#they're the one that goes 'i can fix them'

[teacoff]

A piece of shibari Butchlander wip that no one asks. See you in October

[kaixserzz]

what if YOU'RE the mysterious character they're so utterly inlove with?? what if YOU'RE the red flag? the one that makes them weak on the knees? the one that makes then stutter and stumble on their words? the one that makes them fluster and red just thinking about you?

what if YOU'RE the one flirting with them with such little to no effort and they're swooning? you grab them by the chin and they're seconds away from screaming?

what if the dark, mysterious character that you oh so love was the one who's trembling just at your mere presence? so pathetically inlove that they can't even speak?

[tennessoui]

au where jedi healers take a vow not unlike jedi temple guards, but instead of wearing a mask and becoming anonymous, they give up their sight and wear blindfolds to allow the Force to guide their every action. it’s also supposed to blind them to their patients’ differences, which used to be symbolic but since the war between the jedi and the sith broke out, has become much less so

because jedi healers are supposed to heal regardless of if their patient is a jedi or a sith, when they’re deployed on battlefields after the fighting is over, they use the Force to heal every injured person they come upon.

anakin skywalker, who was chosen from the creche and agreed to follow the Healing path at the age of 9, thinks it’s sort of stupid that they have to wait until after the fighting is over to begin to help because he can feel people dying in the Force, he can feel their pain--

young general kenobi, who remembers his old creche-mate anakin skywalker and how blue his eyes once were, thinks it’s beyond foolhardy that this healer is stealing out across an active battlefield, blindfold over his eyes and bending down to heal karking darth maul and single-handedly diverting all of obi-wan’s attention away from the droids and sith legion because now he has to make sure he’s ok he can’t just leave him to the whims of the Force, he’s unprotected and he’s going to get himself killed----

it’s a headache and a half for everyone involved because general kenobi keeps abandoning his battle strategy and sometimes even position to ensure healer skywalker’s safety and healer skywalker keeps dropping everything and everyone the moment he feels obi-wan kenobi get hurt in the Force to rush to his side, Force Vow of Healing Equality be damned.

but......the Council keeps deploying them to the same battlefield because healer skywalker is never more effective as when he knows he must heal fifty mortal wounds before he can rid general kenobi of a headache, and general kenobi is never as ruthless as when skywalker is on the field close to him, in potential harm’s way

despite how much they insist they hate each other 

[faunabel]

my fave form of what's basically friends to lovers is when two people meet and have all their own baggage and the connection they form together and love they have for each other forces them to unpack all that baggage if they want to make things work. the kind of relationship where you're forced to look in the mirror and stop avoiding ur own problems because that person forces u to confront all of them (and u force them to confront theirs, too) because the relationship will Not work if you keep up all these walls either from your person of interest or even from urself!!! and there's too much of something there to give up and move on because it's difficult

the kind of thing where there's romance but the real plot of it all is self transformation through loving another. like the focus is on two individuals w/ their own lives who come together and have romantic feelings for each other vs the romance itself being the plot.

and maybe in the end they don't even stay together! maybe it doesn't work out! but there's drastic change and an undeniable impact they both made in each other's lives that will live on. is changing for the better not love in its rawest form?

[rapidhighway]

not a fan of dadow but shit man it does kinda make sense sometimes idk

[brionysea]

if mike was straight, stranger things would've ended after season 2

[lord-squiggletits]

Something I keep seeing when I speak to others about MTMTE Megatron is basically the idea that he's going on a personal journey to become a better person, that the point isn't for him to be "redeemed" but for him to get a chance to do good and die as a person he can live with again. That MTMTE presents a unique take on this because being away from Cybertron gives Megatron a chance to be a person rather than a political figure and this is how it gives him more depth as a character. Or just generally pointing out in a narrative sense that Megatron being in MTMTE limits his story options so of course his story is going to be more focused on a personal journey than on politics of him dealing with the Decepticons/Earth/etc and that just because JRO made a choice to take that path with Megatron doesn't mean that it's inherently bad.

And I'm just, mmm like I understand all of those points and acknowledge that they all contributed to the MTMTE Megatron we got. I even think that without JRO writing Megatron we wouldn't have had his lore be as fleshed out and 3D as it ended up becoming.

