#they're all just suffering out here

[yuexias]

woke up this morning thinking about how my babies would celebrate chuseok (mid-autumn festival) so here's some:

- seo harim would go home for a quick dinner, before leaving real quick with an excuse that she has to work so back to the police station hq she goes bc crime never rests even on celebrations and holidays. tho mostly it's bc chuseok would mean it's around the time for nabom's death anniversary so ?? everything just hurts a bit more during that time

- cheon jaeha would also be forced to go home for dinner though he is mostly just busy saying shit to piss his father off bc wdym they gotta stick together as a fam when the reason why his mother is gone is sitting right there trying to 'discipline' him as the head of the family? when he's finally kicked out, he's gonna go for a ride and maybe close to crashing his bike once or twice, but it's all good. at least the moon is pretty.

- yeo ju-an is just. suffering. in and out. he hates family and friends gathering, and for the same reason as harim, it's all just harder when he's the contributing reason for nabom's death. most likely to lock himself up in his art studio and just draw and draw. the only thing he's gonna spend hours on is just nabom's portrait tbh.

[jesuis-assez]

↠ Tim & Lucy ↳ 2x10 - The Dark Side

[waterlinkedgirl]

Musical Touken Ranbu: Michinooku ~ Hitotsu Hachisu (Michinooku ~ A Single Lotus)

Here we go! Only a few days after the archive release and toumyu's ninth anniversary (congratulations!)

Michioku, or Michihasu, is a myu I have many conflicting feelings about, both positive and negative. However, I do believe that with the right amount of care in the next Mika-related story myu, the negative can still be cleared. Plus, I'm glad about a lot of things being re-established. The writer does need to step up her game a little on the plot-writing side of things, as well as the understanding-and-respecting-past-myu side of things, but as long as she does, this can still be given a proper place within what was already established.

Keep in mind that these are only the subtitle files, timed and tled to the DMM senshuuraku and the bluray respectively. The archive version will have a talk at the start, so the starting times of the subs will have to be delayed accordingly.

You can find the subtitles and my TL notes document here!

[rexonalapis]

it is very telling that average genshin players cannot comprehend seeing an actual mature, qualified leader that is actually good at taking her job seriously after meeting archons who either is still childish, clowning whimsically, or straight up incompetent.

[spoondoodles]

I blacked out and more Logince HS AU appeared on my canvas idk what happened (also ty @oatmeal-stans-the-trash-rat for some inspiration sorry it took so long to make a post about Them <3)

[bonebabbles]

I keep starting and abandoning posts that go into my drafts, as I try to stay tasteful about how fucking revolted this part makes me. Like, I'm legitimately unsure if the very relevant trauma I have is making me see things that aren't here

But first we see that Star Flower is trying to ingratiate herself to the group, just after she reappears from chapter 5. Chapter 5 is about how Clear Sky is still abusive towards his son, and she comes in after stroking his ego, stressing how alone she is, and appealing to how she'll be loyal unlike his child. (She glances over at Thunder, directly implying this.)

Now in Chapter 9, she's babysitting and trying to care for Milkweed's kits (in spite of discomfort from Milkweed), taking a wet sleeping space away from the others, and pulling more than her own weight "without complaint." Putting herself through harsh sitations to prove her worth.

All while trying to appear extra attractive to Thunder, and later Clear Sky. Basically every man in power who can "protect her"

Like, am I going fucking crazy? With how we later find out that Star Flower was "promised as a mate" to One Eye's subordinate Slash, is... is that hypersexualization? One of the extremely stigmatized symptoms of sexual abuse?

She goes to find Clear Sky alone to throw herself at his paws, and he's very quickly attracted to how she promises to perfectly obey him, have no needs of her own, and finally be the perfect servant that he desires

"I don't deserve your trust because I am dirt. I understand you because I also regret something. I'd die for you. I'll never betray you unlike those who have."

