#stuff to get off my chest

[thebrainrotsreal]

Was pondering how Mark’s rigid ass mask/lens is prob a Budget Thing (since squishy, bendy lens are pretty much a mandate for all hero animated series, like JL, BTAS, TNBA, Spider-Man, etc), and then I was slapped with a vision of Mark in a more JL/BTAS-ish style and I had to see it through. I am a genius btw.

[itistimetodisappear]

Yes we've all heard aroace people complain about the 'you haven't met the right person' line. But to the idiots citing this as the reason aroace people 'aren't oppressed’: No, micro aggressions aren't what's oppressing us.

I could talk about corrective rape, but I'm not going to because that's not what scares me the most. The worst thing about being aroace (aromantic, and asexual to a certain extent) is that society is set up for couples.

Being aromantic is a crushing economic disadvantage. As a couple, you can save more. As a legal couple, you can borrow more. This puts Mortgages out of reach for a lot of aromantics. Adopting too. Although aro people can adopt, you must have a similar income to a couple, which again, rules out a lot of aros. Don't forget Immigration, spousal visas will never be an option for us.

Being poor and aro means you're denied housing, family, international movement, basically anything that allos of a similar income would get. And anything you can get, you'll have to jump through many more hoops for. But we can't fix this by legalising aro marriage, like we did for the gays. Until our society's economic system is completely revolutionised, we'll be waiting.

It's impossible to compare oppression. You can't objectively say which minority group has it worse and I really mean that. But also I'd rather be called slurs and hated by Christians all fucking day.

[the-phantom-peach]

Meeting the Light Dragon ✨🐉

[tagged as spoilers!]

[mazuwii]

Real talk

This is about Reiner in fanfiction that aren’t about Reiner. He’s often depicted as a toxic ex or a violent person and I know they’re just fanfiction but in canon when was the last time you saw him harm anyone out right. When Sasha punched him unprovoked he said she was right despite it being unreasonable- he let Eren punch his face with his silly nubs. He’s just a teddybear 😞 I know he’s a fictional soldier but he’s genuinely just a teddybear

[sunflawyer]

once again, biiig big big shout-out to selfshippers whose f/os have a canon partner / popular ship with a canon character and are uncomfortable with contents of them or anything related to them. no, you're not a 'stealer'. your f/o ONLY WANTS you. you're their canon partner. no one can change it. you're destined to be with them, and no one else.

we're here for you. you're not alone, and we all know that your f/o loves YOU and YOU only.

hugs you. 💗

pr.o.ship.dni

[nibbelraz]

When your brother wants to betray the powerful demon king you both work for but you know that's NOT going to end well so you try to convince him not to do it but he's also seen those LUSTFUL gazes you do to said demon and calls you out

[starry-bi-sky]

yall ever think Shen Yuan went through like, internet withdrawal after being transmigrated into Shen Qingqiu? Like, he's canonically a NEET shut-in who did nothing but spend his time online, you can't tell me that for the first week or first few weeks of being SQQ he wasn't twitchy.

Like, reaching instinctively to his pockets for a phone that wasn't there, having an obsessive itch in the back of his mind that he should check and see if X or Y novel or webcomic has updated -- only to realize he can't anymore and being irritated by it. Wanting to go and see if there's new posts about this or that, but again realizing that he can't.

When he's bored or uncomfortable or just feels like wanting to escape he tries to go for his phone to distract himself, but oops! Not there anymore, and now he has to find a new and different way to distract himself from his feelings. And going through system notifications, quests, etc only does so much.

And there's that Tetris Effect too. SQQ makes a mistake while writing and instinctively goes to backspace on it except hey-ho that's not a keyboard and now he just dipped his pinkie into a bottle of ink or on a still-drying letter.

With him scrambling to fix his reputation and learn how to be a peak lord, I think his abrupt cold-turkey from all things internet would just be another straw on the camel's back that he promptly Ignores until it goes away on its own after he acclimates to his new surroundings.

[lay1306]

Listen, I always try to be very mindful of keeping my wild fandom mind and reality properly separated and not become ACTUALLY insane about a ship, but as a 30 year old queer I feel like I must say that there is no way that what jikook are doing isn't an actual gradual soft launch. As someone who has the tiniest bit of actual life experience now, I just don't see how their dynamic and chemistry could NOT be read as romantic. Are they coworkers? yes. Are they best friends? yes. But it's pretty obvious there something even deeper going on there and it's honestly just denial at this point to think otherwise.

