#spent my whole life being told i was

[bunnieswithknives]

Thanks.

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[nepttunnee]

the thing that really gets me in mha is that like. before deku gets his quirk everyone is like you cant be a hero at all. which at the time makes sense bc all might is number one but like at all??? thats crazy. and then woah he has a quirk and he can be a hero and gets into the top class of the top hero school and we immediately meet a guy whose power is just tail. his name is tailman. and another who i kid you the fuck not is a diaper wearing misogynist whose whole schtick is he has sticky balls. and they’re like these r the top students ever!! the future of japan!! and deku is like i could have never gotten here without all might!! meanwhile ojiro is sitting there like a singular fucked up backflip away from being in the same boat as him hello?? looking at him straight on he’s just man?? are you serious right now. and then deku loses his super cool quirk whatevs and has to wait forever for his super powerful best friend/lover/enemy? to buy him a super cool gadget thingy whole time fucking tailman is over here on the same level as the kid who makes lightning bolts strong enough to fry the human brain come out of his hands

[greenerteacups]

oooh please someday tell us what you think of GOT

oh, no, it's my fatal weakness! it's [checks notes] literally just the bare modicum of temptation! okay you got me.

SO. in order to tell what's wrong with game of thrones you kind of have to have read the books, because the books are the reason the show goes off the rails. i actually blame the showrunners relatively little in proportion to GRRM for how bad the show was (which I'm not gonna rehash here because if you're interested in GOT in any capacity you've already seen that horse flogged to death). people debate when GOT "got bad" in terms of writing, but regardless of when you think it dropped off, everyone agrees the quality declined sharply in season 8, and to a certain extent, season 7. these are the seasons that are more or less entirely spun from whole cloth, because season 7 marks the beginning of what will, if we ever see it, be the Winds of Winter storyline. it's the first part that isn't based on a book by George R.R. Martin. it's said that he gave the showrunners plot outlines, but we don't know how detailed they were, or how much the writers diverged from the blueprint — and honestly, considering the cumulative changes made to the story by that point, some stark divergence would have been required. (there's a reason for this. i'll get there in a sec.)

so far, i'm not saying anything all that original. a lot of people recognized how bad the show got as soon as they ran out of Book to adapt. (I think it's kind of weird that they agreed to make a show about an unfinished series in the first place — did GRRM figure that this was his one shot at a really good HBO adaptation, and forego misgivings about his ability to write two full books in however many years it took to adapt? did he think they would wait for him? did he not care that the series would eventually spoil his magnum opus, which he's spent the last three decades of his life writing? perplexing.) but the more interesting question is why the show got bad once it ran out of Book, because in my mind, that's not a given. a lot of great shows depart from the books they were based on. fanfiction does exactly that, all the time! if you have good writers who understand the characters they're working with, departure means a different story, not a worse one. now, the natural reply would be to say that the writers of GOT just aren't good, or at least aren't good at the things that make for great television, and that's why they needed the books as a structure, but I don't think that's true or fair, either. books and television are very different things. the pacing of a book is totally different from the pacing of a television show, and even an episodic book like ASOIAF is going to need a lot of work before it's remotely watchable as a series. bad writers cannot make great series of television, regardless of how good their source material is. sure, they didn't invent the characters of tyrion lannister and daenerys targaryen, but they sure as hell understood story structure well enough to write a damn compelling season of TV about them!

so but then: what gives? i actually do think it's a problem with the books! the show starts out as very faithful to the early books (namely, A Game of Thrones and A Clash of Kings) to the point that most plotlines are copied beat-for-beat. the story is constructed a little differently, and it's definitely condensed, but the meat is still there. and not surprisingly, the early books in ASOIAF are very tightly written. for how long they are, you wouldn't expect it, but on every page of those books, the plot is racing. you can practically watch george trying to beat the fucking clock. and he does! useful context here is that he originally thought GOT was going to be a trilogy, and so the scope of most threads in the first book or two would have been much smaller. it also helps that the first three books are in some respects self-contained stories. the first book is a mystery, the second and third are espionage and war dramas — and they're kept tight in order to serve those respective plots.

