the effects of their actions while allowing them to deflect consequences, along with society at large mimicking them just because they have money.

[furiousgoldfish]

Does anyone else feel like the society is structured in a way that has people forced to obediently and submissively endure harassment and abuse from their bosses and people in authority, but they're allowed to take out their frustration on anyone who is powerless to inflict consequences on them? Like their own employees, service workers, their spouse, family, children. There's no consequences for hurting the powerless and loads of consequences for standing up to authority, even if you're standing up to them for a good reason. It's almost like things were designed to be this way.

Shouldn't it be the opposite though? We should focus on standing up to people in authority, because they're likely to abuse authority they have, so there should be no consequences for challenging this authority, it needs to be challenged. We should have severe consequences for hurting those who can't fight back, because they need that protection the most.

[valtsv]

[caliburn-the-sword]

i find it really annoying that people are all like "omg ella totally pranked bridget on purpose as a plot twist since that was the only thing they changed in the past and they successfully stopped her from doing that"

did none of you listen to get your hands dirty?? or even pay attention to anything about ella's character at all?? or pay attention to the original cinderella fairy tale?? bfr

an IMPORTANT detail of the cinderella fairytale is that cinderella was BANNED from going to the ball by her unreasonable, evil stepmother. the vase gave lady tremaine a valid excuse to ground ella in the movie, but if not for the time travel intervention, she would have found some other reason to just ban ella from going to castlecoming to try and get her own daughters to snag a prince. at THIS point fay would swoop in and save the day, but because she's already been established as bad at magic, THIS is why she is limited by midnight - after all, if ella wasn't banned and went dress shopping with bridget, how would the glass slippers ever be so important that she ended up getting her daughter her own glass shoes

two, the villains ONLY crack open the evil cookbook to lord it over red and chloe to rub their loss in their faces, once they think the coast is clear because red and chloe have ALREADY dispatched merlin's security, and they got too self assured. without time travel, they would've been racing against the clock to get out before they were caught by merlin. they wouldn't have had time to crack open the book. so once they were FINALLY safe i believe they would've been more cautious. perhaps ulyana would have consulted the souls of the black lagoon, or maybe one of her friends snatched it out of her hands and froze themself opening it in their excitement. it doesn't matter, all we need to know is that ulyana figures out that she has to trick someone good into opening it to the page she needs. since we know that ulyana intended to pretend to be bridget's friend, i think it's possible that she herself tricks ella into opening the book by telling ella she wants to make amends with bridget, which makes the betrayal so much more intense for bridget and explains away why she'd be so angry at her in the modern day

[aithusarosekiller]

Why do people act like smart Barty and cool Barty have to be one or the other

Can he not be both?

Are you not allowed to be alt and clever?

Do my hair dye, sense of style, and facial piercings cancel out my A* grades? Nobody warned me of this

Give me barty who sits for hours on end with Dorcas making his own punk clothes and shouting about hating the ministry then showing up to class with his green streaks of hair and gauged ears and getting 99% on everything without listening to a word of what was said

Give me the barty everyone is intimidated by in the corridors just sitting silently in the library chewing his quill and researching a brand new incantation

Counter-culture doesn't mean stupid 🙏

He's me and I am him

[idkaguyorsomething]

a support group for people with “unconventional” daemons. jeff with his flounder he has to carry everywhere in a huge tank. lois with her poison dart frog everyone is afraid to touch. sam with their elephant that’s the reason they can never go higher than two stories in most buildings.

[contagious-watermelon]

i think a lot of the reason i don't really feel connected to the mainstream (""mainstream"") aro community is due to the fact that it seems to be always subordinated to asexuality. there aren't even any aromantic informational posts that aren't just a second thought on an ace one — or that don't include asexuality in any way at all. and so many people seem to view themselves as (aro)ace that i simply can't relate to them at all

bc really i feel like my sexual orientation doesn't matter at all when it comes to discussing aromanticism — and obviously being aroace or aroallo have different struggles and may experience their aromanticism differently (and aroallos are consistently ignored due to the very thing I'm talking about) — but everyone seems to think of aro issues as some sort of mirrored version of ace ones

and i can't ever seem to find anyone advocating for or even discussing our rights when it comes to navigating society. for all people complain about amatonormativity, it seems the extent is just "my friends won't believe that i don't have a crush." which yeah, is a problem, but I'm not in high school anymore. I'd like to be able to afford a house on one person's salary. I'd like to be able to choose to have kids one day, if i want to (which i think i do, but I'm lowkey way too young to even think about that right now).