This isn't manipulation. She means this. The story is playing their romance sincerely. She's comparing "betraying" Thunder by telling her own father about an assassination ambush to Clear Sky's history of child abuse, physical assault, and murder

She believes she's on the same level as this; a monster who murdered a childhood friend in a fit of entitled rage. She was a victim of One Eye who really believes that the way her father used her means she "understands" this monster, deserves this treatment.

And Clear Sky LIKES that.

He likes that she will have COMPLETE FAITH in him. That she will follow him WITHOUT QUESTION. That she will OBEY his orders. That's fucking verbatim, that's THE TEXT!!!

WHILE HE'S STILL CRYING ABOUT "ive tried to atone every day" FOLLOWING THE LAST TWO BOOKS WHERE THE ONLY SHITTY THING HE DOESN'T DO IS MURDER INNOCENT WOMEN

Am I insane?? Am I wrong??? Am I missing something here???? Why the fuck is the fandom takeaway "haha sexy girl steals his dad." Did I read the same book

[sysig]

Dr. “Has to get a good grade in therapy” Doran (Patreon)

[dreamlogic]

aye can i get a fuckin uuuhhhh

break. on my burger

[sskk-manifesto]

Next time we should just skip over ep 3 and do a chapters 84-87 reread

[kyliafanfiction]

I sometimes feel like characters who do truly monstrous things while also having been victims of some pretty insane shit themselves are sort of an exercise in empathy. Or at least, should be seen as such.

Like, in real life, if a person who has been horribly broken by their experiences and failed by society than proceeds to rape someone - it's hard to feel the justifiable sympathy/empathy for that person (without excusing their rape, never do that) because well, you can look at this actual human person they hurt, or worse, and it feels gross and disrespectful to the rape victim.

And this is understandable. (And applies to more than just rapists/rape victims of course, that's just the most visceral one and thus picked for that reason)

But a fictional rape victim is... fictional. You can't 'disrespect' their trauma, and while obviously rape/whatever else is real, and people may related to the rape victim and thus see your comments about the rapist also being a victim as somehow being about their experience...

Well, it's not.

Because the rapist here, didn't actually hurt a real person. Fictional characters are objects. They're objects that often grab us by the throat and refuse to leave our fucking heads, yes, but they're objects. They are tools used by writers to tell a story, and readers to tell a story.

And one of the things fictional characters are good for is allowing us to consider experiences we never had, and imagine ourselves in other circumstances and lives. (Also just fun and fascinating and interesting to watch their stories).

It's very easy to feel for the rape victim in fiction, and rightly so. That's Level 1 Empathy there. Granted, some people IRL fail that, but that's not really what we're talking about here.

Advanced Empathy, hard Empathy is feeling for the rapist. Not for the rape, of course, even if they feel guilt about it, but if someone really was failed on multiple levels and was broken and damaged and went through the sort of psychological wringer that would leave most of us here on tumblr catatonic - they do deserve the same Empathy any human (any person) who went through all that.

Even after they also do the bad thing, critically they still deserve Empathy. And that is fucking hard. I very often have a hard time feeling bad for truly awful people who also deserve empathy and sympathy, real and even fictional (despite all this, yeah, I'm not perfect on this) for what they (separately) went through.

It also becomes even harder when what they went through is utterly bound up with what they did. How what they went through and experiences is in part responsible for what they did - because they still made a choice. The circumstances may have left them not in their right mind, may have left them feeling without choice, may have driven them to things they normally might not think of or do, but they still chose to do that bad thing. And that's not okay. They still hurt someone.

And yet - one cannot remove the action from the circumstances. So you can still feel empathy, and elucidate all the factors and circumstances as to what led up to their choices and why, and it doesn't change that they did the horrible thing. The rape, or the murders, or whatever.

But circling back - with a fictional character... they didn't hurt a real person. There's no one who is real that suffered. The things the character did IRL are bad because they hurt real people.

So you're not being disrespectful to the victim by feeling that empathy, or sympathy. By exploring the things that they were a victim for. Even by wanting to focus on those things - fictional characters should be compelling in all their aspects, if they're written well.

