#theme: womanhood

[aphrodites-serenade]

An apology to— myself

Oh body of mine, how I've battered you.

And yet you still make sure my heart beats.

–

I promise you over and over that I'll get better.

I'm sorry, I say, I can't help the way I think. 

–

I pick this body apart, piece by piece, as if it'll change anything 

And as if I can rearrange anything. 

Why couldn't you have been shaped like those other girls, I ask, looking at the mirror.

–

I've put you through terrible outbursts of mine. 

And you suffer the most due to my self-consciousness.

–

With time, my body will grow tired of me. 

It will give out, like every other body. 

It can work as hard as it can, but it can not keep me young. 

–

But for now, my body refuses to give up on me. 

It tries to make everything work despite my constant blunders.

–

It's too kind, really.

I gave up on myself a long time ago.

[daisywords]

thinking about this post but also it's more than that. do you ever think about how stories starring men are allowed to be about humanity but stories starring women have to be about Womanhood

[st4rguy]

[insummerigrieve]

“You must be the loneliest girl I've ever seen.”

[antiyourwokehomophobia2]

Being obsessed with Bl*e eye samurai while being normal about gender makes the fandom so unbearable

[piecesbythestars]

“frankenstein,” a poem about women’s suffering

normalized in medicine, glorified in pornography, justified in religion. since we birth people, does this mean we birthed the society that causes and trivializes our agony?

[binomech]

the themes. the shattering of the woman-as-womb. the child does get a better life than the parent because she is capable of escaping the cage of the heterosexual nuclear family as a tool for perpetuation of capitalist accumulation of wealth. the bodily autonomy in recognition, modification, care, identification and use.

the haunted house is the white supremacist cishet patriarchal family structure's gatekeeping of the body (IT'S A PHARMACEUTICAL) and with our construction of alternative class-conscious support networks we're setting it on fire

[smile-files]

HELP???

[aroaessidhe]

2024 reads / storygraph

Pluralities

sci-fi novella

a burned out 20-something with premonitions has a gender-questioning journey, after quitting their job and becoming friends with benefits with a trans guy

with a parallel narrative about a runaway alien prince in a space empire and his complicated friendship with his sentient spaceship friend

audiobook arc from netgalley!

[katyspersonal]

What's your interpretation that the left hand of cleric beast is much bigger that the right?🤔

Well, like I've pointed out before, the only explanation I am seeing is blood ministration being done on the left arm!

However, this might get a little more interesting with the Cleric Beasts, because Emilia is also one, yet her arms are symmetrical!

My closest guess to why it happened is because of something Healing Church has been known to do with female bodies. Namely - do some sort of surgery/manipulation/operation on them in order to change their blood type into 'holy blood' one, which they are able to share with the hunters!

English localization team had to use term "groomed" instead of whatever this actually says, and this is definitely going into top 10 of my biggest headaches with mistranslations! As you can see from the Japanese script retranslation ( x ), the meaning is more literal, implying a procedure. I always felt like it would be a surgery on bone marrow, since this is where blood cells are produced, and doctors in Bloodborne could have learned to alter them into having impossible type of blood!

So, as a female cleric, Amelia might have had her first communion with the holy blood as a Blood Saint, instead of generic blood ministration treatment like apparently everyone else has!

I am still not sure why female staff specifically was the Blood Saints, since apparently blood vials are not menstrual blood, as we can learn thanks to Adeline:

Maybe it could have something to do with menstrual cycle, though, because of the whole cycle of moon vs menstrual cycle thing, and Laurence being affiliated with Moon Presence, and then Micolash also stealing his swag and basing his own institution on:

I'd say this is either some sort of deeply rooted superstition within the setting, or in fact, yes, the holy blood links to the Great Ones who put HELLA importance on blood and birth, so being biologically female is crucial for that link to take intended effects.

