#sorry i'm really frustrated about this

[pinkautist]

had to unfollow and artist i enjoyed bc they talked about how they use ai and took the stance of, "people need to stop attacking me for it bc it's been really helpful to me as a disabled artist 🥺 we should be standing together as artists not trying to divide ourselves 🥺" you know what else ai does? YOU KNOW WHAT ELSE AI DOES??? IT USES ENOUGH ENERGY TO KILL OUR PLANET MUCH FASTER THAN ANYTHING ELSE WE CAN DO ENERGY-WISE.

i am a disabled artist too. my cognitive and mental disabilities that make burnout a substantial roadblock aside, i can have frequent and extreme pain in my wrist (sometimes out of nowhere, sometimes as a result of drawing) that makes drawing an extremely painful and slow process for me (this is due to hypermobility probably). sometimes i draw in spite of the pain, and sometimes it's enough to have me taking long breaks. as a result of the combination of disabilities i have, i am an extremely slow artist. sometimes i struggle with having intense motivation to create, but no actual inspiration because of things going on in my head. and it's a struggle because i desperately want to create, but nothing is coming to me, which makes me feel really bad. and in spite of ALL of this, i still will not use fucking ai to "soothe the uninspired motivation" or to "create in spite of my pain". i will not hand my humanity over to ai because of such trivial reasons. ai could never do what i can, because creating is about the process, not the end result. i feel accomplished in a way that using ai could never provide when i see a piece coming together, something that i've created from nothing. ai will never provide that feeling.

[andsewingishalfthebattle]

Novice sewing pattern: Cut out shapes. Line up the little triangles on the edges. Stitch edges together. We've also included step-by-step assembly instructions with illustrations.

Novice knitting pattern: yOU MUSt uNDerstANd thE SECret cOdE CO67 (73, 87, 93) BO44 (63, 76, 90) 28 (32, 34) slip first pw repeat 7x K to end *kl (pl) 42 * until 13" (13, 13, 15) join new at 30 pl for 17 rows ssk 27 k2tog mattress lengthwise BO and sacrifice a goat to the knitting gods. WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU WANT "INSTRUCTIONS," I JUST GAVE THEM TO YOU

[vaguely-concerned]

having seen at least the rough outlines of all the romances now I have to say that I think emmrich's is probably objectively the best in terms of coherence and completeness of story arc (with the understanding that ultimately the 'best' romance is whichever one makes YOUR heart sing anyway so objectivity is a silly thing to claim that way, it just felt like it's the arc with the most well-paced focused content and the least dangling threads)... but lucanis' is my favourite haha. just. the whole kneeling before your beloved full of reverence but without any of the distance that usually implies??? his complete undramatic certainty and calm in every scene with rook after this, having spent the whole game caught between fear and longing???? mr. lives in a pantry but it says nothing about my psyche don't worry about it it's purely for tactical reasons that I keep myself contained in a small dark room not entirely unlike a cell, love among the parsnips -- finally coming to rook in their room and it's so comfortable and comforting???? after all the times rook supports and comforts him through the game he's finally able to return the same to them when they need it while being so calm and steady and it's so fucking sweet and feels so effortless and with no price attached?????? he basically assigns himself the role of your bodyguard and he WILL stab a god over it??????????????? the turn to protector (which was in his heart all along longing to get out and find a place) of it all????? he sounds like he's found himself unexpectedly stumbling into such a soul-lightening state of revelatory existential relief, full on 'you only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves' mary oliver style, and he goes and he shares that with rook and protectively envelops them in it when they're hurting??????????????????????????? hello for the maker's sake hello can anyone hear me?????

[canisalbus]

oh I am so jealous about your non-gendered language (as someone who also only uses they/them)

The only way to use non-gendered pronouns here in greece is to call people 'it', as in the 'this is an object' type of 'it' which obviously isnt what most people are looking for

.

[mnemo-sick]

transformers fandom. what if I said bee is not a baby? what happens? do I burst into flames?

[sskk-manifesto]

Bungou Stray Dogs: Dead Apple and how “ability users” (opposite to “normal people”) learning to accept themselves through the acceptance of their own abilities is a queer metaphor of acceptance of own's sexual orientation and gender: an essay by me

[scarletfasinera]

I hate when people are like "I already didn't like xyz so it's not difficult for me to boycott it unlike those loser customers that actually Liked the thing which I could never understand bc I was never a customer uwu" bc like. That literally isn't boycotting lmao. That is just Never Being A Customer In The First Place, which means nothing actually.