And it all comes back to the whole fandom thing again. So many people try to deny it by making whole ass essays about how they interacted with x y and z that one time. I need y'all to remember they're actual people and real people are capable of incredibly complex relationships with more than one person at once. They have friends that aren't each other, they have confidants that aren't each other. And if anything, all those interactions just make an even more stark of a contrast as to how THEIR relationship is different than all the ones they have with other people.

[tr1cked]

i know a lot of people say graphics & formatting don't matter ... but i feel like to a lot of people they do and it makes me really ... like depressed about writing sometimes.

[wanderingmind867]

Frank and the scenes in Venice make me really uncomfortable. For one thing, the blessing of Mars makes him lose his weight and physical awkwardness. Frank changes, and the first thing Hazel says is a compliment. She says he looks better now. I can't stress this enough. Mars took his son, forcibly changed his body, and then acts like he should be thankful. And then Hazel seems to prefer Frank's new look, which I bet made Frank feel awful. The implications here…oh, they're awful. I don't think Rick Riordan actually meant anything bad when he wrote all this, but I still really don't like reading about it. So sitting through those chapters agitated me to the point where I had to put down my book and write all this.

Also, I hate Triptolemus. Turning Nico into a plant and refusing to cure Hazel… he's a massive jerk. I think I'm beginning to realize I hate most fictional characters associated with plants or plant life, but I can't help it! Why plants, when you have the far superior quality of robotics or marine life or something? I mean… I don't want to be a robotics engineer or a marine biologist, but characters associated with robotics and ocean life always appeal to me more than characters with ties to plant life.

[basket-of-radiants]

Why were you so disappointed by Rhythm of War?

This has been sitting in my askbox for years. I've taken several cracks at answering, only to get frustrated with the subject matter and burn myself out every time. I didn't like Rhythm of War. More than that, I didn't like it in a way that tainted my enjoyment of the entire series. And despite what it may seem, I don't actually enjoy discussing things which I don't like. I always want to talk from a place of good faith. Which is why now that my feelings towards the series are a little more positive, I think I can finally answer this.

I'm going to try to stay away from specific plotpoints and story beats for this post, because my goal isn't to nitpick (if for no other reason than it would take a week to write this post), I'm just looking to talk about my overall impressions. I think that might mean the only spoilers here will be structural? idk, if you haven't read Rhythm of War yourself then you should probably do that before looking for other people's opinions anyway. 

I liked Way of Kings when I first read it. I didn't love it at the time, but I liked it. Certainly enough to keep reading once I'd finished. One thing that made me a bit uncomfy, however, was the war against the Parshendi. They were this unknowable enemy which the book was not interested in knowing. An inhuman army. Their main purpose was to kill Kaladin's friends, or else be killed by Dalinar's armies. And yet the Parshendi, and the parshmen in the form of Shen, did show hints of personhood. And so it bothered me how Dalinar spoke so casually about how the Alethi had decimated their numbers, how the others used the war as a means to amass wealth and power. (It didn't bother me in a "this is a bad book" way but in a "these characters are bad people" way.)

One of my foibles as a reader is that when a book is very clearly treating one side of a conflict with more humanity, I tend to be a bit predisposed towards the other to account for that. And with the Alethi clearly being the invading party and superior military force, there was also some underdog favoritism. I didn't really like how the book treated the Parshendi. This is to say that going forward, the singers would be more important to me than any other through line.

So imagine my delight at reading Words of Radiance and meeting Eshonai, one of the Parshendi, who even gets her own point of view sections! They were no longer being treated as a faceless mass, we were getting to see things from their perspective as well. And it became plain to see the damage the Alethi had done to them. I couldn't really bring myself to root for Dalinar or really any of the humans against the listeners. I couldn't even bring myself to like most of these characters. I still enjoyed the book but once it became clear there wouldn't be a peaceful conclusion, let's just say that I wouldn't have wept for Dalinar and Adolin if Szeth had managed to off them. Like everyone in the book, I assumed that going forward all the parshmen would be turned into evil voidbringers in the everstorm and that the listeners were mostly dead. Except for Rlain, and Eshonai because I'd read or been told that book 4 would be Eshonai's book and thus had assumed she was fine. (Oathbringer spoilers, she was not fine.) So ultimately it was still a bit of a downer way to end the book. 

