#vaguely coherent ramblings

[inumbrapugnabimus-maybe]

Making decisions after 2 am is a great idea *posts all of my oc art with no context*

[monsterqueers]

YK, I'm thinking that the true mark of a mech pilot isnt that they pilot a vaguely human-shaped robot, but that they have Something Fundamentally Wrong With Them.

The Something Very Wrong With That Guy is central to the character being well suited to being encased in a giant shell to do Incredible Violence.

That something wrong can be something slapstick and funny, or it can be a incredibly traumatic backstory, or mental illness, or vague amoral bloodlust , or whatever- but there is Something Wrong With That Guy

Mech series that forget this part tend to fall short- Vld had many sins, but that most of their guys were pretty normal mentally for a mech pilot is certainly a factor in it's level of Flop.

And my money for why this is the case is on the fact that its because they dont have they key flavor of Something Is Very Wrong With That Guy being a driving undercurrent. When people write plot focused/gen fanfic versions of a mech thing that are considered 'better then canon' they ADD the Something Wrong as well in many cases, if you notice.

All the long celebrated and cult classic mech stuff all has this going on; Gundam, NGE, Xenogears- There Is Definitely Something Wrong With That Guy(or many guys in there) and thats what really makes them shine.

You have to make your mech pilots a little fucked up to make them proper mech pilots.

[itskaist]

when you hit the tag word limit you know you should just make your own post

[transmascutena]

Hey hey, I forget if you've ever posted about this, but one thing that fascinates me about Utena is the food side of everything. How Akio bakes, how Anthy basically only successfully makes shaved ice, and how Utena talks about the food going bad from lack of refrigeration. How it's not the job of the Rose Bride to cook. How Wakaba being able to prepare food makes her a good wife. I have thoughts about this, but I'll avoid saying too much because I wanna hear what you have to say too

i have gotten an ask about anthy's cooking before, where i talked about the ability to make food as a symbol for agency/freedom/independence, and how anthy can cook certain things like festival food, shaved ice, rosehip jam, the cantarella cookies, but not really anything that counts as a substantial meal (the curry is a bit of an outlier here. i guess it shows that her agency is mainly expressed through messing with nanami?) anthy says she wants to get better at cooking, and i'm inclined to believe her. i think she has the potential to be good at it too, but that akio has.... discouraged her from trying, as a way to make her more reliant on him. although, i actually can't recall if akio ever does anything in the kitchen other than (allegedly) bake that cake to impress utena, so maybe i'm way off. or maybe that's another piece of symbolism i haven't quite figured out.

you bring up a good point about gender roles here in regards to wakaba too. cooking is traditionally a woman's role in a lot of cultures, which makes it interesting that anthy, who as the rose bride is supposedly meant to be the ideal bride/wife not only cannot cook very well, but, according to touga, should not cook at all? i guess that ties back to the agency thing, though. but does wakaba have a lot of agency? she has a certain degree of freedom, at least, that comes with not being tied up in the main narrative most of the time. i'm not sure. i think food and cooking is one of the (many) things within this show that does not have one specific meaning that can be used to interpret everything related to it. i suppose my conclusion is that cooking can be both a limiting role if it's forced on you (in the sense of "you need to cook well to make for a good wife which is of course something you should want to be"), and something liberating if you do it for yourself. it's also just kind of a necessary survival skill, which is why it's so telling that anthy doesn't have it.

surprisingly enough i've never really posted about utena's food talk in episode 33 or how it may or may not play into this symbolism, so i guess i'll take this as an opportunity to do that. first, during the othello game, she talks about messing up measurements when cooking, and about the flavor coming out wrong. "you can't undo it once it's done." this shows her worries about what is happening/what will happen, and is already hinting at her regret afterward. it's a metaphor, but it also kind of ties into the agency symbolism. it tells us that utena is not very good at cooking either, and hints at the similarities between her and anthy. later she talks about what to make for lunch the next day. she's rambling, trying to distract herself, dissociating, and i don't tend to read a lot into what specifically she's saying. that's not really what's important. however, i do think it's signicant that she's bringing up anthy, for one, but mostly that she's talking about something urgent she needs to do that isn't here. she's making excuses to go home, to stop. if you buy the cooking as agency thing, utena's worry about the food going bad could once again reflect her worries and doubts about the whole thing. is there symbolism to the fact that she specifically brings up salmon and eggs and asparagus and sandwiches? maybe. but i think it's too easy to get caught up in all the little details and miss or ignore the bigger picture of what actually matters (very vaguely referring to an analysis of this scene that i hate. if you know you know.)