the trouble begins with A Feast for Crows, and arguably A Storm of Swords, because GRRM starts multiplying plotlines and treating the series as a story, rather than each individual book. he also massively underestimated the number of pages it would take him to get through certain plot beats — an assumption whose foundation is unclear, because from a reader's standpoint, there is a fucke tonne of shit in Feast and Dance that's spurious. I'm not talking about Brienne's Riverlands storyline (which I adore thematically but speaking honestly should have been its own novella, not a part of Feast proper). I'm talking about whole chapters where Tyrion is sitting on his ass in the river, just talking to people. (will I eat crow about this if these pay off in hugely satisfying ways in Winds or Dream? oh, totally. my brothers, i will gorge myself on sweet sweet corvid. i will wear a dunce cap in the square, and gleefully, if these turn out to not have been wastes of time. the fact that i am writing this means i am willing to stake a non-negligible amount of pride on the prediction that that will not happen). I'm talking about scenes where the characters stare at each other and talk idly about things that have already happened while the author describes things we already have seen in excruciating detail. i'm talking about threads that, while forgivable in a different novel, are unforgivable in this one, because you are neglecting your main characters and their story. and don't tell me you think that a day-by-day account tyrion's river cruise is necessary to telling his story, because in the count of monte cristo, the main guy disappears for nine years and comes hurtling back into the story as a vengeful aristocrat! and while time jumps like that don't work for everything, they certainly do work if what you're talking about isn't a major story thread!

now put aside whether or not all these meandering, unconcluded threads are enjoyable to read (as, in fairness, they often are!). think about them as if you're a tv showrunner. these bad boys are your worst nightmare. because while you know the author put them in for a reason, you haven't read the conclusion to the arc, so you don't know what that reason is. and even if the author tells you in broad strokes how things are going to end for any particular character (and this is a big "if," because GRRM's whole style is that he lets plots "develop as he goes," so I'm not actually convinced that he does have endings written out for most major characters), that still doesn't help you get them from point A (meandering storyline) to point B (actual conclusion). oh, and by the way, you have under a year to write this full season of television, while GRRM has been thinking about how to end the books for at least 10. all of this means you have to basically call an audible on whether or not certain arcs are going to pay off, and, if they are, whether they make for good television, and hence are worth writing. and you have to do that for every. single. unfinished. story. in the books.

here's an example: in the books, Quentin Martell goes on a quest to marry Daenerys and gain a dragon. many chapters are spent detailing this quest. spoiler alert: he fails, and he gets charbroiled by dragons. GRRM includes this plot to set up the actions of House Martell in Winds, but the problem is that we don't know what House Martell does in Winds, because (see above) the book DNE. So, although we can reliably bet that the showrunners understand (1) Daenerys is coming to Westeros with her 3 fantasy nukes, and (2) at some point they're gonna have to deal with the invasion of frozombies from Canada, that DOESN'T mean they necessarily know exactly what's going to happen to Dorne, or House Martell. i mean, fuck! we don't even know if Martin knows what's going to happen to Dorne or House Martell, because he's said he's the kind of writer who doesn't set shit out beforehand! so for every "Cersei defaults on millions of dragons in loans from the notorious Bank of Nobody Fucks With Us, assumes this will have no repercussions for her reign or Westerosi politics in general" plotline — which might as well have a big glaring THIS WILL BE IMPORTANT stamp on top of the chapter heading — you have Arianne Martell trying to do a coup/parent trap switcheroo with Myrcella, or Euron the Goffick Antichrist, or Faegon Targaryen and JonCon preparing a Blackfyre restoration, or anything else that might pan out — but might not! And while that uncertainty about what's important to the "overall story" might be a realistic way of depicting human beings in a world ruled by chance and not Destiny, it makes for much better reading than viewing, because Game of Thrones as a fantasy television series was based on the first three books, which are much more traditional "there is a plot and main characters and you can generally tell who they are" kind of book. I see Feast and Dance as a kind of soft reboot for the series in this respect, because they recenter the story around a much larger cast and cast a much broader net in terms of which characters "deserve" narrative attention.

