#there has to be something in the target

[phoenixkaptain]

One could argue that my obsession with specifically the bloodier sections of Hannibal, the scenes that show humans in excruciating pain, as well as my obsession with Red Dragon’s depiction of Will’s imagination, painful and attractive in the most disgusting way, both paved the way for my becoming obsessed with such properties as Claustrophilia (a novel that honestly reads like Hannibal got his hands on season 1 Will, I’m dead serious, they even mention Silence of the Lambs, like, author knows) and Saw (a property thay pretty much deals exclusively in human suffering)

It could also explain my fascination with the idea inherent within all these properties, that being the idea that a human who is put through immense suffering might then decide to put other humans through the same or worse. Hannibal put a lot of emphasis on Hannibal himself specifically wanting Will to kill with him, to reveal his inner self, so to speak. Red Dragon Will fears killing people immensely for fear that he would be seduced by the bloodlust curdling inside of him. Claustrophilia, I don’t want to spoil if anyone wants to read it, but it shares that same idea. The only character in Saw who survives a Jigsaw trap without either joining a depressing group therapy session or becoming one of Jigsaw’s many (many) protegés is the lady who cut off her arm in, like, movie 6.

It could also explain why I like the idea of obsessive characters. Characters who are obsessed to the point of murder, characters with the internal motivation that if they cannot have something, no one can. The so-called “yandere” character who would rather kill their love than not have them locked in a box in the basement.

(Does Saw fit this frame? I don’t know, man, that one guy’s “trap” was just talking. All he had to do was sit calmly and have a semi-nice chat with another dude. Who sets that trap up without at least a little hint of obsession? And the glass coffin scene, man, I do not even have to go there, we all know. And carrying around the only remaining body part? Even for planting evidence, like, dude. Dude.)

(Does Red Dragon fit this? Yes. Hannibal literally stabbed Will so Will would be permanently physically changed by him. He gives the Dragon of the title Will’s address in hopes that something will happen that will once again change Will’s entire life so he can never forget about Hannibal. The first time Hannibal talks to Clarice in Silence of the Lambs, he asks about Will and, more specifically, Will’s looks. Red Dragon fits this, I cannot emphasize enough how many murderers want to break Will’s back in any way they can, like, it’s practically an epidemic (it’s two people))

What is it that fascinates me so? The blood? The fuel of all life? The changing a person so fundamentally that they can’t move without thinking of the one who changed them? The holding on too tight? The tragedy? The absolutely hilarious AUs that can be written? Yes.

[grandwretch]

i so badly want one of those fic examinations of steve's relationship with joyce and hopper but solely through eddie's pov like hear me out

steve and eddie chat a lot in the upside down (and later in the hospital, when they learn hop is alive). steve has taken charge of filling eddie in on the rest of their of-age crew without the kids butting in. he never mentions his own parents, but he talks about the rest of the party's a lot, especially joyce and hopper. eddie knows what it's like to desperately want someone to be your parent and trying to hide it from his own childhood, when he would try to be cool about wayne dropping him off at his dad's house. steve obviously adores joyce and hopper, thinks the world of them and legitimately looks up to them.

eddie isn't sure what he expects from a cop who came back to life and the world's most determined housewife, but he's excited to meet them as someone steve loves.

cue eddie's horror when he realizes that neither of them really feel much for steve rather than annoyance and vague distrust. that joyce trusts will with eddie, an accused murderer, in a heartbeat and still hesitates to leave him with steve. that hopper brushes off every ounce of steve's hero worship and joy.

he tries to broach the topic with steve, gently, and is heartbroken when steve genuinely has no idea what he's talking about. and not because he's oblivious, but because steve thinks that's what he deserves. he thinks that's the parental love that someone who was an asshole in high school needs, because that's what would make him a good person. he needs people to call him out constantly, obviously, because why else would they keep doing it? why would nancy? at least they're here. at least they're not ignoring him. at least they're not forcing him into a box. they just want him to be better.

like, this is the man who thanked a girl for calling him bullshit and telling him she never loved him. he doesn't Know that's not how you're supposed to handle things. no one ever taught him that.

and now eddie's gotta figure out how he can teach steve how to be loved the right way without outing himself and his huge crush on his love-starved dork of a friend.

