#themes: becoming

[weusedtobegiants]

Every hobby I have I picked up from a man who I wanted to love me. I don’t know how to not become the people I bring home.

Olivia Gatwood, from Life of the Party

[wishfulsketching]

This is what the dynamic was like

[zookie-art]

Shadows and light ~

[eastgaysian]

the specific frustration with dungeon meshi is that there's been a very distinct shift in fan content and a very clear reason for it. it was one of the rare cases of a decently popular work where the vast majority of fan content you saw was gen or f/f; m/m ships existed but they were not anywhere near as overwhelming as in other fan spaces, and people who heard about dunmeshi by word of mouth often came in knowing about farcille. the anime started airing after the manga was completed and is a pretty faithful adaptation, it's not as if it added any more fanservice/sexualization/shipping fodder. the only difference is that it made dunmeshi more mainstream/popular, and that's when the focus started shifting towards m/m ships and away from gen and f/f. for the people who enjoyed being in a fan space that unlike 99% of fandoms wasn't m/m focused, that fucking sucks, and there's nothing you can do about it because you are always flat out outnumbered

[araekniarchive]

@mnvart // Kaveh Akbar, 'Calling A Wolf A Wolf' // @PinkRangerLB on Twitter // @kosmogrl // @devinsturk, '15 Proverbs for the Fellow Chronically Ill' // Jasmine Deporta // Anaïs Nin, House of Incest // the gentle wisdom uquiz by @inkskinned // Rora Blue, 'Sweet Dreams' // Hala Alyan, Dear Layal

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

In the world of heavy metals, love is denser than hate!

[theoldkyokodied]

One wedding and three funerals

Background paintings under the cut

[thebrainrotsreal]

Different ghost king outfits! (o^ ^o) Always adored the au as soon as I heard about it, but I never tried to design what it would look like until now! Left outfit is where I tried inverting Danny's usual ghost fit as jumping point, the middle is going ham with more a space/ecto theme, and the last is focusing more on Danny's ice core/powers! The middle's cape, hood, and ruffles near the belt-like bit are all pieces of void/portals, reaching through can pull out anything, and it can shrink or expand to his will!

[crescentfool]

reunion 🌸

[hoofpeet]

Dinks

[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

[virtual-kangel]

antis: *enjoying media with dark themes like murder, drug trafficking, abuse, etc *

also antis when the media becomes even remotely sexual:

[blayarka]

[anghraine]

It's interesting (if often frustrating) to see the renewed Orc Discourse after the last few episodes of ROP. I've seen arguments that orcs have to be personifications of evil rather than people as such or else the ethics of our heroes' approach to them becomes much more fraught. Tolkien's work, as written, seems an odd choice to me for not wrangling with difficult questions, and of course, more diehard fans are going to immediately bring up Shagrat and Gorbag.

If you haven't read LOTR recently, Shagrat and Gorbag are two orcs who briefly have a conversation about how they're being screwed over by Sauron but have no other real options, about their opinions of mistakes that have been made, that they think Sauron himself has made one, but it's not safe to discuss because Sauron has spies in their own ranks. They reminisce about better times when they had more freedom and fantasize about a future when they can go elsewhere and set up a small-scale banditry operation rather than being involved in this huge-scale war. Eventually, however, they end up turning on each other.

Basically any time that someone brings up the "humanity" of this conversation, someone else will point out that they're still bad people. They're not at all guilty about what they're part of. They just resent the dangers to themselves, the pressure from above, failures of competence, the surveillance they're under, and their lack of realistic alternative options. The dream of another life mentioned in the conversation is still one of preying on innocent people, just on a much smaller and more immediate scale, etc.

I think this misses the reason it keeps getting brought up, though. The point is not that Shagrat and Gorbag are good people. The point is that they are people.

There's something very normal and recognizable about their resentment of their superiors, their fears of reprisal and betrayal that ultimately are realized, their dislike of this kind of industrial war machine that erases their individual work and contributions, the tinge of wistfulness in their hope of escape into a different kind of life. Their dialect is deliberately "common"—and there's a lot more to say about that and the fact that it's another commoner, Sam, who outwits them—but one of the main effects is to make them sound familiar and ordinary. And it's interesting that one of the points they specifically raise is that they're not going to get better treatment from "the good guys" so they can't defect, either.

This is self-interested, yes, but it's not the self-interest of some mystical being or spirit or whatnot, but of people.

Tolkien's later remarks tend to back this up. He said that female orcs do exist, but are rarely seen in the story because the characters only interact with the all-male warrior class of orcs. Whatever female orcs "do," it isn't going to war. Maybe they do a lot of the agricultural work that is apparently happening in distant parts of Mordor, maybe they are chiefly responsible for young orcs, maybe both and/or something else, we don't know. But we know they're out there and we know that they reproduce sexually and we know that they're not part of the orcish warrior class.

Regardless of all the problems with this, the idea that orcs have a gender-restricted warrior class at all and we're just not seeing any of their other classes because of where the story is set doesn't sound like automatons of evil. It sounds like an actual culture of people that we only see along the fringes.

And this whole matter of "but if they're people, we have to think about ethics, so they can't be people" is a weird circular argument that cannot account for what's in LOTR or for much of what Tolkien said afterwards. Yes, he struggled with The Problem of Orcs and how to reconcile it with his world building and his ethical system, but "maybe they're not people" is ultimately not a workable solution as far as LOTR goes and can't even account for much of the later evolution of his ideas, including explicit statements in his letters.

And in the end, the real response that comes to mind to that circular argument is "maybe you should think about ethics more."

[lucidloving]

墨香铜臭, Heaven Official's Blessing // Tina Tran, "Until I started choking on our memories" // Rykarda Parasol // Richard Siken, "Saying Your Names" // Bluepoch Games, Reverse 1999 // Trebbe Johnson, Fierce Consciousness: Surviving the Sorrows of Earth and Self // Marina Tsvetaeva, "Poem of the End" (trans. Elaine Feinstein) // Boyish—Japanese Breakfast // @catradoraism // Richard Siken, "Planet of Love"

[Requested by @wispy-wallfish]

[dykealloy]