Boycotts are primarily about applying pressure (or completely making it impossible to operate) via financial/commercial/economic impact. AKA it's about money and capital.

If you already weren't spending money on a product/franchise/company, then you were already never part of their sales data, and you just doing nothing & making absolutely no change to your daily life and just continuing to not be part of their sales data as normal, has literally no material impact. You were already never a factor. The people who WERE customers & WERE part of the sales data & ARE withdrawing their money from those sales figures actually ARE making a material impact.

"Supporting" something isn't about vibes or thoughts or feelings or you telling your best friend how much you like a thing, "support" in a meaningful sense is specifically material. It is financial. Refusing to continue supporting something means taking the money you were previously spending on it & putting it elsewhere. If you were never spending money, you were never supporting it, and therefore it doesn't make any difference if you continue to not support it. Boycotting is something CUSTOMERS and CONSUMERS do.

SO STOP FUCKING BRAGGING ABOUT IT & STOP MAKING FUN OF PEOPLE WHO ACTUALLY ARE BOYCOTTING FOR "EVER LIKING XYZ TO BEGIN WITH" & STOP SPREADING THIS FALSE IDEA OF HOW BOYCOTTING WORKS LMAO sorry for capslocking I remembered I was annoyed

I just hate this low-morale mean-spirited bullshit some people do in the notifs on boycotting info posts where they arbitrarily moralize about something they just don't understand so they can pat themselves on the back for doing literally literally nothing AND inadvertently spreading misinfo in the process. Be quiet. Go do something that matters. There are plenty of posts going around, including from Palestinians themselves, with lists of references for how to help Palestine & other similar causes for people currently in crisis, please please do something For Real instead of boasting online about your fandom superiority complex as if it means anything.

[alongtidesoflight]

so here's my honest thoughts on dragon age: the veilguard, after ~40 hours of playing. i finished the main quest after having finished all companion quests and major faction quests. just to clear up what content i saw, i played as an elven transmasc rook who is a member of the lords of fortune. he romanced lucanis (although after finishing the game i'm now leaning towards taash). i don't know what's happening in playthroughs that have a different race, gender identity, romance or faction going on.

full spoilers ahead, i mean it. don't read further if you want to avoid them. i don't want complaining about it in my asks.

oh and also, if you're worried because of a few negative reviews online i can comfort you by saying don't give a fuck about a certain big name youtuber who is very much tied to bethesda franchises giving this a negative review. i'll explain why.

i'm starting off with the things i liked

the game looks really pretty. i was worried it wouldn't feel like thedas anymore (with them trying to "focus on northern thedas only" i thought they'd make a clear cut in environmental design. they do and they don't. it's complicated. i'll elaborate on it when talking about the negative stuff). anyway it does. minrathous feels like kirkwall. treviso enchanted me like the winter palace did. the hossberg wetlands reminded me of the hinterlands and a couple other inquisition maps. arlathan looked like... arlathan. the crossroads were different, but familiar. overall i like the way it looks and feels. it's thedas, with a twist. it's a good one, and gives everything a solid but unique feel.

combat is top tier. if you're a hardcore dragon age player you WILL miss the tactical aspect of it for a bit, but i promise you, once you're used to the way the combat works, you will be lapping that shit up. and once you get to ability combos you'll mourn the control you used to have over your companions in battle a bit less

the MAIN quest and its story. i expected worse, way worse. and for a while the game even had me tricked (harr harr you'll get it in a second) it is Really That Much Worse. but holy shit was it good. i walked away satisfied ngl.

your choices have SOLID weight. there's consequences, good AND bad. i got minrathous blighted, ruled over by venatori, and the leader of the shadow dragons ultimately died because of my decisions. i made those at the beginning and throughout the game. he died at the end. DAVRIN died because i didn't expect what i was saying to have that much weight. i thought i was in the clear. he had hero status. well turns out, your choices can still get your companions killed even if you do everything right. i fucking love him. he shouldn't have made that sacrifice just because i told him to do everything it takes once.