[the-real-list-of-ominous-threats]

Today and every day going forth, you WILL be nice to trans women, or else every threat on this blog comes true for you.

[genderkoolaid]

i think trans-affirming cisfeminism's problem is that it views trans people as a way of analyzing cis gender relations, so trans women are going from the status of cis men to cis women, & trans men vice-versa. there is no appreciation for "trans" as its own status, because that would require viewing transphobia as something the patriarchy does on purpose instead of like. something it trips into on its quest to oppress cis women exclusively. and this is also why by and large feminism (including trans feminists) has fucked sucked at talking about NB/GQ people's experiences without binarizing them

[thefanciestborrower]

Quick little thing about what the 'soft vore' and 'safe vore' tags actually mean

Recently I've seen some folks assuming the 'soft vore' and 'safe vore' tags are exclusively cuddly and nons3xual, so I feel like it's important to let you guys know they're not. Soft vore just means prey is swallowed whole, not that they'll live. Safe vore can include fearplay, blood, injuries, and even mild digestion so long as the prey survives in the end.

I understand the assumption that the tags are exclusively wholesome since most of the nonsexual community (including myself) use them and that's perfectly fine, but they're really just descriptors that tell you what the post contains. You can have digestion in the soft vore tag since the two aren't mutually exclusive, and sometimes a story or art piece might even contain both soft and hard, or safe and fatal vore. Explicit material can also exist within the tags, because 'safe vore' and 'soft vore' have no inherent nons3xual connotations. Now that's not to say there isn't an issue with tag spamming or mistagging in the vore community, and for that all I can say is filter tags and post content as liberally as you can and use the block button frequently. It sucks to see triggering content, it really does, especially if it's untagged. I recently had to deal with some pretty bad stuff myself, so I understand. But at the same time, the vore community contains a lot of people whose tastes may not align with yours or fit neatly into specific boxes, and that's okay! Just filter and block where you can.

There ARE new tags that some members of the community use for exclusively wholesome nons3xual vore and that's awesome, but soft vore and safe vore are not, and never really were, those tags. Tldr; Soft vore and safe vore are just tags that tell you if there's chewing or not and if the prey lives or not. They're not exclusively fluffy, they're not nons3xual, and they can be paired with more violent tags if the content contains both themes.

[aerequets]

I have no excuses

[canisalbus]

How often does Machete have to go through bloodletting? I remember seeing you post about Machete's anemia and bloodletting at some point. this is for evil research.

I think that might vary depending on how healthy or sick he's feeling. If he's having a few good weeks or a good month he may not need to be bled at all. But whenever he's suffering from his usual headaches, fatique, sleeplessness, nosebleeds, heart palpitations or what have you, or he has caught some bug or is having particularly bad bouts of nervousness and melancholia he'd go through another regimen of bloodletting to have his humors rebalanced. I could see once every two weeks being a reasonable interval for regular maintenance, and more often than that if he's actively ill, up to several sessions per day in direst cases.

[marzipanandminutiae]

I brought the skirt I'm working on to the museum yesterday, to get some hand-sewing done at the desk between tours (a lot of my projects end up being done half-hand and half-machine, because I love working on the train or during downtime at my various jobs). you know, the one made of the God-Tier WoolTM

when I invited my coworker, a 19-year-old student, to feel the fabric- in that "OH MY GOD FEEL THIS!!!" tone -her jaw dropped

she had never felt soft, light- or even medium-weight wool in her life. she previously thought, it turns out, that all wool was coarse, heavy, and itchy. she couldn't stop stroking it with that awestruck look on her face

truly, fuck fast fashion and the modern garment industry. for depriving us of sensory richness in our clothing so thoroughly that most of us don't even know what we've lost

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Peeped the horrors

[First] Prev <–-> Next

[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."

