#thats a bit more of a nuanced topic. shes one of if not THE most popular woman in the series but its not really through the merit of her

[empyreansentinel]

Do you have any characters you feel aren't talked about enough? Either narratively or irl, for me Felicity will always be "that one character with the most interesting influence on the story that just gets sidelined in favor of other things"

oh there are plenty!! felicity is a really good example, though it think it is partially by design that she is wiped so cleanly from the games memory. she only ever really existed to a handful of people, her narrative purpose is a warning sign that goes ignored. (wilhelm, claptrap, gladstone, all people who were involved in her death eventually becoming just as expendable to jack and hyperion.) however i DO think that her death would have stuck with aurelia specifically and if the writers had any care for her character it would have changed how she acted in BL3. and from a fandom sense absolutely yes she needs more attention. i need to draw her myself one of these days. and i feel pretty much every BL1 character would be very popular if introduced today, or if they had lived past the first game. outside of that, helena pierce, steele, and baron flynt had potential to be very important to the surviving cast and its not really seen through. uhmm who else. the fact that wilhelm isnt more popular is a little bizarre to me seeing as how he’s so heavily attached to hyperion. i think he was underutilized by the games as well, sacrificing him for the plot in a lackluster way and not really giving him anything to stand out against the other VHs in TPS. he is VERY interesting to me though, and had the potential to be very threatening. sir hammerlock is unironically one of the best characters in the series and he has such a lasting presence between BL2 and 3 and there has been almost complete radio silence on the fandom's end. he is very unique to me! and very charming, and i wish that was felt more by the rest of the fandom at large. he was the perfect introduction to BL2. story wise i think he sits very comfortably, and as far as borderlands characters go, he gets more attention than most. but i am starving for more fan content. i think im cheating a little bit by putting angel on this list but i genuinely do think she should have been mourned properly by the characters (and by the game, from a meta standpoint). shes popular enough as it is within the fandom, but i dont really feel her impact as much as i would like within the games themselves. her being mentioned in BL3 and FFS dont really count to me, mainly because they seem more like misery baiting than properly addressing and mourning her circumstances. she just gets flattened down to this sad, dead little girl. and she was more than that! i guess my biggest issue is that its hard to make narrative connections. borderlands has kind of an object permanence issue with its characters when theyre not on screen.

[lily-blue-blue-lily]

i made a poll about taylor swift. it slightly made my notes a living hell for a week. heres some info i gathered from it cos i figure some people might find it interesting!

(gonna put a keep reading thing cos this might get long!)

- the post got 36k votes and 7.5k notes and really made it round every possible opinion on taylor swift there could be

- it was a lot more negative than i was expecting. i accidentally found my way onto swiftie instagram a few months ago and now my instagram algorithm thinks thats all i wanna watch so i think maybe my perception of how many people are actually are a fan of her is a bit skewed?

- that being said, in general, people were actually very reasonable and had very nuanced opinions in the notes, which was a little surprising

- however, the people who really really dont like her have absolutely zero chill

- tumblr swifties are a lot better than instagram swifties

- i should have made some options on the poll which included being completely neutral/having no opinions on her as a person, thats my bad

- a lot of people think shes hot, regardless of their opinions on her or her music

- the main reasons, roughly in order, for people disliking her are:

1. her fans

2. the private jet thing

3. the matty healy thing

4. her having a white woman victim complex

5. her being a nepo baby (something i wasnt aware of before this poll)

6. her music being overplayed at peoples places of work (which is so valid, i cant listen to cardigan without wanting to die for this very reason!)

(there were other reasons people disliked her but these are main ones)

- a lot of people who said they didnt like her music did have one or two songs that they said were the exception. these are all the ones i saw specified:

- love story

- you belong with me

- innocent

- blank space

- look what you made me do

- bad blood

- the best day

- safe and sound

- no body no crime

- style

- anti-hero

- we are never ever getting back together

- tolerate it

- seven

- you're on your own kid

- long live

- never grow up

- also quite a lot of people said they disliked her music with the exception of one album. the albums i most saw specified for this were 1989, fearless and speak now.

- a lot of people, regardless of their overall opinion on her/her music dislike midnights

- a lot of people said they only liked her music up until red. alternatively, quite a lot people said they have only liked her music released since red.

- i learnt about gaylors (and kaylors) through this poll. i didnt really know that was a thing. it confuses me. (shoutout to the anon i got about it, i dont agree with you and dont really get it, but you were also one of the nicest people towards me on this poll so i very much appreciate that, thank you!)

- on that topic, everyone, regardless of their opinions on taylor, seems to be annoyed by gaylors. (except the gaylors themselves).

- i got frequently (and sometimes quite aggressively) accused of being a swiftie on this poll due to the range of options on it. im not actually a swiftie, im just bad at making polls! i have very complicated opinions on her that frequently change, which is the main reason i made the poll, i wont go into detail on my thoughts on her here (nor did i on the actual poll) but im happy to explain my thoughts fully if someone asks!

- finally, here are some tags that made me laugh!

and this tag, which might be the most baffing thing anyone has ever added to one of my posts:

theres probably more absolute gems hidden in the notes, but this poll got a lot of tags and replies and there was no way i could read everything!

thanks for reading and please dont take any of this too seriously, i made the poll due to my own curiosity and this post is just for anyone else interested!

[shotorozu]

Hello, how are you today? Remember to drink water if you haven’t already! 💛

if you are okay with it and feel comfortable writing it. (also no rush at all, I get it’s exams week and stuff) but could I request some fluff head cannons with Hitoshi Shinso and Shoto Todoroki (separately) with an s/o who is sick with like a stomach virus or food poisoning. Them maybe comforting the s/o or something? Idk, you do whatever you feel best.

I’m sick right now and currently feel like trash so some fluff would be nice. Also, just love your writing!! 💞 hope you have a good day/night

their s/o contracted a stomach virus

character(s) : todoroki shouto, shinsou hitoshi (bnha)

legend : [Y/N = your name] gender neutral, quirk not mentioned

headcanon type : fluff, comfort (x reader)

note(s) : ahh i know what that feels like and thats why i avoid eating out alot, since my stomach starts aching really quickly, even if i JUST ate :( anyways, thank you for waiting! the last week of school was really busy for me today, i spent the entire day filming my project 💀 also, theres not that many nuances here, so i hope that’s okay

➽───────────────❥

todoroki shouto

i can’t really say that shouto would know what to do at first, since shouto almost never gets sick

maybe a few times during his childhood, and during that ONE occasion when he was 12, he tried making soba— when he didn’t know how to

besides the point, man stays healthy; in topic condition. it’s important, if you’re training to be a hero.

so, when he finds out that you contracted a stomach virus / food poisoning, he doesn’t exactly know what to do

sure yeah, he could visit you for emotional support— but he wants to help you feel better.

it wasn’t like period cramps (if you get those)— he has heard that heat can help you cope with those, and he could always help with his left side

in actuality, food poisoning / stomach viruses are nowhere near that💀

you were nauseous, practically camping in the bathroom— since whenever you’d try to get up, and do your tasks for the day

you’d feel a sense of dread in your stomach, and you’d bolt back to the bathroom.

really, shouto hates seeing you like that, looking like death knocked on your window that very morning— skin burning to the touch, even though you felt cold

so, what does shouto do? he goes to fuyumi— since she has helped natsuo get over a case of food poisoning on two separate occasions.

she, luckily has all the remedies available, but still recommends that he should take you to a doctor, if you don’t feel any better.

he returns with water, and an electrolyte solution— and helps you take them, even going far as to fetching a straw for you

holds your hair back when you need to puke, if you have short hair— he’ll make sure to remove everything that’s obstructing your way

carries you back to bed, since you can’t walk without being nauseous. but, if you want to stay in the bathroom, he doesn’t mind

he’ll just bring pillows and blankets to the bathroom. an easy fix!

the class notices that shouto’s been in and out throughout the entire day, and they secretly wonder if he’s a part time nurse 💀

shouto disagrees, saying he’s just caring for his sick s/o, and wishes everything for them to be well again (which makes all of them aww)

bonus : bakugou throws a specific broth recipe at shouto, when shouto came to him for a recipe (since you were feeling a bit better, thanks to him)

the blond stating that “if you’re gonna give them broth, make sure you don’t fucking food poison them again. i won’t be responsible if that idiot doesn’t come to school for a month.”

shinsou hitoshi

frowns when he sees that you’re not present at homeroom— let alone when you don’t give him a heads up on your absence.

he doesn’t think too much of it at first, thinking that he’d just visit you during lunch

oh, and speaking of lunch— there was a sudden wave of UA students that contracted food poisoning / stomach viruses, after a substitute cook cooked for yesterday’s lunch

and because of that thought, it suddenly dawned onto him that you might be sick too

when the second period ends, hitoshi excuses himself to the bathroom, and RUNS to the dorms— absolutely worried for you

when he goes to your dorm, his suspicions were proven to be correct.

looking ill is an understatement, you’re half dressed in your uniform, and completely passed out on the floor— skin slick with sweat

“Y/N?” he calls out, absolutely concerned — which is given, considering your state at the moment

“are you sick? what happened?” he nudges you awake, not exactly sure of the severity of your state.

and when you’re awoken from your sleep, you bolt to the bathroom— falling onto the bathroom floor as you throw up

hitoshi stands near the door way, slightly wincing at your gagging— his heart clenches at the sight of your pain

hitoshi, finally deciding to do something, approaches you “it’s okay,” he comforts, his gentle hands brush against your back

and it feels like a while before it finally stops, and he grabs some tissues when you flush the toilet

“on a scale of 1-10, how sick do you feel?”

“12.”

alarmed by your answer, he momentarily leaves to fetch you some water— going as fast as he could

he comes back, and helps you drink water— and he figures that he should help you get into something more comfortable

of course, his thought process is cut off when you start feeling nauseous again— and the idea of brainwashing the pain away comes into his mind

but of course, it doesn’t work that way. because the sickness would come back if he switched off his quirk

after helping you into comfier clothes, this is when he decides to get recovery girl (who has been busy, considering the wave of sick students that were ill)

who, luckily— managed to make some time for you, which he will be grateful for.

will wipe the remains of your throw up off your mouth, the idea of it being gross doesn’t bother him in the slightest

and he’ll clean your mess if you accidentally get some on the floor— yeah. man doesn’t care at all

though he can’t brainwash the pain away, he will brainwash you to sleep, or take the electrolytes prescribed to you if you hate the taste

hitoshi didn’t care that he had aizawa questioning his whereabouts during the second period, since he was doing everything to make you feel better

and he most definitely didn’t mind babying you so,, he’s less than peeved

when you do feel better, he will tease you about how you were relying on him the entire time.

but the insomniac here would do it again in a heartbeat <3

[minamotoz]

my hbo degrassi wishlist bc i have a Lot of thoughts about it

• i want them to bring back fictional bands like gourmet scum or dead hand, maybe even release a song like they did with paisley jacket

• better neurodiverse rep, especially autism. no offense to my boy connor, i love him and hes one of my favorites, but he definitely feels like a stereotype more than anything and in his later seasons they treat him like a child and characters have to explain concepts like suicide and racism to him, despite him being 16-18 . i hope if they introduce an autistic character, they dont talk down to them like they did with connor.

• idk how possible this will be, but i want them to bring back major characters acting as background characters like they do in degrassi classic. also, but likely even less possible, it would be cool if the child actors could give feedback on the scripts to make things more realistic like they did with DJH/DH. idk i just think everything about the way degrassi classic incorporated the actors into almost every aspect of production is so cool

• i want characters with more relatable interests. i want characters who are into music without being musicians, or characters into drawing or anime or something. idk maybe this is just bc im a terminally online loser with no real life, but its kinda embarrassing when the character whos interests are the most relatable to me is the bigoted, almost a school shooter incel.

