#sorry i'm beating a dead horse but

[twilightless]

i'm rereading chainsaw confidential again and this instantly reminded me of how i saw something just about a week ago or so how a johnny/hands shipper had tried defending their ship because johnny and nancy were "slaughters" and not "sawyers" and thus not fully related to each other...

"Many fans think the chain saw family's name is Sawyer, but it is not. They were given that name in the second Chainsaw movie in 1986. Their real name is Slaughter, as seen in faint letters on the sign above the gas station: W.E. Slaughter Barbecue.

[dukeofthomas]

I can't find it now but there's a post about suspension of disbelief and how it's broken when the story starts trying to excuse it. "character gets knocked unconscious for hours but there's no further issues from this" okay 👍 "and actually this makes perfect sense because of this and that" um no it doesn't why are you lying to me. like i am willing to ignore the holes and the discrepancies!! all you need to do is let me and not bring unnecessary attention to it!!!

and all that is my issue with the whole robin child soldier argument. like i am willing to ignore it i am willing to engage with the fantasy literally all you need to do is NOT try to convince me that Actually It's Fine Because They Want To Do It or whatever. like literally just shut up about it and i can engage with the fantasy!!

[dailyjermasparkle]

mcu has gone from sparkle on to sparkle off :[

[wizardpink]

The only reason we didn't see what happened after Louis left is because they couldn't secure the rights to show us Armand face down in a puddle of blood tears while Fleetwood Mac's Silver Springs blasts through the penthouse.

[mamawasatesttube]

honestly. i Really don't understand why fandom loves the combo of homophobia/misogyny that is "character who is a father threatens his children's male love interests" in 2024 but it's kind of funny that batgirl (2000) literally HAD bruce do this wrt kon and cass's friendship, only for both kon himself AND clark to tell him to stop being a little bitch. like you guys are being more regressive than something written 20 years ago and its a little cringe

anyway um. au where cass found out bruce was trying to deprive her of one of her only friends and beat him up about it. the end

[nitw]

[mewkwota]

I love the artwork you make of terry, it's amazing and i also fucking love terry and his big tits too don't get me wrong. tho i can't help but lowkey feel bad for kyo kusanagi. i mean dude has been getting shafted by snk lately. i get it terry came first, he has a genderbent version introduced in snk heroines, he's more popular especially in western countries, he's in smash, he's in sf6, and his new fatal fury game is coming out this year. so it makes sense i guess. but it's still kind of sad seeing kyo being ignored by snk lately. even the other kof characters like my man iori yagami gets an isekai manga, he appears on the svc chaos cover art, and a guest appearance in other games. mai and kula got to be guests in doa. but kyo? he gets shit on, it's to the point where people started making memes about how terry actually beat orochi by himself. but hey, at least he still has his stans who love him dearly.

I want to say lot of this can also come from people outside the main fanbase that like to play contests with characters based on their worth (because it's funni). They mostly meme things to death before moving onto something else-- believe me, I'm very familiar with that pattern of behavior.

The last thing I wanna have is people assume my gawking over Terry means I think less of Kyo. However, I'm not going to pity him either, that's honestly no different to me than the meme-ing.

It does suck when a character you love receives less visible recognition, but I hope those things aren't necessary for you to care about them in the first place.

[beetleskeleton]

something about Darnell's height

I'm sorry, POSSIBLY???

that says so much. my world view is cracked the fuck open

is there- is there a mister darnell *explodes*

[madamairlock]

Laura's Nightmare Before Election Day

[sheathnknife]

the vampire diaries 8.16 // louise gluck, crossroads

“and damon, like the voiceover tell us, he was worried he would never see stefan again. it was just elena assuring him that there would be peace. that we’ve dealt with this other side of darkness for several seasons, but there’s also light out there and there’s peace, and damon will find it. if you search for it, you will find it. and we wanted to get that last moment to see that [...] damon found it too, and it looked just like his brother.” — kevin williamson

[itstokkii]

it's maybe been about a week but even remembering it makes me deeply upset and shaken(an understatement, i don't know another word that describes how sad i am). i don't know, something about my living experience as an uzbek korean being invalidated and spoken over by someone who's only visited korea a few times... and then talked down to like a child when i tried to speak up for myself, being called immature... i guess i expected better from someone older than me but this fandom has ways of proving you're wrong every single time.

i already struggle enough with my identity being stripped from me again and again. i don't need any more reasons to struggle further.