So imagine my delight at reading Oathbringer, where for the first time singers were being treated as people, full and real people, and where the human characters could no longer ignore or dismiss them. We met Khen and the others, common singers who were sympathetic and just wanted freedom from bondage. We see Venli grapple with the loss of her home. We see Leshwi and Moash connecting with and understanding one another. We learn of a history where singers were the original inhabitants of the planet. Parallel to this, Dalinar is having a truly excellent character arc about confronting one's past actions and acknowledging them to move forward and do better. I loved Oathbringer, for some years it was my favorite book, and I was excited as hell to see what came next. At the time, it seemed to me that there is a clear direction the story is going. Two books about needless war, and then a third where the main cast is forced to acknowledge the personhood of their enemies. This was so cool, all of my feelings from the previous installments were being validated, the characters were going to have to face what they've done in the past and outgrow their militaristic mindsets, I was so sure of that.

Imagine my disappointment when that does not even remotely resemble the direction the story went in Rhythm of War. RoW presented a clear, straightforward “us vs. them" narrative, where every character was totally fine with killing singers. Characters aligned with the singers were either flattened into wholly evil versions of themselves (Moash) or were expected to turn on their side in favor of the humans (Venli.) Because clearly there was no reason good people would be on the side that's all former slaves trying to stay free. Maybe there's some sort of accord or understanding between Navani and Raboniel that I might have found meaningful if the seeds of mutual understanding weren't already there in Oathbringer and then apparently ignored for a year by all the characters.

I have a lot of issues with how the listeners are handled in these books. (Here's some elaboration.) Following OB, I had thought that all my concerns were going to be addressed. Following RoW, I knew they never would be. 

Which is my main complaint, because that's the thread that matters most to me in this series.

I have a lot of other Things as well. Gonna just talk about a few big ones. 

One outsized source of disappointment that may seem a little petty, and which probably is, is that I felt mislead by the premise of the book. It had been announced that this book would center Venli and Eshonai, and I was unbelievably hyped for that. That did not really turn out to be the case. The purpose for their backstory chapters felt less about exploring them as people and contextualizing their arcs, and more about filling in gaps of world history. In the main plot, Venli was a POV character and she certainly played a role, but honestly not a very important one overall. To me she felt like a side character in her own book. I don't think it's controversial to say that the main character of RoW was Navani. A lot of people really like Navani and are happy about that. Unfortunately I'm not one of those people, and I found it all the more difficult to enjoy her when it felt like it was coming at the expense of some of my favorite characters. 

This particular gripe somewhat comes down to preference, obviously everyone prefers to read about characters they like more than those they don't, and it can go both ways. (For instance, on a craft/technical level RoW is probably the superior book to W&T, but I liked the latter a lot more because of my stupidly outsized attachment to Szeth and Nale.) But I do think there's something of a real criticism in how the book would rather focus on the feelings of a queen rather than those of a genocide survivor, and how the former's are given significantly more weight and import. It ties in with my main criticism, I think. 

And then there's how human/human racism had also been wholly cast aside as a plot point. Jasnah fixed slavery so that's resolved, and the only person who still cares about structural racism is the evil bad bad evil villain Moash/Vyre, who is now wholly irredeemable and who you're allowed to totally write off because he's sold his soul to Odium. I've already talked a lot about this. Other people have already talked about this, probably better than me. The writing was actually on the wall for me in OB, but again, RoW was when I fully accepted that this was never going to be addressed. 

There's something else that probably deserves its own discussion rather than being quickly tacked on at the end here, but here we are. This book changed how the series approaches war. 

In WoK, war was very clearly portrayed as a bad and inglorious thing. It was brutal, it was painful, those at the bottom died cruelly and unceremoniously and pointlessly while those at the top turned a profit. Every day was a new horror. The enemy were never evil, they were always just more people forced to go through the same thing. Through the next couple books, it felt to me that even if the characters had accepted war as necessary, there was still a tragedy to it. Conversely, in RoW (and W&T) war is basically a series of boss battles, in between which our protagonists can kill dozens of footsoldiers with barely a thought in the same way WoK had criticized.

Final note on all this, it sucks how we have no perspectives from the former-slaves-singers demographic. Those guys are really thrown under the bus, and seemingly get no self-determination now or ever. It was a glaring problem to me in RoW. Conscripted and enslaved humans and singers probably have just as much ground to form mutual understanding as a fused and a queen. (In fact they already had. In Oathbringer.)

