#ur a Damaged Man handler

[tenacquity]

my favorite thing is ryuu coming face-to-face with a generally intimidating character (v/an z.ieks) and being absolutely terrified like a deer in the headlights bc golly gosh that man (zieks) could absolutely destroy me

only to come to a very important conclusion a couple months later that's basically just

oh. oh, no. honey

i'm going to be destroying you. i see, now. okay. let me change my battle strategy here--okay. i seeyou. i got you. ( ‾́ ◡ ‾́ )

[shiftyyyy]

Hey! Glad you liked the compliment. Good artists deserve those, and reblogs too, don't forget that. Anyways, have some more of my epic Tunner HC's

He has access to Fallout style perks. For example, here's what Tunner said to Mr. Tree when he came into Tunner's cattle ranch (Tunner does have a horse, named Clint.):

Mr. Tree: How dare you kill my only ally!? You dare stand up against beings beyond your understanding, like a flea going up against a volcano...it will only end in your death, and the deaths of those you hold dea-

Tunner: [Terrifying Presence] You better get off my property, or else I'm gonna repair my fence with your corpse, pardner.

Mr. Tree: G-Gah-! Y-..You listen here mortal, I am not to be trifled with! I will kill you where you sta-

Without another second of hesitation, Tunner reaches to his belt, and draws his buck knife from his holster. With a smirk, he tosses it into the air with a spin, before leaning down and grabbing a handful of dry dirt, flinging it into the eyes of Mr. Tree. With his foe blinded, he draws his revolver, quickly firing off 6 shots into the trunk of Mr. Tree.

The tree is shifted back, clearing the dirt from his eyes he tries to retaliate, but Tunner grabs his lasso from his back, quickly spinning it in the air, and grabbing his knife. With a powerful spin, he slams the knife straight into the side of Mr. Tree, and with one last pull, he leaves a massive gash in the side of Mr. Tree's trunk, oozing out a dark, bloody, coagulated sap.

Tunner: [Terrifying Presence] That was just the warnin' shot. Leave, or else I'll make good on that threat earlier.

Badly damaged, losing sap rapidly, Mr. Tree has no choice but to retreat. Sinking back into the ground, and leaving Tunner's farm. The man in question letting out a sigh, taking off his hat and wiping some sweat from his brow. He pulls out a canteen of water, taking a sip, and chasing it with a swig of whiskey from his flask.

--

Ok, put a biiiit more effort into that than I should've-

Uhh, Tunner here is the caretaker/Handler for Brud. Because Brud is a sentient dirt monster, it needs to learn good and bad, and how to act in a somewhat socially acceptable manner. Oh, and school, it needs school to get smart.

OMGOGMGM HIII ITS YOU AGAIN OH MY GOD!! I ABSOLUTELY LOVED UR COMPLIMENT!! IM VERY INSECURE SO THAT REALLY HELPED MY CONFIDENCE ALOT! eue

ALSO OMGOMGKG YESSSS MORE TUNNER CONTENT I LOVE TO SEE IT EEEEEEEE!!!

DUDE OH MY GOD I READ THIS MULTIPLE TIMES YOUR WRITING STYLE IS SOSOSO INTRESTING OMG? I REALLY REALLY ENJOY HOW YOU VISION THIS SO MUCH YOU HAVE ALOT OF PERSONALITY AND EFFORT PUT INTO THIS AND I THINK THATS LIKE RLLY RLLY COOL!! GUHHHH I LOVE HOW TUNNER IS IN THIS BTW HE SEEMS SO BAD AHH AND IM SO DOWN FOR IT!!! IM SQUEALING!! I RLLY HOPE WHEN I POST THIS PPL CAN SEE THIS AWESOME WORK OMG THIS NEEDS TO BE SEEN!! I RLLY HOPE YOU KEEP UP YOUR AWESOME WORK CUZ THIS IS SOSOSO ENTERTAINING TO READ :-)) ALSO THE EFFORT WAS TOTALLY WORTH IT FOR THE OUTCOME!! I LOVE IT!! TY FOR THE ASK!!

ALSOO AWWWW OMGG TUNNER AND BRUDDD THATS ACTUALLY SO CUTEEEEE I COULD DEFINITELY SEE THAT DUDE OMFG THEY TOTALLY HAVE THE FATHER AND SON RELATIONSHIP SOMEWHAT BC OF THAT!!

ANYWAYSS!! ANYONE ELSE ON MY PAGE PLZPLZ GO SUPPORT THIS PERSON THEY WRITE RLLY COOL STUFF :-D!!!

[abigailhobbsgallobamaedu]

Yes, as a Targeted Woman you have most assuredly been a victim of Domestic Abuse, and yes you have survived.

Congratulations.