the inquisitor, morrigan and dorian being there, surprisingly. there's also negatives to this though, see below.

speaking of companions dying and the inquisitor playing a bigger role: the final quest feels like me2's suicide mission. i was blown away by it and the fact that i got to see the results of all my efforts playing out in front of me.

bioware are NOT trying to redeem solas. they love him as a character yes, but i wasn't forced to see any good in him. he betrays you. he fucked my rook over twice. he fucked him over right back, for good this time (the veil wasn't torn down, i anchored it by binding him to it, he's doomed to uphold it). but solas really lives up to his name as the trickster elven god. rip to all the people who grew really attached to him over the years.

varric died. if you like him that's probably as hard reading it as it was watching it. varric died and the game lies about it until the very end. when the realisation hits, it hurts. but in the very best way.

the amount of care they put into gender expression and trans identities this time around. (i'll add onto this with negative points as well too).

rook feels very much ingrained in the world of thedas. he doesn't ask questions that expose the player to lore through dialogue as if he's stepped foot into thedas for the first time. those conversations feel very solid and good. i hope other faction players got as much joy out of this as i did.

and the things i didn't like and boy there's a lot unfortunately

the music. let's just get that out of the way holy shit. it doesn't feel like it belongs in this universe. it gets so incredibly sci-fi-y at times you'd think it's taken straight from mass effect andromeda. there's not a single song unique to veilguard that i really enjoyed. it broke my immersion, real bad. hearing a busker play the tavern songs from inquisition on a lute right after i killed some venatori with wobbly bass songs playing in the background is just odd. weird tonal shift. don't like it. it's made for people who like flashy light-weight cinema.

tevinter nights is required reading. the podcasts are required listening exercises. the game is so fast paced, especially at the start, that there's no time to introduce you to characters and how much weight their names carry in-game. i would not have known who half these people are if i hadn't skimmed over tevinter nights. i'd care even less about them than i already did. there is no time to get properly attached to them. people will act as if you're talking to a legend personified and you'll be thinking man goddamn which chapter of tevinter night were they in again and what did they do???

there's a weird mismatch with the animations. you'll have beautifully fluid ones, like emmrich casting spells. and then you'll have rook's face animating in the most unnatural manner that's sorta reminiscent of mass effect andromeda's "my face is tired" addison, when their emotions SHOULD be landing with the player rn instead.

i'm not vibing with the art style. sometimes it works. most of the time it doesn't. at points i felt like i was watching tangled.

that also brings me to some of the dialogue. same issue. i am watching frozen. i am watching tangled. someone on the writer's team really likes the adorkable trope. bellara is its victim.

for all the talk about identity, bioware sure doesn't like theirs. the grey warden armor got a redesign again and it just makes them look like a generic army. i hate it lol

in general, i don't like the armor design. the wardrobe/appearances system is fine, but it's just not helping if all the armors are just... kinda bland or downight bad looking? and don't get me started on the lords of fortune armor. that is orientalism personified.

the world states should have been carried over, full stop. i know they said they didn't because they want to separate what happens in the north from what happens in the south, which... i could have lived with that. but the inquisitor sends you letters that keep you up to date on... the south of thedas. you learn that there's a blight again, that people are standing strong but it's difficult, denerim's fallen, the rulers are taking care of it, orlais is fighting and they're successful for a while, etc etc. what's good bioware. i thought we don't care about the south this time around. why are you feeding me so much boring generic information. if you're not gonna show any of it and just write letters, then carrying the world state over should not have been an issue. i have a game dev background. those few lines of code would not have broken your budget or pushed your engine's limits. fuck right off.

this gripe of mine carries over to all the cameos. as a lord of fortune you have to deal with isabela a lot. it's fun. i missed her. you get to go drinking with her and taash and bellara! also my hawke romanced her. she's not mentioned once. they had the opportunity to put a sentence or two about her in there with not a lot of effort, trust me.

when varric dies, all she has is a single line about it. for gold, for fortune, for varric. she only says it if you interact with her on your way to the final push. that's not mandatory.

morrigan is there. kieran isn't. the old god soul that mythal and then solas absorbed? who cares at this point, the gods are dead now and solas is locked away for eternity. i suppose? why is morrigan there. she feels unneeded. i wish they'd just left her down south, at least that way i wouldn't have had to witness her god awful redesign.