In essence, RoW disappointed me because it left me with the distinct impression that none of the series's most important through lines (well, most important to me) were going to be resolved well. I liked W&T, but I haven't revised my opinion very much about the overall handling of these topics across the series. Maybe one of the reasons I was able to enjoy W&T so much more was because I no longer had such high expectations.

[pespillo]

they did say the easiest way thru a guy´s heart is thru the stomach

[localguy2]

I hate that this is genuinely something I'm writing rn, but nothing has more RATTLED my faith in the writing team's ability to write a Zane story then him calliNG ARIN CRINGE-

[momentomori24]

The way people get so weird about Shadria makes me wanna scream. What do you mean "well in CANON they're [insert label] and they CANONICALLY don't see each other romantically so it's weird and you can't ship it!!" My sibling in Christ, Sonadow is the most popular ship in this fandom. Y'all don't gaf about canon 💀

People will preach about not letting canon shackle your shipping experience in fandoms until it's a ship they don't like or deem "problematic" then all of a sudden the canon relationship status matters and shipping it now means that you think it's canon. But the same rules don't apply to other non canon ships. Just say you personally don't like it and pick a lane for goodness' sake.

[fazedlight]

I didn’t have the word for butchness when I was a kid.

But I do remember, for a while, feeling that I had found my people - as a horseback rider and a tomboy.

When you’re working with horses, you build muscle from throwing around bales of hay, you’re constantly covered in dirt and slobber, you smell like horse shit. I repaired fences and oiled saddles and got trampled and all that. The first time I was called butch - which was by a straight person, who didn’t think of it in terms of sexuality - was in that era, when I was wearing a tank top that showed off my arms.

It was a refreshing place where I could be myself. Catholic school often forced me into skirts, family forced me into dresses for formal occasions. (My family was well-intentioned and loving, but it was a different era.) I didn’t realize that I was routinely feeling humiliated. But I found my people in riding. And I figured, even though it seemed I was expected to grow out of the tomboy phase, that horse people showed me I didn’t have to (even if I didn’t have an adult word for it).

Which led to an odd sense of betrayal, when I first saw my trainer for a fancy occasion outside the context of a barn. She wasn’t covered in dirt with her hair tied back in a practical ponytail. She was cleaned up, in a pretty dress, hair down and lovely, wearing jewelry and makeup. Completely normal for folks to do, but it felt like a threat to me. That what I saw at the barn wasn’t who she was all the time, when it was all the time for me.

Women could be feminine all the time. Women could do both. But there seemed like no room for women who were masculine all the time, women like me. As my riding friends grew up and developed their femininity more, I felt left behind. Was there anyone like me?

I finally started finding people in college. Away from a Catholic upbringing, suddenly surrounded by queers of all flavors, I finally figured out my sexuality, started figuring out my sense of gender and self. I still didn’t know anyone I’d describe as butch, but the sheer variety I saw helped me realize that I didn’t need someone to be exactly like me in order to belong.

And then I buzzcut my hair - over a decade ago now - and it was euphoric for me. It was such a strong statement that this is who I was. And I know gender isn’t black and white, there are absolutely femme folks who can pull off buzzcuts, but it certainly changes the math. There was no “I can do both” for me. I do one, because that shoe fits.

And then I was called butch again for the second time in my life, and I realized I was finally home in myself.

[charliethefool]

*Tw: sum vent shit....*

I'm gonna be open about this. I was body shamed the other day for being plus sized by an apparent old friend, someone who I guess thought it would be funny to try seeking out my Roblox account and bombard me with insults about my weight on the plantform i seek comfort in. How'd they get this info? No clue. Maybe I friended them and forgot, not important. Point is this. I. DON'T. GIVE A FLYING SHIT ABOUT MY DAMN WEIGHT. It's one thing to creepily follow someone online, but to also mention personal stuff about me from freaking middle school (when I was extremely young and cringe btw) that they knew would probably trigger me is something else. Idc what anyone thinks about my weight. I love my body, and I could care less about a buncha insults. They're words. That's all they are to me. But that doesn't mean they aren't harmful nonetheless.

Long story short, don't go harassing peeple about things that don't affect you whatsoever. It's what I would call 'uncool' and just straight up 'fucking mean'. Please just remember that all of you are damn beautiful, and don't ever forget it, m'kay? Made this as a sort of way of coming to terms with what happened, a fat middle finger to any bigots or TRASH out there. I blocked the person and am now going about my life. End of story.