people talk about aro issues as if its a lack of awareness (which isn't helped by their immediate grafting of it onto asexuality), or point to the (small amount of) statistics on ace people and assume it applies to us too, or that those are the only issues aro people deal with. someone who's ace and alloromantic can still get married and enjoy those benefits from society, even if they have a harder time of it. when anyone does speak up about the lack of rights that aromantic people (and single people — but we tend to be perpetually single) experience, the immediate response from the community is that QPRs need to be more recognized. ... am i the only one who sees that that's a band-aid over a problem that doesn't even give a good solution? that it's just an extension of societal amatonormativity to nominally include (SOME) aro people?

[serpentface]

Question about Couya! Since she is a bastard what are the reasons about her being brought into the main family by her father. Was it genuine care for his child or a way to save face politically/socially? Is her birth mother alive? Do you think she would have had a better life growing up anywhere else?

This is in large part due to how cultural perceptions and legal punishment of adultery varies between male and female citizens, looped into the very strictly patrilineal kinship system.

By legal definition, the word for 'adultery' applies only to situations where a man has an affair with a married woman, or a married woman has an affair with any man. Other forms of affairs (eg a married man having an affair with an unmarried woman) are wrapped into a broader set of sexual misdemeanors and aren't often charged or punished in practice, and the punishments are comparatively minor (if an unwed woman's father pursues charges, the man in the affair is likely to just pay a fine). On a social level, extramaritial affairs in general are certainly not Approved of and seen as lowly and dishonorable, but the average response is significantly less harsh/more willing to entertain Nuance with men than with women.

In this society there's differentiated shades of bastardry depending on the contexts of the child's birth, as well as a distinction for 'nameless bastards' (has not been claimed by their biological father or maternal grandfather, or claimed in adoption).

a) A child born to an unmarried woman via an unmarried man: non-issue for father, potentially serious social harm for the woman (especially if she has never been married and expected virginal, much less severe as a widow or divorcee). The child will not be notably disadvantaged in of themselves (their status will depend more on whether they are claimed and thus provided the social security of a family patriarch), the father will experience no hard disadvantages in claiming them.

b) A child born to an unmarried woman via a married man: mild sexual misdemeanor for the father carrying levels of social shame, even more serious social harm for the woman (often framed as not just loose but a manipulative Seductress of a married man). The child might experience minor to moderate social disadvantages, the consequences of the father claiming them are purely social and will not typically be severe. (Couya is this)

c) A child born to a married woman via an unmarried or married man: both man and woman have committed a crime and can be severely punished. The biological father can technically claim the child but will be disincentivized from doing so. This is the form of bastardry most comparable to the conventional definition, in that it is heavily stigmatized and has effects on concerns of kinship and inheritance.

In addendum to this, if the adulterous wife's legal husband claims the child, this may be punishable if determined to be active concealment of adultery (which is also a crime), and has EXTREME social consequences either way. (Either you're a cuckold too stupid to notice that your wife has been skipping out on you, or you're a MEGAcuckold adultery-accessory willingly rearing another man's child after being horribly shamed by him).

(This is separate from adoption- a man who marries a woman with an unclaimed child after the fact (whether it was a product of adultery or just a general out of wedlock birth) and claims the child is an adoptive father, he is not concealing adultery or being cuckolded.)

A child born in an affair can be considered an heir to their biological fathers (descent and kinship is fully patrilineal and on a Basic level it doesn't matter who the mother is), and can very smoothly and legally be claimed when the affair was not considered criminal adultery. The concern on that front is social perception rather than material legal consequences or kinship issues.

Couya's birth mother was an unwed servant working as a housekeeper for her father Saizen, so the Crime of adultery did not take place. It would be considered a minor sexual misdemeanor, and the woman's father was not about to pursue charges against a nobleman who could Ruin him (and had also formally expressed that he would claim the child, which meant he would not be saddled with a nameless bastard granddaughter). So the concerns here were entirely social.