[ducktracy]

very faithful representation of what it's like to work for 6-11 children's television animation (on behalf of both parties)

[froschli96]

You know what, fuck it, I have to speak my truth! (this is gonna be a rant, so anyone who actually likes assassin's creed revelations and/or the secret crusade, be warned or maybe don't read this at all)

remember how altaïr talks to king richard at the end of ac1, and richard is like "[humans] come into the world kicking and screaming, violent and unstable. it is what we are. we cannot help ourselves."? and how altaïr answers "no. we are what we choose to be." and how that ACTUALLY has meaning bc he himself was "violent and unstable" at the beginning of the game but he has learned and is now CHOOSING to be a better person who cares about others and humanity at large? remember how his calmness and gentleness was something that he ACQUIRED over the course of the story?

and remember how in revelations they then suddenly had a PRE-AC1 altaïr say about the first of his targets "no man should pass from this world without knowing some kindness." and be all wise and calm and collected during a nice little chat with al mualim, who suddenly acts all fatherly? (like, this is suddenly supposed to be a positive relationship? what??)

also, during the confession the target says to altair: "you put too much faith in the hearts of men, altaïr. [...] humans are weak, base, and petty." and altaïr answers: "no. our creed is evidence to the contrary." KJASJFJDKL???? like, it’s almost insulting how close this exchange is to the one with richard. you know, the one that was actually earned after a whole game of character development. like WTF??? cool congrats now that development means nothing. like, apparently that was just altaïr reverting BACK to being the exemplary assassin who understands and believes in the creed that he was apparently just born as. (i also hate how having a young inexperienced altaïr saying this implies that altaïr's faith in humanity is a sign of naivete instead of a sign of the wisdom he has gained after being confronted with counter arguments for a whole game, and also something that distinguishes the assassins from the templars who use humanity's supposed wickedness to justify controlling them like in AC1, but whatever)

altaïr’s development in AC1 mattered BECAUSE he is not NATURALLY a good person, it actually said something about humanity's capacity for both bad AND good and how humans don't have to be forced to be good through mind control bc they can by their own free will choose to be better when taught how and when allowed the freedom to grow. but no. apparently altaïr has just always been calm, wise and gentle. and he just sort of forgot about that during AC1 bc…. ? bc of adha?? bc of abbas???

oh don’t get me started on the whole abbas thing. (it doesnt even make sense that abbas is so hung up about his father and "his family’s honor", like what about the whole point of al mualim not allowing parents to be close to their children bc it would make them weak? like, my dude, you’re not supposed to HAVE any family aside from the brotherhood)

they used the throwaway character that had like 5 lines and made him into altaïr’s main antagonist in revelations… like, abbas wasn’t supposed to be this ONE dude who had personal beef with altaïr, he was just supposed to show how while altaïr’s revered by many, a lot of his brothers also hate him, bc 1) altaïr is a shitty person at this point and 2) bc there’s no real feeling of community and family in this version of the brotherhood, but just a pervasive sense of competition and jealousy — these assassins don’t care about their goal of safeguarding humanity bc they’re too hung up on petty squabbles and divided by rivalries (you know, the things that made malik hate altaïr even before solomon’s temple and that he overcomes in the end which enables him to forgive and to reconcile with altaïr so they can work together and stop al mualim? (you ever just think about "we are one. as we share the glory of our victories, so too should we share the pain of our defeat. in this way we grow closer. we grow stronger." and cry? bc i do. all the time. malik, the man that you are))

and now abbas is altaïr’s childhood best friend turned lifelong enemy?? like, bowden bent over backwards to come up with an explanation for why altaïr is an arrogant ass at the beginning of AC1, when the explanation is right there: he was raised to kill without asking questions and was constantly praised for how good he is at murder, which resulted in him becoming arrogant and disregarding human life. like, it doesn’t have to be some shakespearean family feud type shit. and guess what, this "simple" explanation actually plays into the story’s themes, who’da thunk!