(Post starts out as a sort of meta analysis or at least me giving a reasoned explanation for my interpretation of the story, ends up being petty bitching in the last 1-2 paragraphs)

I just..... I just personally don't agree with the "he's becoming a better person by getting a chance to relax and experience happiness and trust after a life of trauma" as being the best choice for his character? Because the problem is that maybe if he were a random Decepticon foot soldier that would be appropriate, but he was literally the leader of the Decepticons that made them Like That and has political/cultural/societal responsibility for why things are the way they are? To be completely frank, I don't care about him going on a personal journey for self-peace, I think that he should become a better person by helping to un-fuck all the things he actually screwed up???

Like idc about the debate of whether he can be "redeemed" or if he should've been killed/imprisoned/etc at the ending. It just comes down to the fact that for me personally, I feel that since Megatron's wrongdoings were at a social level, him "being a better person" would've been better shown by him engaging with those people who he wronged instead of just going on a frigging personal journey for his legacy and self-peace???

Especially since in other series (exRID, possibly Windblade) we literally got plots like "the neutrals hate Autobots but they hate Decepticons even more" and "the Decepticons have been taken over by Galvatron and are now invading earth 2 electric boogaloo" and "yeah the Decepticons are literally living in slums because people hate them so much and won't give them any work." It just leaves me wondering why in the hell people are like, "oh Megatron got to be happy and have a chance to be a normal person." I don't want him to be normal! I want him to repay his debts to the people he actually wronged! Like if you want to cast Megatron as a hero of the people so badly (which so many of his stans do as if he actually cared about the Cons) then how do you reconcile the fact that Megatron just fucked off and left the Decepticons to suffer on Cybertron? Including some of them attacking during his trial and getting killed and Megatron is basically like "sorry, I'm not coming with you and this isn't going to work." And then Megatron complains about "toxic Decepticon loyalty" as if he didn't literally make them that way? Like I get that MTMTE Megatron is still an asshole but if you've read something besides MTMTE and know what the Decepticons are going through, it just ends up being really grating.

I just don't see Megatron as being a particularly good hero or having a particularly fulfilling story if he's completely isolated from all the bad things he did on Cybertron/the way the Decepticons are suffering until LL#25 where it's like "ah damn I'm going to trial now, well this is what I deserve so it's fine." Why could we not have seen something like Megatron trying to deradicalize the Decepticons or change their public image so they could integrate into normal Cybertron again? They were living in SLUMS and getting gunned down by Starscream's badgeless enforcers!

The best we got was the Functionist Universe but like.... I'm sorry, but JRO inventing a whole alternate universe for Megatron to save doesn't do jack shit to save or fix the people he left behind in this one. It was especially grating to read because JRO literally wrote in someone saying "you saved billions of lives from the Functionists" as if he was trying really hard to show how good Megatron is because he saved people (and also if not for Megatron existing Cybertron would be even worse and half of your faves would be enslaved or dead, also the Functionist Council was going to genocide organics too so technically they're WORSE than Megatron since they hate organics AND want to enslave their own race).

I read Barber's, JRO's, and MScott's series concurrently using the omnibus + a release order list for phase 3, and after all that I'm kind of puzzled why the fandom seems to ardently love MTMTE Megatron and think he's so well written but then also shit on Optimus for things that he did during the same points in the story? Because, and I know this is a blazing hot take, I honestly think that Optimus makes a better hero of his story than Megatron does for his, and Optimus' personal journey combines his personal and political identities into a narrative that's a lot more gruelling and questioning of his goodness than we got for Megatron in MTMTE. Which is fucking saying something considering Megatron committed crimes against sapient species and Optimus is the guy who tried to stop him from doing that and has always been pro-equal rights for all beings. But people pretty much just cherrypick things like Optimus annexing Earth or beating up Prowl and go "he's bad" and I'm like no??? IDW OP isn't a bad person or a bad character??? It's just that unlike MTMTE Megatron he's placed in a narrative that actually suits the nature of his actions and has themes that match. To the point that IMO sometimes Barber's narrative shits on Optimus excessively or paints him mainly in the most unflattering ways.

But like. It's just funny to me because Optimus spent his entire part of the story doing things like trying to stop Earth from being invaded/colonized yet again. Grappling with his identity as Prime and dealing with the fact that people literally worship him vs. the fact that his upbringing made him see the Primacy as nothing more than a facade of authority/leadership. Having people get mad at him for prioritizing politics over friendship/relationships with other people. Even getting shit on for being a cop a decent amount so people can STFU about IDW OP being "copaganda" or "not held responsible for his actions". The problems that Optimus dealt with were personal because they had to do with his self-doubt, culpability for the war as a leader of one of the armies, distance from his soldiers, etc. But all of these are also POLITICAL struggles. Because Optimus gave up on the chance to just be a normal person having personal struggles when he chose to become a LEADER, which also means that he's held to extremely high standards that he regularly fails at in the eyes of others.