dorian at least feels as if he belongs in this story. the shadow dragons are a crucial part to protecting minrathous. he's also weirdly underutilised. isabela and morrigan had more lines than him in my playthrough.

on the topic of romance: bro that was underwhelming. no, genuinely. you know when romance picked up a bit? after the point of no return. i heard maybe two lines of companion banter about it before that. maybe i missed something which i honestly doubt, but romance did not play much of a role in lucanis's storyline. i saved his grandmother as he wished me to (and if you read tevinter nights you know she was rather abusive and their relationship not the healthiest) and told him to focus on his family. a reunified family my rook wasn't even introduced to as a partner at the end of all that.

really, do not buy this game if you're only in it for the romances. others might be better, lucanis's basically gave me nothing. except for an outing (the second coffee date i had with him, it was getting repetitive) all of it played out once i committed to the final quest. the sex scene was a fade to black. annoyingly right after davrin died. if you're looking for well paced and good spice, pick up something else. the sweet talk and the final goodbye were nice though.

for all the good the ever-presence of gender identity does, it is brought up in such a disruptive manner too. it doesn't even play out naturally if you CHOOSE the lines that are meant to be said. hearing the words trans and non-binary in this setting doesn't feel right, and i'm saying this as a trans guy. i think it could have been handled more gracefully. the amount of times my rook went "i'm a MAN" as if he's about to start drumming on his chest and roaring any second now got super nerve-grating. "i'm so glad you're into me... the me who is trans. remember?" just. tell me one trans person who'd talk like that to a person they've grown close with and are trying to romance. this game doesn't handle sexuality well, so all this hey my body might not look like the way you're expecting it to look talk amounts to nothing anyway. i feel about this the way i feel about krem: this is partial exposition to trans experiences... packaged up for cis consumption. the ONLY exception to that is interacting with taash. holy shit was all of that heartwarming and bro did it feel good and natural to talk to them about theirs and rook's gender.

rivain and nevarra are new locations added by veilguard. they're also incredibly underwhelming, small and constricted maps. rivain is a coastline with a few ruins. the hall of valor is a partial ruin nestled into a cave on a beach, with a fighting pit. isabela is there in her skimpy outfit commentating your pit fights. that's it. i'm sorry if you were looking for a bustling pirate cove or whatever. you're not gonna get it. the nevarran crypts btw are a long ass dungeon crawl. that's it.

speaking of maps. i thought people were being dramatic when they said you're gonna be fighting the same enemies on them again and again. i thought they were figure of speeching it. they're not. you WILL fight the same amount of enemies. in the same spot. every time you reload the map. best to stay on a map and clear out the enemies and do as much questing on that map as you can before leaving, because you WILL have to do it all over again once you return.

the three choices i made for my inquisitor didn't matter lol she didn't have to face solas and therefore couldn't stop him at any cost as she had sworn (maybe because my rook tricked solas into binding himself to the veil, there was also an option to fight him. would she have stepped in? who knows). blackwall wasn't mentioned. and either her using a small amount of her forces in the final fight was the reason the civilians of minrathous fared so well..... or it just didn't matter. ultimately i think she had very little impact on anything

[fromtheseventhhell]

One major factor missing from most debates on Arya and Lyanna's beauty is that they're being judged by their society's extremely patriarchal values. In both looks and personality, that context is essential to understanding how others perceive them. George explores the misogyny experienced by non-conforming women, especially with Arya, and it's interesting how he plays with that regarding their physical beauty.

Her mother used to say she could be pretty if she would just wash and brush her hair and take more care with her dress, the way her sister did. (The Blind Girl, ADWD) "You never knew Lyanna as I did, Robert," Ned told him. "You saw her beauty, but not the iron underneath. She would have told you that you have no business in the melee." (Eddard VII, AGOT)

These two quotes offer a nice summation of this idea. With Arya, her supposed lack of beauty is defined by her being a non-conforming wild child. Her hair is messy, her face is dirty, and she's often in "lower class" clothing while engaging in unladylike activities. None of this says anything about her physical beauty but it tells us everything about how she's perceived. Arya could be pretty...If she conforms to society's standards for a highborn Lady. With Lyanna, however, we get the opposite. Where Arya is judged based on her personality, Robert's romanticization of Lyanna is rooted solely in her looks. He doesn't know anything about the person she really was. There is an assumption that, because she looked a certain way, her personality must fit and Robert imagines her much softer and more passive than she actually was.

