#txt — critical

[incorrectinfinity]

What makes us human is the Nintendo 3DS

[idiosyncraticrednebula]

Hot take: I actually think men and women are meant to work together and complement each other and not like,,, dislike each other and be divisive.

[idolomantises]

In one of Drew Gooden's recent videos, he talks about the time he saw a tweet calling Zoey 101 a bad show, got angry, and then immediately logged off and sat with his thoughts and realized how his reaction was both time wasting and pretty irrational.

I feel like more people in fandoms need to do this.

[sublimeinal-messages]

Anyone else disgusted and traumatized over the last moments we get to see Ben? Confused. Mutated beyond all reason. Without his family, and turned into a monster like he’s been thought of his whole life. Remember the timid little boy who was forced to kill a whole room of bank robbers and came out covered in blood, disassociating and wanting to go home? Yeah so he dies and then dies again and loses all memory of his family and loses the other family he has and then rejects the other one and turns into a monstocity that kills them all and it turns out he never got to be happy again and he was just there to murder people when the plot needed and be a vessel to suffer and die pointlessly

And “this was supposed to be ben’s season” when he doesn’t even get to say goodbye. He barely even has a place in the season at all.

“This is a happy ending”

Are you out of your mind??

[ourflagmeansgayrights]

honestly tho. the balls of izzy to suggest talking it through as if he didnt literally threaten to kill ed the last time ed openly shared his feelings

[atdaggerpoints]

I bring a “I hate gender because it cause serious harm to women and homosexuals” to the table that the tumblr they/thems really dislike.

[miniimerry]

My litmus test for deciding if I respect or value a person’s One Piece opinions is looking at the way they discuss Usopp tbh. You can tell a lot about someone based on how they talk about Usopp specifically.

If a person insists that Usopp is useless (whether it’s because he’s not as strong as Zoro or Luffy or Sanji or because he “doesn’t have a real job” on the crew) it tells me that they don’t pay attention to what Usopp does contribute, nor do they pay attention to what the story itself deems useful. Usopp may not be a massive, hulking powerhouse with ultra-powerful haki, but he does have utility in the crew. (And even if he didn’t, he would still belong because they wanted him.)

If a person insists that Usopp is just a crybaby or a coward and that he sucks because of this, it tells me that you don’t pay attention to what he’s doing while he’s running or crying. He might cry or shake or run, but he always comes back. He always stands up and fights in the end. He feels scared and then he does it anyway. It’s easy to forget, but Usopp is just a human in a world of monsters. For him to stand up and fight takes a lot of courage.

If a person insists that Usopp is not strong, it tells me they miss what the story itself tells us about what strength is and what it means to be strong. He has a skill that most do not. He is able to shoot with a degree of accuracy that is borderline inhuman. Whether he can kick through a boulder is irrelevant. Sanji can’t snipe from hundreds of feet away.

If you can’t look at Usopp and see where he fits in the story, I am truly uninterested in anything else you have to say about this story.

[strawbie-doodle]

literally woke up in a cold sweat to make this

[lhazar]

“A son for a son” is the cruelest and deadbeat thing they could’ve had Rhaenyra demand from Alicent after the beaheading of Jaehaerys. Like her shock and horror at daemon earlier doesn’t even exist anymore. It was just lip service to make Rhaenyra look good at the time, but in the moment it counts to say something, all she wants is to make alicent suffer. And for what? Is Luke not avenged properly? All the dead smallfolk they have Rhaenyra pine over, and she can’t even muster a shred of sympathy for a murdered baby and then makes his grandmother choose between the fate of the rest of her family for the beheading of her wounded son. Like. What the fuck. What the fuck? Who are these characters because I can’t even make sense of them anymore. What the hell even was the point of blood and cheese now??

[cchickki]

seeing a dev from larian on twitter talk about how they all have the agency to work on what they want to and find joy in it, then completely ignore all the comments asking why there’s such minimal content for wyll is nasty work.

[greetingsprogramms]

Oh sweet sweet Orym. Prepare to be fucking cherished. Prepare to be fucking courted. Your hot bard is back and he's on a mission to make you smile again.

[canine-economy]

On Swansea’s (often understated) role in Mouthwashing

I say this as a big swansea fan but I don’t rlly understand why ppl are acting like he’s not also complicit in what happened to Anya? AUs where “Anya tells Swansea” and he jumps to violently defend her don’t make sense to me because canonically she does tell him, as he admits to Jimmy. But swansea represents another way of interacting with the capitalist heteropatriarchy that ALSO harms victims: holistic jadedness and resignation.

Swansea is across the board unkind to the Tulpar crew. We can’t forget that he calls anya a “so-called nurse”

and says this to Jimmy, which (if unintentionally) reiterates Jimmy’s own warped perception of Anya’s usefulness and competence. This allows Jimmy to feel justified in his imagination of the nurse’s inferiority. Swansea’s clear lack of respect for Jimmy does less to hurt Jimmy than his lack of respect for Anya harms Anya, because at the end of the day, Swansea’s attitude is contextualized by the violent culture it exists in and he does nothing to reconcile with that when Jimmy becomes the captain. His resignation can thus be weaponized even by Jimmy, a man who Swansea disrespects but whose power he doesn’t try to meaningfully jeopardize, because his across-the-board disdain punches people already marginalized by the environment twice as hard as it does those with power.

