#this is a long rant and i'm sorry

[woodchoc-magnum]

idk. i'm annoyed.

i realise i am a fandom old at this point

and i have seen some shit in this fandom; witnessed the discourse.

and i don't post meta or spec or much of that stuff; i usually put all my ideas into fics.

but guys seriously. seriously.

eddie's current arc is not about buck.

buck and eddie are not currently dating.

buck is eddie's best friend and vice versa.

eddie is not cheating on buck.

eddie is lying to buck by omission, yes, but that is not a friendship ending offence.

eddie is on the very cusp of cheating right now. he went on a date with another woman, yes. he has not kissed her or slept with her. we are at a tipping point. we do not know what is going to happen next.

he only went on a date with another woman because she reminded him of shannon, who he is not over, who he has spent seasons trying to replace.

the point of this show is that none of the characters are perfect - and especially not buck and eddie. they all make mistakes. they have all made mistakes and will continue to do so because in real life, people don't always make the right decisions 100% of the time.

this black-and-white, morally righteous way of thinking, like eddie is suddenly evil now because he's on the cusp of cheating; that it's going to end his friendship, that buck is going to be angry at him for lying - do you have friends in real life? like, i am genuinely asking.

because if my best friend suddenly started cheating on her husband, i wouldn't be mad at her - i would be worried. am i alone in this? like i would be genuinely concerned and trying to help figure out what's going on.

all the shit i'm seeing in the fandom today, all of the spec posts and commentary about the episode and what might potentially happen, just feels like, once again, an attempt to paint eddie as the villain in the story to prop up buck. let's make eddie so terrible that buck has to have custody of christopher, right?

clearly none of you understand how a will works. it's for after you're dead. not for when you're alive.

but the main issue is this - now that buck has tommy, the people who tolerated eddie can stop pretending to like him. there's another option for buck now, so you guys don't need eddie anymore. right? am i fucking right??

i love drama as much as the next person, but in what world would buck turn on eddie because of this? in what world would the 118 shun him? he is their friend! they love him! they care about him! they are a family!

my god, nobody shunned hen when she cheated on karen. nobody shuns bobby and he indirectly killed 140 people!

eddie is a good person who makes mistakes, just like every single other character on the show.

that is the fucking point.

and the way ryan was talking in the interviews - isolation could mean any number of things. we know eddie has a tendency to isolate himself when he's feeling stressed out - does anyone remember season 3? season 5? buck literally broke down his door!

i'm just fucking tired of this bullshit.

eddie's not a bad guy because of this. he has done shitty things, yes. they all have. that's the fucking point of the show, and if you can't understand that or appreciate adult story-telling, then fuck off and watch riverdale.

[snarkspawn]

I really enjoy playing through tnp again like hi it's been a while

[trek-tracks]

Now you two think about what you've done and develop some healthier emotional coping mechanisms

[blueskittlesart]

*sigh* thoughts on Nintendo's botw/totk timeline shenanigans and tomfoolery?

tbh. my maybe-unpopular opinion is that the timeline is only important when a game's place on the timeline seriously informs the way their narrative progresses. the problem is that before botw we almost NEVER got games where it didn't matter. it matters for skyward sword because it's the beginning, and it matters for tp/ww/alttp (and their respective sequels) because the choices the hero of time makes explicitly inform the narrative of those games in one way or another. it matters which timeline we're in for those games because these cycles we're seeing are close enough to oot's cycle that they're still feeling the effects of his choices. botw, however, takes place at minimum 10 thousand years after oot, so its place on the timeline actually functionally means nothing. botw is completely divorced from the hero of time & his story, so what he does is a nonissue in the context of botw link and zelda's story. thus, which timeline botw happens in is a nonissue. honestly I kind of liked the idea that it happened in all of them. i think there's a cool idea of inevitability that can be played with there. but the point is that the timeline exists to enhance and fill in the lore of games that need it, and botw/totk don't really need it because the devs finally realized they could make a game without the hero of time in it.

