#the most embarrassing effortpost

[straightlightyagami]

feel like since i finished school my ability to crank out 500 word essays about anything on demand in under an hour has deteriorated, most of my writing practice being tungle poasts these days. maybe I should keep it up by effortposting or just writing stuff for myself or smth but I’m always too embarrassed

[wrestlezon]

(hell yeah. heres a whole post blogging about my blog. i hope you like introspective words. if not... then definitely dont click that readmore)

I posted 3,572 times in 2022

That's 3,572 more posts than 2021!

(well... a respectable amount... for this being the first year of Blog Existing)

370 posts created (10%)

3,202 posts reblogged (90%)

Blogs I reblogged the most:

pepsitwist

dogcollarpunk

hoodyhoo

allelitewrestlings

(3 people with the best tastes on the site and a fantastic sourced aew content blog. hell yea ofc these were my most reblogged blogs)

I tagged 3,533 of my posts in 2022

Only 1% of my posts had no tags

(oh no. where are they. where are these 40 untagged posts?? how could i leave them BARREN... NO... THEYRE LOST... OUT IN THE COLD...)

#chuck taylor - 576 posts

#orange cassidy - 570 posts

#cm punk - 500 posts

#fanart - 406 posts

#p - 291 posts

#trent beretta - 229 posts

#talkzon - 221 posts

#mjf - 220 posts

#jon moxley - 201 posts

#eddie kingston - 198 posts

(ah yes my top 3 favorite wrestlers. chuck, orange, cm punk. of course. LMAO. funnily enough the pipeline for me was in that exact reverse order... punk vs eddie got me watching the show, then i saw an orange match and was like hey thats fun and cool, then i was like hold up... whos that weird-cute guy who hangs out with him sometimes... and now here i am. with incurable chuck taylor brain worms.)

(ok. actually the story is a bit more ironic than that but if i get too openly genuine on here i'll break out in hives sooooo moving on)

Longest Tag: 140 characters

#excalibur said something last friday along the lines of ''hes not willing to team up with danhausen yet'' which made me laugh out loud. ''ye

(my tag got cut off... i think this is before xkit rewritten added the ''tag too long'' alert for the quicktags thing. i dont even remember what the rest of it was supposed to be... this was on a gifset of the hook birthday chips incident)

My Top Posts in 2022:

#5

thank you aew broadcast team for the instant replay alternate angle on wardlow's very cool pin

295 notes - Posted July 13, 2022

(...i liked wardlow better when he was a vaguely amoral henchman guy but i can appreciate A Very Cool Pin)

#4

"One word to describe me? GAY"

295 notes - Posted October 17, 2022

(the people need to know. they need to know max caster is an entertaining and somewhat unhinged weirdo)

#3

listen. look. i need you to understand. look at this.

SLOUCHED. HANDS BEHIND HIS BACK. HEAD BENT DOWN. cm punk spends most of his promo at this point AVOIDING EYE CONTACT. he never even holds the goddamn mic!!! punk is posturing SO hard to appear as a small harmless creature. so much smaller than hangman.

which he factually ISNT. i mean, look at how he looks when he stands up straight, when he isn't trying to put on an appearance.

See the full post

325 notes - Posted May 26, 2022

(oh noooo lmaoooo not my overly excited cm punk theory-effortpost... embarrassing...... even more embarrassing in hindsight... u_u "wow theyre doing such a good job of working together to tell this fictional story of conflict and antagonism! such acting! such subtlety! wait. what. no. are you guys mad for real. what the")

#2

See the full post

389 notes - Posted June 4, 2022

My #1 post of 2022

how im feeling about that upcoming dog collar match

752 notes - Posted March 5, 2022

(honestly the most shocking part of this was seeing people out in the wild think this was where the sickos meme came from? which doesnt even make sense chronologically?? sickos has been around forever!!! and the original comic is so good. i am not deserving of kartoonist kelly's onion comic clout i am just a wrestle blog)

(also. i have to say. getting into wrestling right as the cmjf feud started was such a mistake... it set the bar too high... wrestling is not normally Like That... ;~;)

Get your Tumblr 2022 Year in Review →

[akatokuro]

With the advent of Go Away, Milo: The Episode: The Series: The Franchise: The Life, some more in-depth thoughts about Saintia Sho and the fundamental problems I have with it.

I watched the first episode of Saintia Sho when it aired, and found it cute and interesting enough. A series revolving around ladies, awesome! Saint Seiya is fun in its goofy way, but that was always an obvious hole within its fabric. And the protagonist seems very cute and earnest, and I love the focus on Saori. With my interest in Saint Seiya recently being tragically reignited, I went ahead and binged on the manga soon after.