• look, im a NC apologist until i die, but i hope the way they go about writing social issues into the show is less... idk.. on the nose than NC was??? like yeah cool lets talk about feminism and how the internet dogpiles women for having harmless opinions, but the entire thing with maya and the feminist club vs the gamers was so over the top and all the characters, especially goldi, felt like caricatures. later parts of NC got back on the right track with more nuanced topics in a less cheesy way (saads story arc in NC4 my beloved <3) but it was a bit too little too late.

• i want the show to incorporate the cultures of the characters into their stories more. like, im somali and hazel is literally the only explicit somali rep ive ever seen that isnt a stereotype, and her culture and background is only mentioned ONCE (she isnt even played by a somali actor which Sucks but also isnt andrea lewis' fault) and degrassi is a pretty diverse show, so it really sucks that very few characters of color have had their cultures explored.

• hottest take of all time: I DO NOT WANT THE OLD CHARACTERS TO HAVE MAJOR ROLES. the amount of people who say that this new show should be a reunion for the earliest TNG cast do not understand the purpose of degrassi as a franchise at all and its baffling to me. it would be cool to have maybe a couple of characters show up but i dont want the show to have storylines about adult characters bc 1. thats not what degrassi is about and 2. it was boring 80% of the time TNG did it. i dont want a spemma divorce storyline, i dont want any character that isnt snake and maybe marco to come back (and i single out marco bc hes one of the only characters that would make sense for them to come back as a teacher). let the show be about a new generation of kids like degrassi has always been about.

• now this may come off as contradictory to what i just said, but i want references to past seasons and characters. i want someone to be like 'isnt it so weird that this school has so many famous alumni like craig manning or manny santos haha' or 'this school is cursed didnt you hear like 5 students have died here' or 'my cousin went here like 10 years ago did you know degrassi had uniforms at one point' idk it would be funny. hell it doesnt have to be dialogue it could be easter eggs in the background like the jt yorke memorial garden or how NC had posters for romeo and jules and captain who in the background

• a trans character who explores multiple different identities before settling on one. no offence to adam and yael, theyre both great, but adam came into the show with his identity already figured out and it took yael one episode of exploring their gender to find an identity they feel comfortable in, and thats fine! but i think it would be cool if we had a trans character who tried different labels and pronouns before settling on one they thought was right, maybe in a multiple episode arc. mainly just bc i know that not every trans person instantly knows what they are. on the topic of trans characters, maybe cast trans actors this time ????

[holdinghandswithastatue]

my thoughts on the lorien legacies reborn series [spoilers]

i think it sucked

sorry

i loved most of the characters to bits and they all deserved better (in terms of characterisation, plot)

nigel. oh my god nigel i love him so much

ran takeda deserved SO MUCH BETTER im still mad

the way they hinted at a whole bunch of romances but only made the one i dont give a shit about canon

i really really hate white girl taylor cook

yes, having a white american girl as the main character IS diversity :))))))

isabela is cool as shit and i wish i was her

i love their fleshed out backstories but i wish i couldve heard more

THERE WAS LITERALLY NO DEVELOPMENT IN MOST OF THEM (personally i think the series was cut short bc they all had so much more room to grow)

(it gave off percy jackson movies energy)

it hurts me how the writing hinted that nigel would get his heroic moment but he literally never did 

and then nigel was left with what? his only best friend dead, his parents corrupt assholes and him still not having healed from his trauma- still the underdog

ALSO: NIGEL WAS THE ONLY CANONICALLY GAY CHARACTER (except for maybe daunphen but still that doesnt really count bc its only implied) but they just like. didnt give him a love interest. 

nic was literally right there- that homoerotic moment really hit me and i just read it over and over

ran’s death was really well done but also COMPLETELY PREVENTABLE

if isabela had just told einar to stfu and shoot lucas it wouldve all been over and ran and five would still be alive 

speaking of which, ran and five were a super cute couple/friendship i cant tell but i like their dynamic a lot

five saying that he “actually likes” ran is essentially a confession of love in his terms

caleb. i liked him. but he was so boring and straight. i think his development wouldve been great if they just DID SOMETHING WITH HIM

also idk whether to ship isabela with caleb or daunphen but personally i like to think of daunphen as trixic which is unrelated

caleb literally. had potential. troubled home life. not as bad as the others but he never really stopped being an uptight little bitch

if he had, i think he wouldve been great

I LOVED EINAR’S GROUP’S DYNAMIC

do they have a name? i feel like they do but i cant remember

like... what a mix of characters, i love how they work together

personally i think theyre just the gay friend group

on the topic of einar,

i KNOW i shouldnt love him the way i do but if you didnt want me to love him you SHOULDNT HAVE GIVEN HIM REDEEMING QUALITIES

(same with five)

literally einar’s final monologue hurt me so much even though he nearly did drown nigel in gen 1 but still

“will you- will you finally listen?” yea kill me now 

i really hated how they brought the villain in in the final book. the fuck. who even gives a shit about lucas. no one remembers him

also it feels slightly political to make the main villain a radical christian who wants to convert the earth garde by killing them

listen i could talk about einar all day

i think he and isabela were a great friendship... of sorts

i mean did einar ever really let anyone close enough to him to make friends

but hes just so... S O F T

no hes not 

but he is to me 

ew

kopano really deserved a better gf than taylor

god 

also i wanted to see more of miki

again i will reiterate i think nic and nigel wouldve made a great couple

i keep forgetting theyre all just teenagers and thats kinda painful

einar was just a kid bro 

SO MUCH NUANCE TO HIS CHARACTER THAT WAS NOT EXPLORED

so much potential

hmm am i forgetting anyone?

lets talk about john smith

that man has a hero complex and its really annoying and part of me is really glad he wasnt the one to save the day this time but also i didnt want ran to die so

i think it wouldve been fitting if einar just ended it all since he kinda started the whole fiasco

fuck bea barnaby and her homophobic (and also mass-murdering) ass

the john and marina thing shouldve been forgotten completely no one ships them pls 

they had their one true loves just let them be without an s/o thanks

ella deserved to have more screen (? its a book) time bc she was my favourite character in the original series

OH MY GOD I HAVENT TALKED ABOUT NINE YET

hes the loml

also the part where lucas (in the body of john) rips off his cybernetic arm really hurt me

i kinda wish taylor died instead of ran

kill off the heroic white girl instead: the fifth wave style

john is such a stupid selfish bastard honestly but having a hero complex a valid flaw but still. i cannot deal with his bullshit all the time

writing one line on john and nine reuniting was cruel when you know most of the fandom ships them

also i like einar’s softening up near the end, and treating the group like they were his actual friends 

i wish we couldve seen more of them

i love myself a found family ragtag group situation

even though 2 of them died 

and the other has an inhibitor in his head, gets shocked every 3 minutes and took the fall for everyone

AS HE SHOULD THOUGH, MOST OF IT IS HIS FAULT

but hes just a kid

my thoughts are so scattered

omg stop i think i relate to einar... no..... not the literal mass murderer “terrorist” psychopath

he’s uptight and always needing to be in control

but he feels the pressure of having to be perfect to everyone else, and thus falls apart on the inside

gosh i wish i didnt love einar the way i do

final thoughts (but i’ll probably add even more): ran :’( nigel :( taylor >:( caleb :| einar :’( isabela >:) daunphen :D john :|

i hope no one reads this

[tillman]

Pls infodump about lancelot from what i observe almost everyone hates him? (Ok its understandable bec of his affair with queen) im curious why do you like lancelot? And i remember a few days ago you post that there so many things you want to talk about him? And i want to see you rant/gush about his character, relationships, mental illness, his flaws etc ans also what is the difference between fate lancelot and lancelot in the legends? I want to know more about him he is complicated

OK its not that everyone hates him its that people hate what he stands for. the french side of arthurian lit is VERY focused on making lancelot seem like the greatest knight in the entire world because…. wow… hes french. and french people suck. stop normalizing the french. i like lancelot because of what he COULD stand for. theres a lot of things that could be delved into more (his mental illnesses, his communication issues, his inability to comprehend love, the struggle with being unholy or wrong, ect) but no one ever does. so i stole him hes mine now fuck the french they did him dirty.

uhm ok this is under a cut for talks of kinda heavy topics (lots of mental health talk, lots of abuse talk) and also cus its long. sorry i have a lot to say about him) 

i like lancelot a lot cus i see myself a lot in him. mostly in his mental health and how he ends up dealing with situations. his struggle with violent mood swings and his huge burden of being labeled as a sinner or whatever for a relationship he admits to feeling trapped in is…. relateable… comforting to see in a fictional character i guess. as flawed as he is hes still heralded as a good person. hes still loved by his friends and his family. and thats nice.. i like it. 

uhm for his mental health the main thing that comes out is his struggles with trauma, awful depression, and also just the fact he dissociates a lot. in knight of the cart he is so out of it he doesnt realize a knight is attacking him until hes thrown into the water in which he reacts violently and freaks the fuck out, trying to rip the guy off his horse. he like. physically can not handle extreme emotions and will either fall asleep so he doesnt have to face it (le morte says this is a known quality of him, he does this enough dinadan expects it as soon as he gets mad) or he swings so hard he has an extreme bout of depression (in the vulgate when trying to comprehend his relationship with guenevere and galehaut he just shuts down and spends all his time sleeping or staring at the river) or awful mania (see: the many times guenevere freaks out at him and he gets so upset he jumps out a window and lives in the woods). Lancelot has a lot of unworked out trauma from being r*** twice by the same woman who continues to use him and freak him out so much he cant find camelot safe (triggering another huge spike where he runs off into the woods) or the literal entire end of the legends where he has to deal with the trauma of while having one of his dissociative episodes in combat he accidentally kills gareth, someone he loves and adores like a brother or son and gets so upset he just accepts everything happening and hides in joyous gard, where his cousins have to BEG him to go and defend his honor from gawain whos basically knocking on his door pleading with lancelot to kill him. 

lancelots inability to understand a lot of social nuances is also really interesting but like, ultimately leads to a lot of strife for him most namely galehauts death and gueneveres constant abuse. The thing is Lancelot basically idolizes guenevere and this is where a lot of the abuse and weird shit comes from in their relationship. lancelot was a very young knight who honestly didnt understand anything about BEING a knight when he came to court. the queen knighted him and him, being young and not understanding, took this as “i am her knight! i will do anything for her!” and guenevere just kinda ran with this? i dont rlly wanna go too into it ill do that later when i get farther in the vulgate and can talk more on it but it leads to lancelot being trapped in a relationship he admit hurts him, but the small sliver of love guenevere gives him when she needs him is enough to keep him in because his mindset is still “im her knight! this is what a knight should do for his lady!” Galehaut is a different situation where his blindness to social cues and other shit leads to a lot of drama and hellish shit and when he finally snaps and realizes “oh. oh no this is what love should be” its too late and galehaut is dead and lancelot isnt much better. his own mother has to come and convince him not to literally kill himself over this and sends him into a spiral of depression where he doesnt leave the joyous gard for months. when he does and when he comes back to court, no one really … cares? that galehaut is dead. and this is lancelots first experience with actual love and his first experience with the death of someone close to him. which is an awful double whammy to have to experience. he does have good friends like gawain and dinadan and tristan and his relationship with galahad is good but they all end up dead or turned against him by something thats he did and its just. god its so sad to watch. the only people lancelot is left with in the end are his cousins, and even at the end of all of that hes left alone with the corpses of people he thought he loved. 

like hes a very flawed man. lancelot is a problem causer and not a problem solver. he doesnt try to he really doesnt, he strives to be the perfect knight mostly for some sliver of appreciation from someone he idolizes he never really ends up getting. he doesnt know how to cope, and ends up making things worse when he inevitably ends up screwing shit up because of this. hes called a sinner and unholy by god, and while he is very proud of his son for what he ends up achieving, has to deal with the trauma of the grail quest alone. he ends up killing someone he loves, and who genuinely respected and cared for him like a brother in a fit of him not being able to deal with heavy emotions. like he truly is in the wrong in most situations but like. in such a pitiable way. hes a good person, but lets his flaws overtake him a lot and pushes away the people who want the best for him. its like…. sad. 