And yet, of course, if you do that empathy and do talk about what the bad person went through and all that context, people come at you. They call you evil, just as bad as the (again, fictional) character, or they say that you're treading dangerously close to the arguments people use to defend the real people who do these things in real life. Or you're disrespecting all the victims of these crimes IRL. Especially of course, if the person coming at you has a reason this comes close to home.

But again - fictional.

In an ideal world, we'd all feel sympathy and empathy when it's called for, regardless of what the person did. Even the worst most monstrous people deserve human treatment in prison. And if you don't have empathy, that's hard. Even if you do have empathy, that's hard.

So if you look at a fictional character (who doesn't hurt a real person by virtue of being fictional) that does horrible, vile things, but went through so much, and you still can't empathize or sympathize with them... I mean, it doesn't make you a bad person, not even close, this is still fiction, and there's people I should empathize with in fiction that I don't, but...

It's still a failure of your ability to be empathetic. And we're all humans. We're all failing at that, among other things, all the time. But... it's good to be aware of that. at least?

At the very least, bear that in mind when other people are talking about that context, and that victimization. And please, for the love of god, don't fucking pretend that the victimization didn't happen, that this person who did do terrible things (in fiction) suddenly didn't also (in fiction) experience awful shit, as if doing a bad thing erases all the bad things done to you.

Again - it doesn't necessarily make you a bad person, but like... the horrible state of prisons in our society is a real, actual problem. The way we as a society dehumanize people who do bad things is a real actual problem for a lot of reasons (not least because it creates an incentive for authority that wants to dehumanize a person or a group to expand the definition of 'did bad things' to make their dehumanization now acceptable, among other things).

So yeah. Fictional character who suffers but than also makes others suffer - that's a useful exercise in Empathy. And doing that doesn't make you or anyone else a bad person, or actually defending the sorts of crimes, IRL or Fictional, that this character did. Contextualizing is not whitewashing, empathy is not erasing, and humanizing is not disrespecting the victim(s).

So yeah, they fictional character did bad things. But there's more to them than that. And you can say but and talk about what comes after but without disrespecting the fictional victim. Because the fictional victim... is just as fictional. Just as not real.

Is it possible for this to end up being taken too far? Yes. But that's a reason to be mindful of yourself when it comes to real people, not to never do it. And when it comes to fictional people - again, fictional. Nobody was actually, really hurt.

(I really do want to make clear, before people read the tags, that this applies to all crimes these sorts of characters do, rape was just picked as the one to use as the example.)

[musical-chick-13]

I hate when something looks like it would be RIGHT up your alley and the cast is pretty stacked, but there's one person in said cast who is just. Genuinely a horrible human being.

[thevegetablewhichnoonedaresname]

I'm starting Mission to Zyxx Season 5 now, and I have feelings about that.

First, it generally scares me when people hype anything up at all because there is no guarantee that anyone values the exact same thing I do to the same degree. Even if I trust the creators of a thing to value something and try to do right by it, that doesn't always necessarily mean it will be successful, especially if that involves doing something wildly different than what made it good in the first place (I have been burned this way before). I guess I'm just hoping they continue the format of goofy improv shenanigans for the majority of it with something more planned and emotional in the finale if they want, like they've been doing all along. I'd think they would, and I've heard nothing bad about the ending, but I guess it still makes me nervous because I'm so close to the end and I want it so badly to stick the landing. I'm setting my expectations on the floor so I can be surprised instead of disappointed, but honestly, I don't need it to be better, I just need it to be on par with the rest.

Second, and more briefly, I'm happy it's (hopefully) ending before it has a chance to decline. I am so on board with that philosophy. But on the other hand, finishing a thing that I really, really like and knowing there's not another one out there gives me a special kind of heartache. Like, I know there will be other good media, and stuff that's good and unique in other ways, but I know for a fact that there are no other podcasts out there that have the same mix of a balance of off-the-wall improv and structured narrative, quality comedy, fantastical sci-fi setting and loveable characters, and high quality production. There are other things out there with many of those qualities, but nothing that checks every one of those boxes. It's a lightning-in-a-bottle thing that very much feels like the right people had to be in the right place at the right time to do it. Attempts to do it again would feel hollow because it had to be born out of necessity and passion and the talents of the people involved, so if you switch out the people it loses the reasons it's great, and if the same people tried to do it again it'd feel tired. That makes me so, so grateful it exists, but also so, so sad that it doesn't, and I'm 80% of the way done. When it's over, it's over.

