#thank you for posting these stuff i was having an identity crisis over this

[justali-anne]

Undertale special interest kicking in... I swear I'm never getting tired of these guys...

I can imagine them sometimes meeting up Post-Pacifist for game nights. Like... board games, card games, video games... I have a few headcanons about it.

Card/Board games:

Let's address the elephant in the room: Monopoly is banned. Just straight up banned. They played once... Never again. Let's just say by the end of the night there were magic spears wedged deeply into Toriel's new wallpaper... and the wall... and the brick of the house... And the window was shattered. Yeah, Monopoly, it's banned, it's banned.

Papyrus has no poker face whatsoever. Meanwhile, Sans and Frisk have VERY impressive poker faces, and they're both aware of it. Once, they formed some sort of secret alliance and they dominated poker night. It was Frisk's first time playing, too!

I imagine Frisk would just be a natural at all games, hands down. Well, kind of. They don't always win, but they learn very quickly. Jack of all trades, I suppose.

Undyne has this habit of flipping boards (a classic) and shooting magic spears whenever she loses at a game or just gets EXTREMELY passionate about it. Although, if Alphys or Papyrus are the ones that beat her, she'll grit her teeth and act happy for them, just to make them happy.

Unfortunately, Papyrus picked up on Undyne's bad habit and bones started scattering the walls. Toriel had to ban magic bullets in the house after one of them almost gave Frisk a concussion.

Asgore is pretty good at card games, actually! I like to imagine he sometimes spends time with old friends of his, like Gerson and stuff, and they would have tea and play games while they chat, so he's had a lot of practice.

Toriel, on the other hand, hasn't played any board games or cards in AGES thanks to her isolation in the Ruins. She's not terrible, but she's not particularly GOOD at them either.

Sometimes, certain members of the group would try to break Sans' calmness, because while everyone had gotten annoyed at one point or another during game nights, Sans never did. Long story short, nope, he's just too chill. He's just happy to be here.

Once, Alphys bought a Mew Mew Kissy Cutie board game for game night, and she was so excited to show everyone the ropes (and dominate the night for once). She only won one game. And then she had an identity crisis afterwards!

Snacks! They do a rotation on who gets to be in charge of the food! Undyne and Papyrus are NO LONGER in this rotation after they brought in flaming spaghetti and almost set the couch on fire. Even then, you could only really trust Frisk, Toriel and Asgore with the snacks, since Alphys doesn't cook (she brings in store-bought cupcakes, it's the thought that counts), and Sans always forgets or is just too lazy to get snacks, so he orders pizza.

Video games:

They meet up to play stuff like Smash Bros, Mario Kart and Mario Party, but when they play online multiplayer games, like Minecraft, Terraria etc. they just stay home and go on a Zoom call or something. It's a lot less stressful for the introverts of the group (mainly Alphys, but I suppose Toriel could qualify [Undyne and Papyrus are absolutely extroverts; Sans and Frisk are moreso ambiverts, I think]) because they don't have to go out to do it! Yay!

They do all the things typical friends do when they're playing online games! They troll, they tease, they laugh, they help each other out, they TRY to work as a team (emphasis on TRY)...

One of the games I'd like to see them play is Human Fall Flat (I have that game and I play it with my sister :]). I want to see some RAGE. I'm sure Papyrus would love doing the puzzles, but at the same time, I'm sure the others not cooperating or knowing what's going on would tick him off. Yessss... Let Papyrus rage.

Sometimes Alphys and/or Sans would trail off into some scientific conversation or tangent, and after a minute or so, the others would start yelling over them, "NERD!!! NERDS! NERRDDD!!!" Alphys would get flustered, and Sans would desperately try to keep his composure and try not to burst out laughing.

Undyne and Papyrus have the extraordinary ability to make even the calmest, simplest games intense. ESPECIALLY Undyne, oh my goooood. Though I guess she could use the extra stimulation, she will NOT settle for a game with a slow pace. So much for Animal Crossing.

In addition, the gang can get VERY competitive at Mario Kart and stuff. Undyne is obviously the most competitive, but I think Papyrus and Alphys would want to try and impress her. Frisk and Sans? Nah, they're chilling. They don't care, they're just here to watch the chaos. Yeah... There's a reason why Asgore and Toriel don't often play games with these guys. Though they would watch and look upon them fondly. I dunno, it just seems cute.

[northoftheroad]

Hello ! I was wondering if you knew or had a least of every medical condition Dick Grayson has or should be having depending on things hapoening in comics, be it physical or mental health, I want to make some sort of complete and accurate medical report and I need someones help ! Thank you so much <3

Hi,

This is more than I can chew off! With several thousand comics under the belt, and comic book heroes usually healing over night (or at least until the next comic), Dick has been hurt so many times... Shot, cut, drowned, mind-controlled, tortured, punched, you name it. (I'm not even going into the rapes... Or all the times he's lost family members and close friends.)

(Here is an old thread just with stuff Dick has been beaten with... )

Anyway. Here are a number of examples of traumas from all over his career. If anyone wants to chime in, please be my guest!

Two times he lost his memory as Robin:

And of course, he was shot in the head in Batman vol 3 # 55 and lost most memories again. Though it was partly because (or worsened) by a memory crystal and special goggles. 🤷‍♀️

Batman # 55

Nightwing vol 4 # 65

Nightwing vol 4 # 71

He has been close to drowning in for instance Batman # 237, Superman # 700 and New Teen Titans vol 1 # 7.

Shot by some energy weapon in Infinite Crisis. (That's where DC originally planned to let Nightwing die, because of the effect that would have of almost all of DC's characters, but they were kind of forced to change their minds.)

Shot in the shoulder in Batman # 408 and one arm in Nightwing vol 2 # 80, a leg in Nightwing vol 2 # 98 and in the shoulder in Nightwing vol 2 # 148.

A broken leg in Batman # 65 and stabbed here and there in Nightwing vol 3 # 9.

Almost blown to bits in World's Finest Comics # 269.

Radiation damage in Nightwing vol 2 # 116-117.

Almost perished in the desert in Grayson # 5 and exposed to a mysterious alien gas in Batman vol 1 # 107.

And I think I'm going to have to continue in a part two, because there is a limit to the number of pictures in one post...

[badaziraphaletakes]

In which some poor innocent unsuspecting reader submitted an ask and I respond by throwing an entire textbook at them

Like seriously i won’t even be upset if no one reads this PhD dissertation, like actually what is wrong with me omg

The ask:

I want to start by saying I love this account and really appreciate the rebuttals I see here to some of the messed up stuff the fandom’s spit out over the past few years. That being said, the most recent post about “the creepiest take you’ve ever seen,” was one I disagreed with strongly. It’s entirely normal to enjoy watching media where characters have breakdowns. It is not a desire to see a person breakdown. It is a desire to watch a good story.

(Edit: Just realized I somehow omitted to include the full text of the ask here. I apologize for the error! Will fix it soon. -Mod X)

My response:

Hi and thank you for your kind words! (Also idk why there is this huge gap in the text here, sorry haha!) If it were a necessary part of the story, or a part of the story that made sense, I would agree. But it’s not necessary (esp not at this point in the story) and therefore wouldn’t be “good”, if we are defining good art as being emotional truthful, which I imagine is a pretty uncontroversial definition.

Side note: We already saw him have this exact shattering breakdown in Uz. So that renders most of what I am about to say (and arguably some of what you have said) somewhat moot. But I’m going to continue anyway because some of the points brought up here touch on issues that I think bear re-visiting often.

It’s cathartic, it’s engaging, and it helps people who’ve been through the same thing see themselves reflected. For example, I like watching someone on tv hit rock bottom with their addiction because I’ve been through that, and seeing them finally realize they have to work on recovery and actually do it is motivating and empowering.

I’m so sorry you’ve been through that. I haven’t (although I am estranged from an entire side of my family due to alcoholism and meth addiction, which is a whole fun thing), so I can’t comment on this too much.

But addiction is not the same as an ab*sive relationship. (I do have knowledge of those, both from life experience and from my previous job in ab*se research. I edited a newsletter about family violence research for several years.) Seeing a person suffering from addiction realize they want to work on recovery, and realize that the substance they are addicted to is messing up their life, can make sense. Especially if they're in a place where they're able to work on it and have the opportunity to try to change.

But seeing an ab*se survivor “realize they need to get away from their ab*ser because they’re evil and have a breakdown about it” doesn’t make sense, because being trapped in an absive situation is not about “motivation” or what they think about the abser or even, really, about "empowerment". (Side note that word is thrown a lot to delude women into thinking our capitalist system is working for us rather than oppressing us. But I digress.) It boils down to the fact that they are in danger if they leave. The situation is not within their control.

(This next part is not directed at you, but at the general readership, in case this is helpful discussion for anyone: A lot of addictions aren’t within people's control at all either. It depends very much on the drug we’re talking about, the health of the individual, the quantity and duration of the addiction, whether the person has access to the healthcare they need to be cured, and whether there’s a way for them to get free from the broader societal dysfunctions that led to them being trapped in this situation in the first place.)

Also, with addiction, people can absolutely get past that without losing their sense of self and their identity. If they go through that kind of crisis in the process of healing from addiction, I would argue that something is very wrong. (Not with them, but with the society around them). In a best-case scenario, a person suffering from addiction would have access to the kind of mental and physical healthcare and support system that lets you get free from that without a shattering breakdown or loss of sense of self.