(about to talk about fate u can drop off now if u just wanted to read my arthurian lit opinions :-) )

i could go off about fate lancelot and all the problems i have with him for hours but i think the main thing i wanna talk about rn is how they handle his internalization of his life and then just did nothing with it. his wish for the grail is just to be told he was wrong. thats so fucking GOOD!! in life he was heralded as the best knight like of course his one regret was that no one ever stopped him and went “you are wrong. this is wrong. you are doing the wrong thing.” and that being all he wants out of the thing that can grant any wishes is soooooo soo cool and neat. and then they just reduced his personality to “oh boo hoo im so sad im going to fuck a married woman now” like. the fucking dissonance. like lancelot isnt the type for random flings. tristan sure i understand that a bit hes unhinged and hard to characterize and .. honestly does just go around fucking married woman. weirdo. but lancelots entire struggle is over his relationship with guenevere being both wrong morally and literally abusive! i jsut dont get it i dont understand how they built up something so interesting with zero and threw it all out the window it makes me so mad. i dont even wanna talk about fate lancelot anymore rn its giving me a headache cus im so mad. 

[usertoxicyaoi]

so let’s talk about he’s coming to me bc this show deserves some serious hype for how it’s doing right now.

honestly, at first i was so sceptical about the show. most likely bc it was a gmmtv series and we all know gmmtv series’ mostly disappoint. but i saw the trailer, saw that ohm was in it, and that had me curious. mostly bc i’ve missed ohm so much, and i still remember how well he acted in make it right (probably one of the first ever bl’s i watched), and so when i saw him in the trailer after so long, i really was curious to see what the show was about. plus with singto and sing and chimon in the show too? that really really had me curious bc i’ve never seen them 4 work together, although i’ve seen them on various gmmtv series’ so many times. now that i look at interviews where those 4 are together, their dynamics are truly so authentic and organic, and it shows on screen.

then i got to the plot. and that had me even more intrigued. after the disaster that was my dream i was so wary of anything remotely supernatural within bl shows. but hctm in itself is so much more than that? the supernatural part, yes, plays a huge role, but it normalises itself out, in terms of there being a balance of everything being shown. it’s not overshadowing or overpowering or in your face all the time. it only is when it needs to be, otherwise its shown in a very subtle, easy on the eye way, without complexities or leaving you with more new questions whilst leaving your previous ones unanswered. the plot in this show is truly what makes this show stand out so much. it’s fast paced, with no plotholes that leave you confused, and its character driven and the show doesn’t waste airtime on unnecessary things. there’s an equal mix of comedy to balance out the seriousness of the topics discussed on the show, and even the “cliche” scenes don’t feel awkward one bit. because the dialogue and the manner of scene delivery makes the scenes feel so wholesome.

add in the fact that the show is shot so, so beautifully? it really has a modern feel to it, with such a nice use of colours and landscapes and meticulous use of wide and zoomed in shots for purpose. the music score is so beautiful, not too loud and distracting or cringeworthy. the cgi use is kept literally to a bare minimum for purposeful use only. 

queerbaiting. that’s probably one fear i think everyone has with this show. but the show literally hasn’t queerbaited at all, in the slightest. you watch the trailer, and there is literally no indication given of queerbaiting. we know its a bl show, its a show displaying and telling a love story between met and thun. and the trailer shows that. and so far, the show has been showing exactly that too. there is a very clear love story being told. but its not in the usual typical manner. its a lot more wholesome, holistic, and much more heavily focused on the emotional growth of the feelings met and thun have for one another. of course, there’s some elements of physical focus too, but thats not the main focus/point the show is trying to display. and so, does that mean the show is queerbaiting, because we’re already halfway through the show and there hasn’t been an obvious kiss/physical display of attraction between met and thun? i don’t think so. but for those who are watching the show, they know there’s been a very steady momentum building between met and thun, and its been so sweet to see that emotional growth being given so much airtime and focus.

the characters. the characters are truly so, so refreshing. you have met who’s a spirit that singto is absolutely killing it whilst acting as him. his microexpressions, the little nuances, the fact that he can switch from being cheeky and energetic to someone falling in love to completely serious to someone who you feel so, so sorry for, is astounding. you have thun, a law student who plays basketball for his college team that can communicate with spirits, and honestly, i can’t see anyone but ohm play thun. thun is a tease, but so considerate and kind and gentle to the people in his life. he’s someone who is also struggling with his sexuality and isn’t afraid to voice that out or run away from accepting that he is. he’s not taken met for granted and does so much for him, unconditionally. you have thun’s friends: plaifah, prince and khem, and the 4 of them as friends truly feels like they share a natural, deep-rooted friendship. the sideplots, such as prince’s unrequited feelings for plai, plai’s confusion on whether she likes thun or not (and in fact, plai in herself is such a wonderful character since she’s the only main girl on the show, but she’s such an important character that is given that level of respect and attention), khem’s ever increasing role in helping thun find out more information about met, all of these are handled so well and are woven into the main storyline so seamlessly.

all in all, the show’s been a literal breath of fresh air that leaves you feeling so content and ... satisfied and happy after watching it. i’m surprised constantly that this is a gmmtv show, and i just hope it gets a season 2 bc it deserves it. i’ve never seen a bl like it. ohm and singto’s chemistry is outstanding. and the engaging thing about the show is its unpredictability, in the sense that the show uses a lot of foreshadowing, and building on what’s been shown in the previous episode, and yet it still has an element of surprise, since its impossible to guess or predict what could happen next, whilst remaining in a boundary that doesn’t make the whole plot seem out of touch or hard to connect with. its such a wholesome show that gives equal importance to love, friendship and family. i promise you, you won’t regret watching the show, and once you start it, you will fall in love with it. every single bit of it.

[j4nn4s]

rules:

always repost the rules

answer the questions given to you by the one who tagged you!

give 11 questions

tag 11 people

i was tagged by @isakvdhflorenzi, ty miss lorena <3 1. Is the social media presence of the characters important to how you view the quality of the remake/show?

hm well skam nl is my favorite and their social media game is trash LMAOOO so generally No but i do feel like remakes who DO have such a good presence kind of elevate the show and i think it’s pretty heartwarmin to see some remakes go sm farther than skam with social media and puttin out educational and IN CHARA resources like skames does this so well and i feel like in that way, the team is really really spreadin skam’s spirit via these resources (like joana’s billion bpd awareness ig accounts and lucas rubio’s yt channel)

2. Least favourite clip of the show? Why?

tbh there are definitely some duds but probably one of the clips with sana gettin herself into a hole in s4 just bc some were hard to watch cus cringey or yikes .... idk i cant think of others LMAO

3. Which character did you feel the most connected to and why?

ijeoiqjiwoij even tho even is my all time fave skam chara, i have to say isak for all of these reasons 

4. Your least favourite part of every season?

season 1 - tbh even though i really enjoyed this season, it does take a while for it to build up like i rmr at first not being that interested until ep6 maybe ?? which is hard when you’re trying to get your friends to watch but they have to wait until ep6 before shit starts RLLY buildin up and gettin wild

season 2 - hm ig noora chasin after william ??

season 3 - bro NOTHINGGG call me a purist but its such a refined masterpiece like the pacing is good the characterization is so good ugh i deadass cant think of anythin

season 4 - i always felt a little ??? w noora being sana’s bff ig bc from s1-s3 it didn’t Feel like they were that close like even in noora’s pov, sana wasn’t really a part of it that much ?? like eva was more of noora’s bff ?? so i feel like it would have made more sense if maybe sana spoke more with chris or vilde bc sana and vilde eventually seemed to get closer esp with kosegruppa and chris has always been by sana’s side ?? idk that always confused me

5. What is your opinion on the cast’s participation on social media? Do you prefer it when the cast aren’t that involved like the Skam cast, or do you like a lot of content like the Fr cast do?

tbh i don’t care much abt the casts LMAOOO if anythin it kind of brings more harm as seen with the harassment axel and maxence get and also can bring more controversy like with irene (which honestly is p sad considerin how much i love skames bc now i feel super :/ watchin it like she shouldve just had private accts at this point)

6. Favourite song you found from Skam or the remakes?

OMFGGG love this question .... def doorman by slowthai and mura masa bc its one of my fave songs now and i got it from skam nl <3 ugh taste

7. If you could decide which characters from Skam got a season, who would you choose?

OOOHHH ugh torn bc i like isak’s pov but also i want even’s so might have to forfeit isak season for even season ....... hm so probs vilde, sana, even, noora (maybe not w william tho) and honestly maybe jonas too ??

8. Are there any moments that you liked in the show that everyone else seems to hate?

IJXDWQOIJJ yes .... remakes-wise, people hate skam nl s2’s last half but i enjoyed it for the most part ... i think the pacing was off for the last ep but personally, clip 50 made up for it and is p god tier imo ..... and also don’t think the first half of ep10 is enough to discredit the entire season bc i rlly loved seeing liv’s pov and have sm fave moments from the season 

but skam wise, omg might get a lil controversial w this one IM SORRY !!! im bein honest and its Just my opinion ok 

personally s2 got me more invested than s1 and i don’t think its a super bad season like i didnt really say many problems wrong with it until i got on tumblr wiejioqjoiqjq i was sort of interested in the questions that the noora/william dynamic brought up which is, as expressed in william’s war speech to noora, that nothing is ever black/white which i feel was a huge message and feeds into the ‘you never know what ppl are going through’ theme of the season ... like i like the idea of someone like noora, who can have a black/white mentality (as seen in the first clip of s2 when she tells vilde that they can’t have the tannin company as their sponsor bc they objectify women or smth but misses the context and what it could mean for the bus monetarily bc shes caught up in bein ‘woke’) having to break out of that and see more than one side ... and i think remakes like skam austin expanded on this idea well like when zoya was like ‘must be so nice being right all the time’ which i Do feel like is an important for youth to know today .... bc i think its so easy to get caught up in the idea of being so objectively right and morally superior that people lose sight of the more nuanced characteristics to life ... (omg long ramble BUT)

also LMAOOOOO this one might be more controversial as it pertains to bench scene s4 ok oops again doNT GOTTA AGREE !! ........ but i feel like the scene had a lot of good intentions ... i was def kind of cringing a bit tho bc i understand the subject’s sensitivity and how these topics are hard to talk about but i genuinely feel like they both made Some points and should listen to each other .... like as Hard and as maybe ‘unwoke’ it is to admit, unfortunately you sort of do have to answer the tough questions bc that way we learn from each other .... and i perfectly understand why some ppl wouldn’t want to do this and i certainly am tired abt havin to answer shit abt my sexuality or stupid male questions abt women but if u dont answer them, people do go lookin for answers still and the internet is such a shitty place that its pretty easy (esp with youtube’s algorithm) to lead you to ignorant ppl and perhaps radicalization .... questions help us to better understand our community and sometimes they can have good intentions too but we have to ask and answer them or else people will make up answers (which ive literally seen and its honestly worse to see fake as shit and UNINFORMED answers bc ppl did not want to ask you or ppl of ur identity, esp when they’re already startin from a place of hate .... but i rather have ppl ask me patronizing questions than have them spread false info bc that can do much more harm in the long run) however i DO think that isak should also consider sana’s side and i sort of wish we saw him conceding more bc they both have smth to learn from one another, like sana shouldn’t just be learnin from isak, isak needs to learn from sana too

PHEW SORRY QWIOJQWIO girl i just got opinions on some things this is when my desc rlly comes in handy .... oqjdwqioj

9. What did you learn from the show?

omg honestly too much to write here tbh ..... but if it says anythin im (very slowly) in the works of a three part skam essay about basically how skam teaches us to be better humans and how to better treat the people we care about diowjqioj essentially the three biggest themes of the show: you never know what someone is going through so always be kind, always communicate with your friends, and no person is ever alone and i feel like these are definitely rlly good messages to live by (also livet er nå BITCH !!!)