Uh... well.

Well.

That sure was a lot of Milo!

Okay, well, let's look at the premise of Saintia Sho and what it's about in relation to Saint Seiya as a whole. There's actually a really interesting, unique, potentially fascinating setup going on here!

yumetabibito pointed this out to me, but Saintia Sho actually has a more "standard" shounen setup than the rest of the franchise, in terms of Shoko starting out as a normal person who ends up sort of tripping and falling into Sainthood, and learning about it from the ground up. Which, in a lot of ways, when she finds out it's actually composed of an entire worldview and a lifestyle, and not just magic punching powers, would be fucking wild for an ordinary person to wrap their head around.

Sainthood is a really screwed up, brutal, dehumanizing process. The training candidates are young children who mostly get killed in the process. The series basically opens up with "to train new Saints, we kidnapped a hundred orphans, and ninety of them died! Well, them's the breaks! Get going on protecting Athena, kids!" Saints aren't allowed to marry or generally have children. They are expected to devote themselves wholly to Athena, body and soul. To become a Saint is to prepare yourself for death. It is expected that basically everyone will die in the Holy War. These things are repeated over and over.

And that element is present in Saintia Sho. You have Mayura trying to lock Shoko away because her being so strongly fueled by her love of her sister is unacceptable in a Saint. You have Mayura, again, reminding Saori that she is the Goddess of War and "it is a Saint's role to die." Even in terms of basic plot points, being unable to save Kyoko and having to kill her instead for the good of the world at large fits into this idea. You have Katya having to sacrifice her love for Saga and literally wipe all traces of it from her mind in order to accomplish her mission as a Saint.

It's an interesting tension throughout the original series, which, emotionally, more or less culminates when Ikki finds himself unable to kill Shun in spite of all of his tough-talk before then. And even though there is a climax of sorts with Ikki in regards to it, I wouldn't say Saint Seiya devotes an actual specific "exploring this theme" to it, per se. As established, Saint Seiya is generally pulled from Kurumada's ass to sell toys, but nonetheless - that tension still did emerge, one way or another.

Saintia Sho, though, seems to go out of its way to more explicitly embrace this through the subplots of the various Saintias. Mii makes it clear that her devotion to Saori goes way beyond simply a servant for her Goddess. Nearly every single Saintia besides Mii has a subplot about having to face off against a loved one, that they feel they have personally failed in the past, in order to accomplish their duties, in an almost formulaic way that Saint Seiya never really did. EVERYONE HAS A DEAD SISTER THEY MUST DEFEAT. And once again, Katya's whole deal is falling in love with Saga, something that is seen as unacceptable in a Saintia.

This is complemented by the early focus on Saori herself. Saori is a good girl, who genuinely loves and cares about the people around her, and is deeply troubled by the institution of Sainthood being necessary for the greater good and for her own protection. It's a great idea to focus on Saori's pain over this, and her trauma, grief, and nightmares about people suffering and dying for her sake. There is an inherent contradiction about Saints, who are meant to help Athena protect "love and justice", being tortured and sacrificed and not allowed to actually be people in most meaningful ways. The people who protect "love" are discouraged from loving. It's an excruciating position for Saori.

You can even tie this in to the (questionable and pretty gendered, but anyway) idea of "Saintias are meant to protect Athena's noble heart." What does that mean? Well, from the various character setups and portraying Saori herself struggling emotionally near the beginning, the obvious translation is helping Saori to balance humanity, love and compassion with the actual duties of being a goddess and commanding the Saints.

So with this basic setup - we have a more explicit look at Athena being torn up at how her Saints are treated - an ordinary person in Shoko who would suffer total culture shock at the zealotry of Sainthood, and is basically committing a form of heresy by entering Sainthood for solely personal reasons - and a team full of girls who all have personal emotion-fueled encounters standing in the way of their duties - Scorpio Milo also enters the fray and is a major character, with lots of pagetime devoted to his antics, to contribute... uh... hm.

Hm.

It is pretty ridiculous, with this in mind, to set up Rigel - a character who is also motivated solely by his personal love for Kyoko - as Milo's rival. Like, in this context, what does Rigel vs Milo have to add to the conversation? Milo tells him "hey, you're doing Sainthood wrong." Uh, no shit, Sherlock? Like, even if you want to have a character stand-in to take that standpoint, we already have Mayura, and more importantly, potentially the other Saintias. Why miss the opportunity to actually develop the girls and the bonds between them by not having Mii, not Milo, be the one to talk about what a great Saint Kyoko was by being willing to die? Why not set things up so Mii is ultimately the one who chooses to pull the trigger, and this being a point of tension and development within the girls' team?