Besides, not everyone who has an addiction has toxic beliefs about themselves or their own identity or other people, etc etc. (Babies who are born addicted come to mind, if we want to talk about the most extreme example.) So I find the idea that addiction is down to toxic beliefs about one's self very suspect. I would argue that 95% of the time, addiction happens because your life sucks. The mental health community is starting to have this conversation about depression and anxiety - Cognitive Behavioral Therapy to work on one's "limiting beliefs" and "destructive thought patterns" can only do so much to help you feel better when your whole life is shit anyway. And it can actually make it WORSE if the victim is made to believe that their depression is the fault of their "Faulty thoughts" rather than a reasonable reaction to a shitty situation. Not necessarily saying we should throw CBT out the window altogether, but I am saying that mental healthcare will be a LOT more effective when it learns to truly take the broader societal context into account. I suspect, I hope, we'll soon be having a simialr conversation around addiction.)

And that’s doubly the case for ab*se survivors. They’re not stuck in that situation because there’s something wrong with them that they need to fix. They’re stuck in that situation because there’s something wrong with the ab*ser.

Regardless of the victim’s personal worth as an individual, regardless of whether they’re a good person or what-have-you, they don’t deserve to be ab*sed.

(I'm just waiting to hear about how some therapist tells a victim to work on their "limiting belief" that they need to stay with their ab*ser in order not to be killed, and/or tells them that fearing their ab*ser will kill them is a "cognitive distortion", and tells them to stand up to their ab*ser and/or leave, and then the ab*ser kills them. But I digress.)

And the loss of self when separating from a toxic system that’s defined your whole life is a real thing some people go through. It’s not bad consider that Aziraphale could also go through that, or to want to see that experience reflected.

I want to be very clear that I don’t have the smallest objection to people wanting to see that in a show. But a. that’s not what the person was saying, and b. they were also saying it’s necessary. IT’S NOT. I can’t emphasize this enough.

Loss of self is the worst-case scenario for how something like that goes. Nothing good comes from that. That is a side effect of ab*se (because the ab*ser’s the one who says that “Everything you are is bound up in me and you’re nothing with me"), not an integral part of the process of getting away.

Trauma is not necessary for character growth.

The way these things should go is that the person is able to gradually and mindfully work through the beliefs that are poisoning them with the help of a therapist, trusted friends, etc.

I know what I’m talking about. I worked in trauma research for over seven years. Please trust me on this one.

And again, Aziraphale can’t “separate” from them anyway. There’s nowhere he can go where they won’t find him. So his beliefs are irrelevant to his situation. And if the show implies that his beliefs “need to change” as part of the earth being set free from heaven-hell’s tyranny, or that he “needs to change” in order to be free, I will be writing a strongly-worded letter to the creators.

But more importantly, *they didn’t just say giddy.* They also said apprehensive. Perhaps they’re apprehensive because they know it could be painful to watch. Or because they don’t want to see it handled poorly.

“Giddily apprehensive” sounds an awful lot like “excited” to me. I admit it is ambiguous, though, so I’ll give you that one. I maintain that the OP expressed themselves with an exceptional lack of grace, however. And fwiw, they’d be FAR from the first person to want to see Aziraphale suffer because they are mad at him. I think I have good reason to believe that's what they're getting at here, given how many people in the poster's orbit say the same kinds of things and how many other things I've seen the OP say that are along those lines. I acknowledge I should have made that clearer in my original post.

They aren’t giving this advice (if one could call it that) to a human. They’re saying they’re excited to see a character breakdown. Character arcs like that are common and enticing for good reason.

I have yet to see a reason why I should believe that the things people say about Aziraphale are different than the things they say about people in real life.

I would point you to a couple lines down where you say yourself that we respond to characters the same way we respond to real people.

Personal growth ≠ character growth.

But what makes a good character is that they act like real people.

As an audience, character growth (even negative) is engaging.

Yes, absolutely. But we can absolutely do character growth in a way that does not spread harmful mindsets or misinformation about what ab*se and recovery from ab*se looks like. In fact, I would argue that character growth can’t happen if the writer doesn’t write the characters to behave in a way that is realistic to real life.

Characters follow the same rules, though. We respond to characters the same way we respond to real people. The same general rules of personal development and so forth apply.

The idea that “Aziraphale realizes his ab*sers are terrible” is something he needs to do for his “personal development” is highly objectionable. He doesn’t need to grow in this area. He just needs his ab*sers to leave him alone. Side note: We should give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he already does think they’re terrible and only stays with them because he is terrified. Even if this hadn’t been strongly and frequently hinted at in every episode going all the way back to S1E1 - almost every scene, in fact - we should still give him the benefit of the doubt.

Also, even if we say, for the sake of argument, that Aziraphale was a terrible, awful, horrible person - I know you’re not saying that, to be clear - even then, he still wouldn’t “need to realize his ab*sers are terrible” or “have a complete breakdown” or “lose himself” in order to grow. That's not how growth works. The best growth happens when people are at peace and safe and loved. Not frightened and confused and alone. He never chose them in the first place, he never wanted to be on their side. If he were left alone, he would just spend the rest of eternity reading his books and eating Eccles cakes and snuggling with his former-demon. That’s who he really is. There’s nothing about him as a person that needs to change. I agree a story where a person loses their sense of self after escaping from an ab*sive system would be interesting to watch, but I maintain that it does not make sense for the context of this particular story. And, such a story would NEED to make clear that the person wasn’t bad or wrong for deriving some part of their sense of self from the ab*ser and that they shouldn’t have had to have a catastrophic breakdown in order to develop their own sense of self. No one should have to go through that.

It’s not the same thing as asking for personal growth from a real human being.

Good characters do not operate according to different emotional and psychological rules than we do, though. If they didn't, we wouldn’t have millions of people sobbing about how real Aziraphale and Crowley feel to them. We would be the biggest dodos in the world if we were reacting this way to paper dolls 😄

Comparing the desire to see a character go through a dramatic storyline like that (and to come out of it strong and shining) to fundamentalist rhetoric is… just total bullshit.

You said this blog has been a good place for you and I want it to continue to be that way for you. So I want to give you a chance to revisit this part and see if you can say something more constructive. Because I've gotta admit, this really made me upset and I can't let it go without saying something. It’s not cool to call someone’s commentary “bullsh*t” like this.

I heard the line “we must die to ourselves” many, many times from the high-control religion of my childhood. It is a classic cult line. Hence why so many cults have "burial and rebirth" rituals, make people change their names, etc.

I am not just making up a comparison. This is a real phenomenon. Controlling ab*sers are the ones who’ve given us this idea that “death of the self” is character growth. It’s not. Character growth happens in spite of those excruciating emotional crises, not because of them.

Growing as a person is supposed to feel good overall. Not always easy, but on the whole, it should be a positive experience.

Also - Again, they said he “needs” to do it.

And they didn’t say anything about Aziraphale “coming out strong and shining”. You added that in. I think it's wonderful that you want to see that for him (so do I) but that’s not what this person was saying

If they'd said that, I wouldn't object to it at all. But they didn't. That part was left out. Which I think may be very telling in itself.

There are a myriad of reasons someone could have that desire, including having gone through something similar themselves.

Having gone through something similar doesn’t necessarily mean it makes sense for another character. It also doesn’t mean it’s necessary. And having been through something that went a certain way does NOT mean that it happening that way makes sense for someone else.

Deconstruction from a religious upbringing is different from leaving an ab*sive relationship

Aziraphale doesn’t have religious trauma. (I’m not going to talk much about religious trauma and deconstruction here, because it’s outside the scope of this blog, largely because - as attested by no less an authority than Neil Himself - Good Omens is not about religion. But I’ll say a little bit.)

Heaven and hell are not a “religion” in his world - they’re real. His fear of hell (and of heaven) is absolutely, one hundred percent, completely legitimate and appropriate, and NOT something he should be “reasoned” out of. Saying otherwise gives “your ab*ser isn’t actually that evil and scary”. But regardless, in either scenario, that kind of traumatic personal crisis is not a necessary part of the healing process. My heart aches for all the people whose deconstruction process was emotionally shattering. But what makes it ache even more is how for so many of them, the takeaway is somehow that that kind of crisis is necessary - rather than "dear god, i hope no one else ever has to go through that kind of hideous experience to get away from their shitty religion", which surely is what the takeaway should be (assuming there even is a lesson to be learned at all from an experience like that, which is doubtful) - and they go on to demand it of other survivors and gatekeep against people who haven't gone through the exact same thing they did in the process of getting away.

How, HOW did we get to a point where so many people’s deconstruction is a fucked-up, scarring experience that we think it’s inevitable for deconstruction to be that way????? I grieve.

I know the idea of killing one’s old self is inherently wrong to many people.

It’s not about whether it’s *wrong*. If that's valid for someone and they get where they need to be - you do you. It’s about the fact that it’s painful and it’s unnecessary to the process of growth.

Furthermore, it is the kind of thing ab*sers WANT to see happen to their victims when they leave. They want victims to think that they have to have that kind of crisis if they want to leave them. Because then they’re less likely to leave. When we encourage that kind of thinking, we are playing directly into their hands.

What should happen is that the victim should be given the opportunity to realize that all along there was much more to them than their ab*ser.

I don’t personally desire to watch Aziraphale do that, especially because there are so many wonderful aspects of the Angel he’s been since the beginning

Agreed.

But fwiw, this is giving a faint whiff of perfect victim syndrome. Even if he were an asshole, he still deserves to just have his ab*sers leave him alone, not to have some kind of shattering, soul-crushing emotional breakdown. They will always, always be worse than him.

but it’s not wrong to want to see that. People do go through it, and their stories are incredibly compelling.