10. What is your favourite headcanon about your favourite characters?

omg tbh i could not tell u at all how the skam charas are doing except i hope even is okay thats all im thinkin of ok .... OIWXIOJX omg remakes wise tho ..... honestly im so bad at this girl IDK !!!!! LMAO i have to really think i have a bit of vdh and dutch even but thats bc we know like Zero abt them so its easier oijwiojqio idk liv and noah bein cute as shit ..... OH WAIT personally i feel like janna got a bunch of pansexual energy so my BIGGG hc is that she’s pan also bc she’s one of my all time fave charas and my fkn url so itd be dope if she was pan ok boom

11. What is your opinion on fanfiction in the fandom?

tbh i don’t read skam fanfiction but i don’t mind reading some from the remakes (tho still its rare) ... eiojeioqw i just don’t trust anyone but julie to write skam charas bc i think that’s how precious the show is to me LMAO like idk everything ive seen of skam fanfiction and ficlets and one shots, i could never get into bc the tone is just so out of character or there will be lines that just take me out of the fic bc im like this !!!! is not !!! how the chara acts !!!! so yeah idk not rlly a fan bc of my purist ass but i dont mind others reading it

Questions:

1. Favorite quote of the show?

2. Which country would you like to see have the next remake? Do you have any headcanons?

3. Which season would you rewrite and how would you rewrite it?

4. What clips do you personally like or don’t mind, but others hate?

5. Which songs do you think SKAM or the remakes should have included? For which moments?

6. Who would you give SKAM season five to and what topics and themes would it cover?

7. What moment spoke to you or touched you from SKAM the most?

8. How did you find SKAM? How did you feel about it right after watching?

9. Have you shared SKAM with any friends in real life? What did they think of it?

10. Of the remakes, which characters are your favorite of their SKAM counterparts? (Ex. who is the best Vilde remake? Eva? etc.)

11. How do you feel about the SKAM (and remakes) tumblr fandom?

I tag: @smileykeijser @whatadaze @queenofpurgatoryx @itlukey @skamyeets @shaykeijser @megeliz01 @isakcijser @wackpainterkid @axelauriantblot @kar-d-momme

(omg ik some of yall have been tagged so just ignore if u dont want to do it ok im srry it was in the RULES!)

[vodcar]

hey. i wanna ask you about something we talked about before. do you think its bad that i feel... really alienated from "left tube" in general now because of contra? it sits really badly with me that absolutely no one in that circle addresses what she's done. every comment section on philosophytube, hbomberguy, lindsay ellis, ect always mention contra as this "cute group thing" and knowing that most ofthem are cis and don't care just reinforces that dehumanizing trans folk is no big deal to folks

i dont think its bad u feel alienated from left tube tbh. i do a bit too, there’s a certain kind of politics that I tend to engage most with and its more and more hardline marxist/communist lol, and historical materialist.if ur asking me I think much of this ‘left tube’ stuff is a good place for leftists to begin to engage with thinking critically about a wide range of topics, but i don’t think its necessarily developing discourse along the particular lines of revolutionary tradition and actual praxis in the real world. I also dont think its particularly helpful that there doesn’t seem to be much space between the left tube thinkers to disagree with each other, especially not where contra is concerned; i don’t really see any one of the major left tube crowd, since they’re all cis, turning around and saying actually contra thats not on. and outside of that, not having much space to disagree with each other kind of lets down their discourse on having nuance, and a platform for that nuance to take hold. i think left tube although its doing good work in combatting right wing views on youtube, doesn’t really establish an accountable dialogue within itself. criticisms of contra on youtube are overwhelmingly going to come from a right wing and transphobic perspective. a lot of being a leftist is having these discussions with your comrades who do think differently, and its about how we best move forward with our mutual goal but different ideas of how to get there. u can be a good leftie and not agree with popular leftist media and argument. its good u dont.also the inability to have this dialogue within ur leftist communities isn’t very marxist of u in the first place. part of the practice of marxism, both in theory and praxis is to do it on a basis of scientific socialism: do things as a science. to hold each other to account and to challenge arguments to better them is all part of that process and left tube should be pushing for that imo. ?

i also think that yeah a lot of contra’s conceptions of gender have a place where she doesn’t account at all for race in a meaningful way, which as a white woman is troubling especially as one of the most prominent voices on the left on youtube. I hope some lefties rise in popularity and take on contra’s bad stuff and start a discourse and push left tube and its fandom towards better more accountable politics.

I think for me, although im put out by contra’s remarks etc i don’t really care too much because i’ve purposefully not been too invested. my focus is on the communities i have to hand and my comrades in my city, rather than fandoms of left tubers etc. this isnt to say u have to go away and forget everything about them, because a lot of these youtubers will come up in those contexts, but in those context, you’re more able to have a chat and move through reasons why such and such a video doesn’t work or this other stuff contra’s said etc. etc..

idk really what i’m trying to say tbh. basically just go read watch or listen to alyson escalante.

[kendrixtermina]

Typing Misadventures - IN edition

So, typing and the difficulties therein.

Aside from person-specific ad-hominems, some that have been elaborated upon in attempts to explain them on this very website.

Sensors: Bad Sensor descriptions written by NPs, combining with the fact that Sensors rely a lot on developing a practical experential “feel” for things. A bad, vague and overly abstract description that doesn’t relate to their life is gonna be not very useful. (especially for SFPs for whom what they relate to is srz bzness) - Interestingly I’ve seen a lot of Sensors saying that they easily indentify particular types once they have encountered them IRL. (Speculation: With intuitives it probably depends more on wether they have their definitrions straight.)

Ne-Doms: Type-hop and doubt their type alot because they know they always could be mistyped and possibilities are the primary facet of reality for them. The “creative” nature of the auxillary, and their auxillary being a function that generates and handles belief systems,  means they can always reinterpret the evidence by redoing their reasoning or reassigning meaning, also the lack of Si leads to less constancy in their thinking, they change opinion easily, which is normally an asset, but not so much for self-typing as every input generates new ideas. (The auxillaries also have this but to a much lesser degree - b/c)

—

But today, I want to talk about INs (I know, boring - but those are what I know the most about since I am one.)

You may have seen me caveat my posts with “Unless I am actually an xNFP or something” as of late Yeah. It went about like this:

Troll: Haha you’re mistyped!

Me: Why?

Troll: because X.

Me: I have an alternate, more fitting explanation for X and a lot of things which my current typing explains betters especially when you get into the nuance of mbti theory.

Troll: (*hamfistedly applies overreductionistic function definition*) “Anyone who ever quotes a source ever is a Te user”. Just like anyone who ever mentions memory is a SJ amirite?

Troll: *shifts the topic to my person and then accuses me of talking about myself*

Me: *blocks troll largely to curttail own tendency to waste time & energy with internet arguments*

So at my best,  I believe in not dismissing inconvenient PoVs and double-checking, and the main point of replying them was to leave an alternate opinion for future readers hence no point in continuing after that had been done.  

At my worst damn inf Fe makes it hard to ignore input even if I don’t believe it’s justified (except when it fails to pick them up - as inferior functions are wont to be its either sluggish or AHH with little inbetween. ) and that lil 8 fix of mine doesn’t want to “stand down quietly”.  

So I ask a few reasonable, knowledgeable, non-troll person, one of which said “Hm, could be, you anecdote alot which X type also does”

I believed this was better accounted for by simple ol’ Si and w4-self revealing tendencies, but, how could I know for sure? I never denied having a pronounced 4wing and fix, but I thought that sufficiently explaining their perceived discrepancies insofar as I found them consistent with reality and indeed all data collected so far. Too much would just be filed away as “inf Te” as a blanket term, the way any sign that [fan favorite character] is ST rather than INFJ is “inferior Se” though that supposed “inferior” is 80% of what she does and all moments claimed for F or N are the sort of situations where anyone would display emotion or philosophizing and what intuition they display is distinctly Ne instead. 

Like the proverbial man who dreamt of being a frog I couldn’t cast the doubt from my mind and went over reinterpreting my thought patterns throughout the day. How do I know I’m NOT X type? After all my idea of and criteria for type are based on the definitions I extracted from various mbti sources when first familiarzing myself with the topic… how do I know I understood it correctly? How can ANY human correctly understand a definition if they have to deduce/reconstruct/guess what the other meant with their own flawed mind?

(At this point the non-INs in the audience might be rolling their eyes)

I still thought my type made the most sense but the person, through trolling in that particular instance, was not alltogether clueless and had some good insights, and also, some ppl agreed with them (theres that Fe again) - I was pretty sure I was in the holographic-panomramic thinking style but I could be wrong,  thats a fairly rarely used concept which I simply started using cause I thought it made sense. ENFPs can mistake themselves for introverts. I have been mistaken for extrovert b/c of my lack of filter… but I was pretty sure I was a very pronouncedintrovert and had Fe, and so I went over it over and over again.

They said I didn’t comprehend _ i had some theory as to why they thought the way they did (not just bias against xNFPs but assuming all Ti is like aux Ti. After all, an introverted function as a dominant builds a framework and may be reluctant to accept or need time to withdraw when said framework clashes with reality to the point of needing a full revamping, purportedly resulting in a certain stubbornness particularly if it’s a Ji function.  )

but what if I really Didn’t comprehend? Then all my reasoning would be worthless! I dont think I have the skills of an INFP, but what if i misunderstood those? Was a lot of what I’d attributed to Ti just Ne? i thought I had rather typical Ti speech patterns (it was hard to unsee, like my brain used a highly predictable parsing alghorithm to make thoughts into words) but they disagreed and pointed to what they thought was Fi. 

I thought that despite all the differences introduced by  shared preferences and  there were differences between I and the Fi doms I knew. The 9 and the 6 were much more lowkey, non-confrontational than I and way more perceptive in line with how socionics describes Fi as the “Ethics of Relations” and how Nardi calls it an “Inner state of listening/reacting”; I mostly listen to the contents of someone’s words; I’d spot a liar by contradiction or unbeliavable statements, or by deducing what beliefs they are operating from. Feelers supposedly use primarily tone of voice... but I have sure noticed tone of voice a few times, and this is a qualia. I can’t compare what “Fi” or “Ti” feel like without making assumptions of which one I am using. 

Supposedly

The 4! INFPs should be the most similar to me, on the other hand, they tend to have a certain...absoluteness in their beliefs and statements in a way I wouldn’t be comfortable with. I’m more hesitant, more relativizing, adding qualifiers etc so bI don’t say anything incorrect. 

