#to deliberately misunderstand

[apricote]

hiiiiiii *twirls hair* why are you so obsessed with me <333333

[trashogram]

“Why would you want Stolas to have remained his pilot asshole self? You can’t even handle Valentino and Stella being evil!!1!lolol”

😑

Baby sweetie pumpkin darling sugar pie honeybunch… You gotta learn to listen and stop trampling over what other people say, otherwise you’re going to continue to miss the meaning behind their words.

Evil characters are fine. The problem is when evil characters get treated like harmless misunderstood brats instead of the mass murderers and rapists that they are, by the fandom in earnest. ESPECIALLY when the same fandom vilifies other characters for the sake of said murderers and rapists and ESPECIALLY when that vilification comes hand-in-hand with racism and misogyny.

[aphel1on]

another thing i love about laios:

HE IS GENUINELY A REALLY GOOD LEADER!!

despite struggling with the finer points of socializing, he has all the qualities necessary to be a good leader.

(i refer to the manga a lot in this post as someone who's read most of the manga at this point, but i avoided any specific spoilers)

He cares about all his teammates' well-being

He is extremely level-headed in a crisis

He is excellent at strategizing (within his areas of expertise; in the manga someone eventually points out he's pretty much useless at fighting other humans, lol)

If a plan fails, he is immediately thinking up a fallback plan - he doesn't give up

He is acutely aware of his teammates' strength and weaknesses, and accurately assigns them tasks suited to them in times of need.

He is perhaps not innately a 'leader-type'; he's fine deferring to the rest of the party most of the time, even when he doesn't understand why. (Just going along with the blindfold in the sauna for example, lol.) He was ready to head back into the dungeon by himself before Chilchuck and Marcille volunteered to come along. He doesn't think of himself as particularly smart or special. And when the party meets others (such as the old gnome couple) they don't tend to assume Laios is the leader.

But he has an unwavering vision (during the story it's rescuing Falin), and, you see it again and again: when they enter difficult combat, or any time things fall apart and everyone is panicking, Laios steps up and takes charge. His calmness helps everyone else calm down, and they generally follow his lead. They intuitively look to him in a crisis, to the point they're shocked the few times he doesn't have any ideas.

It kind of ties into another thought I have; he is repeatedly seen as "having no interest in other people" by other characters, but this isn't really true! He struggles to understand people and he is aware that they struggle to understand him. This leads to him mostly focusing on the things he IS good at understanding, such as monsters. But he genuinely makes a big effort to understand the people he cares about. In the manga, there are times you see him think deeply about his friends' struggles and motivations. For much of the early arcs, he understands Chilchuck better than Marcille or Senshi do. He and Marcille don't get each other that well at the start of the story, but by the end they have a very strong reciprocal friendship.

I could go on about it honestly but this post is already very long. Tl;dr laios one of the characters of all time to me and i think people should appreciate his leadership skills more!!

[abirddogmoment]

today's hot take for dog people: management is not the same thing as training.

[hesgomorrah]

something so special about watching old tv shows do shit that would be called queerbait if they came out today but they predate queerbaiting as a phenomenon so you know it's genuine home-grown all-natural free-range homoeroticism

[starmist]

Li Susu, Tantai Jin, Xiao Lin and the "Miscommunication" Trope

One thing a lot of people don't understand about tteotm's "miscommunication trope" is that it's very much based in the reality and experiences of the characters.

Susu and Tantai Jin do NOT trust each other and that's a direct consequence of what happened in the Sheng/Boat arc.

Li Susu

In Sheng, Susu genuinely believed that Tantai Jin was changing and becoming a better person only to learn that he had been practicing demonic cultivation and was kidnapped by him immediately afterwards.

After having experienced Tantai Jin's heavy backtrack and her experiences with the devil god, her trust in him is precarious. She'd looked past her prejudices and trusted him once only to be kidnapped, learned she'd been manipulated into marriage by a man who drove his nanny mad, killed a man and then told by that she would suffer the same fate. Why should she rely on this man when he'd already tricked her multiple times?

Not to mention she had in fact had pleaded for mercy on Xiao Lin once already and been denied before the words manged to come out of her mouth. Of course she assumed the worst of Tantai Jin when he killed the king and the later went on to go behind his back to save Xiao Lin.

Tantai Jin

Tantai Jin also began to believe that Susu cared about him but then heard her tell Xiao Lin how badly she wanted to kill him. Then, when he managed to trust her again after he'd been poisoned and she'd refused to abandon him, she then she disappeared on him showing up 4 months later with Xiao Lin at her back whom she then left with again.

In his point of view Susu has repeated chosen Xiao Lin over him, a man he believes she once loved. Something that is proved to him by her trying to save him because the definition of love he knows is wanting to see someone and wanting to protect them.

He has seen her go back to him time and time again. Protect him in the Mohe River, go to his camp when she'd thought he was launching a surprise attack, even trying to protect Xiao Lin when he'd just tried to ASSASSINATE him.

(Side note: a lot of people a quite frustrated with Susu trying to protect Xiao Lin asking what her skin in the game is but she even tried to protect Bingchang like hello?? Also that man has all but been her BROTHER twice not to mention protected and cared for even in this life, ofc she doesn't want to see him die again)

Miscommunication and Mistrust

Their "miscommunication" is deeply rooted in, if not is entirely mistrust and i feel like once you understand that and why it like that the "trope" becomes not only a lot more understandable but also adds to the story. Susu very reasonably does not trust Tantai Jin, and he the same, and that's the true tragedy, how can you devote yourself or the WORLD to a person you don't trust with your heart or well being?

