#there’s an elephant in the room I know

[eeblouissant]

lol me when I me I thought that break was going to last much longer than it actually did my apologies … gen thought artblock was going to beat my ass :’) here’s a bit from a page of doodles because I turned on one (1) ep of tgg & suddenly I can draw again

[meongppangz]

STRAY KIDS in “Chk Chk Boom” MV Teaser #2

[lune-redd]

Oh look, a new Astro Boy reboot got announced! It looks absolutely atrocious!

[front-facing-pokemon]

[goddessofroyalty]

In any X-men omegaverse au Charles obviously is going to have a mating bite courtesy of Magneto.

Except I lean towards the worldbuilding where mating bites and bonds will wear off in time if they're not actively maintained.

But Charles still spends more time with a mating bite/bond than not because every time it's nearly been long enough or has just been long enough for it to wear off he and Magneto end up working together for one reason or another and by the end of it Charles has a fresh bite and renewed bond.

The timing is actually coincidental (and more a testiment to how often they end up working together) but is still very much the elephant in the room when Magneto inevitably leaves again and they return to being advesaries.

[esc-is-holding-me-hostage]

well, Joost didn't lie, a disqualification right before the grand final is certainly not something we've seen on the Eurovision stage

[starleska]

can we talk about the brilliant execution of Dot and Bubble's big reveal!!!

i am still absolutely gobsmacked by what a well-written episode Dot and Bubble is. startling, disarming, confrontational, and tremendously impactful. and holy shit i really really want to talk about how excellent the 'twist' (which really should've been obvious in retrospect 😭 was done):

as a white person it took me about ten minutes to clock that Lindy's friend group were a nightmare Aryan Tupperware Party collective: all white, all blue-eyed, and even Gothic Paul was dressed in blues and whites, with no black at all. but you know how i responded to that? mentally i went 'oh i'm sure it's nothing!' and shoved it aside. and i think it is exactly that insidious tendency to ignore, normalise, and validate overt and covert racism that the episode does such a tremendous job of tackling! everything in the episode gives us the lore we need to understand Lindy and the people of Finetime are white supremacists. Lindy's disgusted face and immediate blocking of The Doctor versus the amount of time she spends with Ruby. Lindy's shock at the Doctor and Ruby occupying the same room implying segregation on the Homeworld. Lindy calling the Doctor and Ruby 'criminals' not for being in the Bubble, but for breaking segregation. Lindy using Ricky September, a white influencer, to calm herself down not just from the monsters, but from interacting with a Black person. the tradwife aesthetic of the Finetime residents making a comeback in real-life right-wing racist circles. ugh, there's so much and it was all right in our faces!! yet many of us who aren't POC had the privilege of going through the episode baffled and uncomfortable, without being able to put a finger on why until the final bit of the episode. doesn't that tell us how quickly and easily we've all taken to ignoring both micro and macroaggressions? that we needed talk of being 'contaminated', improper use of the word 'voodoo', and Lindy straight up telling the Doctor that face-to-face contact was unacceptable, to understand they're white supremacists? oh my God 😭😭 what a genius play, to make Lindy so detestable from the start. she's an arrogant, vain, self-absorbed, moronic, uncompromising, traitorous bitch...and by layering that abhorrent personality and then giving us the reveal of her white supremacy, there is no argument even the most wishy-washy of people could have re: their awful views. Lindy and her friends are revolting racists who are so wrapped up in their own echo-chamber 'bubble' that they would genuinely rather be devoured alive than challenge their own narrow, bigoted views. i'm still blown away by the power of Ncuti's final scene. the disbelief, the frustration, the sadness and the fury...and yet the Doctor still tries to save them against all odds. i think the most common response to this episode was 'The Doctor should have gone all Time Lord Victorious on them', and you're right - he should have! but doing that would've affirmed the beliefs of the real-life racists viewers. the Doctor responding not with violence or righteous vengeance is a very deliberate writing choice: we are supposed to come away feeling revolted that he needed to behave that way, to almost be supplicant to the white supremacists. because that is the real-life view of so many people who don't even view themselves as racist: Black people need to 'perform' to a higher standard, than white people just to be considered worthy of respect. the more i watch it, the more i'm convinced this is the best episode of the whole season, and one of the best Doctor Who episodes we've ever had. we were taken off-guard by having an episode overtly about racism set in the future rather than the past, because our tendency is to assume equality is a natural consequence of becoming technologically advanced. this clearly isn't the case, and Dot and Bubble is a masterclass in confronting racism head-on rather than dancing around it for the comfort of white viewers. just. aaargh!!!! absolutely amazing 🔥🔥🔥