I don’t mean to bash the INFPs here, they are usually just processing their specific feels and do not mean to imply things about others. (Tumblr INFP: “I, an INFP, experience X.”. Tumblr xxFJ: “Are you saying that other types don’t????? You can’t say that! How self absorbed are you?” Immature  Tert Fe User:*distantly feels the same urge toward ,moral condemnation as FJ,but couldn’t care less if INFP offends anyone -  settles for calling them a snowflake instead. * TJs and Ti doms: *roll their eyes, half-assedly consider correcting whoever they disagree with but ultimately just keep scrolling*) Of course Team Fe sometimes has a point if the INFP in question is young and/or irresponsible. 

Example: 

One INFP 4w5: “I be those shallow fake bitches look down on you just because you don’t wear as much makeup. I don’t think anyone who wears makeup can be trusted, unless it’s like,halloween makeup or something like that, they’re just putting up fake faces to be popular.”

Me (let’s say, presumed INTP 5w4): “I dunno... Like I agree that those girls are shallow bitches,if they had spines, they wouldn’ perform arbitrary fake behavior just to be popular.* But not everyone is the same - maybe some people might just wear makeup because they like how it looks. The real problem is people being judged by arbitrary conventions on principle. What does is matter whether someone wears makeup or not? Its a made-up convention with no real reason.  It’s none of anyone’s business.”

* for the record I have since realized that there’s nothing bad about wanting to be popular as long as yopu dont harm anyone, and that for some people its genuinely what they want. I was, like,  13. Common (w)4 pitfall I guess. 

As you see both I and this middle school friend of mine are expressing 4-ish povs, but I used to think  the difference in our reasoning highlighted some differences. 

Granted this is more 5w4 vs 4w5 than necessarily Ti vs Fi,  Could just be the 5′s general disconnect toward action and desire to “know more first”. 

There are 5 INFPs. after all. Mostly sx 5s and as such differentiable from the relatively intense, dramatic sx 4 as long as you’re certain enough that they’re sx. Thinking about how to describe them. More second-guessing and ‘drifting’ than the 4 ones but like them in their analytical nature. A different kind of contemplative.  Still reasons distinctlylike an INFP - See, One of them was religious, for example, and I’m pretty sure an INTP would have had more posts about why they were religious or not, though it’s one of the types most likely to be a non-believer, the religious ones tend to have a theological bent and talk about the perfection and incomprehensibility of god, how god is totally logical etc. (Thomas Acquinas is a famous example) - their faith will be an ordered self-consistent system. A bit like that example of copernikus assuming the orbits must be perfectly circular because natture as he understood it would tend toward the most “perfect” forms. I’m not religious and I could likewise talk about that at lenght.

Arguments that convinced me:  “This is how these beliefs came from, not an actual god” and “If were made out of single celled organism who die all the time as shed skin cells, how would the rest of them dieing at once be different?” “Even if your religion is true that means many, if not all others are not. So at least all some must be myths. How is your “true” religion different from them?” 

Arguments made by famous Te-Fi users: “Occams Razor.” “We can’t disprove a giant sucker on the back of Pluto either, but its no reason to suppose one.”“Belief in god hampers human development and creates dependent, slavish mentality”

That 5!INFP’s attitude toward their belief reminded me more of another Fi dom I know (albeit an ISFP). “Yeah, I know the common objections, but look, it’s what I believe. Don’t come into my house and be a jerk to me about it.” or “[Assholish behavior] is not actually in line with my religion. My religion, and this aspect of it, are actually about love/peace/duty/etc” 

If, while conversing,  you hit a hard disagreement, that is,  an axiom that’s not up for debate, your Fi-dom friend may change the topic/agree to disagree/ “It’s just the way I feel” 

[This could apply to other moral or ideological questions religion is just an example; This is not supposed to be about religion it’s just here to illustrate a perceived difference. . I’m not implying all INFPs have the same approach to religion or even have to be religious.]

Another conversation I remember having with them actually on the very subject of Fi vs Fe. IDK how we got to that topic but I mentioned something I initially thought was an enneagram thing (my memory is vague on the details) but I mentioned something like lowkey feeling guilty for receiving praise that I believe was undeserved. 

She deemed it a Fe thing and said that for her, as a Fi dom/ fe opposing type, a bit of praise she did not agree with might not cause any reaction at all unless she thought they had a point  or otherwise had a reaction from her end, like deciding the criticism was unfair - why should she feel guilty b/c of what someone else says? 

Granted that’s just an anecdote, but what am I to do? INFP 5s are not super common. Also I’m not making this decisionbased on any single of these examples but... not even from the “preponderance” so much as to how they can be best explained. 

And  of course, if I really did get everything wrong after looking into the topic for years, what guarantee is there that I typed any of those people correctly? None, as one of the trolls/claimants correctly pointed out. 

After all what I want is the truth, it doesn’t matter what it is. Or at least that is what I strive for as much as human frailty allows. so what if I’m an INFP? INFPs are awesome. I even considered the type early on, I just thougnt INTP fit better especially once I found out about inferior functions.  And I have always held that a person has no obligation to follow their “talents”. If I don’t have a “talent” for reason (which isn’t the same as mbti thinking anyways) all the reasons why I believe that it is a good way of life to aim for would still stand. Reason is a method to correct for human error and bias, after all, the error and bias we all have, no matter what Ji function we use.

Type insofar as it can even be said to be a real thing is a classfication of emergent qualities, not a hard measure you can get in an instrument. 

As much as I’d want to figure this out, there comes a point where you just have to like step back and put it in context.  it’s just a personality test/ little tool to facilitate communication in which “maybe this or that” is more helpful than nothing. 

Striving for it despite not being handed talent at birth is all the more worthwhile - and if reason was only for certain kinds of people what’s the point of it? Regardless of what tropes people associate with “science” or “logic”, what they actually are by definition are simple basic methods.

Last but not least there was a moment

Soo, existential crisis. At least they can’t doubt that I’m a melancholic or an oldham ideosyncraticXD

Then,  my doubt crumbled away to the “ mostly sure, dont think it could be anything else but im not omnicient” levels at which it was before.

What happened? Well, a rare event:

Well, I went outside and talked to people.

I visited my folks, saw new places, got into a few unscripted situations in other words. 

I’ve seen one post detailing that INs may mistype because they analyze themselves as a whole, feature in less apparent traits and second-guess their reasoning worrying about bias, noticing what sticks out more than the norm etc.  and so on and that may be it in part but I don’t think it’s only this relatively “noble”, too-much-of-a-good-thing mistake.

- It’s a matter about how we are all about ~extrapolating~ from data and using multiple data points and less about decisiveness and practicality. We brood away endlessly trying to come up with interpretations and conceptualizations that makes all the data points fit rather than just going with what they themselves largely seem to suggest. 

One good description I once heard is that Intuitives think in networks while Sensors think in puzzle pieces - I went overboard trying to build ever more complex networks instead of going “Yeah, with all the puzzle pieces so far it’s probably this.”. 

Sometimes the latter approach can be incomplete and miss game changing interconnections - but just as often, the former gets convoluted and therefore, both uselessly vague and too far removed from the actual data its meant to interpret. 

Aaaand, well, almost every sentence I said was “Did you know that...?” or “I think so/ don’t think so because of [observation followed by possible deduction].

Sure, I could be biased in my observation or unconsciously “doing it on purpose to appear a certain way” even if I don’t think I am or care about that, , but some critical mass of “doing it on purpose” would itself be equivalent with 5 (or a 3)

I was a little afraid one time; I reacted by withdrawing and looking at the whole thing as an observatrion and it was a highly temporary thing. And as much as I complain about Fe users playing police, I may have been guilty of one moment of overreacting, unwanted/socially-chiding “help” myself there. (The person perhaps justly called me a know-it-all. They were wrong about one thing but I may have handled it all more constructively) I repeatedly expressed vague undifferentiated preferrences that were closer to analyzing what factors were at work rather than having clear like/dislike reasons readily available. .

I critiqued a TV show (myself and the local INTJ annoying all the non-NTs with our loud, animated critiquing ) and a big factor to being unabvle to enjoy it fully was the lack of High-Concept abstract sci fi content and mostly the lack of consistency - normally a lot of my enjoyment would come from extrapolatinmg and deducing what the world is like and how it, the themes and charactzers “work”, but here I coulnd do that because it was tacked onto a ‘verse it did not fit into. I observed how said INTJ and I reacted to us correcting each other on small things with like a brief thanks or apology & just moving on whilst similar things had gotten annoyed snarks out of our otherwise patient Feeler sister...

The nails in the coffin were those 2 tumblr posts, one about differences in how Fi and low Fe argue (the latter pile including 3 phrases I used verbatim in the last discussion with my SO just hours earlier) and a post by the afore mentioned “resonable poster” about, as she called it “oversharing in soc variants vs soc blinds” though the correct amount of sharing might well be in the eye of the beholder.

But that was the one objection of the troll I didn’t have a non-vague satisfactory reply to, what rly kept me wondering rather than “eh not gonna reinvent the wheel again”, something about “sp/sx woldn’t have long descriptions or emo rants” Apparently they do when they never have to dea with the person again (such as on the internets. )

IDK I did move the description so no one’s forced to read it but lots of peeps have one (This is like... a blogging site??) but the reasons for its existence had more to do with “completionist urges related to then-current obsession (typology)” and “So I like X, bite me.” sort of sentiment than whatever it was they presuposed. 

Dear Causal-Deterministic peeps (ENTP, INFP, ISTP, ESFP): Instances of the same behavior can be caused by different causes! Look at this: 2 4 8.

What’s the pattern? - Could be “powers of 4″.  Could also be “even numbers” or even “any increasing integer”. 

Of course this whole mess is an example of where we H-P folks (INTP, ENFP, ISFP, ESTP) look at everything from multiple angels/Povs, (”Is it like this? Is it lika that? It COULD be seen this other way...”) rather than, well, decide which ones are most relevant here/ “Pick one”. At least the SPs have Se to “just grab one” or whatever it is they do. 

Whereas we just stand there speculating XD The ENFPs sorta do it too but in a whole different way/ area of life? 

Me: “Either he is nuts or I am nuts because we can’t both be telling the truth!”

ENFP: “Well I empasize with both of you so I don’t think either of you is nuts?”

Me: Sorry but this is a real dichotomy here for once. If he dun nothing wrong, then I would be wrong for accusing him thus, just as he says..

ENFP: Can we all agree to disagree and chil maybe? plz??

Might also be why there`s this overlap between ENFPs and Universalists? Though obviously not all ENFPs are universalists and vice versa. 

So yeah. Kinda comical in hindsight. I started out all second guess-ey and entertaining both possibilities in parallel but in the end, well, I do think it’s INTP after all, at least, I’d say its the most probable by a considerable margin. Most definitely 5 tho. For all the occasionall 4 ness its by far the most overwhelming tendency in day to day life/thinking ugh cant I NOT spew nerd facts about everything in sight. What are other conversaton topics? 

Bottom Line: By thinking about your own thinking you alter your thinking, and that way lie 2nd order chaotic systems, the Uncertainty Principle and Goedel’s Theorem...

So going outside both threw me out of that recursion and added new, raw data as a means to test the competing hypotheses. It forced me to see what I actually act like by and large in a natural setting rather than the many ways I could interpret or read the way I act like, which like, is not actually all that mysterious lol

[haleeskitchen-blog]

New Post has been published on http://haleeskitchen.com/how-to-make-from-scratch-japanese-curry-thats-bet/

How to Make From-Scratch Japanese Curry That's Bet...