Like, imagine a Mii who went there on Saori's orders to try to help Shoko, but for the good of the goddess whom she is obviously in love with, and considering herself Saori's most devoted servant, she acts on her own - to Saori's own protests - and does "what needs to be done" to protect her, as per her Saintia training and worldview. That puts Mii in a super interesting position in respect to both Saori and Shoko. Does properly serving her Goddess mean sometimes disobeying her Goddess when she feels Saori's human sentimentality is clouding her decisions? Is this what it means to protect Athena's heart?

And Rigel vs Shoko with debating ideas on how best to help Kyoko is the most obvious thing in the world. They literally have the same basic motivation, but are choosing wildly different ways to go about it - Rigel with the more fucked up, flawed one because, implicitly, he differs from Shoko in that he was conditioned to be a Saint. Sainthood demands absolute loyalty and largely giving up personal attachments and happiness. So it's natural for Rigel to just tilt that into a different directions when he decides something exists more important to him than Athena. Shoko, meanwhile, as an outsider to Sainthood, is in a position to want to search for a different way.

"What does it mean to be a Saint? What do you have to sacrifice to be a Saint? How do you love other people as a Saint? How do you protect your, and Athena's, human heart as a Saint?" is a question Shoko and the girls, close to Athena, understanding that Athena doesn't actually want Sainthood to be a glorified slaughterhouse but doesn't know any other way, are in a really specifically unique position to question and explore.

All of these things would have been great to delve into, but instead, we get pretty simplistic characters - again, Shoko doesn't seem to really develop beyond "I want to save Kyoko" and weaving awkwardly in and out of the original Saint Seiya plot - and lots and lots of Gold Saint fanservice. Shoko sits outside of Eris's keep while Milo and Aiolia storm the place, have dramatic rescues, and uncover the true villain, Saga! They have a dramatic confrontation with him! Because Shoko has... so much reason to care about Saga popping up as the antagonist...

And here's the kicker: even if you must include Milo as a major player within this story and this theme, you could still make it work. You just have to, you know, keep him in character.

If you want to keep Milo, have Shoko actually react to his attitude and his actions. Milo would consider he and Shoko to be polar opposites on the Saint spectrum. Milo is all about pride as a Saint, he thinks he embodies Sainthood more than anyone else - he even argues with or overrides Athena in the name of Proper Sainthood. He shittalks Aiolia because he has "traitor's blood" and is pissy about Aiolia possibly dying because it'd make the rest of them look bad. He gets huffy about being assigned missions he considers "beneath him" as a Gold Saint. Milo is stupid enough about this to put Kanon through this whole hazing torture ritual to prove he's worthy of Sainthood while they're being invaded by Specters coming to assassinate Athena at that very moment and Kanon is in the literal process of trying to fend them off.

Shouldn't this sort of attitude be very repellant to someone like Shoko, who loves her family, only became a Saint out of the desire to save her family, and was raised as a normal person? Shoko finds all of Mayura's talk about love being a form of evil and Athena's worthiness completely incomprehensible. Milo's arrogance and ideas of being the High Standard for all Saints to have to measure up against is off the charts. The series touches briefly on the idea that Saintias are looked down upon by regular Saints to begin with. Wouldn't it make sense to involve Milo on some level in this, because Milo is very, very uptight about Saint Standards?

This doesn't mean you have to make Milo evil. But he can at least start out as logically antagonistic as far as Shoko is concerned, and very skeptical of her capacity to succeed as a servant of Athena. You can carve him out as a figure that Shoko looks at and thinks "I don't want to be this kind of Saint." Shoko can make him soften, or change his mind, or prove herself worthy in his eyes. And it gives Shoko the ability to wrestle with a concrete figure she thought was respectable actually being a huge reflections of the aspects of Sanctuary and Sainthood that she would find troubling. I would love the idea of Shoko and Milo actually challenging each other instead of their interactions stopping at "wow, what a strong, dreamy Gold Saint here to princess carry me away!"

And finally, for Milo himself, I'll be blunt: what the hell are you smoking when it comes to a series with the recurring theme of negotiating personal love vs Saint duty, include Milo as a major character - the major Gold Saint - and then, uh, basically pretend like Camus doesn't exist?