But what does that really mean? If you're a Targeted Woman you can't just leave a violent situation and hope to start a new life free of the terror that an abusive man inflicts upon a woman.

She has made a plan, and now she must revise it.

She must search for new solutions. It is time for her to view her future in a new light. She must be strong and she must avoid the trappings of a new relationship, the escapism of alcohol and drugs, the vortex of despair.

She is no longer a Battered Woman, who is also being targeted. For it is likely that her partner, her "Handler" was tasked with the job of managing and controlling her behavior.

She is simply a Targeted Woman. She will be subjected to each and every behavior that she endured in her abusive relationship, only now by entire group of men, the women and even the children in their lives.

She may become estranged from own family and friends, who may even be recruited in the process.

She will be isolated and she will lose her current support system.

There is no safe house, no sanitary city, there is no refuge.

She will be emotionally and mentally broken down further as she is already wounded, and damaged. These groups will view her as even easier to push, even further down.

Their goal being to force her right back into an equally abusive relationship, thereby removing her ability to choose the direction and quality of her own life.

A new man has likely already been assigned to her and she will again be placed in an identical situation, maybe even worse as this new man will be viewed as her "punishment" .

This is within the scope of the Perpetrators' (cult)ure of rewards and reprimands.

While these views and actions are far from those of the mainstream, they are easily implemented and accepted within these groups.

Targeted Women sharing their stories with the online community, are often unaware of any relief as they struggle to develop some quality of life for themselves and their children.

They focus only on the Stalking component of these Hate Campaigns and know that these laws are rarely enforced.

When in fact, these groups are Domestic Terrorist Cells by simple definition. American citizens targeting other American citizens.

These groups are Organized Criminal Elements due to their illegal revenue generating activities.

These groups are conspiring against their victims' Civil, Legal, and Human Rights and can be charged in many ways under US18 Section 241, opening the door even further to combine with the wide variety of state and local crimes that they engage in.

In conclusion, there really is no need to focus on creating new laws to protect Targeted Women, for they are already in place and can easily be enforced and must be. These women are your mothers, your children, your grandmothers, sisters and aunts. They deserve protection and they deserve justice.

[tanadrin]

hey *whispers* hey. hey. i saw your post in the wow tag. i would read THE SHIT out of your interpretation of wow lore. i have homework right now but i think i might just read through your blog a bit. the characters have always been such a high point for me (listen. i know knaak did a lot of shit. but you can pry Krasus from my cold dead hands he was EVERYTHING to middle school me) and i feel so conflicted over what theyve done to the characters - sylvanas, anduin, everyone. would love ur take

You might be a little disappointed, most of my blog isn’t about WoW (it postdates my WotLK raiding/RP guild phase, and I’ve only just recently got back into it with Classic). Lots of opinions on WoW characters below the cut.

I actually don’t hate Krasus as a character. He’s fine, he’s not a Designated Idiot Ball Carrier like some of the others are. In re: the dragons generally, I don’t like the simplistic thing WoW lore does a lot where one faction leader going bonkers turns the whole faction into baddies for no apparent reason, because all political entities are monoliths except when they’re not. I’m also not a huge fan of how crowded the, erm, metahuman bureaucracy on Azeroth has become in the lore–like, the Keepers and the Dragon Aspects serve similar roles, and the lore could have done fine with one or the other, and the dragons were here first (and Ysera and Alexstrasza are BAMFs), and so should get to stay.

Sylvanas is bae, obviously, and Sylvanas as Warchief was a terrific move plotwise. I think it’s a pity they had to kill Vol’jin to do it (because I am also very here for Warchief Vol’jin), but she is obviously the more interesting choice. Speaking of Warchiefs:

Thrall doesn’t have the Green Jesus Marty Stu quite as bad as some people think, but he does kinda have it, and I don’t see them grappling quite with the fact that he done fucked up. Like, not only did he install a Warchief who should have had all smart members of the Horde tugging at their collars nervously when he started his rule, Garrosh turned into a Sha-summoning Old God-corrupted, casual-atrocity-perpetrating maniac, not to mention all the bullshit on Old Draenor I do my best to forget about lest my blood pressure spike. We don’t really get a satisfying mea culpa from Thrall for that, and then his response is to fuck off to fiddle around with the Earthen Ring for a bit, before retiring to a farm in Nagrand. Keep in mind, one of the whole reasons the Horde came together in its current shape in the first place is because of the charismatic, hopeful figure of Thrall. It ran the very real risk of splintering under Garrosh for good (ESPECIALLY after the murder of Cairne, RIP Cairne Bloodhoof, you were too good for this world), and even the most unifying successor (which I think Vol’jin was) didn’t have Thrall’s inclusive, unifying vision. Sylvanas doesn’t, either, and even more, is sort of low-key hated by everybody else, so while I don’t think she’s a maniac like Garrosh who would recklessly divide the Horde, she’s also not, I am forced to admit, necessarily the ideal Warchief from a political standpoint.