The affair might have started beforehand but the pregnancy that produced Couya occurred after his wife's third viable pregnancy ended in the premature birth of a underdeveloped boy deemed necessary to euthanize (and tbr would Not have survived either way). This was after Livya Haidamane had a couple early term miscarriages, two viable but very difficult pregnancies wherein one child was very weak and sickly for the first several years of life, and struggled to conceive every time. A lot of people are going to be at least a little sympathetic to a married man having an affair and claiming a bastard in this context. It's definitely ideal and practical to have more than two children, and his wife (while not outright infertile) clearly could not reliably bear healthy children. (The average response is going to be "Well he shouldn't have done it but like, I get it")

Couya being claimed by her father was a mix of genuine care and saving face. Initially it was MUCH more the latter than the former. Saizen made attempts to hide the servant's pregnancy and to keep his own wife out of sight during the late term (to prevent the baby appearing after his wife had been seen Extremely not pregnant). But there's some levels of care involved, he could very easily have fired the pregnant servant and had nothing to do with his bastard and she would have no recompense whatsoever. The choice to keep and claim the baby and ensure its entrance into the world bore as little social scrutiny as possible is an act of care for his own progeny.

This was Not an act of care for Couya's birth mother (beyond the fact that concealing her pregnancy would benefit her in hiding that she is not only Not a virgin prior to marriage but had a child). She probably would have been about 17-19 at the time and was fired a few months after giving birth, and most likely never saw Couya again after this point (if she did, it would most likely be in the context of seeing her as an adult Odonii in public and noting her to look Scarily familiar). She has an Okayish chance at still being alive, she'd be around 50 (and a person who survives the high infant mortality and birth casualty rates stands a good chance of hitting their 60s), though she could very well be a casualty of the drought+famine.

Whether or not Couya's life would have been better is kind of a mixed bag. She had an awful fucking childhood in large part because her adoptive mother Livya Haidamane hated her. (Livya was ultimately a pretty horrible person but not just like. An Evil Bitch. She had A Lot going on and Couya was a living breathing insult to her and reminder of like, every one of her dashed hopes and dreams). Couya is also autistic and presented very intense symptoms as a child in a society that is Not equipped for a mass-understanding and support of cognitive differences. But she still did have an immensely privileged life with profound physical/economic levels of security inaccessible to the vast majority of people in this region, including her birth mother. Saizen also actually Liked her and cared about her, he just wasn't a routine physical presence in any of his children's lives.

Had she been left with her biological mother, she would be in a very disadvantaged situation as a nameless bastard to an unwed mother. Her biological grandfather may or may not have been willing to claim her, and her mother would have great difficulties in finding a husband (which is ultimately necessary for the security of women in this society). I think her mother was a relatively kind person but not like, a perfect angel. She would probably have complicated feelings about her bastard daughter, especially one whose very existence materially disadvantages her and was very, very difficult as a child. So this probably would not have been a good situation for Couya either.

If you broaden the question to ANY other family completely divorced from the circumstances of her birth, yeah it definitely could have been better. But in her case it's like either "Life of grotesque socioeconomic privilege but in an abusive household" or "Life of profound socioeconomic disadvantages in a household that Probably wouldn't have been this abusive but certainly wouldn't be healthy". There wasn't really a good option for her.

[moonshynecybin]

who do you think would deal better with being isekai'd into omegaverse, marc or vale? alternatively which is more compelling

most beautiful ask. in the world. so funny. ummmm i think. vale is maybe more compelling because his issues with it would be. perhaps unsolvable and endlessly complex. guy who is a lil weird about gender, not terribly into the concept of marriage, and is pretty fundamentally adverse to being. shall we say emotionally legible/vulnerable. exposed. and omegaverse as a genre is all about exposure. its all. giving into the base instincts of your body and those same instincts giving you away to the object of your affections. its going into heat and the person youre in love with is the only one available to help you through it. its scenting someone and that being a crystal ball of their emotions and bodily state ESPECIALLY ie how much they want you specifically. its needing someone so bad you are literally insensate. its getting bonded 5ever and ever irrevocably, OFTEN in the heat of an instinctual moment without the relationship negotiation that happens irl. a genre centered around a betrayal of the body/heart to the mind, in many ways