There was already a tension throughout Milo's character in terms of him having to negotiate his friendship with Camus, who he loves so, so, so much, and his own ego-driven ideas of what is necessary to be a worthy Saint. You can see it in almost every appearance he has. (And this is me actually delving into the fun time of "cross-referencing the pachinko with the gacha game and...) Milo running all the way to Siberia because he's freaking out about Camus not responding to the Pope's summons quickly enough. (Warning him: you'll be seen as a traitor, dumbass!) Milo fantasizing about Camus and he in perfect harmony as loyal Saints to Athena. Milo in EpG going out of his way to nose his way into Aiolia's business because he's worried it'll somehow reflect badly on Camus in the eyes of Sanctuary. His over-the-top tantrums about it in Soul of Gold, failing to even notice Camus protecting him.

And fundamentally, of course, Camus himself. The person Milo, Pride of Sainthood, Gatekeeper of Sainthood, loves more than anyone else in the world is someone who, when it comes down to the wire, is not only very much driven by personal love and a very humanistic moral code, but is willing to toss aside duty and Athena for his loved ones if it's a dire enough situation. Camus doesn't actually care about the institution of Sanctuary. Athena only matters so much as she is useful to actually help people. And there's a sense that Milo did his best to just refuse to actually process those things about his beloved best friend, because of the implications it carried. Milo walking that weird mental la-la-la tightrope is interesting.

Milo is someone who has internalized Sainthood so much that Camus can't explain the traumatic, painful (if very stupid filler) reasons he's abandoning it without Milo taking it completely personally and rejecting it out of hand. To him, as far as Camus goes, rejecting being a Saint is a rejection of Milo himself, and he completely loses his head about it. Milo is someone who, in a lot of ways, cannot reconcile how much he loves this person - because he does, truly - with his role as a Saint. When you try to force him, it comes out in extremely weird crying-while-strangling-him ways.

There would obviously be an interesting place for a person like this within Saintia Sho's setup and themes.

So if you must have Rigel vs Milo, you can still have some form of the broader conversation - how they choose (or chose, in Milo's case, since Camus died) to "protect" their respective loved ones. Rigel is choosing a path of absolute unconditional loyalty, protecting Kyoko no matter what she becomes or how much harm she causes, even if it means throwing away everything else. Milo, on the other hand, was in this constant state of trying to correct or cover for Camus. Constantly subtly warning Camus not to step out of line, or punishing him for doing so - because Milo is really afraid to lose him. Because as a Saint, Milo can't actually choose him.

So how would he react to seeing Shoko, shamelessly, blatantly, unapologetically, and repeatedly, choosing her sister, and trying to find another way that, unlike with Rigel, he can’t just dismiss?

(Milo and Rigel are both wrong, by the way, and both stances reflect that neither of them are really thinking of their loved ones' actual feelings and wellbeing, but nonetheless. But you can even play that up: Rigel's tactics led to losing both himself and Kyoko, fundamentally, and Milo still lost Camus and even wound up hurting him even further, no matter how much he tried to corral him in and squash out his disloyalty. You guys both suck, congratulations.)

But of course, there's none of anything like that! Milo's role as a hardass, arrogant Saint is stripped from him in any meaningful way, and his internal conflict over Camus is stripped from him too, so what we've left with is Generic Cool Gold Saint who, well, looks like Milo, and... is there for cool badass action scenes and heroism that the girls should have gotten? There is literally no actual reason for Milo as he exists to be there, let alone take up so much pagetime and focus. He adds nothing to Shoko's story. He adds nothing to the themes. He adds nothing to the question of the role of the Saintias. Hell, he adds nothing to his own story arc and struggles.

Go away, Milo.

To the manga's credit, in the more recent chapters it's finally tilting towards focusing on the girls, which is fantastic. It just took way, way too long (and it's pretty obvious that for all intents and purposes we're basically on the final story arc) and for some reason Pod Person Milo is still hanging around trying to act like he's relevant.

[kata4a]

speaking of negotiating one's relationship with tumblr,

so like, what do I post here?

shitposts. I actually have a sort of sincere fondness for the art of the shitpost; it's reminiscent of like, haiku or koans. or perhaps musical prelude - a single idea distilled to its most concise expression, without any constraint on its content. I think this is maybe the kind of post I'd miss making the most: there's nothing that quite has the same pragmatics as "a short and somewhat ambiguous sentence posted without context"

effortposts. ugggh. or like, discourse posting. I guess I'm conflating the two but they're similar niches. this is the sort of post that I'm most often embarrassed by when I read back through my past posts? maybe that's just the cringe talking. but I feel like this is uniquely unrewarding, in terms of the ratio between effort expended and the quality of engagement. I don't know if long-form essays are something I still want to do ever, but they're probably better served hosted on like a personal website or something

art. I do post a lot of the things I make here, maybe almost everything. this is really rewarding! it's the kind of thing I most want to keep doing, probably. but there are plenty of places to post+share art, and these also tend to be my least-interacted with posts so it's not like tumblr has a huge hold on this niche for me

friends? okay this isn't a post type but it's the most compelling hold tumblr actually has on me. like, having a more or less unfiltered and uncategorized stream of my thoughts is such a good filter for like, people I enjoy interacting with, and in particular people I enjoy interacting deeply with. there's a kind of intimacy that takes a lot of time to grow irl (cf. safety-as-an-emotion) that is very easy to cultivate through the medium of like, the pseudonymous traumadump