You don't, you cant, no matter how much you love them. You have to have a foundation for something to be built

[foldingfittedsheets]

Okay so. We were driving on the freeway home. A two lane road out of the mountains. There was a truck camped out in the left lane, pacing the van in the right lane.

Now common courtesy is that you use the left lane to pass and move right when there’s a car behind you because it means they’re going faster than you.

But this truck. Had a line of seven cars backed up in the left lane, all stymied by this blockade. The right lane backed up too, all because this truck wouldn’t move over. He was dedicated too, braking when the van did to keep them level and keep any cars from getting passed. This went on for over ten miles to much honking and frustration.

When the van finally broke free and traffic was able to move through we saw that the asshole truck was a company truck. So….

Edit to clarify: I cannot call the company, it’s international, and there’s no business email.

[lesbiansanemi]

Someone commented on wind blown lilies about how there’s soooo much miscommunication in it but like. I don’t think there is actual miscommunication going on. That implies people are TRYING to communicate and things are getting lost in translation or misunderstood. That is not happening in wind blown lilies. No, people are just outright refusing to listen to each other’s advice and also bold faced lying to each other. I don’t think that’s miscommunication I think that’s everyone just being stupid and stubborn lol

[sorrydetka]

i feel fucking crazy reading everyone batshit takes on severance… my bad yall, i thought we still needed evidence to back up our claims but ig we can just start making shit up

[ceramicbeetle]

comrade in arms pt 2 is kind of funny for hawkeye’s flat “oh yeah” for casual sex fans followed by his ‘im going to killing my self’ facial expression when margaret wakes up and tries to start LARPing a long term romantic relationship with him

[tainebot01]

Whenever I see people comparing Hugh O'Connor and Sorin Sprocket it's almost always in terms of appearance because they're both blue bookguys with glasses and resting >:| faces, and it's really funny to me because little do you realise these nerds are two distinctly different flavours of the very same genre of madlad.

(Spoilers incoming...)

Hugh O'Connor spends half his time on screen desperately trying to hide the fact that he's a part time crane operator in his 20s and fails thanks to the aforementioned part time crane certification, lies through his teeth about his height, build, intellect and god knows what else, had this all revealed in a court of law by his best friend’s defense attorney after their other mutual bestie had been outed as a girl, decided the best strategy to get said defendant declared innocent is to commit such blatant perjury absolutely nobody buys it, and gave such a mess of a testimony that the prosecuting attorney straight up left the room to preserve any remaining braincells. Before he ultimately breaks down in messy tears from how much he loves his best friends. He also got indirectly stabbed in the hand by a spring loaded box cutter courtesy of Myriam.

And then you have Sorin Sprocket who communicates mainly through paper airplanes, has been walking around with an untreated stomach wound that only takes effect once you actually point it out to him after which he immediately collapses in a pool of his own blood, literally cannot remember anything past The Worst Day Of His Life and has been relying on his own handwritten account for months, despite all this he still has no goddamn clue what's going on the entire trial because his memory keeps getting screwed with due to other's clumsiness or gaslighting, and somehow manages to shimmy along the side of a blimp of his own design while bleeding out from the aforementioned stomach wound. In the middle of a storm. All out of nothing but love for his wife. He also got stabbed on two separate occasions, once with a candelabra and once with his own stim toy.

I don't know where I was going with this but the point I'm trying to make here is that I think someone on the writing team just really likes to stab nerds.

[grecoromanyaoi]

i mean. a. i was definitely talking abt mostly white ppl trying to analyze my family history n experience thru a system that isnt relevant. b. 'israelis hate black americans' citation needed? c. what have i said that is antiblack im geniuenly curious

[ourlordapollo]

I have like mental spellcheck but it's just a mean SJW from 2015 Tumblr who helpfully tells me whenever anything I've ever said thought or reblogged could possibly in any way be construed as "problematic"

[idiosyncraticrednebula]

People who side with Triton and criticize Ariel for rebelling against him miss the whole point of the story. I don't know what it is about Ariel in particular that many people online look for every reason to hate on her and justify everything that happened to her.

[himedanshicult]

yknow, ive always had a deep discomfort w using the term 'misgendering', particularly when it happens to me in social situations,and i always chalked that up to an internalized transphobia or w/e but no, that post is exactly it. "misgendering" is a toothless sounding accusation that makes the act itself sound like a misunderstanding at best and a meager personal slight at worst. it doesnt capture the social implications of degendering, particularly when it is enforced after repeated "corrections" and particularly when doing so actually encourages people who previously "correctly gendered" you to start degendering you by default. it doesnt cover the dehumanizing language that immediately arises from people needing to defend the action, the sudden reducing of my very being to whats hanging between my legs or some chromosomes or gametes that they can't see and dont even know abt, etc. degendering is such a more violent and malicious act than even most trans people are willing to admit, let alone cis people, and "misgendering" does not cover that weight even remotely.

[klatchianmist]

I like bionicles

Sometimes you have to scrape bionicles off the bottoms of ships so they can swim faster.