That Arya isn't pretty or Lyanna wasn't wild are two perceptions that George specifically pushes back against. This is where people miss the brilliance of them being linked as literary mirrors; it is largely about us learning more about Lyanna, but it touches on more than that. The significance of them being written as wild, willful, and with their own beauty is that George isn't writing his female characters around patriarchal expectations. When people debate their beauty, that's often the trapping they fall into. Beauty and non-conformity are treated as mutually exclusive factors when the story itself never makes that point; this is also the logic that leads people to the (incorrect) conclusion that Lyanna and Arya aren't meant to be similar. Arya's self-esteem issues around her looks and being a Lady make this a topic certain to be addressed in the future; George has made it a part of the story. The conclusion shouldn't be that "looks don't matter", but that looks aren't indicative of a character's value, personality, or morality.

[elllteo]

Creators I love you but it's time to wake up

Among rumors about our tumblr user data being sold off to Midjourney/Generative AI, recent Extremely transphobic events (that have been ongoing) coming to a head, another extremely concerning internet censorship bill being pushed in upper levels of government, and a general air of frustration over how the site belongs to and is operated by perhaps the second stupidest CEO (second only to twitters own) of our age, I'm very done with the last few vestiges of what the old internet held for artists.

And if you're reading this, you probably are too.

I know we're tired. We are all tired. It is not always viable to pack up shop and move, again and again and again.

From tumblr to twitter to anywhere else we've ever grown up posting, things no longer work. Our audiences are kneecapped by aggressive and hostile algorithms, our reach is abysmal - if we aren't shadow-banned or silenced for one (transphobic) reason or another, we're thrust into an ever growing pit of hostility where the only thing that drives clicks is fighting and contention.

We're tired. We're so fucking tired. We aren't businesses, we aren't content mills, we cannot keep this pace that modern social media has set for us, to wring every ounce of creativity out of us to profit from and leave us rotting.

The key to staying afloat here, and I cannot stress this enough, is to stay connected to your peers.

Pack up and move as units if you must. Exodus from the sites that are killing us. Push your entire friend group of artists to move from one site to the next that promises you a kinder experience.

Art drives movements, it drives change, it is all that encompasses being human. If you take that away from the shitty places, they will be left with nothing but a cesspit of inhumanity and the people who follow you will be more incentivized than ever to move with you.

Yes, this is terrifying. There are no guarantees. There never was, and never are, and never will be.

But stay connected. Stay human.

Support each other and be willing to hold hands and jump when we all - as a group - need to jump from the flames we're all trying to convince ourselves wont kill us before rescue comes.

Rescue isn't coming, rescue will be found hand in hand with each other. I'm offering you my hand, please take it. There's always a new start, there are always helping hands reaching for you. You have to look up from the doom-scroll long enough to see and take them.

[scoliosisgoblin]

Which version of Rick is your fav?

it's so hard for me to choose tbh. HOWEVER, I'd say Evil Rick

then I'd say it's C-137 and Memory Rick

I love how pathetic™ Evil Rick really is tbh. love that he's being controlled by his Morty. can you guess who my favorite Morty is?

[bizarrelittlemew]

tagged by @saltpepperbeard @summerlinenss @edsbacktattoo @xoxoemynn @jaskierx a while back to share my fav fics i've written!

my favorite thing i've ever written has to be Five Birthdays and a Funeral (6 chapters, 57.8k words, E), so i'll start there.

this fic focuses on Stede navigating depression and anxiety while finding himself and figuring out his feelings for Ed, and its thesis statement is very important to me - that the whole "you have to love yourself before you can love others/before you can be loved" thing is a lie, and that you don't have to be a perfectly "healed" human being before you can love and be loved in return.