[devotedlystrangewizard]

the school arc to me is so good because it drags ciel out of his position as a powerful figure and literally places him in the shoes of the person he could have been. the circus arc ALSO drags him out of his position as big bad queens watch dog/head of the phantomhive estate but the school arc feels like a mockery of a future that never was. this is what he could have been had his parents not died. and even then its NOT because he will never be that kid.

he never was.

[lazaruswitch]

that post from eveningdawn22 (I think??) about "not palatable (notably to tim) transfem jay" is only reassuring my ideas and thoughts for the lily todd au but in like a different specific-to-me and specific-to-this-au way

speaking from experience tim drake Would be weird about lily* (for context: lily as in lily todd, from an au where jay is a transfem Muslim, among other things)

this isn't like a character condemnation thing, this is me speaking from experience about what people are like about queer Muslims. (bruce would also be very Weird about it but i think the source would be first and foremost bruce/batman shit, particularly in relation to jay specifically, before we hit the like more general social aspects and whatnot)

people around here (new jersey, but also america in general) are just Like That. the white kids (esp rich white kids from those gated mansion communities or whatever) around here are especially Like That. i've been going to school with them for years and have even been "friends" with some (for a given definition of friends) and they all inevitably to some degree will be Like That. in fact the vast majority of the world is Like That, to varying degrees of severity, not just specifically because of the Muslim bit or the queer bit, but because of the two things together in one person.

(from my personal experiences, it's not always a malicious thing or an intentional thing, but it is inevitably demeaning and isolating in a particular way that's supposed to be acceptable and is brushed off as like, "people can have different political beliefs blah blah blah". microaggressions and the taint of Islamophobia and all that)

there are a lot of places and people that are theoretically queer friendly or push this idea of no prejudice, like my uni, but it's inevitably not actually that straightforward

(tim and tbh a lot of the batfam, or even superheroes/vigilantes in general, are or would be like that. not even your beloved heroes are immune to propaganda, overt or otherwise. jay is already basically a freak in canon. in the lily pot au, lily is a freak existence for arguably "worse" reasons. "crazy" white boy is vastly more preferable to transfem niqabi mom.)

there's a specific idea of queerness people have in mind when they talk or think about acceptance, and it's one that does not involve the majority of the real world or communities, and they react poorly when asked to confront that

none of this is new or revolutionary information or ideas; queer bipoc people, especially Black and Indigenous queer people, have been talking about their personal experiences with this for ages, and have been demanding attention and change for just as long

some people are receptive, some people are theoretically receptive, most people don't like confronting or acknowledging the status quo

but i almost never see those kinds of discussions about or from Muslims, especially Muslim women or hijabis (i specify this bc of the visibility of hijab)

if anything it seems like everyone is deeply uncomfortable with just Muslims existing in a way that is not in fact "Other", and having to think too hard about Muslims as people who can have similarities that Really don't fit certain narratives (e.g. devout hijabi who is also proudly queer) even "positive" ones is just so.... incomprehensible, and disgusting, to them

it's exhausting when even the blue-hair-and-pronouns cannot stand the blue-burqa-and-pronouns but everyone pretends that's like. fine. and acceptable. if they acknowledge it at all

tim drake would think lily todd was weird and freaky and he'd be with the majority on that

[chestersbraincell]

The line that sorta goes like “I don’t recall hatching a bunch of arachnid babies being on your list of childhood dreams” makes me think that, in the childhood version of Wonderland(back when I assume Gidget’s gender issues weren’t as pronounced, afterall this is what the tree takes issue with and I assume it happened after their wishes became “corrupted” and they moved on from Wonderland to live the rest of their lives, before coming back as adults ofc), Gidget’s wishes would’ve involved them being like a pretty princess type of deal and that Cecil was then their doting butler. Also had an inkling of Cecil being an imaginary friend sort of parental figure Gidget used to cope with their own parental issues.