(like, abbas might not have been a "fleshed out" character in AC1, but he had a specific function and now that function is gone. mr bowden, mr mcdevitt, you know characters are allowed to simply exist to tell us something about their worlds and the systems they live in and sometimes that’s more important and also more interesting than having every single character have a detailed backstory to explain all their behaviors, right?)

with all of this revelations loses all nuance in regards to the levantine brotherhood and also the creed in general. like, altaïr being a master assassin at the beginning despite being a terrible person and not actually understanding the creed is a criticism of the brotherhood and the creed itself. like, it said something about the order that someone like altaïr was able to get that high in rank, simply bc he's good at killing, which also tells us what is considered important in the al mualim era assassin order. when you make altaïr’s arrogance the result of his personal conflicts instead of how we was raised by a brotherhood that only valued one's ability to kill, you lose that characterization of the assassin order itself!

and by suddenly making al mualim a semi good "father figure" you also downplay his manipulation of not only altaïr but all those under his care. (altaïr says something about al mualim being "as a father" to him exactly twice in the codex, but he doesn’t mean by that that he WAS a father to him, what he means is that he was the CLOSEST THING he had bc HE DID NOT HAVE PARENTS, not because his mother died in childbirth and his father was executed when he was young btw, BUT BECAUSE IT WASN’T ALLOWED, like his parents actually lived but weren’t allowed to be close to him, he says he came to view al mualim’s "weak and dishonest" love as enough and even better BECAUSE HE HAD NOTHING ELSE, BECAUSE AL MUALIM ISOLATED HIS ASSASSINS FROM THEIR FAMILIES. al mualim "loved" him bc he was good at killing people for him! hm, i wonder if this could be trying to say anything about cults and indoctrination and the inherent contradiction in fighting for peace and free will by taking children away from their parents and raising them to become killers?? like, altaïr wasn't ~the special orphan boy~ taken in by al mualim bc his father died a hero's death, it was "the way of the order" to have al mualim be the closest thing to a parental figure for everyone to ensure absolute loyalty! altaïr saying al mualim was like his father is not supposed to make you go "oh, he must have actually been a good guy for altaïr to consider him a father", it should make you go "oh that's kinda fucked up that he considers the dude who made him into a killing machine and who manipulated him a sort of father figure"!)

and then in revelations they suddenly portray that relationship as positive and healthy??? like, it would be one thing to give it some nuance by delving into the psychology behind al mualim’s "love" and maybe showing how al mualim did care about altair in a complicated, fraught sort of way (like, you know, there’s a lot of interesting things you could say about al mualim at several points addressing altaïr as "my child" in AC1 and how that parallels Garnier referring to the people he drugged and abused as his "children", and what that says about how the templars view the people who they say they want to save and in whose best interests they supposedly act (in any case, al mualim doesn’t use that phrase because he has any real parental feelings but rather to patronize and to invalidate any objections, like in a "mother knows best" way))

but they even fucking DARE to parallel that relationship with that of altaïr and darim in revelations, by having the reflection in the puddle of darim hugging altaïr showing altaïr hugging al mualim…. like their relationship wasn’t inherently abusive but just tragically cut short because al mualim was just "corrupted by the apple"… like WHAT???? so it’s not the very real problems like grooming, manipulation and indoctrination and the hierarchical structure of the brotherhood itself (all of which are antithetical to the assassin ideology), it was just the evil apple all along. great. that’s DEFINITELY a lot more interesting.

god im sorry i really dont want to spread negativity but this is driving me INSANE. like, somebody please tell me im not crazy bc i feel like somehow most of the fandom is in agreement that revelations and the secret crusade have better storytelling and characterization than ac1.