i put a lot of personal stuff into it, which was both scary and cathartic, and the response has been incredible and extremely validating. seeing how this stuff resonates 🥹 made me feel less alone (and i always love it when people shout at me about ketchup lmao) 💗 and along with the heavier stuff, it has strong romcom vibes, some of my fav Ed/Stede banter i've written, and lots of smut which i have on authority (from lovely readers) is very hot 😌

next, i'm pretty proud of A Series of Cases of Penetrating Stab Wounds of the Abdomen - a short fic (1.9k words, T) written entirely as a scientific paper in the (fictional) Republic of Pirates Medical Journal! it was extremely fun to find a way to make a narrative work in this format (and i especially love the footnote referencing Roach inventing ye olde toppe surgery) 🤸

i have a soft spot for In the sack (2 chapters, 8.3k words, E), which has a mix of innkeeper domestic fluff/smut, character study relating to Stede and clothes, exploration of why both Ed and Stede might find freedom and empowerment on either side of dom/sub play, and Stede getting to wear the onesie of subification 😌

lastly, this is my least-read fic (which is to be expected for fics with crew member POVs, though it actually has a lot of Ed and Stede being obnoxiously in love), but one of my favs is Bathtub beginnings (4.1k words, M). i just love the 60s New York vibes and think it came out really well ✌️

if you see this and want to talk about your fav fics you've written, consider yourself tagged 💗

[sciderman]

I’m sorry you’ve had to deal with so much Iranian hate and drama <:[

oh anon. hate to break it to you (a lot of people make this mistake) but iran and iraq are two entirely separate nations.

and also i think reducing it to the words "hate and drama" kind of doesn't cover it, anon.

[bitegore]

okay i am actually writing the Experimentalist First Aid metapost right now.

Beginning statement and caveats - I have no reason to believe this is canon and basically don't, except that I like it better. However, it literally would be indistinguishable from canon for the most part for various reasons outlined below, so like, you can't prove it's not. Canon compliant canon divergent headcanon territory.

Also, this is about G1.

I think First Aid is many things.

First Aid is a big giant fucking baby and he has the experience of someone who has been alive for Ten Total Minutes. First Aid is not old enough to have properly-tuned self-preservation instincts or an understanding of what will and will not be able to kill him. Unlike everyone else, he handles this by being a giant soft baby (affectionate) and going "I don't want to go fuck around with things that can kill me" and hangs out inside, where he gets his fill of Necessary Exciting Stuff(tm) with Ratchet and the other Autobots. However, he's still got the ravenous desire for Experiences, and this turns into

He fucking loves learning. he loves learning so much. He doesn't want to get hurt but he wants to know everything. Sometimes he needs to go out and do stupid things for that, but he'd rather learn from someone else's experiences first.

He is a medic. He likes to help people, but he likes to help people by taking them apart and getting elbow-deep inside of them and rearranging things, which is usually the kind of thing that human people get squeamish about. Even granting that Transformers are not as squeamish or flinchy about gore as humans are, being the person who gets to watch their friends get grievously injured and then stick your hands in there and mess around with the wound is pretty heavy for some (most!) people! But I think it would be a strange reading to say that First Aid doesn't like to be a medic, so this clearly doesn't bother him the way it might bother someone else. He doesn't like when his friends are injured, but the actual process of surgery - cutting them open or digging into a wound to clean it out, that sort of thing - isn't a problem for him, which leads into

Even by TF standards, First Aid is remarkably unfazed by injuries, gore, and insides-currently-outside than someone else his age would probably be. And that means I can get away with the next few parts...

I read First Aid as a sadist. In the autonomous, just-kind-of-happens sort of way, not the "I'm going to menace you" sort of way people sometimes interpret that statement. People get hurt in front of First Aid and he finds himself fascinated by the injury and immediately concerned with fussing over them in particular, partially because it's his job to pay attention to the wound and partially because there's something about pain and injuries that fascinates him beyond the confines of his job.

First Aid also likes his job, and he likes doing a good job, which means he's not aout to just start banging anyone up to hurt them for the hell of it because his job is to fix them. I don't even imagine sadism is particularly uncommon among doctors, because frankly it only makes sense to me that the characters literally hardwired to cut people open might have something making it so they don't feel bad when they cut someone open. Which would mean it has to be easy for them to maintain an Autobot standard of professionalism, which doesn't really prohibit being buddies with your patients (see: Ratchet) or, like, certain human standards of care around privacy and freedom from experimentation, but does broadly prohibit being needlessly cruel to your patients in a way they themselves aren't on board with. So this doesn't interfere with his job at all, basically; it's just some extra thing he has on the side for the most part.