[teruel-a-witch]

funniest scene transition in the show history

Happy pride 🌈 to this friendly bear who totally clocked Steve and Danny↓

Steve checks in with Danny, as usual

Danny doesn't see the need to deny the obvious and the next shot is

two bros chilling 5 feet apart with an empty stripper poll between them cause they are gay.

(is it just me or is the lighting literally just the colours of the gay/mlm pride flag? I'm guessing the bus driver chooses the mood lighting/colour scheme and changed it from pink/red of the bachelorette party to the blue/green in honour of the two gayest cops in Hawai'i, this makes as much sense as anything on this show tbh 😂)

[revenantghost]

So with my Mom’s cancer being back, my own health stuff, and everything else going on, I’m not sure I’ll be able to be the most active in this round of bookclub (and I do have a lot of words muted and stuff hidden because of mental health and streamlining things and Tumblr's an ass about showing posts sometimes—so if I miss a post, please don’t take it personally!). ): It honestly makes me super upset

But I really hope that everyone has a good time and I can’t wait to see what people cook up! <3 Last time was SO MUCH FUN it makes me a little nervous about living up to those expectations aksjdkajsn But as long as someone has a good time, that's what counts :3

[ee3y]

"and that Mickey fella you mentioned?" disney be honest do u hate me personally

[agirlking]

“The Sullys didn’t owe Spider anything, they didn’t adopt him.” It is basic decency to not leave a child with the murderers that kidnapped him. Much less a child you knew since infancy, much less a child who at least two of your children love like he’s their own brother.

[kiwisandpearls]

swinging a bat at a hornet’s nest but I really need to exorcise these demons from my brain:

I genuinely want to understand where people who say the pansexual label is biphobic are coming from. I do. I do want to understand why some people so are critical of the pansexual label. But at the same time I just…I don’t know, I don’t think a person choosing to use the pansexual label over the bisexual label is them being inherently biphobic.

and there’s also the fact that to me this discourse seems…kind of pointless. Like I don’t wanna call it infighting but at a point it does genuinely feel like infighting in the queer community.

I don’t know, maybe I can get humbled or educated, I’m genuinely cool with that here, but I just…this feels kind of pointless.

[astarlightmonbebe]

i'm only at the beginning of li tongguang's descent into obsession (eps 17-18), but already it's both hurting and hitting. hurting, because we know li tongguang's capabilities, and his level headedness, and the potential he has, that he seems to throw out due to this obsession. hitting, because when you think about it, the obsession storyline and characterization does make perfect sense. obsession like that is a double edged blade, which can turn from love to hate, childish belief and joy to embittered rage in a second.

on one hand, it's painful to watch ltg's childlike desperation when faced with ruyi again. we want to grit our teeth and think of him as idiotic, unable to take a hint. but the reality is that it's a completely normal response to be expected from him. i mean, it's a dream come true, to see the person you 'love' the most in the world to be whole in front of you. it's probably what he could only dream about, especially being the one to apparently find her bones and bury them.

on a deeper level, ltg's initial reaction is very much a manifestation of his inner child, almost peter pan-like in the 'child that never became an adult/grew up' way. by that i mean to say the desperate urge to please, the constant worrying, and the oscillation between hot and cold moods are all so indicative of someone who grew up in an insecure/unstable environment, usually with volatile or simply unavailable authority figures. from what we can gather, he had no father, his mother wasn't in his life ("she doesn't want him around, nor can she bear for him to be away, so that's why he's like that" per empress zhaojie's words to ruyi). the one authority figure that entered his life to offer some semblance of guidance was ruyi, and even though it's clear that she held care for him, she was also a twenty year old assassin used to training subordinates, not children. her mentorship style is clearly so different when you hold ltg and yang ying side by side, and we know from ruyi's own mouth that she doesn't consider herself to have taught ltg well, and wants to remedy that through/with yang ying (i'll probably make a whole different post comparing this and the affects of this after watching some more episodes lol - there are bullet points in the drafts). so even though ruyi was his authority figure, she was still an emotionally unavailable one who couldn't meet ltg on the level he probably needed at that time in his life, and which no one probably ever did. hence his up and down reaction and actions.