Anyway. Now that that's all out there, I'm just gonna finish listening and have fun. Wish me luck.

[daily-crabbys]

mmg,, i might hiatus again,,,

I'd hate to do it, but there's no joy in crab posts as of right now, and also as of a long while ago.

Managing messages and responding to people in replies and being tagged and all the stuff in inbox is. a lot.

I never intended or expected crab blog to get this big, and it feels like such a chore to do at this point. Not that I dont like it, and not that I dont enjoy the fellow crab lovers, but it's certainly overwhelming.

That plus other socials and such that I manage and real life stuff is just. IDK, it's a lot. Usually, if I get to this point, I just drop off, maybe delete the account if I really can't stand it, but I'm definitely not going to do that here.

At the very least, I'm going to empty out the submissions that have been piling up, but after that, I'm not sure. I may not even get through all of those, I've already been relying on those for a long time at this point, and I think that's pretty obvious.

It feels like a hassle to deal with those anyways since most people don't even identify what type of crab it is that they submit, so I have to take the time to find it, which is usually not at all easy. There are so many posts that I've just had to guess what to tag it as because I just don't know, and there's no solid answer that I can find, at least not usually.

Which is also partially my fault, I've never said anything about it before, and I never specified it at an earlier time to make incoming ones less stressful to deal with, but even so I just. I don't know, I don't.

I don't know exactly when it'll happen, but it's the most likely thing to happen from here. I think I'll modify some stuff about how I handle the daily-crabbys blog to make it easier on me when I come back, but I'm not entirely sure what that'll be. I've never managed a successful daily posting account before, I haven't the slightest clue how to make it all easier on me.

Sorry that this has gotten so long, I didn't mean to rant. There's just so much that I feel like I need to say.

This isn't something coming out of nowhere, and it isn't going to be immediate. I've thought about wanting to do this for a while, and I know I did this already not too long ago, but I didn't really change anything for myself, so I'm just burnt out a lot faster.

Sorry again, both for the length of this and the fact that it's going to happen, but I've just got to make things better for myself before I carry on long term. I really just fucked myself over by not doing this the first time, but if I don't do something about it eventually then I'll just end up hating this blog too much to continue.

🦀💜

[deus-and-the-machina]

ffxiv garlemald discourse is so funny because people will go "ugh people just cant stand it when things aren't black and white" and then you look at how the empire are portrayed in stormblood and shadowbringers and its like hm. that seems like a pretty intense and accurate display of violent imperialism to me! Wow I wonder why people in this day and age may find it hard to feel sympathy for them or even hate them on principal. god its such a mystery.

the games like 50/50 to me on how it tackles these themes because I actually like the garlemald arc in EW, I think it has a lot of horrific and powerful scenes depicting how self destructive fascist propaganda and beliefs are, but I also think it doesn't go far enough on some fronts. the garleans' xenophobia is most notably and obstacle to getting them to accept the contingent's help, which is what they're there to do,

but there's never an admission of harm from any garleans on the uuuuuuuuh massive amount of war crimes the nations around them are still suffering from they're just kind of like "we misjudged you...but you actually wanted to help us all along" like yeah thats great now can we get you all some deprogramming because you keep talking about returning to your prime and glory days and I think we need to unpack some stuff you really SHOULDNT return to. im not even really talking about EW proper but the patches where things are a bit more chilled out and people are recovering.

It feels like they wanted to have their critique of imperialism and also have things end with the beauty of human connection and reaching out and these things just don't mesh well because hey a lot of your modern day audience is not gonna like having to treat people yelling xenophobic things at the cast and your character with kid gloves after you showed them hours and hours of the awful things these people's beliefs have done. especially in the present day hoo boy.