[seaalgae]

while i'm doing fucked up and evil intercommunity discourse i do need to say that it hits in a way that the "transphobes say 'don't be surprised if testosterone doesn't turn you into an anime twink' but every trans guy is trying to be the bear-est bear possible" post that went around a bit ago set it up as something transphobes say to show how out of touch they are, but it's also just. specifically the statement that's outlined as transphobic is the type of post that goes unquestioned for thousands of notes within queer spaces practically once a month when it's about transfems

like i think i've been trying to find ways to outline how specifically caustic even the most open queer spaces tend to be about transfems for years now and i think this is just the example i'm going to latch onto, that this thing that is a pretty obvious, conceptually ridiculous expression of transphobia is also just a genuine sentiment that goes viral among even other trans people pretty regularly, and it's such a strong sentiment that it almost feels taboo to even mention that transfeminine people are also capable of making informed decisions about trans health care as the bare minimum 'hey trans women are still people' type of statement

(because i know people will interpret this in bad faith i'm making this because i've seen enough genuine, unironic "transfeminine people don't be worried if you don't turn out like a petite anime girl :) they're not real" posts enter my mostly trans timeline with enough regularity that i've Been mad about it, and it really just took seeing this one really good post point out that, yeah, that's just a transphobic sentiment, to really drive that home)

[hylialeia]

at a certain point the people writing star wars are gonna have to accept that if they really want to tell the story of right after the original trilogy they need to either 1) stop hating animation or 2) recast the actors.

[mathmusicreading]

Xiè Lián: My surname is Xiè, my first name is Lián. Huā Chéng: You can call me your third husband. Xiè Lián: What happened to my first two husbands?!

I learned Huā Chéng was having Xiè Lián call him "husband" from Ty the Canasian on Kictor's YouTube, I found this when I was trying to corroborate the linguistics, and I indulged and bought the official Seven Seas Entertainment (translator and editor are on Tumblr!) English translations of the books so here's further confirmation from Volume 1:

ETA:

I made this post private because I was unhappy with it (misspelling/misformatting Wúmíng, knowing I wouldn't have good reach for larger and less biased sample size even if I could have tagged better for the fandoms and characters if Tumblr organized by more than the first five tags), but I'm making it public again since it finished and so did the similar poll that fun-mxtx-polls was kind enough to make for me.

Not to bias towards the first option, just to explain it, the first option and why I wanted this poll come from the naming pattern trivia for MXTX's love interests/male leads/gongs, which I think you can best read on Huā Chéng's page on the Heaven Official's Blessing/Tiān Guān Cì Fú wikia. I'm just using that as my citation given:

I'm not sure if MXTX has discussed this meta in-joke somewhere and if so, where.

The SSE Glossary: Terminology note (all volumes of all three MXTX novels) only explains the second and third gongs, and implies MXTX is doing this purposefully. Lán Wàngjī's wikia page explains only the three published gongs, and implies this started from fandom phenomena creating a proto-stage pattern (if you subscribe to "one is chance, two is coincidence, three is a pattern"). Huā Chéng's page linked above is the odd man out and so probably incorrect about Lán-èr-gē vs. Lán-èr-gēge, but it goes above and beyond by explaining the fourth gong, and it uses the most neutral language regarding this trivia.

I think citation is unnecessary for "gē" (哥 | 哥) meaning "big brother" and in certain contexts having the connotation or meaning of "eldest brother" (admittedly my unverified inference), "èr" (二 | 二) meaning "two", and "sān" (三 | 三) meaning "three".

I actually like so much because I like to think if it could use more wordplay and less literalism. Please forgive me for being a poor reader not remembering exactly, not buying the TGCF raws yet, not being able to buy the SVSSS and MDZS raws, and only being able to find old fan translations/interpretations of MXTX's fourth novel preview, but let me explain:

I believe Luò Bīnghé isn't being called "Luò Bīnghé-gē" (or rather "Bīng-gē" since I think? it's more usual to use the suffix with the single/first character of a person's given name, not with their full name, especially when the full name is three (or more? some of my reading has mentioned two-character last names but I didn't find if culture was strict about then making the given name be only one character) characters) for the usual reasons to address someone with "gē", but actually the PIDW!Luò Bīnghé is being called Luò Bīnggē (or "Bīng-gē") because he's more aggressive than canon/SVSSS!Luò Bīnggē who when being differentiated gets called Luò Bīngmèi (or "Bīng-mèi"), and I love that "very fitting reasoning for the naming, not strictly literal and not so bound to literal".

Then with Lán Wàngjī, I see the opportunity that his nickname could have used the natural naming of "erhua is used as a diminutive suffix", and the "er" would have been homophonous with "èr" (二 | 二) for "two" for him being the second gong, and homophonous to the potential "proper address for him as the second Lán son/brother".

In the most literal sense, you'll notice that the gongs so far have had their nicknames be using "(big) brother" and Huā Chéng's uses láng (郎 | 郎) "son" (his stated meaning, although it can also mean "man" and "husband" and the latter is how we can interpret he wanted it to be when coming from Xiè Lián). There's nothing wrong with that and the numbers are perfectly probable, and would still be so as they grow, but also they could feel more like "contrived" coincidence, which is part of my wanting to get away from literalism a little bit, not just my loving clever wordplay. With Huā Chéng, I don't have a homophone I can use for punning like with Lán Wàngjī, or really the "cultural language use where literal suffixes/honorifics get used figuratively for XYZ purposes", but I can make it fit with character interpretation. To me, Sān Láng doesn't have to be "Third Son" because "he has two older brothers" and in fact we aren't sure that he was telling the truth about that—instead, I think Huā Chéng could be being clever with not just getting Xiè Lián to call him (Third/surname "Three") Husband but in saying his name is "Third Man" because this is the third alias he gives Xiè Lián. (Some additional feels this gives me: It's like he's saying he's the same person Xiè Lián met before, that they shared all of that experience and it mattered, that he's the final form of that person wanting to be with Xiè Lián, that he's like a fairy-tale character with many names and forms and a true name and form and all along there was a trick or thread to follow in knowing and identifying him.) It just works out so perfectly because of the third way he introduces himself to Xiè Lián matching him being the third gong, and also the fairy-tale significant number of "three".