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[Photographs: Vicky Wasik unless otherwise noted]

“The Japanese, who are probably the world’s greatest culinary aesthetes, don’t hesitate to serve a greenish-yellow glutinous mess over their rice and label it ‘curry.'” And thus Madhur Jaffrey, in An Invitation to Indian Cooking, cut down Japanese curry with the swiftness of a samurai sword.

To be fair, Japanese curry was just one of her targets. She directed her broadside equally at British, American, Chinese, and French renditions of curry, all of which feature a generic and often stale blend of Indian-esque spices. At the root of her disdain was the question of curry itself, and what it is. That’s a topic worthy of a deeper discussion, but we can briefly say that “curry,” as the term is used outside India, does not have much meaning there. There is no Indian or South Asian spice blend known as “curry,” nor a dish that goes by that name. In the south of India, there’s kari, a saucy preparation that’s often identified as the source of the English word, but, according to Raghavan Iyer in 660 Curries, even that is open for debate.

What we can also say with some certainty is that at some point in the 18th century, the British began to incorporate an Indian-inspired spice blend that they called “curry powder” into their cooking. By 1747, curry had made its first appearance in an English cookbook, Hannah Glasse’s The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy. It’s this more generic conception of curry, and the powdered convenience product that fuels it, that leads us back to Japanese curry.

Now, I won’t go as far as Madhur Jaffrey in condemning Japanese curry. She was on a specific mission at a specific time when she tore it down. Her goal was to introduce a more nuanced idea of Indian cooking to people whose familiarity didn’t go far beyond a dusty old spice tin. But, given Japan’s love of its version of curry—or kare, as the Japanese call it—it can’t just be dismissed. It’s one of the nation’s most popular comfort foods, belonging to a class of dishes called yoshoku—Western foods that the Japanese have adopted, and have at times heavily adapted, but still don’t consider to be inherently Japanese. I will admit, though, that I was less than impressed with my first tastes of Japanese curry. To me, they were as perfectly tame as curry could ever be, which is to say, perfectly forgettable.

That changed after I visited the country last year. I’m always out to prove myself wrong, so one of my goals on that trip was to find a Japanese kare that could make me truly love it. My conversion came at a narrow lunch counter called Kitchen Nankai in Jinbocho, a Tokyo neighborhood famous for its bookstore-lined streets. There, the cooks heaped rice and shredded cabbage on a large plate, set a sliced fried pork cutlet on top, then ladled a black lagoon of steaming curry sauce all over it.

A Japanese curry at Kitchen Nankai, a lunch counter in Tokyo. [Photograph: Daniel Gritzer]

It was an entirely different Japanese curry from ones I’d had before: darker, more bitter, and spicier, without the sweet and soft easiness of so many others. It was a curry that made itself known, its chili heat lingering until well after I’d left the restaurant.

I didn’t leave with just burning lips, though. I also left with a new sense of just how much of a range of flavor is possible in Japanese curry without betraying the essence of the dish. I knew I could make my own, from scratch, calibrating the spices exactly as I wanted them and deepening the flavor as much as I pleased.

My mission upon returning home was to make a Japanese curry that had all the classic trappings—tender morsels of meat, chunks of silky potato, sweet bits of carrot, and green peas—in a sauce that was warm and gentle, cradled in a subtle sweetness, but barking with freshly ground spices, edged with bitterness and prickling heat.

The Spice Dissection and Resurrection

The first and most important step in coming up with my own recipe for Japanese curry was to develop a spice mix. My biggest clue came on the side of a tin of S&B curry powder, one of the most popular Japanese brands.

These days, you can buy S&B and other Japanese curry products in a number of forms. The most basic is the spice powder, which requires the home cook to make their own sauce from scratch, save for the spice blend itself. The next level up in weeknight-dinner convenience is trays of the spice blend set in blocks of solidified roux—cook the meat and vegetables, add water or broth, then melt the blocks into it until a thickened, flavorful sauce forms. Beyond that, you can go for full-blown space-food ease in the form of premade curries packed in NASA-style retort pouches: Simply heat, then squeeze the contents, often already studded with cooked vegetables, onto rice. I ate a whole bunch of these in the service of writing this article.

The ingredient list on the tin of S&B was the most enlightening for my endeavor. While it didn’t show exact quantities, it did at least list the spices in order of quantity. I could see that turmeric made up the largest portion of the mix, followed by coriander seed and then fenugreek—the spice used to flavor artificial pancake syrup, famously responsible for New York City’s mysterious maple syrup odor about 10 years ago. As you can see, it’s a spice profile that leans light, floral, and sweet.

Another helpful resource was this breakdown of Japanese curry spices that I found on the Japanese food site Just Hungry. It mostly confirmed what the S&B tin was already telling me, though Just Hungry had found a Japanese-language source with the approximate percentage of each spice used in S&B, which they translated into English. (The link to the original source in Japanese is no longer working.) Those percentages underscored even further just how mild these Japanese spice blends can be, with upwards of 90% of the spices in the mix made up of the mildest ones.

For my blend, I decided to mirror the S&B breakdown only insofar as turmeric was the number-one ingredient, but I punched up the cumin for more funk, added significantly more black pepper for warm heat, and included a more generous dose of chili pepper for more robust spice. Instead of ground ginger, I opted for grated fresh, to deliver far more zip and zest. Beyond that, I rounded it all out with a range of spices and flavorings, from dried orange peel to star anise and cinnamon.

To bring out their flavor even more, I toasted most of the spices in a dry skillet before grinding them to a powder in a spice grinder.

The most important thing to remember about this spice mix is that you don’t need to replicate mine exactly. That’s what’s so great about making your own. You could simplify it by paring down the number of components, or change their proportions to suit your tastes. It’s this customization that makes the homemade version worthwhile. If you’re not interested in that, you might as well grab a tin of the premade stuff off a Japanese-market shelf.

The Roux

Some recipes for Japanese curry call for cornstarch as a thickener, but many others use a classic roux of flour cooked in butter or another fat. The advantage of a roux is that you can toast the flour to whatever degree you want, altering its flavor more and more the darker it gets. I’m not sure what tricks Kitchen Nankai uses to get their curry sauce as dark as it is, but I suspect a deeply browned roux is one of the keys.

I make my roux in a small pot on the side while the rest of the stew cooks—because this is a stew at heart. Once the flour has reached a deep caramel brown, I add my spice blend. As mentioned above, I dry-toast the spices in a skillet first to deepen their aromas. Frying them in the roux helps develop their flavor even more. Cooking spices in a fat is a technique that’s sometimes called “blooming,” and not only does it make the spice flavor more complex, it also infuses the fat with the spices. That’s a useful step, given that some of the flavor and aroma molecules in spices are fat-soluble.

The Broth and Add-Ins

The final components of the stew are the broth and all the vegetables and meat that go into it. I opted for chicken here, using boneless, skinless thighs, since they handle prolonged cooking much better than the white meat does. You could just as easily use beef, selecting a cut that’s suitable for stewing, or even pork. The basic technique would be largely the same, except for the cooking time, which would be longer for beef or pork.

The first step here is to sear the meat until it’s browned, then transfer it to a plate while you sauté the vegetables. I use a simple combo of diced onion and carrot, leaving out the celery and garlic that often join those aromatic vegetables, since I decided I didn’t want them in this particular dish. There’s no right or wrong here; they’re just not flavors I tend to associate with Japanese curry. (That’s not to say no one in Japan uses them in their curries—I’m sure plenty of people do.)

Once the vegetables are tender and beginning to turn golden, it’s time to add the liquid. Water is one choice, but it’s a missed opportunity to reinforce and deepen flavor. Chicken stock is a better idea, but I wasn’t satisfied with it alone. The holy grail in this dish is a combination of both chicken stock and dashi, which together add a meaty richness and also an unmistakable Japanese essence to the dish. The finished curry doesn’t taste like dashi in any obvious way; it just tastes more Japanese.

At this point, I cut up the chicken and add it back to the pot, along with pieces of potato and finely grated or minced apple. The apple, or another sweet component like it, is something a lot of kare recipes call for, and it’s partly responsible for that accessibly sweet flavor that’s so common to Japanese curry. Given that I had pushed my spice profile in a more aggressive direction, that base note of fruity sweetness was even more important here.

Bringing It Together

To finish the curry, simply stir in the roux, then simmer until the broth has thickened. Green peas can go in right at the end, just long enough to warm them through. The most popular way to serve it is spooned into a bowl with a generous mound of warm short-grain rice, making what the Japanese call kare raisu, “curry rice.”

Is it real Indian food? Clearly not. But when you take all the components into your own hands, it’s a kare with enough flavor and personality to silence any doubters.

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How to Make From-Scratch Japanese Curry That's Bet...

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[Photographs: Vicky Wasik unless otherwise noted]

“The Japanese, who are probably the world’s greatest culinary aesthetes, don’t hesitate to serve a greenish-yellow glutinous mess over their rice and label it ‘curry.'” And thus Madhur Jaffrey, in An Invitation to Indian Cooking, cut down Japanese curry with the swiftness of a samurai sword.

To be fair, Japanese curry was just one of her targets. She directed her broadside equally at British, American, Chinese, and French renditions of curry, all of which feature a generic and often stale blend of Indian-esque spices. At the root of her disdain was the question of curry itself, and what it is. That’s a topic worthy of a deeper discussion, but we can briefly say that “curry,” as the term is used outside India, does not have much meaning there. There is no Indian or South Asian spice blend known as “curry,” nor a dish that goes by that name. In the south of India, there’s kari, a saucy preparation that’s often identified as the source of the English word, but, according to Raghavan Iyer in 660 Curries, even that is open for debate.

What we can also say with some certainty is that at some point in the 18th century, the British began to incorporate an Indian-inspired spice blend that they called “curry powder” into their cooking. By 1747, curry had made its first appearance in an English cookbook, Hannah Glasse’s The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy. It’s this more generic conception of curry, and the powdered convenience product that fuels it, that leads us back to Japanese curry.

Now, I won’t go as far as Madhur Jaffrey in condemning Japanese curry. She was on a specific mission at a specific time when she tore it down. Her goal was to introduce a more nuanced idea of Indian cooking to people whose familiarity didn’t go far beyond a dusty old spice tin. But, given Japan’s love of its version of curry—or kare, as the Japanese call it—it can’t just be dismissed. It’s one of the nation’s most popular comfort foods, belonging to a class of dishes called yoshoku—Western foods that the Japanese have adopted, and have at times heavily adapted, but still don’t consider to be inherently Japanese. I will admit, though, that I was less than impressed with my first tastes of Japanese curry. To me, they were as perfectly tame as curry could ever be, which is to say, perfectly forgettable.

That changed after I visited the country last year. I’m always out to prove myself wrong, so one of my goals on that trip was to find a Japanese kare that could make me truly love it. My conversion came at a narrow lunch counter called Kitchen Nankai in Jinbocho, a Tokyo neighborhood famous for its bookstore-lined streets. There, the cooks heaped rice and shredded cabbage on a large plate, set a sliced fried pork cutlet on top, then ladled a black lagoon of steaming curry sauce all over it.

A Japanese curry at Kitchen Nankai, a lunch counter in Tokyo. [Photograph: Daniel Gritzer]

It was an entirely different Japanese curry from ones I’d had before: darker, more bitter, and spicier, without the sweet and soft easiness of so many others. It was a curry that made itself known, its chili heat lingering until well after I’d left the restaurant.

I didn’t leave with just burning lips, though. I also left with a new sense of just how much of a range of flavor is possible in Japanese curry without betraying the essence of the dish. I knew I could make my own, from scratch, calibrating the spices exactly as I wanted them and deepening the flavor as much as I pleased.