it intrigues me, too, because i think, in a very subtle way, ltg is very much a character foil to ruyi in that he reflects some of her worst attributes, or more accurately represents the sort of person she was, or at least acted like (yuan lu's comment about how ltg has ruyi's gaze was meaningful outside of the jealousy arc - to me at least). i saw someone make a really interesting comment on how ltg's devotion to ruyi parallels ruyi's own devotion to empress zhaojie, which i'll also probably comment on more later.

obviously, ltg's obsession stems from an issue much larger than ruyi herself - she just happens to be the unfortunate target of it. and, clearly, i know his descent into it will be ugly, if understandable. i understand ruyi wanting to leave that part of her life behind, but also - to think that maybe many of the issues faced in future eps could have been avoidable if she'd been upfront with li tongguang about her identity early on.

[degrees-of-lili]

In "defense" of Sirris making Sydney and PC make a baby in front of class; Unlike Leighton who does freak shit because they're an old pervert Sirris is explicitly doing because

1) they want grand kids

2) it is a live demonstration of human reproduction from the teacher who shows amateur pornography of themself in class. Also, uses a speculum on vagina having PCs to show off their service???

[batsplat]

from the stuff i’ve heard marc’s former honda teammates (dani jorge and pol in their media careers but joan also i guess) say about him now that they’re racing is generally quite positive, both on a professional/riding level but also seemingly on a personal level? i’m wondering what you make of that given that, yeah, marc doesn’t seem like a very good teammate (unless you’re alex who i’ve left off this list). like MARC wants to separate on and off track stuff and it seems like all of these guys are willing too at least in retrospect, so he can’t have truly burned bridges with them. do you have any thoughts on that

(x, x) most riders are quite good at not burning bridges with each other! it's not like marc's competitors don't know that this stuff is kinda part of the game. I mean, all of marc's past teammates were also trying to assert themselves within the internal hierarchy... you can say that certain teammates engage in 'worse' behaviour than others, but, like, these people do understand they're supposed to be fighting each other! a baseline degree of nastiness is factored in and will be accepted to a greater or lesser extent by your rivals - especially when it comes to asserting yourself in intra-team power struggles. you might hate the other guy in the moment, but generally speaking once the active part of the rivalry is done with... you will probably get over it. marc's fellow riders are aware of how ultra-competitive marc is - and to a certain point they do respect it, not least because they're aware that this is part of the reason why marc has ended up with all those titles. it's like dani said, right, it's marc's strong suit. and in general, you do have to say that there's relatively few teammate pairings that devolve to the level of toxicity that it completely destroys the interpersonal relationship. you might need some level of preexisting animosity... most of the purely competitive sins can be healed with a little time

on the 'separating on-track and off-track' thing... well. this is kind of a question of how you define these things, you can say that marc generally speaking isn't going to massively hold grudges over isolated on-track incidents or whatever... but he doesn't just leave his fighting to the track, and personally I've also never felt he can entirely separate these things out in his mind. can you really say his professional and private relationships with other riders are completely detached from one another? mostly, he's opted to be pretty disengaged from his fellow riders as a collective, and obviously that's a good way to not take things too personally... it's all part of the game, isn't it? sometimes it's good to go with the straightforward approach: marc tells you he will make your life hell, he does indeed make your life hell, and then you both move on with your lives and can maybe actually have a pretty amiable relationship with him in years to come. he's not really defying your expectations at any point here, is he now? it's still a question for each of them as individuals as to whether they think that kind of behaviour is above board and acceptable or not... but everyone by now knows that marc plays these games, so it's not like they're going in blind