I don’t disagree. For me it’s rather about the place this is coming from. OP was saying it’s necessary. There’s a difference between wanting to see a show address this issue overall because it’s interesting, and demanding that a specific character go through it because you think it’s necessary, or that their process of leaving and healing won't be legitimate (or whatever word we wanna use) if it doesn't happen.

And, as you said, it doesn’t make sense for Aziraphale. If the character is an asshole, I’d be able to see it a little more (although again, I still very much question the entire idea in the first place) But he's not an asshole. I find anyone’s thinking it “makes sense” for him to be highly questionable.

I know Aziraphale is much more than a character to many people

Speaking as a (very, very, very slightly, lol) professional writer and actor - every character should be “more than a character”, if they’re well-written. They should feel real if the writer and/or actor has done their job well. I like NG's line that "If you write someone who is utterly and completely themselves, you get people coming up to you and going 'Oh my God, you wrote my life!'

a desire to watch him go through a psychological breakdown is not some poorly concealed desire to watch real people go through that.

It may or may not be. I agree that it isn't always.

In this person’s case, though, I very much did get concerning vibes. Poorly concealed. (As an ab*se survivor, you start to know the vibe of victim-blamers after awhile.)

Regardless, though, the way we respond to characters is the way we respond to people in real life. Story is a primary vehicle through which people learn how to interact with one another and their environment. If it wasn’t, discussing media along these lines would be pointless, and I'd just spend all my time talking about how good David Tennant looks in those tight pants 😁 Or, probably, I would take up a different hobby altogether.

I wouldn’t have wasted my time starting this blog if the things people say about this story and especially about Aziraphale didn’t have real-world applications (not to mention making a lot of ab*se survivors feel very unsafe in the fandom - before we turned off anonymous asks, I got an average of two messages a day from ab*se survivors and other oppressed people telling them how this blog has made them feel so much safer in the fandom) - and if their views about the characters didn’t mirror the kinds of things they’d say about people in real life. (All the anti-Aziraphale autiphobic takes come to mind.) I flatter myself I have enough judgment that those takes wouldn't have troubled me so deeply if they weren't reflective of real-world societal problems and indicative of problematic attitudes in the people who write them.

In this case, the wording is identical to the kinds of problematic things people say about real-life victims/survivors. Yes, the person may not actually consciously want (or want at all) to see real-life ab*se victims/survivors suffer. But I absolutely, one hundred per cent guarantee you that anyone saying this has some major problematic biases/assumptions that are contributing to how ab*se survivors are maligned, degraded, and oppressed in our society. (I never want to see Disabled people suffer, but if I say ableist things, I’m contributing to it whether I mean to or not. I may not want to see women suffer, I am a woman, well more or less anyway lol, and I've identified as a feminist my entire adult life, but nevertheless there have certainly been times in the past when I've said sexist things. It's something all of us will always have to be vigilant against in ourselves. I suspect at this point I'm preaching to the choir, because you do not strike me at all as a bigoted or ignorant person, but I figured I'd re-iterate all that again anyway, because screaming it through a megaphone as often as possible is what this blog is for lol. :)

And what’s worse, they are spreading that rhetoric. I’ll be damned if I’ll let it go by without saying something.

Hope this makes sense and cleared some things up.

With love and respect,

Mod X.

[leighlew3]

Hi Leigh, hope you are doing well!

Maybe you have answered this question before: how would you have written the Supergirl reveal to Lena?

You still have the elements of it being so late in series and that Lena actually already knows.

I wonder how a good writer would approach this because in the show it was an actual train wreck- Lena wanting to expose Supergirl’s identity at the Pulitzer party before Kara actually said it?! So out of character. And all that stuff after? So stupid.

Anyway thanks for answering this question :)

Hi! Hangin' in there, thank you. 🤗

Well, it depends on what point the launch off was.

Let's say she learns via Lex, just like in the show (rather than rewrite the whole damn series in this post, haha).

Just thinking on the fly, here goes... I woulda just had her reeling, feeling betrayed, and isolating rather than putting on a front.

Kara doesn't understand what's happening, but wonders if maybe Lena is secretly angry with her for killing Lex (remember, Kara believed she took him down in that final fight at the end of S4). This is hammered in further after Alex plants the seed that, evil or not, Lex was still Lena's brother, and so some level of sadness is likely to still exist there. She advises Kara to give Lena time and space.

Kara, further worried by Lena's worsening isolation and mood, ignores her sister's advice and makes efforts to connect, but increasingly senses the distance and her guilt grows.

Meanwhile Lena -- between finding out the truth that Kara is Supergirl in such a terrible way, while also hiding that she killed Lex (to protect Kara, ironically) truly spirals and starts to think that Kara perhaps never was truly her friend at all, only using her to be able to eventually take down Lex. A means to an end. Feeling like that's all she's ever been to anybody, including her "best friend" who meant the world to her, Lena becomes darker and more cold, sure -- but never takes those ridiculous 'villainous' actions of any kind.

Alex pulls a typical Alex move and starts to suspect that Lena's isolation and darker vibes could mean trouble as "She is a Luthor." and she's worried she'll carry Lex's torch now that he's gone, and her isolation means she's up to something. Kara of course doesn't buy it -- much like in the show, defending Lena, rebelling against the notion.

After ramping the tension throughout Season 5A on these fronts, a dramatic series of events eventually leads Kara to go to Lena and try to have a much needed conversation. Lena thinks she's perhaps finally going to confess, and she allows herself to feel hopeful again -- alas that hope is dashed, when instead Kara simply apologizes for killing Lex (so she thinks she did), and not realizing how much doing so would cause Lena pain. Lena finds this ironic, Kara's concern for her pain, considering she's lied to her all this time and still won't be open with her. Lena then decides that if nothing else, she won't lie.

She tells Kara that Lex died at HER hand, not Kara's.

Kara is shocked. She's pulled away by an emergency before they can discuss this further. And thus, Kara now believes Lena's distance and darkness is driven by guilt over killing her own brother, and Kara now feels more guilty than ever that she went through that, and that she continues to keep Lena in the dark, even though Lena opened up to her. As we approach mid-season, the two have several 'almost' moments where it seems Kara might actually confess her identity. And we make it clear that she wants to. But the more she sees how hurt Lena is about having to kill Lex, to protect her no less, the worse she feels and the more she's terrified to tell Lena her secret, believing that Lena's done so much for her, meanwhile all she's done -- is lie. It wrecks Kara. And her anger issues start to rise up again, and that comes out a lot in Crisis crossover (in which our world's Lex is NOT yet present again btw), which is of increasing concern to everybody.

Post Crisis, in which Lena and Kara work together to save everybody even though they can barely even look at each other, we have these two idiots with their secrets, both struggling tremendously -- Kara with her anger and guilt, and Lena with her sadness and pain. And both with their regrets. And the rest of the group is noticing these tensions, between missions / various genre adventures.

It ramps up, until finally, shit hits the fan in a 100th episode. Lena is held hostage by someone threatening to kill her if Supergirl doesn't reveal her identity (similar to how it was in the show, but without the Mxy stuff, or at least using it better) -- Kara is fully willing to reveal herself to save Lena. She prepares to do just that, and even goes to the press conference, but just before she has to do it, her friends find a way to save Lena without the reveal needing to happen. But Kara is also nearly killed in the battle. The closest she's ever come to dying.

In the aftermath, Lena has now seen how far Kara would go to protect her -- both in terms of being willing to give up her life AND reveal her identity to the world. Lena of course forgives Kara (quietly, to herself) and decides to let Kara have her secret, even if it means they both pretend the other doesn't know, silly as it it. Alas, what she doesn't expect, at the end of the episode --

Kara reveals her identity to Lena (at Kara's place after everyone else goes home). Turns out almost losing her life made her realize she didn't want to die a coward and a liar on this front. And also, Lena not knowing put her at worse risk than knowing. And she deserves to know, so she can protect herself. So Kara can better protect her.

After/during her confession, Lena sheds a tear, and Kara starts to profusely apologize, thinking Lena is devastated by the revelation. But Lena confesses that it's tears of relief, because she's already known. She was just wondering if Kara would ever trust her enough to tell her the truth. Kara is shocked to know Lena knew, grateful she's kept the secret for her, and heartbroken to know she learned it from Lex, before killing him. She also makes it clear she didn't keep it from her because she didn't trust her, it was never about that. It was simply the belief that not telling her protected her somehow. But now she's seen that was foolish, in this case. Realizing now they've both been dumb and their secrets have done nothing but cause each other, and themselves, so much pain -- they agree: no more secrets.

And they hug it out -- because besties! Just gals being pals right?!

*eye roll*

Then the rest of 5B becomes all about Lex popping up alive, and being furious that Lena and Kara are closer than ever, and that his attempt to destroy their relatio- I mean "friendship" failed. And he comes at them harder than ever, with Lillian's help. And so on. And by the end of S5, in an epic battle, Lex is finally stopped and captured once and for all and hauled off to prison, but not before sending Kara to the phantom zone.

Lena is devastated, as she and Kara only recently had all cards on the table and were growing closer than ever, so S6A then becomes all about the super friends trying to find Kara in the Phantom Zone (with a LOT less cheesy stupidity, and a lot more focus on Kara's traumas and torture while in the PZ rather than any dumb filler crap with her dad being alive -- perhaps she sees him, but it's just a cruel illusion).