My mission upon returning home was to make a Japanese curry that had all the classic trappings—tender morsels of meat, chunks of silky potato, sweet bits of carrot, and green peas—in a sauce that was warm and gentle, cradled in a subtle sweetness, but barking with freshly ground spices, edged with bitterness and prickling heat.

The Spice Dissection and Resurrection

The first and most important step in coming up with my own recipe for Japanese curry was to develop a spice mix. My biggest clue came on the side of a tin of S&B curry powder, one of the most popular Japanese brands.

These days, you can buy S&B and other Japanese curry products in a number of forms. The most basic is the spice powder, which requires the home cook to make their own sauce from scratch, save for the spice blend itself. The next level up in weeknight-dinner convenience is trays of the spice blend set in blocks of solidified roux—cook the meat and vegetables, add water or broth, then melt the blocks into it until a thickened, flavorful sauce forms. Beyond that, you can go for full-blown space-food ease in the form of premade curries packed in NASA-style retort pouches: Simply heat, then squeeze the contents, often already studded with cooked vegetables, onto rice. I ate a whole bunch of these in the service of writing this article.

The ingredient list on the tin of S&B was the most enlightening for my endeavor. While it didn’t show exact quantities, it did at least list the spices in order of quantity. I could see that turmeric made up the largest portion of the mix, followed by coriander seed and then fenugreek—the spice used to flavor artificial pancake syrup, famously responsible for New York City’s mysterious maple syrup odor about 10 years ago. As you can see, it’s a spice profile that leans light, floral, and sweet.

Another helpful resource was this breakdown of Japanese curry spices that I found on the Japanese food site Just Hungry. It mostly confirmed what the S&B tin was already telling me, though Just Hungry had found a Japanese-language source with the approximate percentage of each spice used in S&B, which they translated into English. (The link to the original source in Japanese is no longer working.) Those percentages underscored even further just how mild these Japanese spice blends can be, with upwards of 90% of the spices in the mix made up of the mildest ones.

For my blend, I decided to mirror the S&B breakdown only insofar as turmeric was the number-one ingredient, but I punched up the cumin for more funk, added significantly more black pepper for warm heat, and included a more generous dose of chili pepper for more robust spice. Instead of ground ginger, I opted for grated fresh, to deliver far more zip and zest. Beyond that, I rounded it all out with a range of spices and flavorings, from dried orange peel to star anise and cinnamon.

To bring out their flavor even more, I toasted most of the spices in a dry skillet before grinding them to a powder in a spice grinder.

The most important thing to remember about this spice mix is that you don’t need to replicate mine exactly. That’s what’s so great about making your own. You could simplify it by paring down the number of components, or change their proportions to suit your tastes. It’s this customization that makes the homemade version worthwhile. If you’re not interested in that, you might as well grab a tin of the premade stuff off a Japanese-market shelf.

The Roux

Some recipes for Japanese curry call for cornstarch as a thickener, but many others use a classic roux of flour cooked in butter or another fat. The advantage of a roux is that you can toast the flour to whatever degree you want, altering its flavor more and more the darker it gets. I’m not sure what tricks Kitchen Nankai uses to get their curry sauce as dark as it is, but I suspect a deeply browned roux is one of the keys.

I make my roux in a small pot on the side while the rest of the stew cooks—because this is a stew at heart. Once the flour has reached a deep caramel brown, I add my spice blend. As mentioned above, I dry-toast the spices in a skillet first to deepen their aromas. Frying them in the roux helps develop their flavor even more. Cooking spices in a fat is a technique that’s sometimes called “blooming,” and not only does it make the spice flavor more complex, it also infuses the fat with the spices. That’s a useful step, given that some of the flavor and aroma molecules in spices are fat-soluble.

The Broth and Add-Ins

The final components of the stew are the broth and all the vegetables and meat that go into it. I opted for chicken here, using boneless, skinless thighs, since they handle prolonged cooking much better than the white meat does. You could just as easily use beef, selecting a cut that’s suitable for stewing, or even pork. The basic technique would be largely the same, except for the cooking time, which would be longer for beef or pork.

The first step here is to sear the meat until it’s browned, then transfer it to a plate while you sauté the vegetables. I use a simple combo of diced onion and carrot, leaving out the celery and garlic that often join those aromatic vegetables, since I decided I didn’t want them in this particular dish. There’s no right or wrong here; they’re just not flavors I tend to associate with Japanese curry. (That’s not to say no one in Japan uses them in their curries—I’m sure plenty of people do.)

Once the vegetables are tender and beginning to turn golden, it’s time to add the liquid. Water is one choice, but it’s a missed opportunity to reinforce and deepen flavor. Chicken stock is a better idea, but I wasn’t satisfied with it alone. The holy grail in this dish is a combination of both chicken stock and dashi, which together add a meaty richness and also an unmistakable Japanese essence to the dish. The finished curry doesn’t taste like dashi in any obvious way; it just tastes more Japanese.

At this point, I cut up the chicken and add it back to the pot, along with pieces of potato and finely grated or minced apple. The apple, or another sweet component like it, is something a lot of kare recipes call for, and it’s partly responsible for that accessibly sweet flavor that’s so common to Japanese curry. Given that I had pushed my spice profile in a more aggressive direction, that base note of fruity sweetness was even more important here.

Bringing It Together

To finish the curry, simply stir in the roux, then simmer until the broth has thickened. Green peas can go in right at the end, just long enough to warm them through. The most popular way to serve it is spooned into a bowl with a generous mound of warm short-grain rice, making what the Japanese call kare raisu, “curry rice.”

Is it real Indian food? Clearly not. But when you take all the components into your own hands, it’s a kare with enough flavor and personality to silence any doubters.

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How to Make From-Scratch Japanese Curry That's Bet...

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How to Make From-Scratch Japanese Curry That's Bet...

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[Photographs: Vicky Wasik unless otherwise noted]

“The Japanese, who are probably the world’s greatest culinary aesthetes, don’t hesitate to serve a greenish-yellow glutinous mess over their rice and label it ‘curry.'” And thus Madhur Jaffrey, in An Invitation to Indian Cooking, cut down Japanese curry with the swiftness of a samurai sword.

To be fair, Japanese curry was just one of her targets. She directed her broadside equally at British, American, Chinese, and French renditions of curry, all of which feature a generic and often stale blend of Indian-esque spices. At the root of her disdain was the question of curry itself, and what it is. That’s a topic worthy of a deeper discussion, but we can briefly say that “curry,” as the term is used outside India, does not have much meaning there. There is no Indian or South Asian spice blend known as “curry,” nor a dish that goes by that name. In the south of India, there’s kari, a saucy preparation that’s often identified as the source of the English word, but, according to Raghavan Iyer in 660 Curries, even that is open for debate.

What we can also say with some certainty is that at some point in the 18th century, the British began to incorporate an Indian-inspired spice blend that they called “curry powder” into their cooking. By 1747, curry had made its first appearance in an English cookbook, Hannah Glasse’s The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy. It’s this more generic conception of curry, and the powdered convenience product that fuels it, that leads us back to Japanese curry.

Now, I won’t go as far as Madhur Jaffrey in condemning Japanese curry. She was on a specific mission at a specific time when she tore it down. Her goal was to introduce a more nuanced idea of Indian cooking to people whose familiarity didn’t go far beyond a dusty old spice tin. But, given Japan’s love of its version of curry—or kare, as the Japanese call it—it can’t just be dismissed. It’s one of the nation’s most popular comfort foods, belonging to a class of dishes called yoshoku—Western foods that the Japanese have adopted, and have at times heavily adapted, but still don’t consider to be inherently Japanese. I will admit, though, that I was less than impressed with my first tastes of Japanese curry. To me, they were as perfectly tame as curry could ever be, which is to say, perfectly forgettable.

That changed after I visited the country last year. I’m always out to prove myself wrong, so one of my goals on that trip was to find a Japanese kare that could make me truly love it. My conversion came at a narrow lunch counter called Kitchen Nankai in Jinbocho, a Tokyo neighborhood famous for its bookstore-lined streets. There, the cooks heaped rice and shredded cabbage on a large plate, set a sliced fried pork cutlet on top, then ladled a black lagoon of steaming curry sauce all over it.

A Japanese curry at Kitchen Nankai, a lunch counter in Tokyo. [Photograph: Daniel Gritzer]

It was an entirely different Japanese curry from ones I’d had before: darker, more bitter, and spicier, without the sweet and soft easiness of so many others. It was a curry that made itself known, its chili heat lingering until well after I’d left the restaurant.

I didn’t leave with just burning lips, though. I also left with a new sense of just how much of a range of flavor is possible in Japanese curry without betraying the essence of the dish. I knew I could make my own, from scratch, calibrating the spices exactly as I wanted them and deepening the flavor as much as I pleased.

My mission upon returning home was to make a Japanese curry that had all the classic trappings—tender morsels of meat, chunks of silky potato, sweet bits of carrot, and green peas—in a sauce that was warm and gentle, cradled in a subtle sweetness, but barking with freshly ground spices, edged with bitterness and prickling heat.

The Spice Dissection and Resurrection

The first and most important step in coming up with my own recipe for Japanese curry was to develop a spice mix. My biggest clue came on the side of a tin of S&B curry powder, one of the most popular Japanese brands.

These days, you can buy S&B and other Japanese curry products in a number of forms. The most basic is the spice powder, which requires the home cook to make their own sauce from scratch, save for the spice blend itself. The next level up in weeknight-dinner convenience is trays of the spice blend set in blocks of solidified roux—cook the meat and vegetables, add water or broth, then melt the blocks into it until a thickened, flavorful sauce forms. Beyond that, you can go for full-blown space-food ease in the form of premade curries packed in NASA-style retort pouches: Simply heat, then squeeze the contents, often already studded with cooked vegetables, onto rice. I ate a whole bunch of these in the service of writing this article.

The ingredient list on the tin of S&B was the most enlightening for my endeavor. While it didn’t show exact quantities, it did at least list the spices in order of quantity. I could see that turmeric made up the largest portion of the mix, followed by coriander seed and then fenugreek—the spice used to flavor artificial pancake syrup, famously responsible for New York City’s mysterious maple syrup odor about 10 years ago. As you can see, it’s a spice profile that leans light, floral, and sweet.

Another helpful resource was this breakdown of Japanese curry spices that I found on the Japanese food site Just Hungry. It mostly confirmed what the S&B tin was already telling me, though Just Hungry had found a Japanese-language source with the approximate percentage of each spice used in S&B, which they translated into English. (The link to the original source in Japanese is no longer working.) Those percentages underscored even further just how mild these Japanese spice blends can be, with upwards of 90% of the spices in the mix made up of the mildest ones.

For my blend, I decided to mirror the S&B breakdown only insofar as turmeric was the number-one ingredient, but I punched up the cumin for more funk, added significantly more black pepper for warm heat, and included a more generous dose of chili pepper for more robust spice. Instead of ground ginger, I opted for grated fresh, to deliver far more zip and zest. Beyond that, I rounded it all out with a range of spices and flavorings, from dried orange peel to star anise and cinnamon.

To bring out their flavor even more, I toasted most of the spices in a dry skillet before grinding them to a powder in a spice grinder.

The most important thing to remember about this spice mix is that you don’t need to replicate mine exactly. That’s what’s so great about making your own. You could simplify it by paring down the number of components, or change their proportions to suit your tastes. It’s this customization that makes the homemade version worthwhile. If you’re not interested in that, you might as well grab a tin of the premade stuff off a Japanese-market shelf.