Even if he didn’t return to the post of Warchief, Thrall had a moral obligation after the Garrosh debacle to try to help hold the Horde together and heal the divisions his negligence caused. At least to throw his support behind Garrosh’s successors, and not to pretend that Deathwing’s death meant everything was OK forever, job done. And if he wasn’t going to do that (and he has excellent motivations for not wanting to do that!), I think the consequences of that have to be explored. I think some people would blame him, and be justified in doing so. I think somebody like Varok Saurfang, who has had decades of experience with the damage bad leaders could do, would rightly be a little pissed, even as he sought Thrall out for help, that Thrall had let the Horde he built languish under subpar leadership. Thrall has been selfish–and that’s great, because he desperately needed some character flaws more significant than “cares too much” and “believes in people a lot.”

Anduin: better than Varian, still a little bland? Varian was a Professional Idiot Ball Handler, who seemed to do stuff not out of a coherent conception of his character, but just because the plot required a Generic Human King to do it. Plus there was all that stuff with the cloning and the kidnapping that never really made any sense. I like Anduin’s optimism; I like that he feels like a thoughtful, reasonable guy, who’s doing his best in often-impossible circumstances. I feel like they could show him being a little more frustrated sometimes, though, and a little pissed at people like Jaina who obstinately refuse to do the strategically correct thing even if it means setting aside their resentments for a bit. Disclaimer: I play almost exclusively Horde toons, they may address this better in the Alliance quests in WoW.

But oh man, besides the Draenei, I hate most what they did to Jaina. Jaina was that rare jewel, an optimist in a world whose setting demands perpetual chaos. Yes, yes, Theramore and the mana bomb, I’m not suggesting she should be made of stone, but it breaks her character to have her suddenly go from someone trying to forge a lasting peace between the Horde and Alliance in WC3–to the point where she would see her own father dead–to someone who now blames the whole Horde as one no exceptions for what happened at Theramore. Should she struggle with grief and pain and anger? Absolutely. But she should deal with them in more complex ways than “now I am become the mirror image of Daelin.” Nevermind that even if she did that she should at least regret not listening to him back in WC3. (Do they address that in BFA with the introduction of Kul Tiras? Idk, I haven’t played BFA at all yet.) It seems like Jaina’s role now is to be the Person Who Hates The Horde, and honestly, that’s a tired trope. It’s just not interesting, it has no nuance, it has no interesting outcomes. You could maybe get away with it with the generation of leaders from the Second War like Daelin and Genn who knew the Orcs only as the fel-corrupted servants of the Burning Legion, but it’s obvious to anyone with two brain cells to rub together than the current Horde is a very different animal politically and strategically, so even if you hate the Orcs with a burning passion, that is not going to transfer to the Tauren, nevermind onetime allies like the Blood Elves.

Gul’dan: oh my god the time travel plot was so stupid. Did the whole universe get duplicated in the alternate timeline? Since travel between the universes is cheap and easy that means there’s a whole nother Burning Legion with a whole nother Sargeras out there that’s still a huge fricking threat! Not to mention a whole nother Azeroth! Did just Draenor get duplicated? That doesn’t seem to match up with the fact a lot of the Burning Legion characters in WoD seem to be parallel universe versions of Burning Legion villains we already know, but it’s not directly confirmed or disconfirmed. Is it some sort of weird Bronze Dragonflight timey-wimey thing that doesn’t have its own independent reality? Ok, fine, but obviously this alternate Draenor has enough of an independent existence for us to visit it again and see what it’s like decades later, not to mention bring some of the people there back. Gul’dan was a fine, if one-dimensional villain but bringing him back from the dead was dumb, dumb, dumb, in a setting where death often feels meaningless and seems to be reversible at random. And the general incoherence of magic in the setting combined with the perennial incoherence of time travel plots (Gollum voice: *we hates them!*) really just reduced WoD to a quivering mess of plot holes, like febrile fan speculation made manifest.

Tirion Fordring: good example of a purely heroic character done well, which WoW has few of. I think because he actually has challenges to overcome, and he doesn’t feel like an idiot.

Bolvar Fordragon: Literally did not know or care who this guy was until the Wrathgate cinematic, but what they did after that with his character was terrific, 10/10.