and it's not like other former teammates are constantly badmouthing each other. I mean... look, let's just cut to the chase here and bring in valentino as our reference point (as he is for the sport as a whole, which by the way does also help create a certain baseline of acceptability for marc's antics - maybe goated riders are just supposed to be dicks who knows). vale's premier class teammates were 1) nobody (2000-01), 2) tohru ukawa (2002), 3) nicky hayden (2003; 2011-12), 4) carlos checa (2004), 5) colin edwards (2005-2007), 6) jorge lorenzo (2008-10; 2013-16), 7) maverick vinales (2017-20), 8) franco morbidelli (2021), and 9) andrea dovizioso (2021). of these eight men (let's just exclude 'nobody' for now), do you know how many had serious complaints at any point about valentino as a teammate? that's right, it's one guy. one. some of valentino's other teammates, like hayden, checa and edwards, were even quite actively positive about their whole experience. this is the thing - you do need some specific circumstances for teammate rivalries to escalate from 'being kinda bitchy every other month' to 'actively fantasising about stabbing each other'. not accounting for natural interpersonal animosity, let's list some circumstantial factors that you need to get a bridge-burning-worthy level of feud:

you need a competitive bike. it is possible to beef about development direction when you're in the trenches (cf late 2010's yamaha, 2020's honda)... but generally speaking this is going to be quite low-level petty stuff, not actual war

you also need something that approaches competitiveness between teammates. if one teammate is unquestionably stronger than the other one, then it is very unlikely that you are going to get any open hostilities. the tension comes when the two sides are close enough to each other for the internal hierarchy to actually be a contentious issue (this is also basic self preservation... if you're the far weaker teammate then you do not want to make the situation troublesome, because then you will be the one to be fired)

following on from those first two things... well, it doesn't hurt to have a title fight in the mix. there are also other ways you can generate competitive stakes, like, for instance, if you and your teammate know that one of you will be out of a job soon. basically, it helps to have something to squabble over

it is maybe easy to forget how rare it is this century for teammates to be fighting directly for a title, let alone over the course of multiple seasons. only two 1-2's since the year 2000 and they're both for the factory yamaha's (though 2006, 2011-13 and 2017 did all prominently feature two factory hondas). which means that for valentino, the prerequisites were met just the once in his premier class career... and yes, the results were pretty memorable, but (topic! for! another! post!) it's worth pointing out that even that relationship was pretty much 'fine' whenever there was a sizeable disparity between the two of them performance-wise (2008 and 2013 are the most clear cut examples). I think the way I'd frame it with marc is that he has a bunch of mildly dubious strategies up his sleeve to assert himself within the team, which don't really deviate that far from what you'd expect from a rider of marc's calibre and only need to be escalated under specific circumstances. that doesn't mean he doesn't have the potential to be ruthless, but up until now it's mostly been a fairly 'acceptable' level of ruthlessness on the intra-team level... and not something that is likely to make other riders actually hate him

taking marc's teammates one by one... dani was the closest to meeting the bridge-burning prerequisites, though he was only a title rival in marc's rookie season. and marc did go further with him than he did with anyone else, and dani has made some pointed comments about marc's style as a teammate... but yes, he is fonder of marc these days. partly I'd just emphasise again that this is a fairly natural progression when you've stopped directly competing for long enough, and partly it's also just a question of individual personality - dani's not massively into holding grudges. then there's jorge, who... I mean, they might as well not have been teammates, given that jorge was either too slow or too injured to even be sharing any track space with marc. you have to put that one down primarily to circumstance, seeing as jorge's own track record on the teammate front isn't exactly spotless. marc and jorge beefing in 2019 would have been pretty dumb and also a massive waste of everyone's time in a year in which marc singlehandedly won the team's championship. even those two needed more to get things going

moving on to the dark years, pol and marc had an extremely stop-and-start partnership on a honda that was generally pretty uncompetitive... so the only stuff they could get ever so mildly irritable about were riveting incidents like 'marc saying pol wasn't the biggest championship threat' (neither of them were) or 'pol saying he'd copy marc's set up' (which proved entirely useless). not exactly title decider territory, is it now, and marc very much had pol covered as a challenger throughout their partnership. also, those two do have a longer history! they've known each other since they were kids and hold a pretty significant place in each other's careers. now that pol's more or less retired, it's natural there'll be quite a lot of sentimentality there - which will paper over any small cracks that appeared during those two years. and joan was a one year teammate at a time in which the bike was consistently close to offing them both. they only managed to start a sunday race together as teammates on thirteen occasions. it would take some serious effort to engineer a feud with that little opportunity, and, really, why on earth would you bother. maybe if honda had gone for rinsy rather than joan for the factory seat, it could've been a bit more prickly, but it's unlikely that it would have escalated beyond that