now imagine you didnt actually grow UP in an omegaverse so you have no toolbox to DEAL with all that. sensory input off the SHITS. and. like suddenly and without WARNING now vale can feel in his CHEST exactly how distressed marc marquez is about every one of their interactions. and how much he wants his ass. like truly every part of his hind brain is like jesus christtttttt i should be inside him right tf now im a terrible alpha. and then the higher part of his brain is like what the fuck. what the fuck. i am not responsible for marc, what the fuck. and oh hey theres a bump on my penis i need to ask people about this right the hell now. thats vale. so i see this as a somewhat fraught comedy of sex errors where his ADHD ass is treading horny water trying to learn alpha manners and also. much more complexly. not fall into all of the traditional alpha expectations/roles. that little trap of gender. because at heart vale is a little trickster who loves to buck expectations!!! and maybe his journey here is realizing that he can just be himself comma sex freak. and that leaning into those "alpha" traits doesnt mean he is conforming lmao he can still have his own unique version of his family. learning the norms of a society and what makes sense to him and what still doesnt. sorting through the weeds of it. and that being vulnerable rules sometimes. and that marc loves him. because that last one is kind of hard to ignore now... again because of that emotional and physical vulnerability that comes with the genre... honestly him knowing all of that about marc without having to actually TALK about it may solve some of their problems tbh. like why work through all that verbally when you can sniff them and then fuck them. kind of the omegaverse fantasy in quite a few ways

marc. jeez louise. i think would HATE it more. at first. control freak 9000. maybe has to miss races for heats. suppressants arent legal. experiencing weird omega sexism if we want to go that route OR. my favorite. has been lying to the press about his status since he presented. tiniest 15 yr old youve ever seen: im an alpha ! :3 uh sure bud. sure. i bet. SO actually maybe he falls into a world where hes just been white-knuckling it for the last billion years during race weekends and most of the paddock kind of KNOW (scent blockers only go so far...) but are lowkey afraid to call him on it dlkjdfljldsfd... similar to vale in this scenario, he sort of has to learn how to omega— and when his heat hits during summer break and his ass start leaking in the middle of the spanish equivalent of walmart, he finds a psycho little ziploc bag of sweaty vale shirts under his bed and he genuinely is like girl what the hellllllllllll.... wiggin out. and his next heat he turns up to race with truly NO practice managing it all, so its way more obvious than normal and the farce is growing thinner and vale literally pulls him aside to be like hey are you GOOD ? but in that valentino not that i care about your ass kind of unspeakably divorced way and marc is like woag. bc a pheromone truck just ran him over. eyes glassy face flushed sweaty as hell mouth a little open.... and he opens his mouth to make an excuse and nothing comes... and then obviously they fuck like its the end of the WORLD

and like i DO think marc pulls out of it more cleanly than vale overall, bc something in HIS lizard brain would be deeply soothed by like. excelling at being an omega. getting an A + in being a bottom. doing that for vale, specifically in the context of pushing his body to the absolute LIMIT to do it.... hes locked in. its go time. and then theres the insane possibility of vale putting his mouth on his neck and them getting basically soulbonded forever where they have to have crazy sex every few months ? hes like ummmm okay. i could get used to this for a while lmao

[carefulfears]

thinking about "you have a life" / "i don't know what i have" + "what do you want, dana?" / "i want everything that i should want at this time of my life" + the perceived shame in scully's loss of normalcy... "unlike you, mulder, i would like to have a life" + "do you believe in the afterlife?" / "i'd settle for a life in this one" + "don't you ever want to just stop? get out of the damn car? settle down and live something approaching a normal life?"

her friend ellen saying, "well, first you have to get a life." tara, pregnant with their christmas gift, saying that life before one grew inside her was "somehow...less, just a prelude," while barren dana cries in the kitchen. "i know you and dad were...disappointed...that i chose the path that i'm on."

thinking about how mulder said, "this is a normal life," and how she smiled. (he doesn't know any different). how, in the end, he said, "hey, scully? i know it's not your normal life, but thanks for coming out there with me."

(christmas before quantico, "i guess i'm afraid of making a big mistake. dad thinks i am." and missy's response: "it's not his life, dana.")

her application to adopt emily was rejected: "you're a single woman who's never been married or had a long-term relationship. you're in a high stress, time intensive, and dangerous occupation."

bill's reaction: "sounds like something your partner would say. this isn't about any little girl, dana. this is about you. it's about some...void, some emptiness inside you that you're trying to fill."

and mulder to the judge: "the fact that she can adopt this child, her own flesh and blood, is something i don't feel i have the right to question, and i don't believe anyone has the right to stand in the way of."

(that last christmas with missy before everything: "there is no right or wrong. life is just a path...just don't mistake the path for what is really important in life. the people you're going to meet along the way. you don't know who you're going to meet when you join the FBI. you don't know how your life is going to change, or how you're going to change the life of others.")

and ultimately, it all leads to a leather couch. and after contemplating that sacrifice of normalcy, what she should want, the decisions she could have made, she says, "i once considered spending my whole life with this man...what i would have missed."

she could've been a doctor, like her father wanted. she could've settled down, married waterston, had a normal life, like her friends and brother wanted. but what would she have missed?