Meanwhile, Lena, at wits end, visits Lex in prison, hoping to get information out of him as to where and how they can find Kara in the PZ. But he taunts her, plays games with her, etc until finally, she tells him goodbye for good. He doesn't believe she'll be able to stay away forever, especially as long as he knows how to find Kara. But she finally sees through it all, basically tells him he's full of shit, that he has no idea how to reach Kara in the PZ, he's a liar, always has been, and his power over her is gone. She vows to find Kara on her own and to never be anything like him, as he's selfish and cruel and insane. And she finally walks away from him. And he can't believe it.

Now that she's found her inner strength, Lena is able to think more clearly, less out of anger and desperation, and thus she, Alex and the Superfriends eventually embark on an action-packed retrieval of Kara in the Phantom Zone, ultimately saving her in the mid-season finale.

The final half of the final season (6B) focuses on Kara's deep traumas experienced/re-lived in the phantom zone, as she struggles with doing her job as "perfect" Supergirl while mentally screwed up. No one really notices but Lena, because Kara hides it well. Alex is just happy her sister is back, busy planning a wedding, focusing on vigilante work, etc. And the Superfriends have lots of other issues to focus on as well. But Lena sees Kara's struggles because she knows a thing or two about trauma, and she's there for her. Especially after Alex and Kelly get married with a few episodes to go and Kara doesn't want to burden her sister, who is finally so happy.

The final episodes feature Kara facing her demons, internal and external (as villains from past seasons pop up to haunt her, as it turns out the events post Crisis brought them into this universe, and now they've come after her, and they've all got to take them down).

In the end, the show wraps up with Kara finding a level of peace she never had before, having faced the past and all she's gone through and lost, in great part thanks to having Lena by her side.

And the show ends focused on Kara, for an episode called KARA. Not focused on Lex, nor the supporting characters, not on shoe-horned cameos, nor other bs. But Kara herself, and her journey, her healing from a lifetime of loss and trauma, her relationships to her family and friends, and rediscovering that which is always going to rest deep within her soul, even if it gets a little lost sometimes...

Her unbreakable sense of HOPE.

The End.

[carlyraejepsans]

Hi ! This is the anon who had a full on gender crisis in your asks like, a month ago I think ?

First I wanted to apologize, now that I'm doing better I realize that venting to a random trans person online was maybe kind of uhh... rude ^^'

And secondly I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart, because your answer was just, so, so nice that I teared up a little bit (a lot). And sometimes over the course of one month, I came back to the post and felt really emotional still. You took the time to explain things in a touching way and with utmost kindness, so yeah. Thank you. Now, I took the time to reflect on my identity, regardless of what other folks thought of me. And I decided to educate myself more on like queer history and people's experiences with labels and stuff ? And a lot of it resonated with me, I just chose to ignore it so I could stay in my own little bubble of self loathing... And I actually came out as nonbinary to one of my closest friend, so that's cool heh. So, yknow, I can't make judgements about someone I don't know, but I think you might be a really good person :) because your words really helped someone out...

Oh and also, I absolutely love your art so much it converted me into a Soriel shipper, and your opinions are very true, keep going and may the haters be blocked 👍👍👍

have a nice day !

me 2 you i am so happy for you buddy, welcome to the cool club

[shaperaverse-brainrot]

Can you do the character ask thing for Raven?

Thank you for the ask!!!

First impression

Oh good lord. Right. Confession time. I gave myself so many spoilers as I was listening to the albums. I was scrolling the New Albion tag for months before getting into Shaperaverse looking for exclusively DoNA posts, because I was struggling to find any ones I hadn't seen before, and of course I discover the "weird narrator named Kate" had a whole backstory thing. And when I eventually listened to radio hour and had a Lloyd Allen moment of course I stalked his tag and found the Lloydven stuff.

So I kind of knew him as a fan favourite character, and was pretty excited to get to the carnival album on my listen through, to see why everyone seemed to like him so much. And. Uh. Yeah I immediately knew why. Silly clown man who was also a bit of a villain?? Absolutely sign me up.

Impression now

He's my favourite little guy to write about I love him so much. Definitely in my top three favourite Shaperaverse characters if not my absolute favourite of all time. It's really interesting to see how my perception of him has changed in the almost three years (HOW HAS IT BEEN THAT LONG) since I first listened to BotLH, but I think now it's just settled on "Fucked up human being who should probably go to therapy but is trying his very best with what he's got"

Favourite Moment

THE SHOW MUST GO OOOOON THE SHOW MUST GO OOOOON OH DAVID I AM LOSING AND WE NOT NOT WHAT WE'RE DOING BUT MY SMILE GOES NEVER WRONG

Idk if I got the lyrics right but. Honestly that bit in Raven's storytime theatre hits me like a damn truck every single time. Screaming crying doubled over in pain the vocals the vibes the everything.

Second favourite honourable mention has to be the pursuit with Sarah. Because oh. My. God. Being forced to give up your past self as you push harder and harder to save the family you have now. Aushshs

Idea for a story

I am a fanfic writer through and through how dare you make me choose between my babies-

If it counts I really want to finish my WIP on David running into William in level 5 instead of the August Sky Playhouse, and he gets to adjust in a somewhat healthy way and loosening the dam on his powers and doesn't lose his sense of self in the progress

If we're talking about ideas that aren't even wips I have an urban fantasy au where the whole Raven/David identity crisis is that he's a weird demon thing that has to unlearn a bunch of repression to like. Be able to use weird powers and not die.

And as a bonus I have to admit Fayz your Lloydven Cinderella au are some of my absolute favourite Shaperaverse fics of all time I love the way you write David/Raven in them.

Unpopular Opinion

I am. Unfortunately. So basic with most of my Shaperaverse interpretations. The only thing I can think of that relates to him at all is that I wish there was less linear time? Like the whole "Marjolein being with them for two years" and "Lloyd leavimg in a year" and, tying into Raven, him (well, Paul in the cabaret) explaining to Asha in the cabaret that Lloyd's been a doll longer than human, and later to the audience that Lloyd has been in the doll and he in the CU for a hundred years. Just... Not in my head. Nope. Time is fluid. Lloyd may have been a doll for a century but in my head he was like... Both centuries old when he died yet also only like 41. Time doesn't exist. They're immortal yet so breakable mortal at the same time. Raven was in the CU for both a week and until the universe was ripped apart by the chaostrophe. There's such an emphasis on time not making sense and then- (I'll shut up now.)

Favourite Relationship

It has to be Raven and Han Mi. I don't think much more needs to be said. If you haven't already you should check out the twitter tales wiki page and you'll fall in love with Raven and Han's relationship I promise.

Little child sleeping in my arms so soft and safe are you the only truly real I can aspire to create-

Favourite Headcanon

CANE USER RAVEN. It mentions in the podcast he takes to carrying a cane around for pizzazz but in my head he carries it around both for pizzazz and because he needs it to walk. Depending on mood and context it can be because he needed it as David and overcame internalised ableism while getting through his other issues and started using one, because he got injured by Sarah in the postie war and it was an injury that resulted in him using a cane, or simply because he gaslit himself into needing one as part of the Raven persona, starting as pizzazz and then solidifying itself as something Raven Always Used, to the point that if he doesn't have one he will struggle.

[knifedog-machina]

Role Fatigue And Being A Shell Of A Person

I Want Off This Self-Inflicted Archetype Ride, Thanks

Hey, my name's Gavin, he/him, and I'm writing out my fucking identity crisis on main, because what else do we have a journal for?

Content Warning: I get existentially fucked up about my personhood and purpose in life, and I use a few reclaimed slurs as identity labels for myself. This ends on a pretty hopeful note, all things considered.

So. This past week, we realized something, that Jude and I - especially me - have been basically fitting in the same roles Max's daemons used to. Because brains are weird, and they love patterns, and we've been unconsciously keeping this pattern going for a solid year or so.

And at the end of that last essay he posted about it, Max said that we aren’t the same thing. His daemons were parts of himself and extensions of what he needed back then. We, as their headmates, are separate people. And that’s that, right? Pack it in, solid conclusion, all neat and tidy. I sure fucking wish it were, but no, I’m having a bad time and I'm going to talk about it. My old therapist told me that writing out my thoughts is good for me, and I’m choosing to believe her.

I spent most of my time in the back. Not in a proper headspace, but just running damage control, executive functioning. Keeping track of stuff like, when's the last time you ate, or what do we need to do now to make your feelings less awful, or you should really take a break from memorizing brainstem structure and take a walk. And it's kinda ridiculous that I can do it for someone else, because I also have ADHD and all the executive function issues that go with it, but it’s easier when it's for someone else. And I guess that's part of being a Caregiver.

I'm capitalizing Caregiver there because I'm talking about the archetype. Martin was a caregiver archetype - her purpose in life was to take care of Max and their needs as a person, and she felt fulfilled and content with this because she was a part of them. She was never under the impression that she had anything to gain from becoming a fully separate person, someone with her own wants and needs as separate from her job, and she didn’t have anything to gain! She was happy like that, being an extension of someone else's needs, because Max was living enough life for both of them, and she didn't need to be a person for them to exist and thrive together.

I’m a separate person from Max. I'm a separate person from Jude. I'm not just an extension of what my partners need from me. But - fuck me, I've spent this long trying to be! And it's not even something that started here, it started in source, because Jude needed me to be functional while they were fucked up and having meltdowns over their abuser, and I stepped up because I wanted to help them. I helped them until I couldn’t anymore, because I was emotionally exhausted, and I stopped and recovered just enough that I could help them again the next time they ran back to me.