[cherries-in-wine]

𝑷𝒂𝒓𝒂𝒍𝒍𝒆𝒍𝒔 𝒃𝒆𝒕𝒘𝒆𝒆𝒏 𝒍𝒐𝒍𝒊𝒕𝒂 𝒂𝒏𝒅 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒗𝒊𝒓𝒈𝒊𝒏 𝒔𝒖𝒊𝒄𝒊𝒅𝒆𝒔 ‧₊ ☁️⋅♡ ࣪ ִֶָ☾.

People call Vladimir Nabokov a disgusting creep for writing from the perspective of a pedophile when in reality if you read the book, Humbert Humbert is not likeable in the slightest. He's an unreliable narrator that's so stuck in his own delusions that he can't see how miserable dolores is because of him. Nabokov is a great writer and lolita is really well written. It's a great satire in the sense that it's pathetic to see Humbert Humbert think he's sooo charming and these "nymphets" are soooo in love with him. Dolores' trauma is obvious to any competent reader, I don't know how people are so charmed by Humbert Humbert that they can't see how dolores' defiance which he refers to as "teenage rebellion" or "tantrums" is a very apparent cry for help. Lolita is a Gothic horror, a cautionary tale. It's a genius work of art and what's most horrific about it is how society reacted to it, how it's so normalised to sexualise little girls that blatant pedophilia is interpreted as a tragic love story. Nabokov himself referred to dolores as his "poor little girl". He had a lot of empathy for her and it must be so heartbreaking to see her getting sexualised.

When I first read the virgin suicides i thought it was a great work of satire. I adore the Lisbon girls with all my heart, I see a part of myself in all of them by varying degrees. The boys who claimed they loved these girls, only saw them as some fantasy. Even in death they never truly respected any of these girls. How when they found Cecelia's diary, instead of trying to make sense of why she killed herself, they selfishly searched for their own names. I loved the irony of the boys claiming they loved these girls when they didn't know anything about them. It showed how their "love" was really shallow and surface level. I thought Jeffrey Eugenides really understood me in that sense. But in reality he didn't mean any of the things the boys did to be interpreted as satire. According to him, peaking through windows, stealing used tampons, joking about groping dead girls, these grown men still picturing those little girls years later while they had sex with their wives etc was supposed to show that teenage boys are not disgusting horny dogs, but romantic softies (if anything this made me think teenage boys are much more repulsive than i thought). According to Eugenides the book is satire, but in the sense that you never know what was going through a person's head when they committed suicide and you can't make sense of it no matter how hard you try. Everything about how the boys viewed the girls was not satire and was to be taken at face value. This really broke my heart, an author who i thought really did get me and understood me, ended up making me feel watched instead of seen.

It's so interesting how lolita which is supposed to be from the perspective of an unreliable narrator was taken at face value and the virgin suicides which was to be taken at face value was perceived as satire.

The director of Lolita didn't get her at all, even he thought she was some kind of a seductress instead of a child that was abused repeatedly. While the virgin suicides movie was so much better than the book, Sofia Coppola, the director, understood the Lisbon girls so well and she did them justice.

[shinobicyrus]

One thing my brain keeps going back to about Pacific Rim (besides the rad giant robots) is the whole existence of kaiju organ harvesters and their implications.

Like, you have Hannibal Chau, a bizarre and interesting character, but we’re presented with a black market operation that seems mostly interested in the “alternative medicine” uses of kaiju parts.

But my brain demands to know: what does the corporate kaiju harvesting industry look like? Sure kaiju blood is toxic, but there are plenty of toxic materials that have useful applications. Are there chemical companies studying kaiju organs? Big-Pharma jumping on the kaiju bone-powder bandwagon? Are bio-tech firms studying kaiju hide to make tougher materials? Agribusinesses clamoring to acquire kaiju crap for fertilizer?

I’m picturing something like the age of whaling, when humans hunted giant animals and carved them up to feed insatiable industries. Whale-oil lighting lanterns for entire cities, whale-bone being used in everything from knick-knacks, tools, umbrellas, and corsets. Ambergris alone was used in perfumes, medicines, cooking. It was even added to wine as an aphrodisiac.