"what if there was only one choice and all the other ones were wrong?" / "and all the...choices would then lead to this very moment. one wrong turn, and...we wouldn't be sitting here together."

[umactuallycallie]

Predictably, Heathcliff. I adore him. Every time a Goodreads review says he’s the villain an angel loses its wings.

[rubiatinctorum]

I get where people are coming from when they say Diaspro in Winx lost the plot for the sake of being turned into a minor villain and that's all once Valtor enabled her to do what she did in S3, but I feel like that was a reasonable narrative choice. It's only a love potion at that point (while I could go on all day about the ethics of love potions, of course, a later season has her straight up trying to do direct murder). She's a noble, guards will do her dirty work, and I understand that she would feel like getting revenge on Bloom while getting back together with Sky. She was promised a position — romantic AND political — she nearly had and then it was taken from under her by a random fairy who wasn't even "supposed" to be in the running. I don't think what she did was nice, but it makes sense for the story and for her character for her to want to reclaim her position in the way she did. Sky's love was an accessory, in part, to her political ascension, and thus he is again rendered accessory and accomplice by the love spell. And, sending guards after threats seems to be the thing to do in the magical universe if you're a disgruntled noble, so it's probably not unfamiliar for Diaspro to have seen occur before or want to do. It's not a uniquely rotten response any more than Radius' behaviour towards the monster (who, he didn't know it, was Stella). If we fault her for this action rather than only the intention behind it, we need to examine how the worlds in Winx Club deal with threats to their monarchs in general, which sounds interesting but I frankly don't have time for tonight. Diaspro did wrong, but she didn't do uniquely wrong there, and Eraklyon has the punitive security structures in place to have enabled that.

Diaspro's later appearances seem to flatten her motives and the symbolism behind why her relationship with Sky was important and what she does about it (who cares what Diaspro's political aims are and how her status might reflect how she deals with problems, the audience needs to see Bloom thrown into fire I guess), but I feel like seasons 4-8 weren't really that good anyway, so I can't even claim this as a fault of the writers doing Diaspro specifically wrong instead of them just doing the whole show wrong at that point. It might be related, and it might be a coincidence, but a lot of the writing choices seemed to become more flat to me right around when the art shifted to that lifeless godawful Flash simulacrum of S1-3's art.

Also like... idk but if some long-haired hottie wizard in a sick coat and contemplative eyeshadow told me he could help me get my promised chance at both romantic and political success back, I'd at least hear him out, yknow, see what he had to say (<- don't trust me I simp for Valtor)

[butcharyastark]

awake at 1am thinking about how both max and silver's arcs in black sails are about getting exactly what you always wanted and it backfiring spectacularly. and making everything worse somehow

[princehendir]

Do you guys remember that Reddit screenshot that was like:

Incel-adjacent guy: the simple fact is that no hot woman wants to get with an average looking nerdy man. That's why guys like me are fucked.

Normal commenter: why don't you try dating average looking women with nerd hobbies then?

Incel guy; what would be the point of that

.......... Sometimes the male loneliness discourse feels a lot like that.

[exilley]

Public education is not actually about academia, it's about industry. The purpose of american schools, from day one, was to integrate members of the general people into a society that is nigh dependant on submission to the status quo. If you ask any teacher, student, parent, counselor, or any other person who is invested in public schooling, what the purpose of going to school is, they will respond with some variation on how it's meant to prepare kids for their future careers. What's important is not that one is in touch with their history, or able to perform basic mathematics, or that one can engage with literature and art in a meaningful way. The important part is that schoolchildren have a dispassionately earnest work ethic, an unyieldingly flexible standard of punctuality, and an uncompromising set of inordinate values about properness drilled into them. I don't think it's funny or ironic that school settings are commonly compared to prisons, and I don't think education should have to exist to serve the purpose of monetary and political benefit to be considered worthy of investment. Until public education as an institution is no longer viewed as an extension of industry, intellectualism will never thrive and no number of foundational reworks of the system will be effective at remedying the underlying cause of dysfunction and corruption.

[kc5rings]

Having a latex fetish is always at least a little inherently funny because there’s a solid chance that at least part of the human brains attraction to shiny things and bright colors comes from recognizing those traits as signs of fresh ripe fruit

And now that same inherited pattern recognition makes some of us horny about shiny clothing