SPEAKING OF WHICH, can we talk about how, even IF we completely ignore AC1 and treat revelations altaïr as his own character…. the narrative still doesn’t really work?

basically, the whole point of his story in rev is that "he gave his whole life to the brotherhood", this obsession led to him not using his time with his family which has him ending up dying alone in a dark library and this in turn makes ezio reevaluate his life choices…. except. he doesn’t? neglect? his family? or whatever? like, his devotion to the assassins is sort of painted as this tragic flaw that leads to a lonely death bc it supposedly comes at the cost of his family, but… his wife has joined the assassins, (at least) one of his sons is in the brotherhood and even when he goes to protect the assassins against the mongols, he takes his family with him (except for the son who stays behind bc he has a family of his own and who, ironically, ends up dying bc of that)… like, you can’t describe altaïr as a good husband and father in the database and have his son tell him that "everything that is good in me began with you, father" when they say goodbye, and then want to make us believe that he put his family behind the brotherhood and that that is a character flaw that leads to his tragedy.

because you HAVE to have a character’s tragedy be the result of a character flaw. like. that is how tragedies work. otherwise it just becomes tragedy for the sake of tragedy which is… boring bc it has no purpose. and we know it is SUPPOSED to have purpose bc ezIO FUCKING QUITS BEING AN ASSASSIN AFTER WITNESSING IT!

it’s like they want to have their cake and eat it, too — they didn’t want to actually make altaïr a bad husband/father, but still wanted to make his life a tragedy where he loses his family which is why instead they outsource all responsibility to abbas who now has to be the reason for ALL the deaths.

like, they try to make at least maria’s death kind of sort of the result of altaïr’s rashness or whatever but like… these guys KILLED THEIR SON and TOLD HIM THAT ALTAÏR HAD ORDERED HIS DEATH. like, altaïr losing it in response to that is not rash, it’s fucking logical and justified! if anything the scene made me angry at maria for trying to stop him. like, GIRL, he was YOUR son too??? but god forbid we give female characters actual real emotions, she has to fill the role of "voice of reason who dies for altaïr’s man pain" i fucking guess.

like, it’s this weird mix where his tragedy is simultaneously painted as his own fault but also not really bc abbas is the one responsible for all the shit that happens. it just… it just doesn’t really go together.

the only way to make his story make sense narratively and to give it actual purpose is by looking at it in the context of ezio’s story, bc the things he sees in altaïr’s memories are supposed to be a revelation (ha!) to ezio specifically. and i guess that’s maybe the crux of it all — altaïr’s story in revelations was conceived of first and foremost to support ezio’s story and development. which is probably also why many people maybe don’t notice bc, having skipped ac1 and started with ac2, the majority of people mostly care only about ezio and only really appreciate altaïr’s story in as far as it serves to push ezio forward. (tho i’ve also seen a few people say that ezio is also written kind of weird in rev, but i’ve never really been an ezio girly myself so i can’t speak to the truth of that)

like, altaïr dying alone in the library doesn’t really have to make sense for his character, i guess, bc it’s only really supposed to be a cautionary tale for ezio.

so, i guess, for once, they actually had a MAN dying for another man’s character development, which is pretty woke actually. ubisoft, i take everything back jksdsfjhgdsahfhsdhfghfdsgjhsdgjh

[mintflavoredfemurs]

Idk just thinking about Killer and his acknowledgment of Nightmare but also his acknowledgment of the fourth wall/player but also his personality disorder with Chara and Sans in the reigns of his mind and Oh God !!

Killer belongs to Rahafwabas

[circusk]

worlds most atrocious awful yaoi

calling them fools gold cause they're both trying to trick eachother for their own gain (fools gold is "fake" gold. pyrite btw) but also because they're both fucking idiots . they are the fools

[dustykneed]

post-the search for spock but it's a yuri slice of life comic <333 nothing as good a bonding activity as lovingly combing out your vulcan wife's hair as you fondly bitch about your other wife 🩵💙💛

[slickricklj]

Ada Wong + Leon Kennedy - Inspired Change

"Best not to ask who or why. I understood that. Made my peace with it. Until that one night in Raccoon City...changed everything." - Ada Wong