The Roux

Some recipes for Japanese curry call for cornstarch as a thickener, but many others use a classic roux of flour cooked in butter or another fat. The advantage of a roux is that you can toast the flour to whatever degree you want, altering its flavor more and more the darker it gets. I’m not sure what tricks Kitchen Nankai uses to get their curry sauce as dark as it is, but I suspect a deeply browned roux is one of the keys.

I make my roux in a small pot on the side while the rest of the stew cooks—because this is a stew at heart. Once the flour has reached a deep caramel brown, I add my spice blend. As mentioned above, I dry-toast the spices in a skillet first to deepen their aromas. Frying them in the roux helps develop their flavor even more. Cooking spices in a fat is a technique that’s sometimes called “blooming,” and not only does it make the spice flavor more complex, it also infuses the fat with the spices. That’s a useful step, given that some of the flavor and aroma molecules in spices are fat-soluble.

The Broth and Add-Ins

The final components of the stew are the broth and all the vegetables and meat that go into it. I opted for chicken here, using boneless, skinless thighs, since they handle prolonged cooking much better than the white meat does. You could just as easily use beef, selecting a cut that’s suitable for stewing, or even pork. The basic technique would be largely the same, except for the cooking time, which would be longer for beef or pork.

The first step here is to sear the meat until it’s browned, then transfer it to a plate while you sauté the vegetables. I use a simple combo of diced onion and carrot, leaving out the celery and garlic that often join those aromatic vegetables, since I decided I didn’t want them in this particular dish. There’s no right or wrong here; they’re just not flavors I tend to associate with Japanese curry. (That’s not to say no one in Japan uses them in their curries—I’m sure plenty of people do.)

Once the vegetables are tender and beginning to turn golden, it’s time to add the liquid. Water is one choice, but it’s a missed opportunity to reinforce and deepen flavor. Chicken stock is a better idea, but I wasn’t satisfied with it alone. The holy grail in this dish is a combination of both chicken stock and dashi, which together add a meaty richness and also an unmistakable Japanese essence to the dish. The finished curry doesn’t taste like dashi in any obvious way; it just tastes more Japanese.

At this point, I cut up the chicken and add it back to the pot, along with pieces of potato and finely grated or minced apple. The apple, or another sweet component like it, is something a lot of kare recipes call for, and it’s partly responsible for that accessibly sweet flavor that’s so common to Japanese curry. Given that I had pushed my spice profile in a more aggressive direction, that base note of fruity sweetness was even more important here.

Bringing It Together

To finish the curry, simply stir in the roux, then simmer until the broth has thickened. Green peas can go in right at the end, just long enough to warm them through. The most popular way to serve it is spooned into a bowl with a generous mound of warm short-grain rice, making what the Japanese call kare raisu, “curry rice.”

Is it real Indian food? Clearly not. But when you take all the components into your own hands, it’s a kare with enough flavor and personality to silence any doubters.

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How to Make From-Scratch Japanese Curry That's Bet...

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[Photographs: Vicky Wasik unless otherwise noted]

“The Japanese, who are probably the world’s greatest culinary aesthetes, don’t hesitate to serve a greenish-yellow glutinous mess over their rice and label it ‘curry.'” And thus Madhur Jaffrey, in An Invitation to Indian Cooking, cut down Japanese curry with the swiftness of a samurai sword.

To be fair, Japanese curry was just one of her targets. She directed her broadside equally at British, American, Chinese, and French renditions of curry, all of which feature a generic and often stale blend of Indian-esque spices. At the root of her disdain was the question of curry itself, and what it is. That’s a topic worthy of a deeper discussion, but we can briefly say that “curry,” as the term is used outside India, does not have much meaning there. There is no Indian or South Asian spice blend known as “curry,” nor a dish that goes by that name. In the south of India, there’s kari, a saucy preparation that’s often identified as the source of the English word, but, according to Raghavan Iyer in 660 Curries, even that is open for debate.

What we can also say with some certainty is that at some point in the 18th century, the British began to incorporate an Indian-inspired spice blend that they called “curry powder” into their cooking. By 1747, curry had made its first appearance in an English cookbook, Hannah Glasse’s The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy. It’s this more generic conception of curry, and the powdered convenience product that fuels it, that leads us back to Japanese curry.

Now, I won’t go as far as Madhur Jaffrey in condemning Japanese curry. She was on a specific mission at a specific time when she tore it down. Her goal was to introduce a more nuanced idea of Indian cooking to people whose familiarity didn’t go far beyond a dusty old spice tin. But, given Japan’s love of its version of curry—or kare, as the Japanese call it—it can’t just be dismissed. It’s one of the nation’s most popular comfort foods, belonging to a class of dishes called yoshoku—Western foods that the Japanese have adopted, and have at times heavily adapted, but still don’t consider to be inherently Japanese. I will admit, though, that I was less than impressed with my first tastes of Japanese curry. To me, they were as perfectly tame as curry could ever be, which is to say, perfectly forgettable.

That changed after I visited the country last year. I’m always out to prove myself wrong, so one of my goals on that trip was to find a Japanese kare that could make me truly love it. My conversion came at a narrow lunch counter called Kitchen Nankai in Jinbocho, a Tokyo neighborhood famous for its bookstore-lined streets. There, the cooks heaped rice and shredded cabbage on a large plate, set a sliced fried pork cutlet on top, then ladled a black lagoon of steaming curry sauce all over it.

A Japanese curry at Kitchen Nankai, a lunch counter in Tokyo. [Photograph: Daniel Gritzer]

It was an entirely different Japanese curry from ones I’d had before: darker, more bitter, and spicier, without the sweet and soft easiness of so many others. It was a curry that made itself known, its chili heat lingering until well after I’d left the restaurant.

I didn’t leave with just burning lips, though. I also left with a new sense of just how much of a range of flavor is possible in Japanese curry without betraying the essence of the dish. I knew I could make my own, from scratch, calibrating the spices exactly as I wanted them and deepening the flavor as much as I pleased.

My mission upon returning home was to make a Japanese curry that had all the classic trappings—tender morsels of meat, chunks of silky potato, sweet bits of carrot, and green peas—in a sauce that was warm and gentle, cradled in a subtle sweetness, but barking with freshly ground spices, edged with bitterness and prickling heat.

The Spice Dissection and Resurrection

The first and most important step in coming up with my own recipe for Japanese curry was to develop a spice mix. My biggest clue came on the side of a tin of S&B curry powder, one of the most popular Japanese brands.

These days, you can buy S&B and other Japanese curry products in a number of forms. The most basic is the spice powder, which requires the home cook to make their own sauce from scratch, save for the spice blend itself. The next level up in weeknight-dinner convenience is trays of the spice blend set in blocks of solidified roux—cook the meat and vegetables, add water or broth, then melt the blocks into it until a thickened, flavorful sauce forms. Beyond that, you can go for full-blown space-food ease in the form of premade curries packed in NASA-style retort pouches: Simply heat, then squeeze the contents, often already studded with cooked vegetables, onto rice. I ate a whole bunch of these in the service of writing this article.

The ingredient list on the tin of S&B was the most enlightening for my endeavor. While it didn’t show exact quantities, it did at least list the spices in order of quantity. I could see that turmeric made up the largest portion of the mix, followed by coriander seed and then fenugreek—the spice used to flavor artificial pancake syrup, famously responsible for New York City’s mysterious maple syrup odor about 10 years ago. As you can see, it’s a spice profile that leans light, floral, and sweet.

Another helpful resource was this breakdown of Japanese curry spices that I found on the Japanese food site Just Hungry. It mostly confirmed what the S&B tin was already telling me, though Just Hungry had found a Japanese-language source with the approximate percentage of each spice used in S&B, which they translated into English. (The link to the original source in Japanese is no longer working.) Those percentages underscored even further just how mild these Japanese spice blends can be, with upwards of 90% of the spices in the mix made up of the mildest ones.

For my blend, I decided to mirror the S&B breakdown only insofar as turmeric was the number-one ingredient, but I punched up the cumin for more funk, added significantly more black pepper for warm heat, and included a more generous dose of chili pepper for more robust spice. Instead of ground ginger, I opted for grated fresh, to deliver far more zip and zest. Beyond that, I rounded it all out with a range of spices and flavorings, from dried orange peel to star anise and cinnamon.

To bring out their flavor even more, I toasted most of the spices in a dry skillet before grinding them to a powder in a spice grinder.

The most important thing to remember about this spice mix is that you don’t need to replicate mine exactly. That’s what’s so great about making your own. You could simplify it by paring down the number of components, or change their proportions to suit your tastes. It’s this customization that makes the homemade version worthwhile. If you’re not interested in that, you might as well grab a tin of the premade stuff off a Japanese-market shelf.

The Roux

Some recipes for Japanese curry call for cornstarch as a thickener, but many others use a classic roux of flour cooked in butter or another fat. The advantage of a roux is that you can toast the flour to whatever degree you want, altering its flavor more and more the darker it gets. I’m not sure what tricks Kitchen Nankai uses to get their curry sauce as dark as it is, but I suspect a deeply browned roux is one of the keys.

I make my roux in a small pot on the side while the rest of the stew cooks—because this is a stew at heart. Once the flour has reached a deep caramel brown, I add my spice blend. As mentioned above, I dry-toast the spices in a skillet first to deepen their aromas. Frying them in the roux helps develop their flavor even more. Cooking spices in a fat is a technique that’s sometimes called “blooming,” and not only does it make the spice flavor more complex, it also infuses the fat with the spices. That’s a useful step, given that some of the flavor and aroma molecules in spices are fat-soluble.

The Broth and Add-Ins

The final components of the stew are the broth and all the vegetables and meat that go into it. I opted for chicken here, using boneless, skinless thighs, since they handle prolonged cooking much better than the white meat does. You could just as easily use beef, selecting a cut that’s suitable for stewing, or even pork. The basic technique would be largely the same, except for the cooking time, which would be longer for beef or pork.

The first step here is to sear the meat until it’s browned, then transfer it to a plate while you sauté the vegetables. I use a simple combo of diced onion and carrot, leaving out the celery and garlic that often join those aromatic vegetables, since I decided I didn’t want them in this particular dish. There’s no right or wrong here; they’re just not flavors I tend to associate with Japanese curry. (That’s not to say no one in Japan uses them in their curries—I’m sure plenty of people do.)

Once the vegetables are tender and beginning to turn golden, it’s time to add the liquid. Water is one choice, but it’s a missed opportunity to reinforce and deepen flavor. Chicken stock is a better idea, but I wasn’t satisfied with it alone. The holy grail in this dish is a combination of both chicken stock and dashi, which together add a meaty richness and also an unmistakable Japanese essence to the dish. The finished curry doesn’t taste like dashi in any obvious way; it just tastes more Japanese.

At this point, I cut up the chicken and add it back to the pot, along with pieces of potato and finely grated or minced apple. The apple, or another sweet component like it, is something a lot of kare recipes call for, and it’s partly responsible for that accessibly sweet flavor that’s so common to Japanese curry. Given that I had pushed my spice profile in a more aggressive direction, that base note of fruity sweetness was even more important here.

Bringing It Together

To finish the curry, simply stir in the roux, then simmer until the broth has thickened. Green peas can go in right at the end, just long enough to warm them through. The most popular way to serve it is spooned into a bowl with a generous mound of warm short-grain rice, making what the Japanese call kare raisu, “curry rice.”

Is it real Indian food? Clearly not. But when you take all the components into your own hands, it’s a kare with enough flavor and personality to silence any doubters.

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