Swansea doesn’t position himself as an ally, he positions himself as willfully uninvolved in everything, an observer to the shitshow ride to hell. Just because he dislikes Jimmy doesn’t mean he aligns with Anya. He makes it clear that he’s not on her side, either. After a life of doing what he felt was expected of him, Swansea on the Tulpar looks out for Swansea and Swansea’s comfort. In trying to situate himself outside of the politics of it all as an older white man, he simply allows them to play out. The toxic culture keeps existing, playing out in the microcosm that is this freighter, and Swansea in all his experience recognizes that shit has hit the fan and elects to coast through it, even explicitly numbing himself to it by breaking his sobriety. It is, of course, hard to force yourself to be sober—to see clearly. But had Swansea forced himself to get involved sooner, he might have set a precedent for Daisuke to recognize Jimmy’s abuse, which could have saved Daisuke’s life as well as created a safe space for Anya. But Swansea’s inaction forces both victims to confront an abuser on their own, unable to reap benefits from his privilege and experience.

Jimmy is clearly intimidated by swansea in a way he is not by Anya, Daisuke, or a post-crash Curly (Swansea, for example, physically manifests as an aggressor in Jimmy’s “responsibility sequences”, and Jimmy ties Swansea up to avoid what he sees as the real possibility of pushback that he doesn’t conceive of Anya being able to do). Swansea has a power he does not act on or with until it is far, far too late. In fact, he acknowledges in his final monologue that he was dissatisfied with the discomfort with opening his eyes and living an exemplary “good man”s life. The best days of his life are ones in which he’s belligerently drunk—days in which he didn’t have to hold himself accountable. He regrets the life he spent performing for higher-ups and we watch him reject it by scorning Captain Jimmy, but he also doesn’t want to be held responsible for helping other people when it’s their turn to endure the expectations and violence from similar (if not the same) higher powers. Tragically, he possesses the hindsight to recognize that how he acted on the Tulpar consequently wasn’t what Daisuke needed out of a role model, leading to Daisuke becoming a victim. His hands-off approach to emotional engagement with his young male intern (another symptom of patriarchal gender norms) may have been to avoid Daisuke turning out miserable and jaded like himself, but it doesn’t actually indicate to an already-confused Daisuke what the dangers of that attitude are. Swansea never admits his own shortcomings in a tangible way which, had they come from a man with experience and prestige like himself, may have shifted that culture that failed Anya. She comes to him with the story not because he has situated himself as any earnest friend, but likely out of desperation on a ship Jimmy now controls.

When we allow “the machine” (Swansea’s own words) to beat us down to the point that we don’t find it productive to challenge unjust power dynamics, we become complicit. I think too many people get hung up on his disdain for Jimmy and Jimmy’s fear of Swansea as a marker of allyship with Anya, but the truth is that Swansea. Is a bad ally. He’s hardly one at all. His long stint in the demanding capitalist environment molded a perfectly complicit result out of him, as it aspires to do, even if Swansea bitterly recognizes that. Jimmy’s overt violence from a position of power is a different and much more brutal approach to abuse enabled by people who have been left too tired and bitter to care that he does it. A man who could’ve intimidated and even threatened Jimmy is too resigned to try until there is literally nobody but himself left to fight for, which is an attitude carefully cultivated among the lower rungs of hierarchies to keep the top safe. Swansea in particular seems very unhappy with the capitalistic, patriarchal expectations laid out for him as a father, husband, and laborer. His decision to just stop trying and spare himself the grief instead of questioning why those expectations exist and how they would hurt the others onboard only delays him being directly targeted by Jimmy and doesn’t interrupt the latter’s violence.

Not a single man in mouthwashing is innocent in Anya’s victimhood. This is a statement tentatively uninclusive of Daisuke, because I think the game very deliberately positions him outside of manhood through his youth and thus struggling with the concept of “fitting in” to the patriarchy. Curly, Jimmy, and Swansea all represent different failures that ultimately perpetuate Anya’s suffering and force her to defend herself and finally take her life into her own hands. A holistic analysis of rape culture in MW necessarily engages with all three of them. Only not being a friend and ally to rapists and other male abusers isn’t enough, and Swansea proves it.

[astronnova]

dreamworks making some of the best animated sequels to their animated movies ever

[idolomantises]

I’ve said this before, but I always found stories that frame heaven as “evil” and hell as “good” (or less bad) to be genuinely boring. I like more nuanced approaches to each realm.

I understand that for a lot of people, Christianity is a religion they like to criticize and mock, but I feel like if you don’t even understand the fundamentals of the religion, why even attempt to critique it?

[sublimeinal-messages]

I don’t know who needs to hear this right now, but you’re not a bad person for seeking happiness after the abuse you suffered, and your life has value just by existing. Full stop. No negotiation. You do not need to atone for the ‘crime’ of being born

[arrenkae]

Obviously after 3 whole games, it becomes increasingly difficult to track all the possible player choices. It's understandable to trim them down. It's understandable that in a story set 10 years later, in a different part of Thedas, most of them won't have a significant, or even noticeable impact of the story.

But what is so wild to me is the idea that it's better to give us nothing than "small cameos and one liners" like what the fuck are you talking about

Cameos, one liners and small codex entries were the best way to give nods to the previous choices without putting too much effort into it and making wildly divergent world states and it made the dragon age world feel so much more alive and "yours"

Suuure sometimes people wished there were more to some of their choices but we all understand that sometimes it's asking for the impossible. It was still better than FUCKING NOTHING

I was so happy hearing Morrigan talking about my warden and how he is a good father and how happy they are together

"None of this should matter, it's Rook's story" sorry this is bullshit? You are bringing back Morrigan, you are bringing back Varric, there are several characters we could realistically meet in Tevinter, we are going to fucking Weisshaupt

This is absolute bullshit and the fact that they were hiding it up until now speaks volumes