Ludwig is an interesting case, though! He was SUPPOSED to have blood ministration too, like Laurence or Cleric Beast of the Bridge! Why would not the first Healing Church hunter and the HEAD of their hunters do something so crucial? Especially since Cleric Beast of the Bridge drops the Sword Badge with which you buy Hunter Chief Emblem, implying that this beast is currently what Ludwig used to be? But his left arm is not bigger. In fact, it is even smaller. So I am trying to think of the variants of what had happened here:

1) Ludwig somehow merged with an actual horse, so his anatomy is simply no longer judged through the same lense

2) Ludwig is a leftie, and this is where he holds his Holy Moonlight Sword, so its effect would be a "remedy" for possible arm deformations

3) Ludwig is not a simple beast, but the one with a lot of Kin features, so his anatomy is simply no longer judged through the same lense (+horses are primarily herbivores, and Kin is associated with the flora in the setting, so maybe that's why he went horsegirl mode instead of getting something weak like antlers lol)

4) Ludwig is trans and actually was the first to get Blood Saint treatment rather than regular blood ministration (+we take Adeline's blood from her right arm, and notice that his right arm is a little bigger)

5) Ludwig is a cis man and was the first biological male who attempted to receive Blood Saint treatment instead of regular blood ministration, but that didn't take the intended effect because the gods Be Like That in the setting + his unusual visions and mutation might be the side effect of that and that's why Healing Church stopped doing that with male organisms. Basically, if a male attempts becoming a living factory for the holy blood, it will go "wrong".

6) Combinations of the above points

.....Okay, that went a little unfocused from the initial topic, but you see my points here! Thank you for the ask!

_________________

Bonus ideas:

- Whereas Ludwig is holding the Holy Moonlight Sword in his left hand, Amelia also is grasping the Gold Pendant in her left hand. So maybe nothing was special about her, but holding a special item in the "effected" hand will remedy the asymmetry effect, and had Amelia not been doing that all the time, she'd be asymmetrical too?

- Amelia using recolored model for Bell-Ringing Woman for her appearance might be not accidental, but a fuel for the headcanon that she has Pthumerian blood too, and Pthumerians might simply evolve differently, or traditionally have different way they' go for the blood communition. Off the top of my head, look at Loran Clerics having same sized arms:

Basically, I can answer why Cleric Beasts and the huntsmen have asymmetrical arms, but not why people like Emilia and Ludwig broke the trend despite being the first in line to have blood ministration normally... Because I just have too many ideas, and my preference usually falls towards the most logical ones, but when there are equally logical ideas I become helpless :')

[weusedtobegiants]

I didn’t want to become the kind of woman who is always nervous but I didn’t want to become my mother either.

Olivia Gatwood, from Life of the Party

[oflgtfol]

theyre literally not searching for foreign life in interstellar though like theyre quite literally looking for planets that may be habitable for human beings. if there’s life already there is irrelevant other than that it could be a sign for human habitability. theyre quite literally not even thinking about aliens at all

[neptunesenceladus]

thinking about Themes and Motifs and how Tone can be conveyed through the layout of the page

[gods-favorite-autistic]

why does this video essay on Silence of the Lambs have a Raid Shadow Legends sponsorship 😭😭

[sifutoph]

need us to stop being a silly little guy for one second and acknowledge that t0ph is rude and it isn't some funny trait. it's a flaw. its a reaction, sure, because her whole life she'd needed to play the part of being the obedient little girl and her rudeness is a result of wanting to affirm her independence and probs as a legitimate way to exercise her confidence and/or to go about her establishing boundaries or things she didn't like, but it's still a huge flaw.

[aphrodites-serenade]

Think of me, a woman

My parents may have left their parents, siblings, and friends behind,

But they can not leave their old ways of thinking behind.

–

No matter what I accomplish,

My goals are scrutinized to the point that I don't bring them up anymore.

My existence is degraded and reduced because of the simple fact that I am a woman.

–

People with no knowledge of me think I should retire from my aspirations.

They'll list an "appropriate" title for me: Mother, maid, wife,

And demand me to be happy with only that.

–

Oh mother, you know I'm too boisterous to stay at home.

I am too disinterested in men to ever serve a “husband.”

And having children terrifies me to my core.

–

Regardless of where I end up,

I ask that when you visualize my future,

you look at me first.

Don't think of a man.