First Aid is a big giant fucking baby and he has the experience of someone who has been alive for Ten Total Minutes. First Aid is not old enough to have properly-tuned self-preservation instincts or an understanding of what will and will not be able to kill him. Unlike everyone else, he handles this by being a giant soft baby (affectionate) and going "I don't want to go fuck around with things that can kill me" and hangs out inside, where he gets his fill of Necessary Exciting Stuff(tm) with Ratchet and the other Autobots. However, he's still got the ravenous desire for Experiences, and this turns into

He fucking loves learning. he loves learning so much. He doesn't want to get hurt but he wants to know everything. Sometimes he needs to go out and do stupid things for that, but he'd rather learn from someone else's experiences first.

He is a medic. He likes to help people, but he likes to help people by taking them apart and getting elbow-deep inside of them and rearranging thigns, which is usually the kind of thing that human people get squeamish about. Even granting that Transformers are not as squeamish or flinchy about gore as humans are, being the person who gets to watch their friends get grievously injured and then stick your hands in there and mess around with the wound is pretty heavy for some (most!) people! But I think it would be a strange reading to say that First Aid doesn't like to be a medic, so this clearly doesn't bother him the way it might bother someone else. He doesn't like when his friends are injured, but the actual process of surgery - cutting them open or digging into a wound to clean it out, that sort of thing - isn't a problem for him, which leads into

Even by TF standards, First Aid is remarkably unfazed by injuries, gore, and insides-currently-outside than someone else his age would probably be. And that means I can get away with the next few parts...

I read First Aid as a sadist. In the autonomous, just-kind-of-happens sort of way, not the "I'm going to menace you" sort of way people sometimes interpret that statement. People get hurt in front of First Aid and he finds himself fascinated by the injury and immediately concerned with fussing over them in particular, partially because it's his job to pay attention to the wound and partially because there's something about pain and injuries that fascinates him beyond the confines of his job.

First Aid also likes his job, and he likes doing a good job, which means he's not aout to just start banging anyone up to hurt them for the hell of it because his job is to fix them. I don't even imagine sadism is particularly uncommon among doctors, because frankly it only makes sense to me that the characters literally hardwired to cut people open might have something making it so they don't feel bad when they cut someone open. Which would mean it has to be easy for them to maintain an Autobot standard of professionalism, which doesn't really prohibit being buddies with your patients (see: Ratchet) or, like, certain human standards of care around privacy and freedom from experimentation, but does broadly prohibit being needlessly cruel to your patients in a way they themselves aren't on board with. So this doesn't interfere with his job at all, basically; it's just some extra thing he has on the side for the most part.

I think that's all the requisite readings.

In sum, this gives us a guy who relaly likes being around people in pain, who also likes being the guy to help them out of it, and likes to learn. He's encouraged to do all of these things by the people around him, because he's not being concerning about any of it- he's just dedicated to what he does and he's good at it, and getting better every day.

And by the same tokens, you have a guy who really, really badly wants to get to take someone apart over and over, because he wants to see how they work on the insides and he likes the way they look when they're in pain, but he doesn't want to fuck over his friends, comrades, patients, or teammates, and everyone he's interacting with is at least three of those things.

Plus we get G1 First Aid's pacifism, which is a strongly-held ideological standpoint that First Aid maintains - he won't fight, he won't carry weapons, but he will work as a medic. We can interpret that this isn't a squeamishness issue for him by the asme tokens I established earlier - that he's much more okay with getting into the guts of his friends and coworkers than the average person would be - and also by the fact that he was built in a military context and everyone else is a military fighter of some sort. if he were reluctant to hurt people because of anything shy of serious personal convictions, I am convinced that the Autobots around him could have convinced him otherwise. His position is profoundly difficult to maintain in an active war zone, aftr all.

So even beyond standard Autobot ethics, First Aid does not want to hurt people. Yet I reconcile this with saying he is an innate sadist anyway, because they're not mutually exclusive. It really just means that, like, First Aid can want to take people apart all he likes; he's just not going to do it to anyone until someone asks him to.