And I didn’t learn anything from that! I didn’t learn that I had to take time to rest and recover before I could help anyone else, I learned that I'm fully fucking capable of helping someone else if I just focus on them. This is the exact opposite of what I was supposed to learn, but I'm nothing if not exceptional.

Because - listen, I like helping people, I genuinely like taking care of people I love, it feels like I'm doing something important and making a difference and I am. It's so important to me to make sure that my loved ones are okay, and if they aren’t, I want to help them feel better. It's genuinely fulfilling to me.

And I looked at that, and I looked at what I could do, now that I'm here, feeling lost and confused and upset about forgetting important people and details in my life, and I decided that I would be fine just doing that. Only that. Specifically that. I can forget about how I feel like I’ve lost my identity by just making a new one. Right? It’s not like I had anything else to do, and I like helping people. It worked out.

So I just helped out. I didn't front, even though Jude did to talk to friends and make new ones and gradually get more involved in our daily lives, because I just didn't fucking want to. Like, really, what did I have to talk about with people? I don't have much. I'm doing something important, anyway, isn't that more useful than talking to people, or playing a game, or getting into a podcast, or reading a book? I was completely fine, and I had to be fine, because I couldn't help my partners if I wasn't fine and if I couldn’t do anything useful I’d have to face how fucking disconnected I felt from being a living person.

And now. Now, I can’t do that anymore. Because I fucking burned out. You really could have seen it coming months ago, if you paid attention, but I sure fucking didn’t. So I can’t do the things that I’ve been building my fragile fucking self-image over, and I’m left to look at what else I have to my identity to talk about. And it's really not enough, honestly.

Like, okay, I have three cats. They're wonderful little bastards, and I love them, and I can't hold a conversation only talking about my cats. I'm a fag, I’m queer, I’m transsexual, I'm kinky, I'm stone, and several of our friends have boundaries around discussing sexuality and slurs that I am not going to cross. I was into martial arts back in source, and we don't have the time or money to learn that now. I tend to like alternative rock and indie music, and I haven't listened to new music in months so that's kind of a dead end. I like tabletop roleplaying games, and we don't have the time to listen through a whole session, let alone a season, and I don't have opinions to discuss on them anyway because I'm fucking tired.

So I don't have much that makes me feel like I have an identity. I feel lost and frustrated and tired and anxious and useless. And I argued with my partners about reaching out to our friends for support, because I don't want to burden them with my nervous breakdown. Because isolating myself from the world has gone so well so far, hasn't it?

Turns out it helps to talk to people. Turns out we have the kinds of friends who also like helping their loved ones. Shocker, I know. And we know the guy who wrote the guide to growing as a person from being a fictive - thanks Goratrix - so I really should've done that weeks ago. Preferably before the nervous breakdown, but whatever, it happened.

In conclusion, I'm really not okay right now. Huge fucking surprise. But at least I know I’ll feel better if I start actively doing things. Because I can do that. Listen to new songs, listen to one session over three days. Play a video game. Getting one fucking hobby will probably do wonders to fight off the existential despair. And it's all going to be painfully fucking slow, because I'm not gonna remake a sense of self in a week, and it's going to suck. And I'm gonna get through it, and I'm going to feel better. It'll be worth it.

And hey, if you read through this whole thing and you're also going through the horrors, mood, take my hand. We’ll get through this shit together.

[erics-meep-morps]

I have so many thoughts about RWBY and I don't really know how to put it all down into words, so right now I'll just say I really really hope RWBY somehow comes back, but if it doesn't then thank you to everyone who had made RWBY reality. I only started watching last October, so it's been short but sweet watching this show. I'm at a point in my life where I'm not really sure what I want to do with my life and kinda in an identity crisis, but this show has helped so much getting through that.

While the show might be over (fingers crossed it isn't), I'll definitely continue to be in the fandom and reblogging all the great stuff people have posted, and I have some ideas for fics, headcanons, and commissions so if I have the energy and motivation I just might post those. Thank you again to the CRWBY, and thank you to the fandom who welcomed me in.

[vees-genshin-blog]

Daily Genshin 14 (Double Update)

Warning: THERE ARE 5.1 SPOILERS HERE. I HAVE GOTTEN FARTHER IN THE QUEST.

Second part of the double update, Day 14 is here!!

I collected crystal cores and condensed resin and collected dailies and stuff. The main stuff I did was ADVANCING ON THE STORY QUEST!!!! So I actually took note of my reactions while doing it, though I actually couldn't finish it, but I will do my best to finish it tomorrow 😤. Everything in bold after this paragraph is my live reaction so I hope you guys enjoy!! In parentheses, I'll add context or later thoughts.

I feel like I'm the one getting scolded 😭😭. (I felt that scolding in my soul. Especially the part where she saying how it's like things go in one ear and out the other... yeah I've heard that way too many times 😔)

Drunk Citlali 😂😂😂 (Enough said here)

Ororon was gonna be sacrificed as a baby !?!?!?!😭😭😭

Im really glad im not controlling Chasca here because I mess up the hide while followin someone parts way too many times and its always frustrating to start over.

Ororon got involved to protect his granny 😭😭.

ARE WE ACTUALLY GONNA ATTACK THE FATUI?!?!?

We finally meet them 😲😲😲. Are we gonna fight??? Pls no. (Thank God we didn't actually fight Capitano. I don't think my Childe International team is ready for that right now)

ORORON EVOLUTION!!!! Nope never mind, he was possessed. GET OUT OF HIS BODY!! (I was genuinely excited until I realized was what was happening 😔)

Ah yes, nothing like getting possessed to finally have some self-reflection and identity crisis time. FUDGE YOU PERSON!!! Don't you dare!! 😤😤😤😤😤 Yes Ororon!! Struggle to live!!

HE GOT A NAME!!!! He's a... chosen one 🥹🥹🥹 (This was me making a cheeky Harry Potter reference in my head. Also his pose when he held the name and was all glowy was so cool and I'm mad that I didn't get a pic of it)

But seriously, why is his soul fragmented??

Capitano is from Khaenriah!??!?!? He also probably knew Mavuika from 500 years ago!?!?!? I.... have some thoughts about that now 😁

I'm sorry but Ororon looks like he's stuck between his arguing parents 😂😂😂😂😂

Live photo taken:

WE'RE OFFICIALLY ALLIES!! 😭😭😭 (Also dang, Capitano has a rotting body. ANGST POTENTIAL)

And I'm gonna stop here because I need to sleep. Peace out.

So yeah!! I stopped after Capitano and Mavuika had their talk in the Speaker chamber and we'll see how the situation escalates 🥹. I hope you all have a wonderful day!!

PS: Since this is day 14, I will post a Progress Check tomorrow since I did a double update today.

[its-koili]

hey guys. sorry for being gone for so long. heres an update

(tw for: mention of violence / gore, general distress, mental health issues)

(tw below)

.

basically i had a huge mental health crisis. i was having 24/7 constant rolling panic attacks from may of 2023 to january of this year. my last big meltdown was in early february. been processing a lot of CSA trauma and some recent trauma that ive gone through. i think i talked about my panic attacks before leaving social media but idk i dont remember. isolated myself from absolutely everybody.

the main thing that made me leave was that while i was keeping up to date on the g3n0c1d3 (censoring bc idk how tumblr is about it), and when i was looking in the replies / related of the awareness videos, i came across 4 accounts dedicated to using gore for clicks / shock. not videos of the g3n0c1d3 (thank god bc of how they were using the vids) but of unfortunate every day situations and cam footage. like, the kind of stuff you could see on liveleak back in 2010. just out in the open on twitter. they all had usernames like "(insert number here) ways to die)". they were all content farms for click/ad revenue. it was too much it was a huge trigger and i had a full on meltdown. the bluecheck ppl on twitter were using the replies of the videos people uploaded for raising awareness to upload mindless g0re for money. the fact that peoople have 0 compassion for human life sent me into a spiral that i couldnt get out of. (i reported 3 out of the 4 accounts i was able to and 3 got taken down but 1 is still up and it odesnt seem to be uploading the hardcore g0r3 anymore. so thats good. but that was one of the reasons i left social media. ive been keeping up to date w the news but thats it. i left my socials entirely and ive only been on my phone to look up recipes or to use my computer for media research groceries and gaming and shows

that was the main thing that pushed me to leave. i just couldnt take it anymore. during the start of my crisis last year, i was planning on taking a small break, but all of that pushed me over the edge and i dropped everything. after that, my issues got worse and i dont remember most of it. thankfully. but i couldnt bring myself to talk to anybody. i isolated myself and just. laid in bed. but im doing better so i guess thats good

on another topic ive beeen nervous to post this on main but during all of this (ive talked abt tihs a little bit on my priv before i left) i found out that im a system a long while back. my dad (one of my abusers) had/has DID and it terrified me to think that i could be anything like him. i also knew cereal abuser who pretended to be a system to get away with stuff/abusing their friends (and then years later admitted that they werent a system and siad that systems are fake.) LOTS of tears. lots of crying over this. was in denial for a few weeks. cried some more. then eventually came to terms with it.

i dont want to post abt my system online too much bc i dont want to act like this is some fun trendy thing bc its not. it makes day to day living very hard (some lighter/funnier issues that make it hard are: arguing with an alter bc YOU dont know where THEY put YOUR MEDS, not being able to cook because one alter can and the other cant, your art style not being consistent because their styles are different). i dont want to really make it a massive part of my identity online bc its not a big deal! theres just Multiple Little Guys in my brain. so. im a system! im the same but....this explains why i dont remember talking to certain people SUIDHUFHX. i always felt bad. makes conversing with online friends hard especially if icons/usernames are changed. ill make a separate post about this someday thatll go into detail a bit more.