Malfurion, Tyrande, Illidan: These characters all bore me to tears. My WotLK main was a druid, and I’m a big fan of the druid lore, so I wanna like Malfurion, I really do, but he’s just so dull. Partly because it doesn’t feel like he has any real limitations on his power, just whatever the plot demands he be able to do or not do at any given moment, partly because he just feels like a stiff-necked scold. Tyrande is even more one-dimensional. Illidan is pure 3edgy5me, and the demon hunters in general feel like they get to be too cool to actually traffic in any of the pathos of what should be their emotional equivalents like the Death Knights and the Forsaken. It’s like, “oh man, my life is so tormented, I have these bitchin’ horns and tattoos, and I’m, like, totally immortal, here, hold my rad sword thingies for a second.” At least with the Death Knights you get the feeling that being a Death Knight is a genuinely miserable experience, so there’s some genuine conflict at the heart of the class: sure, you play as a hero, but not the kind of hero you’d necessarily want to be. Demon hunters are just pissed they don’t get to sit at the cool kids’ lunch table, and Illidan genuinely acts like a giant asshole and then gets self-righteous and whiny when his friends and family are like “Dude! Stop being such an asshole!” There’s room for a prickly character, who’s a dick, but who’s our dick, and maybe that’s what they were going for, but Illidan is just the worst.

Azshara, Lady Vashj: The Naga were a giant fucking mistake. A symptom of the inability to let backstory stay backstory, to have to resurrect and retread the same events over and over again that plagues serials when lesser writers without original ideas get let loose on them. Settings like WoW (like Star Wars, like Star Trek, like Dune) are whole universes. You should be expanding the borders, making them feel bigger, more fine-grained, more alive, not beating the same major characters to death over and over again. The ancient Kaldorei are way more interesting as a lost past and a lesson in hubris than fish-snake-people who live under the sea.

Also, water levels are dumb and I hate them. This applies to coral-and-shellfish themed zones regardless of whether swimming is involved.

Cho’gall: I loved the “insane nihilist death cult” reincarnation of the Twilight’s Hammer Clan in World of Warcraft, and Cho’gall as the many-eyed crazed ogre mage with two heads was great. Would much rather have more Cho’gall than Guldan 2.0.

While I’m on Cataclysm: one thing you don’t often feel in worlds like WoW is the possibility of real defeat, because for extradiegetic reasons, it’s impossible to truly lose in any long-lasting way (or, in quests like Battle for the Undercity in WotLK, they just… don’t let you, which feels dumb as heck). I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of a post-apocalyptic fantasy world, a world where the bad guys won, and all the worst things the good guys feared came to pass. I think this is one reason I loved the original interpretation of the Draenei so much, because we saw in Draenor what that really looked like. It was bleak, and it was poignant, and even though it was set within a silly melodrama, it actually moved me. Cataclysm did something similar with the postapocalyptic time-travel instance (time travel being used well for once in WoW!), where you saw that Deathwing’s victory wasn’t just an abstract possibility, but a thing that could actually happen. It made the possibility of defeat feel more real, and it gave you a taste of that same bleak, poignant feeling: this, it said (just for a moment!) is what failure looks like, an Azeroth without life, without hope, in which everything you ever struggled for was utterly in vain. And that motivated you to work even harder to prevent it.

Alleria, Turalyon: “You last saw us in WC2, and since then we’ve been fighting a thousand years (subjective) of endless war against the Burning Legion and been irrevocably changed by the experience” is actually pretty great! But if I were going to rewrite WoW lore, I would make that a thousand objective years and set the final victory over the Burning Legion in the future, at a time when the Alliance and Horde have made a durable peace, and Azeroth has moved on from decades of endless war. I think there’s a real problem with trying to make the player one of the heroes that brings down Sargeras for good because it’s *such* an epic battle, but it’s a massively multiplayer game. Making every player the grand master of their class order was bad enough, but when you are obviously playing out entirely different diegesis from everyone around you, even if you didn’t have problems like sharding and a glut of phasing and cross-server activities and instant teleportation to dungeons, it really feels like a single-player RPG with a chat function. I mean, conflicting diegeses is always going to be a problem with questing-based MMOs, but suspension of disbelief worked when you were plainly one person embedded in a larger effort, like in vanilla, BC, and WotLK. But “you are one of thousands of people who is the Best Warrior Ever and sole Leader of the Warriors, and who has the Only Artifact Weapon that somehow also has thousands of copies”… yeah, that just doesn’t work for me. I feel like I’m being pandered to, and not in a fun way, like with the Pandaren.

Sargeras: I like that they retconned Sargeras to have a better motivation than “demons made me nihilistic.” The idea of a void-corrupted titan being something so terrible a member of the Pantheon would shatter worlds to prevent it is interesting. But the Void gods still feel… kinda non-threatening? We don’t see them actively working to threaten anything we really care about, the Void is mostly a pretty passive abstract force like the Light, and in general I feel like the setting isn’t really dualistic, but er… trialistic? Is that a word? In that there’s a three-way opposition between the Void, the Light, and the Nether/Arcane, from the perspective of which each is the opponent of both of the others, but that’s never laid out explicitly anywhere.