As an aside, in my corner of fandom anyway, it seems like we talk a lot about characters who kind of throw interpersonal concerns and care for those around them to the wind in order to chase their own hedonistic desires (see: Vortex, Overlord, Motormaster, Megatron, etc) or otherwise, put bluntly, just kind of don't care that much about their partners' and playthings' consent even when they have it. And that can be a lot of fun, obviously; I like them. But as of late my friends who shoot the shit with me about consensual kink in Transformers have been busy or we haven't been talking about it for a while, and I've been missing the other side - the exact same desires and interests, just harnessed, controlled, and managed, not because First Aid has to but because he just, like... feels like it. It's what he wants to do. And, like. yeah the Autobots wouldn't be pleased if he turned out to be some sort of turborapist, lol, but he's the first person to decide he's not going to run around doing harm. I tie it into the pacifism. Part of this reading is because this is my reading; part of this reading is because I want to insert even more contrast between the characters I see First Aid Aid played alongside than I'm already seeing when I finally sit down and write about him myself.

So what this boils down to - all together - is that First Aid wants someone to ask him to take them apart.

And he likes to learn.

So the first person to catch his attention and walk him through opening their chest up is going to get to see him catch his brain on every shiny new edge he's not used to seeing outside of a medical context, and he's going to go over and catalogue every single part and take them out and put them back in and he's going to do it over and over until he can do it without looking and then he's going to do that to everything else, too. He's going to pick up every style of play fast and hard, but I read him landing hard on the "roleplay is kind of silly, I like bodies" side of domination. And I think he'd enjoy domination a lot.

He's a good student and a quick study. He likes to learn. He's enthusiastic and comfortable being taught, too. It would be very easy to turn him into a service top, too, to talk him into being an extension of your own hands and guide him through doing what you want.

But only to a point. Because he's still a pacifist, so you can't use him to hurt someone else, unless they're also asking for it. But, hell, he's part of a combiner team... I bet that would come easy to him, too, once he does have everyone's consent.

In a few thousand years, I think First Aid is going to maybe be one of the biggest kinksters in the entire Autobot faction, or he's going to have extremely narrow and extremely specific tastes. But he's going to get there through experimentation and he's going to get there through his fascination with anything new, which right now is everything.

Last bit is that - I think his instincts are not fine-tuned, self-preservation-wise. I think his social instincts are just as bad. you develop those over time, after all, and through experience, and he doesn't have that. And he's a pacifist because he doesn't want to hurt Decepticons. Very sweet, certainly, but the Decepticons are like... kind of dicks lmfao. The way of things is not very complicated because there are so few Transformers around and alive; eventually First Aid is going to run into a Decepticon. The question is if he ever ends up on good terms with someone from the other faction - or if he already has - or if he gets himself hurt early and learns to avoid them fast. But even with the latter, I don't think that's how he'll stay. I think he wants to experiment. I think he wants to learn and do more and learn more. So eventually he will run into a Decepticon who is also willing to play the way he's willing to play, and they will end up making, if not friends, then at least some sort of positive interaction and First Aid will...

...well, he's never going to stop being curious, huh. That would be boring. But his morals and standards for his behavior are either going to stay ironclad or they won't, and either way it'll be interesting to see what happens. Because there's no bottom to where First Aid might go, eventually.. as long as he's being asked for it.

[wandixx]

Serious chaos one-shot snippet

“Hey, Dami?”

Boy hadn’t looked up from kittens he was bottle feeding but let out hum indicating he listened.

“I think about trying out more girlish style. Do you think it would suit me?”

Well, Damian had no idea but if Dani wished to give it a chance, then, well, the only appropriate course of action was to offer his aid.

Also features: Dani and Damian working at an animal shelter, Steph being fashionable, and Batman's rouge gallery and no, it's not a spelling mistake :)

[aeolianblues]

one last thing I will say on that topic. Americans getting upset about you calling out Zionism. When you're not talking about Judaism or in fact, about religion at all. When you're talking about a national military funded by a country that has been dropping bombs on the middle east since the 1980s. But then I suppose when people who are so so so comfortable with equating a whole religion, or further a whole entire group of multiple ethnicities, with simply 'terrorism', are criticised on any aspect of their wrongdoings of course they must think we're talking about their whole religion. Literally every word is a projection.