[brick-van-dyke]

The more I learn about the history of the middle east in general, the more I realise that the "Israel-Palestine conflict" is actually just a group killing their own fellow shared ethnic group who are "too brown".

Hebrews and Arabs both originate from Phoenicians, aka "Abraham's descendents" according to their respective oral stories and passed on histories. They are from the same place and people. However, there is a narrative that twists this and claims that Arabs were "always an outside force that invaded", when the various groups within that ethnicity always had their share of cooperation and conflict in various stages of history. Just like, say, the various groups in France. They were of the same group and no particular ethnicity had no more of a "claim" to the land than the other, they just had their beef and eventually integrated.

So when I see "but the Arabs are colonisers" I can't help but ask; what is a colonisers to you? Seriously. If colonisation means "any conflict in the past between a shared group from the same place" every single group would be colonisers. There's no such thing as "an innocent conflict" where atrocities weren't committed by either side. So please get that out of your head if you want to say "but the Arabs did X, Y, Z to the Hebrews so it's colonisation and they don't belong in A, B or C areas". That's just not how colonisation works. It's like calling TERF or cis a slur when they're not. Conflict between the same people from the same area is, yeah, a conflict hit not colonisation. However, a people who are from a completely different place who want to erase an ethnic group and take over their culture, erase their history and get rid of their physical features? Yeah, that's what colonisation is. It's genocide with the aim to erase a specific group or culture and take it and the land over. For example, the British in the Middle East.

The problem with calling Arabs "colonisers" is not only is it completely historically wrong, they're from the same place and have the same origins as the Hebrews, but they (like Palestinian Jews) have been their since before the British came. Compared to European Jews who came later on after having lived in Europe (and became European as that is genuinely a part of their culture and ethnicity as well and shouldn't be erased or forgotten, that's also cultural erasure of Germanic, Polish, etc traditions passed on) and, sure, do have origins there *as well* but it needs to be understood that they, specifically Zionists, are a part of the British colonial project aimed at killing *both* Arabs and Jews. The point isn't to help Jews against a colonisers from the first few centuries (sorry to tell you everyone, but no, the Ottoman Empire, Baylon and the Pharaohs literally do not exist anymore, like how Italy isn't the Roman Empire by default because that's where Rome is), but a group of people who've just been living there for the past few centuries and generations who just want to live. The problem is, they haven't been allowed that and propaganda keeps being pushed that completely jumps around historical facts like, for example, Jews (ethnically speaking) were not always Jews but the Ancient Hebrews, aka, Phoenicians, aka where Arabs came from ethically. They are the same people, just who moved to different areas and developed different cultures and languages. Sort of like, you know, every other nation with specific dialects for specific regions and different cultures and folk stories depending on where you go.

The point is, so much of Jewish history is actively being erased to "protect the Jews" by...commuting cultural genocide of the Jews and Arabs. It ignores the actual impact of Nazism within Israel's formation and history, how much it influenced policy, how Jews who were "too visibly Phoenicians" aka appeared too Jewish or arabic or middle eastern in appearance were deemed as "weaker" and "lesser" for my surviving the holocaust and used as a reason to deny rights to both Jews and Arabs who were too visibly Semitic. It ignores how antisemetic Israel is towards Jewishness and how utterly antisemetic Islamophobia is because they are literally from the same origin and, yes, hatred and fear of one does carry into hatred and fear of the other. So much of the propaganda and denialism of history happening right now is a direct response to dear and hatred of "big noses", "brown skin" and people deemed as too middle eastern because they, just like in World War II, World War I and beforehand, antisemetism is the backbone of British imperialism and conquest of the middle east (yes, this also means a targeting of Arabs and Jews as people who look a specific way). And yes I'm annoyed and yes this is a ramble that's probably not very coherent, but damn I'm so sick and tired of misinformation and the twisting of everything to suit this narrative of "Arabs versus Jews" as if they aren't both just Semites who are being collectively oppressed, erased and reinvented by the west to suit western ends.

[ayakashibackstreet]

Your mid-20s are for suffering actually