Finally, with the fourth gong, I've looked at Suika's TGCF Afterword translation, a NovelUpdates MDZS spoilers forum post by K.san crossposted to the Grim Reapers Have No Days Off spoilers forum by alexfilia, a reply to this post in r/tianguancifu by u/chenmochou, and also this post in r/tianguancifu by u/Loud_Daikon6167 which cites a TikTok I can't see either because of TikTok's thing about opening to a random page/the homepage or I assume the TikTok being removed or locked. Given the first NovelUpdates post maybe having more of a direct translation compared to the first Reddit post, it's still not definitive to me whether this is "actually more of a fandom thing, with MXTX acknowledging and participating in it enough to help make it possible" or it's "MXTX doing this on purpose with her name choices and character traits, whether she meant to have the pattern from the start or later, and yes could have been influenced by fandom" because I think "Other: 四少" is probably about the male lead(s) compared to it following "Protagonist: the uke's name is not determined yet" so it doesn't seem like the fandom came up with a nickname out of whole cloth. "Four young masters" is perfectly probable and could be equally reasonable, and "four ikemen" could even follow in reasonability; in fact it could be more likely and realistic since this is a modern setting, which would have different use of "young master" to me, and because we believe the gong to be the regular human and the shou to be the grim reaper. But for the wordplay, I would have liked it if the gong were the grim reaper and the "four theme naming" came from the famous "sì" (四 | 四) meaning "four" is homophonous with "sǐ" (死 | 死) meaning "die/death" and the latter being used in the Chinese for "grim reaper"/"death god".

[perfectlyvalid49]

Would this person hide me?

Would this person turn me in?

Is it safe to tell this person I'm Jewish?

What is the plan for leaving? (Where am I going? How am I getting there? What's coming with me? How much of my life can I shove in a suitcase?)

What is the threshold for leaving? (Remember to err on the side of caution. If you wait too long you won't be able to go.)

All these things are questions that Jews ask themselves. And while obviously, the worst results of antisemitism are the actual attacks against Jews, especially those that result in the loss of life, I think that it is still pretty devastating that Jews can't feel safe in their own lives.

A person shouldn't have to think that the question "will this person hide me?" needs an answer. But Jews know that it has in the past often enough that it's reasonable to think that it might in the future, and that if it does, that answer is gonna be really important.

this sentiment is so true

[velvetvexations]

I'm probably beating a dead horse but the thing that really bothers me about the idea that "women can wear pants but men can't wear dresses" is that it's literally not true in multiple parts of the US! I grew up in a household where I was forced to wear dresses, forced to keep my hair long, my parents even had a problem with me wearing mostly black and publicly cried tears of joy in a dressbarn when I tried on a floral pink top.

there were also strict gender roles in the household! my brother and male cousins got to watch tv or play while I and my female cousins had to help prepare and clean up after meals. at family gatherings i was told explicitly that "little girls should be seen and not heard". my older brother's only chore was taking out the trash whereas I was expected to parent my little sister, keep the kitchen, living room, my room, and my little sister's room clean, make dinner when my mother couldn't, help with laundry, and when my mother worked overnight shifts I was responsible for getting my older brother, father, and younger sister up in the morning, get my sister dressed, pack her lunch, and get her on the bus in time- all while being expected to excel in school. the division of labor is stark and defying it is a form of gender nonconformity! I got physically punished and socially ostracized for questioning this dynamic or resisting my "feminine duties"! I was also constantly pressured to have children despite adamantly saying for years I didn't want any! not wanting to be a mother is a huge form of gender nonconformity! also, while pants generally might be degendered, other masculine attire very much isn't. for school events there was a gendered dress code (dances, graduation, awards ceremonies) and not abiding by the dress code would incur punishments up to detention or not walking for graduation. in the area i grew up in you get disgusted looks (and sometimes verbally harassed or hatecrimed) for having a masculine style haircut, wearing a masculine cut suit, wearing men's dress shoes, wearing masculine streetwear styles, etc. Masculine gender presentation is NOT JUST PANTS and IS PUNISHED in women and trans people who were AFAB Not everywhere is a progressive haven where childfree women with buzzcuts that wear men's clothing face no backlash, discrimination, or harassment

Your parents sound like such fucking abominable people and it bothers me so much that people like that still exist in this world.

I'm sorry for what you went through growing up, anon, and I'm glad you're out of that situation now. <3