but if you're making a season of television, you can't do that, because you've already set up the basic premise and pacing of your story, and you can't suddenly pivot into a long-form tone poem about the horrors of war. so you have to cut something. but what are you gonna cut? bear in mind that you can't just Forget About Dorne, or the Iron Islands, or the Vale, or the North, or pretty much any region of the story, because it's all interconnected, but to fit in everything from the books would require pacing of the sort that no reasonable audience would ever tolerate. and bear in mind that the later books sprout a lot more of these baby-plots that could go somewhere, but also might end up being secondary or tertiary to the "main story," which, at the end of the day, is about dragons and ice zombies and the rot at the heart of the feudal power system glorified in classical fantasy. that's the story that you as the showrunner absolutely must give them an end to, and that's the story that should be your priority 1.

so you do a hack and slash job, and you mortar over whatever you cut out with storylines that you cook up yourself, but you can't go too far afield, because you still need all the characters more or less in place for the final showdown. so you pinch here and push credulity there, and you do your best to put the characters in more or less the same place they would have been if you kept the original, but on a shorter timeframe. and is it as good as the first seasons? of course not! because the material that you have is not suited to TV like the first seasons are. and not only that, but you are now working with source material that is actively fighting your attempt to constrain a linear and well-paced narrative on it. the text that you're working with changed structure when you weren't looking, and now you have to find some way to shanghai this new sprawling behemoth of a Thing into a television show. oh, and by the way, don't think that the (living) author of the source material will be any help with this, because even though he's got years of experience working in television writing, he doesn't actually know how all of these threads will tie together, which is possibly the reason that the next book has taken over 8 years (now 13 and counting) to write. oh and also, your showrunners are sick of this (in fairness, very difficult) job and they want to go write for star wars instead, so they've refused the extra time the studio offered them for pre-production and pushed through a bunch of first-draft scripts, creating a crunch culture of the type that spawns entirely avoidable mistakes, like, say, some poor set designer leaving a starbucks cup in frame.

anyway, that's what I think went wrong with game of thrones.

[jacquiarno]

It’s Bisexuality Visibility Month (also Suicide Awareness Month), and the biphobia has been constant and intense, even in our own bi spaces, mostly from fellow LGBTQIA+ people.

Bi women have been told they are tainted for being with men, that we are dirty and dick obsessed. We’ve been told we are perverted fetishists by both cis and trans lesbians, with even gay men joining in on the insults, with one even threatening violence towards bi women if they come near lesbians. We even got told we deserve to be abused, raped, and murdered by our male partners because that’s what we deserve for dating men.

Bi men are being accused again for being HIV carriers, with gay men saying they are only good for sex because they will end up leaving them for women. One trans man said he would kill himself if a man started dating a woman after him, not leave him for one but just start dating again and that person being a woman.

I haven’t seen insults directly about non-binary bisexuals, but I’m sure there would be and a lot of hate lumps us all together. All this hates stings me but I can’t imagine the pain of all this for non-binary, trans women, and trans men dealing with it all, and it makes me so disappointed and angry that fellow trans people in this community are hurting them.

Pride Month a lesbian wrote “I wish god would eradicate all the bisexuals” while another wrote “For Pride Month let all the bi people disappear” with both having thousands of likes and comments agreeing. Now during Bi Visibility Month, a non-binary lesbian with feminist in their profile posted “Happy bi visibility month, I hope they find a cure soon 💖”. While continuing to mock us after.

Our allies and so-called LGBTQIA+ advocates have been silent and have even participated in bierasure, laughing at us when we point it out, saying “It’s not that serious.” “Lol the bis are getting upset over nothing again”. Only the bisexual advocates and pages have spoken out against the hate.

The B in LGBTQIA+ is suppose to be for bisexual but this community says and treats us as awfully as the bigots do to all of us. Bisexual is the sexuality that is attracted to two or more genders, that we have the ability to love anyone regardless of their gender. But we’re treated as greedy, perverted, hyper sexual, unfaithful, which from bigots you understand and usually brush off, but from those within the community who go through similar prejudice and should understand, sharing the same ignorant mindset.