That's why, to me, MTMTE Megatron falls flat in comparison and really as a "hero" or heel-face character in general? Because he also made a decision to be a leader, and IMO once you do things like become the commander of an army and start your own galactic empire, you lose the right to prioritize your personal problems and instead are obligated by the power you've chosen to wield to focus on your POLITICAL problems. If Megatron's power, influence, and crimes are of a social-political nature, then his heel-face turn arc and ways of showing that he's a better person/helping to heal what little damage he possibly can should have been shown with actions that help on a social-political LEVEL. That's why I'm not particularly impressed with his character arc and feel as if it was overhyped by other people in this fandom: sure, the extra character depth and emotion is nice, but I'm not really going to see him as extraordinary or even particularly good when the extent of him "becoming a better person" happens entirely on a random road trip to fuck-off nowhere. Especially not when the ending of LL tried to sell me a "they lived happily ever after" ending while basically leaving the freaking MUTINY as just Rodimus going "oh it's okay you're forgiven, we're all together again" and I guess everyone was fine with Megatron and wanted to spend an eternity on a ship with him just because Getaway died.

This is why I like (the concept/themes of) exRID/OP and the way Optimus' character arc was handled a lot more. Because for Optimus, the personal and the political were as one. He was held accountable for his actions towards others and the disruptive effects they had on a social level, sometimes to a ridiculous extent (the fucking "oh Megatron is an Autobot so now that makes the Autobots colonizers" plot and that stupid colonist screaming about how Optimus is "literally fascist" my beloathed). Even his very personal issues like his relationship with Zeta were still cast in a wider lens of, yeah this is a personal struggle that Orion faced, but he was still part of a Society TM and his actions were sometimes ill-informed or harmful to others. Even if I had a lot of problems with the way Optimus' story was written by Barber (plot holes, little meaningful character interaction, forced conflicts), at least the BASELINE of it was way better than Megatron's in MTMTE. Especially since Optimus' struggle was explictly about things like struggling with responsibility and how he feels he HAS to intervene in political affairs because has to save people/make up for his past mistakes. That's something that a good leader/good person actually does, so I found Optimus to be a better hero (even if his actions weren't all "good") because he was trying to be a good person by actually getting involved with Cybertron/Earth and subjecting himself to something he hates (leadership, war) and dealing with a shitload of criticism instead of just going on a fuckin "personal journey" lksdlkfsd.

Which just makes me extra salty that people hold up MTMTE Megatron as the pinnacle of Megatrons and literally the best Transformers writing evar! while turning up their nose and ignoring or outright despising IDW Optimus. Like okay. I guess since Megatron got handled with silk gloves on while Optimus got put through the wringer of being shit on by every other person in the story, it's easier for you to pretend that Megatron is a poor uwu boy who just needs friendship and love while Optimus is literally the worst bastard to ever exist. Or maybe it's just that since Optimus' story involves him sometimes fucking up, being criticized, or making things worse, that makes him morally bad. As opposed to Megatron who disrupted a lot of other characters' stories in MTMTE, had to have an entire alternate universe invented so that he could "save lives," and got to sail off on a quantum Lost Light happily ever after, so since he's happy and the story says he saved people that means he's a good hero.

[unproduciblesmackdown]

NOTE: THIS ITEM IS CURRENTLY IN PREORDER. IT WILL SHIP IN JUNE-JULY 2023. We will be printing based on preorder size, so grab one now if you want one!

More than 40 trans writers and artists have joined forces to explore the deeper meanings of the Fast & Furious franchise (and also gender). There's really no way to know why this exists, but it does, and you can own it! Suitable for F&F fans and newcomers alike. Contributions include:

- A new short story by Manhunt author Gretchen Felker-Martin - A demolition derby driver’s perspective on 2 Fast 2 Furious’s derby scene - An essay contemplating the queer symbolism of Cipher’s bowl cut - The scoop on the franchise’s only canonically nonbinary character - Instructions for an F&F-themed tabletop roleplaying game - A contemplation of which Taylor Swift album represents each F&F character - Plus: Bingo cards! Comics! Haiku! And, of course, hot gay erotica…

2 Trans 2 Furious is edited by Tuck Woodstock & Niko Stratis, with cover art by Mattie Lubchansky and zine design by Shay Mirk.