i went years thinking it was just "kinning" but it wasnt lol. it turns out that your personality completely shifting, tastes in food / music / art / media changing, the way you walk / talk dress changing, and having complete memory blackouts when you """"kin shift"""" isn't normal. /lh (dw ive had a lot of time to come to terms with this)

but basically right now ive been spending time getting to,,know myself?? iive been using simplyplural for myself for several months and im uncovering a lot of my memories / trauma ect bc alters can write down what they need to in the chat. so i can go back later and read it. its been v helpful!

i will not be coming back just yet. i have no interest in using social media rn or drawing or writing unfortunately. ive been working on my original stuff here and there but i havent been drawaing fandom stuff bc im not hyperfixating on a fandom.

also. some things have come up. im not going to say anything until the party in question is stable/safe/comfortable before i even suggest anything for context (i dont plan on talking abt anything at all unless they start talking publicly). right now i am helping someone through abuse. their wellbeing is my #1 concern. i'll think about other things after im sure theyre okay.

i dont really have any resolutions as to how things are going but i do feel better and im not having as many panic attacks. i dont really know where im going with this now sorry. just trying to brush over the basic topics before i go. idk if anybody remembers me bc ive been gone for so long so idk if im just talking into the wind but if i am thats fine honestly this is helping me reorganize my thoughts (i type these vents out a lot on docs so i probably wont remember posting this hiudhvu)

other than that. i dont draw or write anymore. i think in the past 6 months ive drawn like....5 things. its. weird. im completely disconnected from fandoms now. coming up to a full year of not having a hyperfixation at all.

my bday was on the 6th. im 27 now im very old (everybody forgot it asides from my husband (and the people he reminded) n my abuser). ive been trying to cook and bake more and ive been playing video games again. planning on getting back into drawing soon and working on my original stuff. when i come back im planning on redesigning my profiles and updating my social media bios and stuff bc theyre so old. also ill make a section on my carrd for my system. there you go theres some positivity to the update nxfjdfjh. sorry if i dont seem very enthused im very tired so typing has been a chore hfuidshuifv.

sorry that this was a lot or if it seems disjointed i was trying to put down as much into this as possible without making it too long

bye!!! see u all soon!

[mostlysignssomeportents]

California to smash prison e-profiteers

On Weds (May 10), I’m in Vancouver for a keynote at the Open Source Summit and a book event for Red Team Blues at Heritage Hall and Thu (May 11), I’m in Calgary for Wordfest.

It’s a double-whammy that defines 21st century American life: a corporation gets caught doing something terrible, exploitative or even murderous, and a government agency steps in — only to discover that there’s nothing it can do, because Reagan/Trump/Clinton/Bush I/Bush II deregulated that industry and stripped the agency of enforcement powers.

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/08/captive-audience/#good-at-their-jobs

Man, that feels awful. The idea that extremists gutted our democratically accountable institutions so that there’s nothing they can do, no matter how egregious a corporation’s conduct is so demoralizing. Makes me feel like giving up.

But the law is a complex and mysterious thing. Regulators aren’t actually helpless. There are authorities, powers and systems that the corporate wreckers passed over, failed to notice, or failed to neuter. Take Section 5 of the FTC Act, which gives the Commission broad powers to prevent “unfair and deceptive” practices. Since the 1970s, the FTC just acted like this didn’t exist, even though it was right there all along, between Section 4 and Section 6.

Then, under the directorship of FTC chair Lina Khan, Section 5 was rediscovered and mobilized, first to end the practice of noncompete “agreements” for workers nationwide:

https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/antitrust-enforcers-to-ban-indentured

A new breed of supremely competent, progressive regulators are dusting off those old lawbooks and figuring out what powers they have, and they’re using those powers to Get Stuff Done. It’s like that old joke:

Office manager: $75 to kick the photocopier?

Repair person: No, it’s $5 to kick the photocopier, $70 to know where to kick it.

There’s a whole generation of expert photocopier-kickers in public life, and they’ve got their boots on:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/18/administrative-competence/#i-know-stuff

This is the upside of technocracy — where you have people who are appointed to do good things, and who want to do good things, and who figure out how to do good things. There are dormant powers everywhere in law. Remember when Southwest Air stranded a million passengers over Christmas week and Transport Secretary Pete Buttigieg responded by talking sternly about doing better, but without opening any enforcement actions against SWA?

At the time, Buttigieg’s defenders said that was all he could do: “Pete isn’t the boss of Southwest’s IT department, you know!” He’s not — but he is in possession of identical powers to the FTC to regulate “unfair and deceptive” practices, thanks to USC40 Section 41712(a), which copy-pastes the language from Article 5 of the FTC Act into the DOT’s legislative basis:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/10/the-courage-to-govern/#whos-in-charge

The failures of SWA were a long time coming, and were driven by the company’s shifting of costs from shareholders to employees and fliers. SWA schedules many flights for which they have no aircraft or crew, and when the time to fly those jets comes, the company simply cancels the emptiest flights. This is great for SWA’s shareholders, who don’t have to pay for fuel and crew for half-empty planes — but it’s terrible for crew and fliers.

What’s more, selling tickets for planes that don’t exist is plainly unfair and deceptive. A good photocopier-kicker in charge of the DOT would have arrived with a “first 100 days” plan that included opening hearings into this practice, as a prelude to directly regulating this conduct out of existence, averting the worst aviation scheduling crisis in US history. That’s what Buttigieg’s critics wanted from him: a competent assessment of his powers, followed by the vigorous use of those powers to protect the American people.

One domain that’s been in sore need of a photocopier-kicker for years is prison tech. America (“the land of the free”) incarcerates more people than any nation in the history of the world — more than the USSR, more than China, more than Apartheid-era South Africa.

For corporate prison profiteers, those prisoners are a literal captive audience, easy pickings for gouging on telephone calls, books, music, and food. For years, companies like Securus have been behind an incredibly imaginative array of sadistic tactics that strip prisoners of the contact, education and nutrition that governments normally provide to incarcerated people, and then sells those prisoners and their families poor substitutes for those necessities at markups that cost many multiples of the equivalent services in the free world.

Think of prisons that reduce the amount of food served to sub-starvation levels, then sell food at high markups in the prison commissary. For prisoners whose families can afford commissary fees, this is merely extortion. But for prisoners who don’t have anyone to top up their commissary accounts, it’s literal starvation.

This is the shape of every prison profiteer’s grift: take something vital away and then sell it back at a massive markup, dooming the prisoners who can’t afford it. The most obvious way to gouge prisoners is by charging huge markups for phone calls. Prisoners who can afford to pay many dollars per minute can stay in touch with their families, while the rest rot in isolation.

In 2015, the FCC tried to halt this practice, passing an order capping the price of calls, but in 2017, the DC District Court struck down the order, ruling that the FCC couldn’t regulate in-state call tariffs, which are the majority of prison calls:

https://www.cadc.uscourts.gov/internet/opinions.nsf/0/C62A026B396DD4C78525813E004F3BC5/%24file/15-1461-1679364.pdf

This was a bonanza for prison profiteers. Companies like Jpay (now a division of Securus) cranked up the price of prisoners’ calls. At the same time, dark-money lobbying campaigns urged prisons to get rid of their in-person visitation programs in the name of “safety”:

https://www.mic.com/articles/142779/the-end-of-prison-visitation

Not just visitation: prisons shuttered their libraries and banned shipments of letters, cards and books — again, in the same of “safety.” Jpay an its competitors stepped in with “free tablets” — cheap, badly made Chinese tablets. Instead of checking out books from the prison library or having them mailed to you by a friend or family member, prisoners had to buy DRM-locked ebooks at many multiples of the outside world price (these same prices were slapped on public domain books ganked from Project Gutenberg):

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2018/07/24/no-cost-contract/

Instead of getting letters and cards from your family members and friends, you had to pay to look at scans of them, buying “virtual stamps” that had to accompany every page (they even charged by the “page” for text messages):

https://www.wired.com/story/jpay-securus-prison-email-charging-millions/

Enshittification is my name for service-decay, where companies that have some kind of lock-in make things worse and worse for their customers, secure in the knowledge that they’ll keep paying because the lock-in keeps them from leaving. When your customers are literally locked in (that is, behind bars), the enshittification comes fast and furious.

Securus/Jpay and its competitors found all kinds of ways to make their services worse, like harvesting recordings of their calls to produce biometric voice-prints that could be used to track prisoners after they were released:

https://theintercept.com/2019/01/30/prison-voice-prints-databases-securus/

Of course, once the prison phone-carriers started harvesting prisoners’ phone calls, it was inevitable that they would leak those calls, including intimate calls with family members and privileged calls with lawyers:

https://www.aaronswartzday.org/securedrop-prisoner-data/

Prison-tech companies know they can extract huge fortunes from their captive audience, so they are shameless about offering bribes (ahem, “profit-sharing”) to prison authorities and sheriffs’ offices to switch vendors. When that happens, prisoners inevitably suffer, as happened in 2018, when Florida state prisons changed tech providers and wiped out $11.8m worth of prisoners purchased media — every song prisoners had paid for:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/08/captive-audience-how-floridas-prisons-and-drm-made-113m-worth-prisoners-music

As bad as these deals are for prisoners, they’re great for jailers, who are personally and institutionally enriched by prison-tech giants. This is textbook corruption, in which small groups of individuals are enriched while vast, diffuse costs are extracted from large groups of people. Naturally, the deals themselves are swathed in secrecy, and public records requests for their details are met with blank, illegal refusals:

https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2018/may/25/laramie-county-prison-phones/

The “shitty technology adoption curve” predicts that technological harms that are first visited upon prisoners and other low-privilege people will gradually work its way up the privilege gradient:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/29/impunity-corrodes/#arise-ye-prisoners

Securus powered up the Shitty Tech Adoption Curve. They don’t just spy on and exploit prisoners — they leveraged that surveillance empire into a line of product lines that touch us all. Securus transformed their prisoner telephone tracking business into an off-the-books, warrantless tracking tool that cops everywhere use to illegally track people:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/10/technology/cellphone-tracking-law-enforcement.html

In other words, our jails and prisons are incubators that breed digital pathogens that infect all of us eventually. It’s past time we got in the exterminators and flushed out those nests.