We glimpsed how kaiju affected pop-culture. Now picture a kaiju smashing a city, but the stock market going up for construction companies (rebuilding the cities), vulture real estate (buying the destroyed land cheap), and all the other corporations that profit from the systematic dismantling of a kaiju corpse and making money off of its parts. Sure, a city was roughed up and who knows how many thousands are dead, but it’s a better windfall when a kaiju makes landfall. It’s always less profitable when jaegers kill them too quickly; sea-based extractions are so much more expensive.

Imagine entire industries, entire economies that don’t just make money from the devastation of kaiju attacks, but grow dependent on them. And then the laws, the squabbles over those valuable, resource-rich kaiju corpses. If a kaiju attacks one country but keeps rampaging and is killed in the country next door, who has claim over the body? The party who was damaged more by it or the country where the corpse physically is? Bidding wars over “cleanup” contracts that cut corners and are only interested in collecting those sweet, sweet, kaiju parts as fast as possible, even if their official mandate is supposed to be the safe removal and cleanup of a toxic substance.

Once jaegers started getting efficient at killing kaiju, the people with all the money became less interested in solving the problem of kaiju attacks and switched to merely managing the industries that kaiju-killing feeds.

What? You want to put more resources into R&D to try and close the Breach? Whatever for? The kaiju comes out, jaegers kill it, and the “host country” gets the proceeds from the kaiju’s body. It’s a win-win for everyone. Why waste time, money, and effort solving a problem that isn’t a problem anymore?

Everything is under control.

[maerhiya]

in regards to the constant dismissal of his aroace identity, i hate it when alastor 'fans' say and use the excuse: "he's fictional, he won't get offended."

like, you're right, but it can and will offend us.

when you see yourself being represented on screen, of course you'd feel enthusiastic about it — representation allows individuals to see themselves reflected in the media they consume, validating their identities and experiences. but when so many people take that representation and decide to disregard and discard it, it is so fucking frustrating. we finally have another character to be part of the tiny amount of representation we have, but then people don't even care about how much it means to us? like yeah, alastor won't get offended because he's not real, but it frustrates and annoys us. do you realize that it's also technically invalidating the aroace community? that you're invalidating our feelings? imagine feeling like you're finally being seen because your orientation is finally being represented in media, and people just decide to blatantly ignore, discard, and invalidate it.

media has such a powerful influence on real life, representation being a prevalent factor of it. there are numerous posts that dictate how people went to watch a movie/show or read a book just because a character depicts their identity in it — obviously, being represented is an incredibly uplifting and validating experience.

which is why seeing an aroace character in a popular show is so meaningful to us because we live in a world where romance and sex are literally everywhere and prioritized above all else. (and it's pretty obvious that alastor's on the repulsed end of the spectrum, but even if he wasn't, at least make an effort to acknowledge his sexuality instead of continuing to portray him as allo; aroace folks can be in relationships but it's not going to be the same thing with allos' experiences.)

any and every representation matters, but why does that seem to stop at people under the aroace spectrum? like y'all can't even let us appreciate the scraps of representation we have. we barely have any, so are we really that dramatic for being upset at how people easily disregard and dismiss our identities that are being depicted on screen just like that? is it truly wrong of us to want to defend and maintain the little representation we have?

[mizaruwu]

I love your necromancy Hyrule au so much!! It brings me joy and makes my brain think about how and why and all this stuff about it. Do you know how Hyrule ended up going to necromancy? Or if he has any thoughts or doubts, he's doing what he has been running from for a long time in order to keep legend somewhat alive, why? Loneliness? Was it that unbearable knowing that what he had was gone? Sorry I'm ranting...it just makes me think.

It was unbearable. Of experiencing something so sweet and comforting only to lose it– It's cruel even, to form these connections and bonds only for the force (the goddess) that brought them together separated them in the same way.

Perhaps grief is a better word than loneliness, four of the people he considers his family are dead, gone for a long time already, two of them dont exist yet and the other two dont exist at all (in his timeline) The realization hits him after a week of avoiding thinking about the topic.

at first, Hyrule didnt consider necromancy at all– he spent almost a year desparately looking for items with time travelling abilities but none of them worked anymore. He was on the brink of giving up when he stumbled on the book with the revival ritual.