[liskantope]

For well over a year, I’ve had this excellent post on heroism up as a window on my smartphone. It struck a nerve with me and relates closely to a topic on which I’d like to pour my feelings out in writing one day. At least for the first few months, my main reason for not getting rid of that window was that I wanted to keep it as a reminder to write an effortpost* I’ve always wanted to write on my struggle at not being able to reach the levels of greatness I’ve always dreamed of. Eventually I sort of halfway tuned it out when scrolling through my Safari windows on my phone, but it did continue nagging at me.

Today I finally decided that I was sick of seeing that window up, and besides there’s no way after seeing the heading so many times that I’m going to forget the name of the post and the blog it was posted on, so I finally delete it. But now I’m mentioning and linking to it here, because I do want to motivate myself to write that thing someday. I expect it will be slightly painful to write and may even wind up topping the Longform Posts I Look Back On With Most Embarrassment list. But I guess that’s the risk everyone takes if they want to become less inhibited in their writing, and one day I will at least attempt to write the thing.

* “effortpost” as in long and with a lot of care taken and probably on Wordpress, yet I want to be able to write it as something a bit closer to a fluid stream of consciousness expressing ideas that mostly come from emotion, which is sort of incompatible with the way I normally approach what we normally think of as an “effortpost”

[etirabys]

a follow up to the documentation of psychological changes, on discarding the ideal unachievable self

one of my persistent underlying preferences for how to deal with people is to... not, and there’s a substantial part of me that wants to never communicate with another human in person (and rarely online) but write publicly about policy or philosophy or science, and also post cool fiction (no personal posts whatsoever: no direct mentions of my mood, location, age, ethnicity, etc), and no one actually talks to me but I am being a smart productive force in the world, and sometimes I write direct responses to other people’s arguments but I don’t have friends really, I’m just... happily ticking along on the machinery of my intellect, with all the mental appendages for dealing with people withering, unused and unwanted.

and this idea is so seductive, and this used to be and still kind of is my ideal self. I’ve only ever reached out to it earnestly when I was so unhappy I thought I should force major personality changes in myself, like redirect all the interest I have in myself and the people around me to intellectual pursuits, starve out the ego. (“Surely the ‘self’ will die out when there are no people around for whom I must/am driven to perform the self.”) The mind I am when I am thinking about a math problem or an ethnic conflict on the opposite side of the world is the mind I want to be all the time; this is incompatible with the mind I am when I’m trying to impress or interest someone at a social event, or any kind of talking to someone whose opinion of me I care about. (Part of why I don’t like being this mind: I can feel my self-respect drop when I want someone to like me, and unfortunately I often want people to like me – most of me loves having friends and at most points in my life have wanted more of them.)

ofc I can’t do this. I have social needs that I kinda resent but can’t kill, and I have to pay attention to them and feed them or they shall make me unhappy. The potential self that is happy and thriving and has lots of friends and occasionally embarrasses themselves or hurts someone else is, okay, a desirable self. But it’s a second best self, because the best self is still the one who lives out in a cabin full of mealsquares and books and paints, with a couple of dogs. A thing I am doing now that is annoying but beneficial is letting go permanently of that best self, because every time I try sidling closer to it, it’s going to end up damaging progress on the second best self, since the two have opposite psychological requirements. And alongside that I should start actually wanting to be the second best self, and reducing the disdain I feel when I think about the requirements of the second best self... I should probably stop calling it the second best self, it is the best achievable self. The best achievable self is something I find aesthetically displeasing, but being that self will make me happiest, so I shall grimace less and smile more.

One component of grimacing less is knocking down the distaste I feel about my own blogging habits – my ideal unachievable self has a completely impersonal blog full of effortposts, but that’s clearly not who I am right now and making posts about how my life is going makes me happy, so I’ll carry on and stop feeling bad about it in that one tiny corner of my mind.

(All bets off if technology lets me alter my fundamental preferences, though.)