Well anyways, in that way, I feel the death of Cecil in Arc 5 then further symbolises them coming to terms with their gender identity and expression. ie “killing” the childhood dream of wanting to be a “pretty princess”, which was represented by Cecil, their butler. Also perhaps because Cecil acted as a sort of surrogate parental figure this would’ve been representative of Gidget killing the care they had for their parents’ oppinion and expectations

idk

[variousxcruelties]

trying to move my body and stay motivated to move my body bcs i am very out of shape and unhealthy and feel awful all the time and like i’m way too young to be losing this much mobility…but holy shit doing like a hot 15 on a treadmill with relatively low incline and speed put me in actual fucking pain. like my lower back was burning so much that it made me a little lightheaded by the end. and i want so badly to be able to give myself grace and remind myself that it will get better with time as long as i keep doing my best to move but i cannot help but to literally dog on myself for letting it get this bad. for rotting in bed for most of my teen years but especially the majority of my twenties so far and just???

idk.

trying every day to love myself and the body that i’m in no matter what state it’s in. trying not to buy into the idea that i need to be small in order to be worthy. but i hate myself a lot. i have no self esteem. i think i look worse than i have ever looked before and i’m terrified that everyone thinks i’m so disgusting and ugly and lazy. i wish it was easy to want to take care of myself. i wish it was second nature like it seems to be for so many other people. but everything feels like such an uphill battle that i have to fight for to get any basic consistency.

this is just a ramble atp. i just wish things were easier. and i loved myself more. and that walking didn’t cause me so much pain rn because i want to do it and i want to be better but it hurts a lot and i don’t know my limits.

[sp1resong]

yknow what. re: this ol' post--

[gnosisandtheosis]

This piece will come as no surprise to any remotely progressive or leftist Christians. Of course this brand of hyper-individualist, hyper-capitalist, and hyper-nationalist evangelicalism would find its followers rebuking Christ and His message.

One quote from Russell Moore here really stood out for me: "When we get to the point where the teachings of Jesus himself are seen as subversive to us, then we're in a crisis"

Now I haven't read the full interview yet to read this quote in context but it astounds me. The whole point is that Jesus message is *supposed* to be subversive. Both individually and in society we are supposed to challenge the status quo.

For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.

When we look at the world that we have created and compare that to the one we are called to co-create with the Divine, everything will need to be subverted for us to get from here to there.

I came to bring fire to the Earth, and how I wish it were already kindled

[abstractlesbian]

Find someone slightly annoying but in really small harmless ways so I decide none of the behaviours are worth bringing up with them → realizing: hey, Im also annoying! solidarity! → realizing we have a lot in common and starting to bond → finding out other people find this person annoying and are vocal about it behind their back → finding out this person has ADHD like me that's (at least one reason) why we have all these traits in common → fear.

[bitegore]

someone who is not me has definitely said this before but im coming to think that the existence of power is bad. Like. in a super fundamental way. Power requires someone to be subjugated to someone else's . well, power, lol, authority or control or whatever, because the construction of power is that someone can force or coerce or threaten someone else into doing something they otherwise wouldn't do by application of some consequence or another. even the soft power of 'this person is wise and knows a lot' is a construction where ignoring that person or not listening to them leads to some potential negative consequence, so we obey this wiser and older person for their ability to steer us clear of some imagined dark future mired in suffering; things only get harder from there really. But by like dint of existing in the same space as another person tehress nothing that necessarily subjugates someone else until we start playing power games and using power as a method of organizing the social group.