"Maybe I can use this to bring them back instead" He thought as a joke. But that thought got fuled by his desparation and grief– he couldnt stop thinking about it. Why not? Its not a garuntee that he can actually raise the dead right?

Then it did work. Legend is there, looking at him– and who cares about anything else he got his brother back, its one step closer to returning how it was.

Hyrule did have doubts if what's he's doing is right but when Legend woke up and talked to him, that doubt was clouded over by relief, by the first taste of happiness he's felt in a while– he's far too broken to see past his actions now.

[polorizetheory]

No Lilith is not "Evil" or a "Bad Mom"

I said what I said. We don't know what happened to Lilith, we don't know why she and Lucifer split, and if you saw the pilot, you would know Charlie choose to confide in HER about her worries and fustrations. That is a clear sign that as the queen of hell, the woman whose songs brought hope to the demons in hell, had more confidence in her daughter than Lucifer was afraid to have. I saw a post that said "also how bad of a fucking mother does lilith have to be to ignore her daughter for 7 years jfc". As if that is the only reason Charlie hadn't heard from her? Not even a possibility something bad might have happened or had really very important business to deal with as the queen of hell?? And it's even more bizzare how people just assumed that flashback was her "keeping Charlie away from Lucifer". Like hello, it's called putting your child to sleep? And also

Does this really look like a vile woman to you. Did you really see this portraits and went "Oh yeah she hates her husband," NO THAT IS FUCKING IN LOVE WITH HER HUSBAND! SHE IS HAPPY WITH HER CHILD, SHE IS PROUD OF HER FAMILY AND KINGDOM, SHE WANTS NOTHING MORE THAN TO BE WITH THE MAN WHO SHOWED HER MORE LOVE AND COMPASSION THAN BITCH ASS ADAM, AND STUCK WITH HER FOR MILLENIUM AFTER BEING CASTED OUT OF HEAVEN. EVEN WRAPPING HER ARMS AROUND HIM AND CHARLIE

Fautisse, the person whose been at the birth of Hazbin Hotel, even believes Lilith adored her husband just the same as he to her. But shit happens, and something caused her to leave. For reasons WE DON'T KNOW WHY! But unfortunately for her as a female character, the fans and even anti fans have reduced her to another "Stella". Despite the fact Charlie confides in her, and despite Lucifer having pictures with her in his office and still has his wedding ring on. There is a definite reason Lucifer acts this depressed, otherwise he would be acting like Stolas, someone who actually hates his wife.

[rainbowsuitcase]

*extremely tired writer voice* this was supposed to be a short gen fic but now they're horny

[imerian]

My (very old) loscar brooch (?) that i just now made doodles for

More pictures under cut

[pigeonstab]

veryyyyyy old sketch of Enoch

[siryyeet]

Oh you have complicated feelings towards Germany? Let me make 91836373 assumptions about it with my piss poor understanding of history, not listen to germans at all and then come to a horrendously bad and false conclusion on why that is! Also I think you germans should stop feeling guilty and be proud of your country again!

[rivkae-winters]

You Will Rot

I adore this entire scene and their entire exchange and there are plenty of other posts out there on it but I’ve never come across the points I wanted to make hence why I'm writing this. Specifically on the implications of exactly what rots since that latched into my brain and would not let me go.

As always: this is only my interpretation of canon, there is no one true analysis to take as gospel. In fact please interact with your thoughts if you have any! I enjoy talking to other people about this sort of thing, fandom is all about discussion after all!

My stance on this line is one of nuance. I tend to think Sephiroth chose the worst words he could think of without fully considering the full implications.  He said the thing he knew that would hurt Genesis the most after the entire conversation beforehand.

What does it mean to be told to rot? Or even so told you will rot. 

In the FF7 universe, most explicitly displayed in CC, bodies dissolve. Corpses, both monster and human, are depicted as dissolving to return to the Lifestream. This is re-confirmed in the remake. 