~

This zine is 8.5" x 5.5" and perfect-bound like a real book — fancy! Interior pages are black & white. We're guessing this baby is like 100 pages long but we'll get back to you on that.

Currently only shipping to the United States, sorry! We're hoping to at least expand to Canada soon, and also plan to add a PDF ebook option, so keep an eye out!

(that "the scoop on the franchise's only canonically nonbinary character" is the page i contributed about our one & only beloved akd-acted cam stone!! plus also if you're interested in preordering a fancy printed copy of a zine about fast & furious, which you don't have to even know about or like, with all trans contributors. including me)

[goatmilksoda]

When you go through the entire aesthetics wiki and look at all the new-ish ones that have specifically developed on Tumblr, TikTok, and Pinterest, you start to realize that they can really be put into three categories like 75% of the time because people choose the same music constantly when they're making -core playlists so they all fit into either "Soldier, Poet, King", "Bubblegum Bitch", or "Sweater Weather".

[elytrafemme]

call the hairdresser and call the mediator because the way i'm splitting to the fucking ends right now

[moinsbienquekaworu]

Okay whose names sound cool, I need someone to draw. We've got:

Ambitious aka Amy

Constant aka Con

Industrious aka Dusa

Steadfast aka Ed

Vigilant aka Gillian

Majestic aka Jasper (formerly Triumphant or Phil(?))

Ingenious aka Jen (formerly Audacious or Daisy)

Glorious aka Laurent

Observant aka Linda (short for Belinda) (formerly Meticulous)

Illustrious aka Luce

Innovative aka Nova

Spirited aka Pilar

Sharp who will use Shaun if they need a "real name"

Conscientious aka Siobhan (formerly Courteous)

Superb aka Sue (my girl Léonie)

Temeraire aka Tem (my boy Ambrose)

Some of these nicknames are more creative than others but what do you want.

[sysig]

:D ♪

[queen-mabs-revenge]

so i have a great idea. but it's going to involve drilling a hole through my wall. i'm gonna do it.

[toasteaa]

Wait, no, I'm unwell. Neuvillette shows that he cares by being present in order to give support. Neuvillette, who doesn't accurately know how to voice his own emotions, doesn't know the "proper" way to comfort someone, goes out of his way to leave his work and be present with the people he cares about to show that he cares for them. To show sympathy for them. He views this with the upmost importance.

He understands feelings of sympathy, he knows feelings of regret. Of loss. Of mourning. He knows that often being present, even without knowing what to say, is all that is needed to show support. To show that he cares.

I need a moment, oh...

[medicinemane]

Sometimes you have something that you could say, that you think about saying, that you more or less know how you'd phrase it... but it's just not fucking worth it cause you know for a fact that people don't fucking listen

I don't know, I try to stay... if not optimistic then at least with a mind set of "doesn't matter, we've got no choice but to try and make things better"

Truthfully though I think I'm extremely pessimistic when it comes to the chances of anyone actually listening to what I say

I'm not sure if I'm just bad with words but... it seems impossible to convey even simple thoughts to people so... truthfully I've more or less given up and have just stopped trying. Especially if I don't at least know people well

So there it is

[sagaduwyrm]

The reason I love the Red Hood being a crime lord instead of a vigilante is that Crime Alley, functionally, doesn't have the same problems as the rest of Gotham. Their main problem isn't the mad Rogues running around, it's the cycle of poverty, violence, and crime that they're all stuck in. And you know what one of the main ways to combat this is? Community. Organizing. Working together.

Except Crime Alley can't just choose to do that. Who would choose to join such a risky proposition instead of a gang that you know can help protect your family? So the Red Hood comes in and he looks like he's just creating another gang, the same as all the others.

Except he's serious about not selling drugs to kids or people in danger of overdosing. Except he protects the working girls fiercely, even if it loses him money. Except all the money he does make goes straight into the community if it's not making sure his employees are alright.

Working within the system is often a necessary measure to fix the system. Except the system in the case of Crime Alley isn't the government that abandoned them, it's the volatile, terrible gang set up. So Red Hood didn't just work within the system, he took it over and made it work for him instead.

Is this perfect? No. The other bats have valid disagreements with Jason's way of doing things. But he is doing so much good.