this is the thing, right, the only one of these partnerships that would have been worth burning bridges over was dani, and even there marc pretty much had him handled after the first season. in general, marc has been pretty clear on how he's not interested in making friends with the other side of the garage while the teammate relationship is ongoing... which is fine! there's some prominent-ish teammate pairings that are actually good friends, some teammate pairings where one of them is actively helping out and advising the other one, but some riders prefer to just keep their distance. it would have been a little silly of marc to start a feud with a teammate who is galaxies away from being a competitive threat, let alone a title rival, but generally it is possible to toe the line between 'attempting to suppress your internal rivals enough to stop them from becoming a problem for you' and 'taking radical enough action to make your internal rivals despise you'

especially in the post-dani era, marc never really had any need to push things too far... and, let's face it, how many of your teammate relationships end up with burnt bridges is also quite frankly a question of luck and circumstance. do you want to guess which top rider on paper has the worst track record this century with premier class teammate feuds, in terms of a) how many they've had, and b) how little public reconciliation there has been since the end of the rivalry?

yes, that's right, it's the first name that comes to mind when you're thinking of toxic and conflict-prone riders: andrea dovizioso. that old devil, constantly causing trouble. just couldn't stop undermining his poor, innocent teammates. can somebody please stop this ruthless bully before it's too late

I think you get the point. I would personally suggest that dovi is not in fact the worst teammate it is possible to have in a motogp top team. he just happened to find himself in a situation where he was teammates with two separate guys he did not click with at all, in situations that involved a pairing of riders who were (or had the potential to be) competitive with each other, as well as some proper stakes attached to the rivalry. in general, situational factors are going to determine this stuff more than anything else... and marc more often than not does have a reasonably good feel for picking his battles. he's flirted with the line, but he's mostly avoided crossing it. he hasn't had to

[faithandfairies]

Okay, so in 5x12 after Jane jumps off that bridge and then gets rescued Maura is once again faced with the revelation that she's in love with Jane. This time she can't ignore it to the point that in Maura and Jane's first conversation after, Maura's feelings for Jane are like the elephant in the room.

But Jane dismisses Maura's visibly distraught reaction to her almost-death as survivor's guilt and Maura realizes Jane isn't on the same page and declaring her actual romantic love for Jane at that moment won't do them any good.

In the meantime she's still in a relationship with Jack, but the next time we see him Jane gives him a once-over and then pretty much asks Maura if there's trouble in paradise. Which obviously there is, Maura has just realized she can no longer simply ignore her feelings for Jane even if she really likes Jack.

Then Maura breaks up with Jack in that same episode for an excellent reason that technically has nothing to do with all of the above. But it's still fascinating that the first episode we see Jack in after Maura's realization about Jane Jane senses they're in hot water and then Maura breaks up with him.

Then Jane is all about making Maura feel better and literally lists every single pastime Maura likes and would like to try and Jane hates that she can come up with and pretty much promises to try it with Maura if she will just allow it.

Maura finally gives into one and Jane then kind of lures her into going alone to a sweat lodge while she investigates a case she can't figure out.

Then afterwards Maura comes to a ton of realizations

Jack was awesome.

If Jack found his way to her another awesome person can find their way to her (she says while she gives Jane a once-over)

Jane is afraid of her feelings and therefore chooses not to process them, instead she puts them in a little box and ignores them for fear of what will happen if she acknowledges them. (Funnily enough Korsak also warns Jane in an earlier episode how being emotionally unavailable can ruin relationships as it did for him.)

Jane needs to figure out her feelings for Maura on her own, Maura can't do it for her. But either way Jane will be okay.

For now, at least, Maura is willing to wait for Jane as she figures out her feelings.

Literally all 5 points are addressed in the season 5 finale, some as realizations only by Maura, others also by Jane that she then talks about with Maura.