Rot is not a term for humans, it’s not a cultural concept the same way it is for us in the real world. To decay and decompose are not processes that sentient beings undergo.

Rot is something for objects- things that live but aren’t alive enough or connected enough quote-un-quote to return to the Lifestream in the same dramatic manner. Rot is for things like food and flowers and things that are below the level of humans or animals or anything with general sentience. 

Sephiroth is telling Genesis here, he is not just a monster: he is insignificant. He is telling Genesis that he is not enough of a sentient being to return to the Lifestream and he’ll continue falling apart in real time just like a piece of fruit left forgotten and rotting on the kitchen counter. He is telling Genesis that at the end of the day he’s already dead in every way that matters and is no longer a person. Sephiroth is telling Genesis that he will have no mercy given to him at the end of the day: he will rot and waste like an object lacking sentience and then he will be left there.

Sephiroth is digging into Genesis’s own deepest insecurities here. Genesis fears not just being irrelevant but being rendered a non-entity, to be kept or out of control. Genesis has defined his entire life as a journey to be someone to be enough to be someone worthy of love and praise and being seen. Objects aren’t people, and Genesis is an object to Sephiroth with that statement. 

The only person who could help him no longer considers him a person- nor a thing with sentience. 

Obviously this is all over analyzing Sephiroth’s dialogue. This line was said with calculation, yes, but it was also somewhat reflexive. Sephiroth is under a lot of stress in this scene and Genesis has been slinging everything he never wanted to be told at him in a single conversation. Genesis then has the audacity to try to act as if he did something good. While Sephiroth’s world is collapsing around him and his other defected friend acts like he did him a favor. Sephiroth is angry, who wouldn’t be angry. Sephiroth thought the world of Genesis prior to his defection, he thought the world of both of them and those illusions have been crashing down around him.

So he uses Genesis’s own grief over his former friend’s tattered life that manifests as self deprecation and self dehumanization against him. He confirms the de-humanizing rhetoric that Genesis has been attaching to his own existence. Sephiroth in his pain and anger pushes past the fears that Genesis has been externalizing to what he knows Genesis is truly afraid of. 

If Genesis considers himself a monster than by the standards of the person Sephiroth thought he knew he is already living out his worst fears. He is nothing, he is nothing without his mind. If Genesis wants to be what he once considered a non-entity: wants to wallow in the rot and non-personhood so much then he can. 

Sephiroth turns his back on, in his mind, the moving corpse of the long dead Genesis Rhapsodos and walks away. 

You will Rot You are Nothing

There is also something to be said here for the Kanji used in the original!

I’m not touching on this as much as I would have liked to but it would be criminal if I didn’t at least pull out a Kanji dictionary.

I pulled Sephiroth’s line from here; warning the website is not in English at all but easy enough to navigate via context/knowledge of story events and the characters' Japanese names. 

Sephiroth’s line is: 朽ち果てろ kuchihatero

This is translated in the official English release as “You will rot” and in a pre-US release fan translation from May of 2007 roughly the same way as “Go decay”

朽  Decay; Rot; Remain in Seclusion

果  Fruit; Reward; carry out; achieve; complete; end; finish; succeed

[1][2] [3 specifically for 朽][4 specifically for 果]

Thanks for reading!

[petitprincess1]

the hateboners that the antis have for hazbin and everything related to viv is INSANE. can't scroll through any kind of social media (especially on twitter!) without accidentally stumbling upon the dumbest, most braindead takes. can't make silly little posts about hh or hb without antis flooding in. it's like their entire personality is to hate on viv and her works for some fucking reason

SO SO FUCKING REAL!

That's why I had to leave Twitter. It's just impossible to say even the slightest thing positive about HB and/or HH without the swarms of hate. Like I posted the small clip from the first ep of Hazbin with Adam wanting to be called "Dickmaster" bc I found Charlie's blunt af reply funny, especially since she's usually so perky. That's it. So many fucking QRTs of people either saying how bad or unfunny, commenting about Verbalase, and [insert stupid ass drama here]

And it's not even like I could block them. The moment I blocked 5 accounts there would be, no exaggeration, hundreds of others popping out of nowhere. It got to a point where it was bad for my mental health. If it weren't for HB and HH posting on Twitter, I would have no problem deactivating my account. It's so bad.