That’s where California’s new photocopier-kickers come in. Like many states, California has a Public Utility Commission (PUC), which regulates private companies that provide utilities, like telecoms. That means that the state of California can reach into every jail and prison in the state and grab the prison profiteers by the throats and toss ’em out the window.

Writing in The American Prospect, Kalena Thomhave does an excellent job on the technical ins-and-outs of calling on PUCs to regulate prison-tech, both in California and in other states where PUCs haven’t yet been neutered or eliminated by deregulation-crazed Republicans:

https://prospect.org/justice/2023-05-08-california-prison-phone-calls-free/

Thomhave describes how California’s county sheriffs have waxed fat on kickbacks from the prison-tech sector: “for example, the Yuba County Sheriff’s Office receives 25 percent of GTL/ViaPath’s gross revenue on video calls made from tablets.” Small wonder that sheriffs offices lobby against free calls from jail, claiming that prisoners’ phone tariffs are needed to fund their operations.

It’s true that the majority of this kickback money (51%) goes into “inmate welfare funds,” but these funds don’t have to go to inmates — they can and are diverted to “maintenance, salaries, travel, and equipment like security cameras.”

But limiting contact between prisoners and their families in order to pay for operating expenses is a foolish bargain. Isolation from friends and family is closely linked to recidivism. If we want prisoners to live productive lives after their serve their time, we should maximize their contact with the outside, not link it to their families’ ability to spend 50 times more per minute than anyone making a normal call.

The covid lockdowns were a boon to prison-tech profiteers, whose video-calling products were used to replace in-person visits. But when pandemic restrictions lifted, the in-person visits didn’t come back. Instead, jails continued to ban in-person visits and replace them with expensive video calls.

Even with new power, the FCC can’t directly regulate this activity, especially not in county jails. But PUCs can. Not every state has a PUC: ALEC, the right-wing legislation factory, has pushed laws that gut or eliminate PUCs across the country:

https://alec.org/model-policy/telecommunications-deregulation-policy-statement/

But California has a PUC, and it is gathering information now in advance of an order that could rein in these extractive businesses and halt the shitty tech adoption curve in its tracks:

https://docs.cpuc.ca.gov/PublishedDocs/Efile/G000/M478/K075/478075894.PDF

That’s some top-notch photocopier-kicking, right there.

Catch me on tour with Red Team Blues in Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto, DC, Gaithersburg, Oxford, Hay, Manchester, Nottingham, London, and Berlin!

[Image ID: A prison cell. Behind the bars is the bear from the California state flag. There is an old-fashioned telephone headset near his ear, such that he appears to be making a call.]

[cephalog0d]

(About the WIP game)

I mean, at this point you already know I love all your fics with all my heart, so I'll refrain from asking about everything you listed and focus on the Reverse Robins - Tim and Damian and the Terrible Horrible No Good Very Bad Week Without Batman because that title alone made me laugh and I'm dying to know more

Thank you!!! <3 Your support and motivation are everything.

(also requested by @automaticsoulharmony so I hope it's okay to combine the asks!)

OH BOY. This mess. XD I have so many feelings about this mess. I've had a couple references in some of the reverse robins stuff I've posted (and in an upcoming one) to an Incident involving Tim and Damian and Ra's and some bad things happening. Well. This is that incident.

This takes place when Tim is 14-ish and Damian is 19-ish (and Duke is 17-ish). While Duke and Damian get along okay, Tim and Damian emphatically do not, for various reasons, but a major one is that the reason Tim figured out their secret identities was because of a very small slip-up on Damian's part, and Damian being Damian he does not take that well. (To be fair, while Tim doesn't excessively rub his face in it, he's not entirely gracious about it, either, because he can be just as much of a petty little shit.) Generally speaking, Tim genuinely wants to help the Bats but maybe also just a little wants to show up Damian because he's a little arrogant and a little competitive, and Damian absolutely does not want this random child involved in anything and he certainly doesn't need his help.

Cut to: A little over a year after Tim falls into the whole Bat thing, Batman has to leave town to take care of some big League business, and leaves Damian in charge as the eldest. Due to Reasons (which are actual plotted reasons, but I'm glossing over them here), Ra's decides this is a good time to roll up and cause some mischief.

Damian (not incorrectly) interprets this as yet another test where he's expected to prove himself and focuses on doing that (successfully, to be fair!) Tim, on the other hand, thinks (correctly) that it's a smoke screen for some other schemery, intended to distract Damian. Later in their relationship, Damian would listen to this and at least consider it, but unfortunately they are emphatically Not Friends, and Damian absolutely does not need help from some random child who's forced his way into their life, so he doesn't listen. Also unfortunately, Tim "Self-preservation who? never met her" Drake isn't just going to let it go.

So. Without giving away everything that happens. Some highlights.

Lots of detective work

Lots of absolutely not communicating

Picking fights you can't win as a distraction!

Life-threatening and permanent injuries!

SO MUCH GUILT

Lying to Batman!

Lying to the GCPD and the media!

Bonding via lying to Batman/GCPD/the media!

Well-motivated but extremely bad at feelings dad!Bruce making things worse before he makes them better!

Also he's bringing 10-ish-year-old Cass back with him into the aftermath of this whole THING which is great timing for absolutely everyone

Tim's introduction to Cass is waking up in a hospital bed with All of the Injuries on All of the Drugs and seeing a small Asian girl sitting next to him and watching him and deciding that sure, this is fine, this is the least weird and awful thing that's happened in the last 48 hours

Anyway, there's a lot of angst and drama and emotions and Duke and the Superboys being real MVPs while Damian is having an existential crisis and Tim is trying not to die and it's THE major turning point in Tim and Damian's relationship moving forward and there's so much to it I can't wait to write.

[wildernezz]

you only just followed me but i saw your bio, so:

analyse me lol

finally got around to doing this. man, i really gotta get back on my analyzation grind. anyways this is the most i was able to think of. not sure how accurate it'll end up being, but hopefully i'm able to get some things right lolll. and if not, hopefully you at least enjoyed reading through it:

autism. that is the very first thing that strikes me when scrolling through your blog to analyze stuff and i just needed to get that out of the way as soon as possible. the autism is undeniable. and if you're not autistic it's some sort of flavor of neurodivergent. i'm putting my bets on autism though.

you're a very honest and straightforward person. you're very clear about your boundaries and what you're trying to express when talking about things. it's incredibly respectable and a really good trait to have, but i feel like sometimes you question yourself for it. it's hard to describe but i'll try touching more on it later.

i feel like you're not a very talkative person in real life. considering you have a lot of deltarune posts, a large part of me feels like you relate to kris. you also just give off those vibes of someone who's a little monotone, not extremely talkative, but can definitely ramble about the things you're interested in. i also feel like the story arc of kris is something you probably relate to. i haven't analyzed kris enough to feel solid in describing their trauma but i know something in that is something you relate to. especially with the conflict of identity and knowing who you are. i have no idea how to describe that in kris terms but i know it's there. 

rolling along with the deltarune ball, there's a whole lotta noelle in there too (which based btw, noelle is awesome). it makes me wonder if you relate to her too. maybe it's the overall anxiety she has, but i feel like it also ties into the idea of identity, losing yourself, or not completely knowing who you are. it's weird to describe because i feel like you do have a solid sense of who you are, it's just that every now and then you probably have some sort of moral crisis or existential crisis and it can send you spiraling if you think about it for too long. you seem like somebody who lives life the way that you want to, but there is still a slight underlying fear of both yourself and the world.

oh i just know you've questioned your gender a few times. maybe you haven't particularly dwelled on it for a long time, but i feel like you've def had that "maybe i'm not entirely cis" thought pop in your head every now and then.

this is honestly a tougher analyzation for me to pinpoint, but it's not because i can't tell anything about you, it's more like i could point at a character and go "that one's you" but i have no idea how to back it up lmaoooo. so here's some characters that i feel fit you but i have no idea why: Kris from Deltarune (duh), steve minecraft (idk why either), L from Death Note, Nick Carraway from The Great Gatsby, both Danny Saunders and Reuven Malter from The Chosen (1987 movie specifically), and also a weird mix Twilight Sparkle, Starlight Glimmer, and Maud Pie from MLP:FiM.

hopefully this provides something insightful and is at least semi-accurate. i usually do better analyzations on my @analyzing-people-like-hell account where i'm given a list of characters to work with, so if you want i'd gladly redo an analyzation over there. however i have been way off my analyzation grind so i make no promises on how long that'll take lolll. either way, my bad if this isn't all that accurate, but it was super fun to look through so thank you for the content B))

[traumasurvivorshelpingsurvivors]

Tw, Parental abuse, threats of murder, threatened violence against women, sexism, A boy being told to toughen up deal, being called names

Looking for support and validation (💛📼 sorry for the emojis i want to be able to find this post once it gets answered, don't know if this counts as symbols and is against the rules, im so sorry)

My dad (45) talks about how to could kill me at any moment anytime i (15M) am annoying to him. He's been doing it since i was a child, getting in my face and screaming about how he would brutally kill me if he could. Now that i'm a little older i try to make jokes like "you wouldn't i'm just so cool and awesome, i can't be killed" but he goes on about how "i could. i could. i can. i will kill you."