and like we live in a very power-centric world (obviously) so it's hard to concieve of the world without structures of power in the same kind of way it's hard to concieve of a world without, like, language or the cultural idea of the color blue or whatever, where it's this ingrained logic that just straight up Is part of how the world is run (to us, right now) but we live in a world where we have had problems that existed for millenia that we are killing, one piece at a time, like we are gods who can just turn our backs on cholera and infant mortality and widespread poor crop yield that produces famine and so on (if we choose to, which broadly we have made exclusively available on an exchange-for-money basis because this world is still running entirely on power) so i have to choose to believe that one day we will be able to turn our back on the idea of Forcing someone to do something as the only way to make any headway in society or to allow civilization to function and we will be living in a world miles better for it

[mothbeasts]

ok since you're the fabby expert riddle me this bc i've been thinking abt this all day for some reason. what do u think like. her childhood/young adulthood was like. i rotate her in my head all the time but it is SO difficult to think abt her outside of the state she's currently in now. i know she didn't spawn upon this earth like that. but that's the only way i can picture it so i need insider intel on this subject

SO glad you asked because i think about this extensively. disclaimer that this probably does not line up with Actual Canon it's just my fun little version of events that happens in my brain.

With that out of the way. What was younger fabby like?

For starters. she was 100% a theater kid and finds it embarrassing as an adult. But you cannot stop being a theater kid. Ever.

Honestly. I feel like she was fairly normal as a kid. Maybe a bit TOO interested in morbid things like poison and murder but honestly. That feels Normal. She would've been the kind of kid who like enacted the strangest scenarios and drama with dolls I think.

Things get interesting at around her young adult era. See, in my mind, a lot of her issues started at around that time. Her general constant stress and poor sleep schedule were Definitely worse when she started university. But she powered through (mostly on spite) to get her engineering degree anyways. And then got a job with Zoraxis. Which in no way helped anything ever. In my mind she also got a minor in an art field - not entirely sure what but that's just how I imagine it going. Probably something fashion related, if we wanna take that watch poster into account.

Another thing in my mind is that she was far more reserved in. i wanna say the late teens-early 20s range. Quiet, not really drawing attention. Very absorbed in her studies. Her turn towards evil science was kind of simultaneous with her becoming more like the Fabricator we see in the games; by the time she's gotten a cozy spot near the top of Zoraxis, she's got her act perfected. But the perfect evil science persona DOES take time to craft and that wasn't really the direction she had intended to go at first. She started off just wanting to go into normal engineering or something. Even into her early days with Zoraxis, she was a bit eccentric perhaps but not quite at evil science level for some time.

I think her interest in poisons and such started to take a turn for the worse when she got access to university level chemistry labs. And then her engineering education obviously went towards murder.

The summary is she was honestly Pretty Normal in my mind up until she started working for Zoraxis. After that she realized she actually thinks the whole evil thing is fun and she wants in on it.

HONORARY OTHER HEADCANON MENTION: I tend to draw her with a prosthetic arm. Why, you ask? Lab Incident. She accidentally blew herself up really bad. This happened shortly after the start of her career at Zoraxis.

[strixcattus]

I want to make a list of everything that needs to agree with something in the time travel conlang, just to get my thoughts organized.

The guiding principle here is: Everything that might have cause to agree with something, does so. A Watsonian explanation for this would probably be something like, "there are a lot of ways time distortion could drop information or cause someone to miss it, and they would really like to know whether they're talking about their friend or an evil future version of their friend." The Doylist explanation is absolutely that I think it would be funny and fun and also I've never done any sort of agreement in a conlang before and have a lot to make up for.