Don't even get me started on TikTok, even some of the fans there can be a bit much 😮‍💨

While Tumblr has hateful shit, it's not nearly as bogged down as Twitter is. Plus, I find so much more love here than I ever have on Twitter. (Not to say no one was nice to me. It just was a lot of hate that it was hard to separate the good from the bad.)

I'm not saying that they can't dislike Vivzie or anyone. It's just mind-boggling how antis/crits will literally HARASS ppl for watching a cartoon, even if that person also has misgivings for Viv. Which some fans do and that's perfectly fine. It's almost like separating art from the artist isn't hard.

I think it's even stranger when fans often echo the SAME CRITICISMS that they're saying, and yet....we dick ride Viv?? Um...sure....why not....

At this point, I just mainly say positive shit out of spite (and genuine love for the shows ofc). I'm just so done.

[lordoflucky]

Been working on a bit of an Albert Harebrayne character analysis/rant/opinion piece because he's my favorite, and there's something that I realized that's a bit too much of a van Zieks centered tangent to fit with the flow, but I still want to talk about it. (Spoilers for 2-3 & 2-4)

So, at the start of 2-3 Harebrayne has a lot that he believes in. He believes in his hypothesis and that his invention could help make the world better. He believes in Asman & Drebber and that they are genuinely working alongside him to make something great. He trusts them. He trusts the experiment. And he is taken advantage of because of it.

This is all solidified at the end of the first trial segment: Harebrayne's hypothesis is faulty, and Asman and Drebber were most likely using him to steal government grant money. Harebrayne is left at a complete loss because of it as everything he believes in is proven in a court of law to be faulty.

Except one thing.

He believes van Zieks has his best interests at heart.

Even after everything- being betrayed by his investor and engineer, seeing van Zieks's courtroom cruelty- he still trusts his old friend.

And! He's right! Van Zieks does care about him! He does have Harebrayne's best interests at heart! Shown no better than in the the iconic "Laudable not Laughable" scene:

As Harebrayne calls himself a fool for "Misguidedly believing he could do whatever he set his mind to, despite his lack of talent" and van Zieks rebuffs him in an instant: "To believe in yourself and work your fingers to the bone to realise your dreams… That's laudable, not laughable."

And then there's van Zieks himself.

Van Zieks can't trust anyone after the initial professor betrayal, and that's only enforced by the many attempts on his life while acting as the figurehead for the Reaper. He has reason to toss trust and belief in others aside, and that's exactly what he does for the majority of the game before finally agreeing to Ryunosuke's defense in the finale.

But when Harebrayne's belief starts to waver, and he's on the cusp of becoming entirely disillusioned, van Zieks is the one to pick him back up. He doesn't want to see Harebrayne lose that passion, the way he did.

Harebrayne's passion, how much he believes in people and himself, it isn't a flaw. It's his best quality. And van Zieks is the one to state that- in all his distrusting glory- he is the one to tell Harebrayne that.

Look I could say many words about van Zieks arc and it's pacing, but this sets up 2-4 so well.

When van Zieks finally agrees to Ryunosuke's defense and he says he can't trust anyone. Not the police, or the judiciary, or other lawyers. Despite that, there is one thing he's willing to believe in: Ryunosuke's determination to uncover the truth.

I can't help but feel seeing Harebrayne's willingness to trust Ryunosuke and van Zieks despite everything may have inspired him to finally open up in the finale.

Harebrayne chose to trust van Zieks, and now van Zieks chooses to trust Ryunosuke.

It's just so important to me how much respect van Zieks has for Harebrayne. Yes, that man is silly, and eccentric, and has his idiosyncrasies. He makes mistakes, he's forgetful, he's trusting to an arguably naive degree.

But that trust and passion is exactly why van Zieks respects him so much. What Harebrayne launches to call his greatest flaw, van Zieks sees as his greatest strength.