I feel like this is pennies compared to other people and their parents but i can't take it anymore. I'm tired of threats and hands on me and him getting in my face and the yelling and blowing up over little things like my nails or clothes or whatever. There's a stigma for boys and abuse, and it feels really isolating... I've heard all the "toughen up" and "man up" and "be stronger" and "you're being weak" and i'm really lonely

I know so many more women are victimized and oppressed and scrutinized and abused and hurt than men and i really don't want to take away from that, but i don't know what to do. I'm so tired and stressed and scared and lonely. Like i'm the only boy out here who is being yelled at and crying about it, i can't help but feel like im being weak for crying. He keeps talking about how men are so much better than women and can take them down and hurt them and i hate it.

he wont let me have a heater in my room, winter is coming soon and my room has shitty ventilation and insulation because i'm above the garage. He said no to the heater because my room is messy (bits of laundry and wrappers here and there, i think it's pretty clean and stuff) and therefore i'm a disgusting pig and going to burn the house down and should have thought about that before i asked. I'm so cold, my body is freezing, i can feel the coldness of my hands as i type this. Every winter is colder and colder these days. I'm thinking if buying a heater secretly tho! maybe i'll feel a little less sad if i can sleep warm and cozy...

thanks for reading, sorry this went into a tangent, i tried to tw everything at the top but i don't know if i did it all right, i'm sorry. Thank you again, thank you so much. I feel a little better now that i typed all this out. I should go to bed now, nightnight, have a good day, thank you.

Hi anon,

It sounds like you've experienced these threats so many times that you've become desensitized to them and have normalized them to the extent that you feel this experience is equivalent to "pennies" compared to others. But threats on your life should be taken seriously, regardless of who says it, how many times it's been said, or even your gender identity. You're right that the culture around boys and men is to be "tough" but that shouldn't mean tolerating abuse. You're not decentering misogynistic abuse by highlighting toxic masculinity. Your dad sounds like an incel.

Hearing about the heater situation is even more concerning because it's starting to sound like neglect as well as child endangerment. I recommend that you reach out to a crisis resource such as 741741 or 988. You can also take a look at this spreadsheet with other crisis resources, as some of those include crisis resources specifically for men or minors. If anyone has any additional suggestions or comments, please feel free to add on. Otherwise, I hope I could help and please let us know if you need anything.

-Bun

[gorogues]

tricksterrune replied to your text post: Clearly he has a pair of dice in his fist, ready to fling them dramatically at the right opportunity

Oh yes, clearly!

aukisstic replied to your ask post: THANK YOU I hate the pride special so much…

Yeah, I just did not think that story was good at all.

demonbirdsforever replied to your ask post: See this is where I go… they were in other comics!? I missed those!🥺

The Rogues are in tons of issues (cumulatively), but not all those stories are great :>

it-is-i-zim replied to your ask post: Not to be weird or anything but rn I actually feel like for Captain Boomerang, Knight Terrors Robin #1 or Suicide Squad Blaze as a whole are the worse than Suicide Squad v4

You're not being weird at all, but neither of those are canon. If I'd included non-canon stuff the list would have been really different lol, but in hindsight I should have made that clear.

it-is-i-zim replied to your ask post: Cuz Suicide Squad Blaze treated him like he was nothing more than a joke (and called him Captain Cultural Appropriation, which if we take Suicide Squad v4 #26 into account, where his mother is aboriginal, it feels like the writers just don’t know him), killed him off revealed that he was actually assaulted by whatever monster he was fighting and then killed him off for real.

Believe me, I agree that story was terrible :] It just didn't make the list because thankfully it's an AU.

it-is-i-zim replied to your ask post: And then in Knight Terrors: Robin #1 like… I understand it’s supposed to be from Tim Drake’s perspective, but it really paints Captain Boomerang in a really bad light. Like he killed Jack Drake on purpose. When he didn’t even throw the boomerang until he was collapsing from 3 gunshot wounds to the chest.

Well, Digger did go there to kill Jack, but Identity Crisis was a terrible story anyway. I should have included it in my worst Digger stories list, and am not sure how I forgot. I'll add it with a note that it's a late addition.

it-is-i-zim replied to your ask post: Like… The beginning of Suicide Squad v4, yeah, I agree, they fucked over Digger big time, but at least it got better at the end, despite issue #26 also calling him Owen instead.

It's of course a very subjective matter (all best/worst lists are), but I just thought those comics were straight up edgy and terrible. I've never liked any Adam Glass or Ales Kot comics.

it-is-i-zim replied to your ask post: Suicide Squad v1 was also Not Great™ as a whole due to the use of slurs for aboriginal people within it. Issue 4 was the worst of those where on top of using a slur for an aboriginal person to a black man, he also said black people can’t be artists and tried agree with a Nazi and made the super racist statement that minorities commit the most petty crimes.

This is also subjective, and I get where you're coming from but I don't think they're bad comics. It's fine if you don't like it -- a lot of people don't like what was done with Digger in that series, and that's valid -- but I think it's a good series. It hasn't always aged well, but it's the reason the Suicide Squad concept exists to this day. The racism is tough to read, but Ostrander was making a point about the garbage Waller, Bronze Tiger, and Vixen have to fight through to do their jobs and just exist as Black people. It does suck for Rogue fans that Digger was chosen to be the problematic mouthpiece, though, so I understand why some people don't like it. I agree it was a very drastic swing from his pre-Crisis characterization, so I don't love that aspect either.

it-is-i-zim replied to your ask post: Sorry, I have many thoughts on the true worst Captain Boomerang comic.

That's fine! :)

it-is-i-zim replied to your ask post: Also for Owen I’d argue for the Supergirl v5 comics. Cuz apparently that version of Supergirl that he’s not only rooming with, but is also trying to get with is 16. And he’s like… Literally an adult man. He literally called that version of Supergirl “jailbait” in one of the better comics of the bunch.

Yeah, I have mixed feelings on that series. It wasn't good, but unfortunately I think a lot of Owen's stories weren't great so to me it doesn't necessarily stand out. He's a good character who's been in a lot of mediocre stories…in part because a lot of DC's output was mediocre around that time.

demonbirdsforever replied to your text post: I read the Catwoman issues you recommended and now understand the kiss.

Hope you enjoyed it!

[loveydoveylex]

Hi Lex! Your ship is so cute and your s/i is adorable! Please tell us more about the two of them but ESP about your s/i please and thank you 💗

OHHH, BOY. howdy there, anon!! thank you SO much for the question, because I absolutely LOVE getting to infodump about lore - lex is me but he's also a cooler me who has a cooler backstory and DAMMIT, I CAN AND WILL TALK PEOPLE'S EARS OFF ABOUT IT.

so take a seat, and, as the magician would say...

✨ LET ME TELL YOU THE STORY OF LEX ✨

I've talked about this kind of stuff a ton before, so you can get a deeper look into his background and how he met ray over here on this post! I'll sum it up by saying that lex is a weakling, a scaredycat, a chicken... all those synonyms. all of 'em. he can't fight, he's barely got any powers, he can't even throw a punch! he uses the excuse of being a natural pacifist, but he's just terrified of conflicts.

he's also got an ongoing identity crisis, so that's FUN. lex isn't actually a member of the same species as rayman - he comes from a divine alien species named stargazers, who watch and protect over celestial bodies! for whatever reason, lex ended up in the glade, with no recollection of who he was or how he got there. therefore, he never had to use the powers he could've had, and thus he never developed any. (maybe a good thing he didn't - he would've been terrified of HIMSELF if he had godlike powers...)

but anyways, yeah. lex has no idea of any of this. so he spends a long, long time trying to search for his place in the world, feeling like an outcast. someone who doesn't belong there. he looks like rayman, the magician, all those funky dudes, but he's got glowing antennae and a tail, what the heck is up with that?

I reckon his 'character arc' of sorts would be learning to accept that sometimes, you won't have all the answers. and that's okay. the universe works in mysterious ways and you don't need to make sense of everything. where he came from and who he used to be doesn't matter. what matters is who he is now, and the person he is now is someone who's surrounded by people that care about him despite his differences.

and rayman is a large part of him slowly learning to accept that, because he's with him every step of the way - from the moment they first met, even though lex was horrified, scared, and distrusting of him, rayman stuck by. and slowly got him to open up. ray definitely always knew that there was something more to him, no matter how much of an outer shell he may have had that needed to be cracked open first.

and in the end, the two just... feel connected to each other, in some strange way. and they can't quite put their finger on why, until lex finally works up the guts to confess to rayman that goddamn dude you make my heart do somersaults and it's weird and confusing but also I really like it let's kiss please. and rayman, whose heart is racing faster than a ferrari car, completely understands and reciprocates and goes sure man. let's kiss.

the two are dating by the start of rayman 3 (yes I have a cohesive timeline for my selfship), and get married somewhere in the time between the end of r3 and the beginning of rayman origins ❤ fun fact: they're dorks and propose to each other at the exact same time, in the midst of a high-stakes adventure disney's robin hood-style. the adrenaline just gets to them and they blurt it out simultaneously. and if that isn't love, I don't know what is!