The numbers this conlang inflects for are: —Singular (needs no explanation) —Monogender plural (a given group of one gender) —Multigender plural (a given group of multiple genders) —General plural (used for blanket statements that may or may not have exceptions, such as "stars give off heat" or "cats have fur")

The grammatical genders of this conlang are: —Null (always and exclusively used for 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th person) —Former (past variant of myself, you, or a familiar 3rd person entity) —Future (future variant as above) —Alternate (alternate-timeline variant with a branch point in the past) —Split (alternate-timeline version of a future variant, with a branch point in the future) —Dopple (they're not a past or future version, our lives are identical, but somehow we exist separately at the same time and I need to gender them somehow)

(The distinction between 3rd and 3.5th person can get complicated. If I'm friends with someone named, say, Alice, and her future self travels back in time to now, then regardless of whom I'm speaking to, Alice is referred to in 3rd person and future-alice as Future 3.5th. If, however... let's say Nikola Tesla. If Tesla were to time-travel to 2023, and I met him, I would refer to him in 3rd person, because he would be the only Tesla I am familiar with and the only Tesla in this time frame.

On the other hand, if my grandfather were to travel through time as a young adult, and we met in the present, I would refer to him in 3.5th person, because I already know my grandfather as someone else. However, if I did the time-travelling, and met my grandfather in the past, I'd refer to him in 3rd person, and the version of him who is my grandfather in 3.5th... unless I happened to bring my present grandfather with me, in which case my present grandfather would be referred to in 3rd person and the past version in 3.5th.

Get it? By default, the native version of a person in the current time frame is referred to in 3rd person and all interlopers in 3.5th... unless they do not exist in that time frame, in which case the one with the greatest familiarity to the speaker is referred to in 3rd and all others in 3.5th, or if the speaker is travelling with the native version of that person to their time frame (or another person native to the same time frame who also knows the person), in which their native version is referred to in 3rd and all others in 3.5th.

As a sidenote: If my young grandfather (3.5th) time-travelled to a point after his death, but within my life, I would be well within my rights to refer to him in 3.5th person, even if he is the only version of himself in the current time. Those who did not know my grandfather at his current age, but met my time-travelling grandfather, would be well within their rights to refer to him in 3rd person and my present-day grandfather in 3.5th (future gender—or alternate, if my present-day grandfather didn't do any time travel in his own life).

(I don't know what you would do if Nikola Tesla showed up in 2023 in his time machine, then took you back in time to meet his self from a few years later in that self's native time. Leave it as exercise for the reader, I guess.)

—Adjectives agree with gender of the nouns they modify, by way of suffixes. If they need to agree with multiple genders, the suffixes are stacked in a set order. They're also inflected for number and for person, because you can expect to have an adjective attached to a 1.5th, 2.5th, 3rd, 3.5th, or 4th person noun/pronoun (e.g. in 1.5th person, "the evil me").

—Adverbs agree with the verbs they modify in terms of objective tense, again by way of a suffix.

—All persons of noun and pronoun that have multiple genders inflect for gender and number.

—Verbs are conjugated first for tense in objective time, then affixes are attached (these can be prefixes or suffixes) which encode person, gender (if applicable), and subjective tense for the subject and object. The positioning of these affixes is fluid, but they each point towards the nouns they're agreeing with.

—"No tense" is a valid objective tense for a verb whose objective tense is unknown, but whose subjective tense is known. For instance, if I know I'm going to mail you a letter, but I'm not sure when in time I'll be when I do so, I can refuse to inflect the verb for tense.

—A particle (which may act as an adjective or an adverb) can be constructed to indicate objective and/or subjective time for something not normally indicated. For instance, it might be attached to the noun "his texts" to indicate that the texts have not been written yet, or that whoever "he" is hasn't written them yet, but the texts themselves exist already, or to a verb to indicate that some third party (with which it agrees in number, gender, and person) has already experienced an event which is in the future for all other players in the sentence.

Verb objective tense conjugations tend to indicate the subject's person in some way. Some objective tenses lump 1st person with 1.5th person and so on, and others distinguish between them. I haven't decided yet, but this may be dependent on the base form of the verb. Like French! But worse.