These spaces are suppose to be our safe havens as well, but are just as dangerous. We try making our own spaces and even that is invaded by these people, we are beyond exhausted. We need the other members of the community that aren’t biphobic to speak out more and shut these people and this hate down. Because the lack of empathy from this community is frightening and all this in-fighting will allow the bigots to pick us a part more easily.

[anaalnathrakhs]

love this part of my life where the things that are difficult but challenging and good for me are things i can stop and skip and halfass, but the things that are difficult and painful and pointless are the things i have to live with no matter what

[sydmarch]

it was so stupidly difficult to find any nutritionist who has experience with arfid & takes insurance so after having to go through all these referrals my therapist sent me & jumping through hoops I lowkey hate the lady lmao feels like such a waste of time & energy

[wylanslcve]

Wylan's wide-eyed reaction to Kaz calling him his demolitions expert is even funnier when you realise that Wylan actually has no idea what he's doing, like he canonically agreed to do demo work for the Dregs without even knowing the first thing about demo and now he's suddenly being called an expert at it and he just has to go along with it because this is his job and therefore he needs to at least act like he knows what he's doing (even though he has absolutely no clue and he's only doing this because he's desperate).

[knaveofmogadore]

You ever wake up from a dream so fucked that you have to sit there for 10 minutes after waking to rewrite the ending so that you can move on with your day or are you normal

[yikes-ajax-thats-sad]

People really think trust issues are just "aww they're scared of love" and it's like bitch no. Trust issues as in I'm deeply in love and the issue is I'm waiting for you break my heart after undergoing periodic abuse in relationships. I'm not scared of love I'm scared of what you'll do with it.

[wishful-seeker]

53% done with Horizon Forbidden West (going for full completion including side quests and collectables), with 88 hours of play time with only one death to an enemy on hard mode.

Of course it was a Thunderjaw who beat me lol

[scoringeffects]

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[justtogetthrough]

After crying for hours today after speaking with my vet my body finally demanded several glasses of water to replace everything I’ve cried out in the last day and a bit it seems.

My cat may need to be put down real soon. Possibly this week kind of soon.

They’re calling me back tomorrow to check in and decide whether I need to take her to an emergency vet.

I messaged my step kid to tell them she might have to leave us soon and I thought there’d be more time to organize a visit so they could say goodbye, but I’m not sure that’s possible anymore. This kid is the sweetest person you’ll ever meet and they made my night so much better. They’re going to come visit me anyway in a couple weeks even if my cat is already gone because they know not waiting longer than necessary is the best thing for her. They said they’ll come and be with me and make me food so I don’t have to be completely alone for at least a little while after she’s gone 😪

Haven’t heard back about the file recovery and quitting my masters is still on the table.

I don’t know if I’ve ever hated my life more, and felt so out of control.

[topaztimes]

Hi this is a vent post! Continue scrolling if you'd rather not see that

[meezer]

mfw I keep doing things that I'm scared to do, but I do them successfully and come away from them reluctantly having to admit that I am a capable adult

[lesbiansanemi]

I spoke too soon I should have known that was too easy for him I’m so tired I was like hey! I might have found someone interested in subleasing, if they end up not wanting to ill start making posts places but either way, ill need a move in date to advertise and tell people. Do you have any estimates of when you might find a place yet?

And my fucking roommate replies with a bunch of links to apartments like well you could move HERE like fuck you fuck you fuck you jackass this wasn’t what we agreed on and also 90% of the places he sent me were places I already contacted and had no availability/a waitlist/couldn’t sign until august and the other 10% were WAY out of my price range also none of this solves that I don’t want to sign a new fucking lease cuz I want out of this fucking fuck ass city between you and your bf you make almost TRIPLE what I do you will have such an easier time finding a new place and moving plus you wanna stay in this stupid fucking fuck ass city just fucking GET OUT

[girlivealwaysbean]

my sister called me and kept asking excitedly that what's happening in my life and