[adelle-ein]

part of me wants to watch good omens, just from the perspective of a practhett fan/gaiman mixed-feelingser who read the book eighty billion years ago (age 13) and then reread it when the show was first out bc she didn't remember aziraphale/crowley being much of a thing (and she was right it wasn't)

like i'm curious for a number of reasons, not least of which is that good omens the book suffers terribly from being written by two fundamentally different writers. superficially practhett and gaiman's main bodies of work are very similar -- putting spins on myths and legends and lore, general cynical/jokey tone -- but like. their actual worldviews and styles of writing are SO different on just a fundamental level, they have such different priorities when writing. pratchett romance and gaiman romance could be opposite ends of a writing scale lbr. pratchett fucking hates sex scenes and gaiman can't stop (badly) writing them in. pratchett firmly refuses to make any of his characters conventionally attractive, neil gaiman is very much a "all my characters are pretty." pratchett's writing is generally more optimistic and gentle then gaiman's (if a child dies in a pratchett book it's a Big Fucking Deal, for gaiman it's a tuesday.) pratchett likes a smaller scale and more character-focused narrative in general, et cetera. there's a reason everyone has always struggled to adapt pratchett works to the screen, because he was not a big screen writer by any stretch of the imagination. none of this means that gaiman's writing is BAD it's just very, very different

good omens just reeks of several different manuscripts mushed together, the end result being that no character or theme is very well fleshed out and the enjoyable bits are over very quickly as we jump from author to author and pov to pov. also show of hands, who thinks that gaiman put a full on sex scene in there originally instead of fading to black and pratchett just ctrl-shift-backspaced the whole thing lmao. so i'm not surprised the tv show has gone a wildly different direction from the book, because the book simply isn't very good. plus several parts of the book i suspect had nothing to do with gaiman at all and would be difficult for him to retell (either bc he doesn't have the information to do so or just because he's rewriting a late friend's story and that can't be fun, this isn't a judgement of gaiman.) also gaiman's writing and character have changed a LOT since the 90s, GO the original book was laced with homophobia and i know some of of his old graphic novels have bad transphobia issues (haven't read those.) i don't have any issues with the show taking a different direction basically. i think that's a good call for many reasons. but i'm also just like how??? can you adapt this book to screen??? well rewrite the whole dang thing and pick some side characters (aziraphale and crowley) to actually become main characters and lead the narrative so there actually IS a central narrative instead of a general "here's what eleven billion different characters did during the apocalypse." it's a smart call. it also means the show is predominantly about two white men, AND you can actually do something with all those nasty gay jokes and make them a real couple instead which....ratings! attention! media sensation! blah blah. though this season doesn't seem to be catching on like the last one

but anyway the rest of me...doesn't really like watching tv shows very much and doesn't actually want to watch a show by an author i don't particularly like, about a premise i'm not super interested in, with a target audience i am Less Than Fond Of (superwholocks) lmao

[laziarteest]

Re-watching the Sly Cooper cutscenes since I finished re-watching all the cutscenes for the Ratchet and Clank games I’ve actually played And like, spoilers for a game series that hasn’t had a new entry in 10 years, I guess

I mentioned briefly on Twitter a couple minutes ago, but I miss these characters so much. I know that Sucker Punch is on record as saying they wanted to move away from the exaggerated cartoony style and try out more realistic games and darker themes, but like... These games are surprisingly dark for a series with colorful anthropomorphic animals meant to be stylistically reminiscent of old Saturday morning cartoons. Like, ha ha raccoon steals things But also the three main characters are all orphans??? Not to mention the fact that Sly himself watched his parents get murdered right in front of him. There’s literally a villain that was filled with so much hate for Sly’s family line that he invented a way to become immortal so he could murder the family’s descendants forever if that’s what it took to get rid of them once and for all. Then the end of the second game where Bentley and Murray are just thoroughly traumatized both physically and mentally. I guess good news for fans of competent characters in wheelchairs? Cause Bentley is just permanently wheelchair-bound after that, but continues to work with the team. And like I’m still hoping we eventually get more from the series Cause that cliffhanger at the end of Thieves in Time is just evil. At this point, I’ll even just take a remake/re-imagining of the first game? Introduce these games to a new generation, it’s so sad that there’s been basically nothing new aside from the occasional obligatory merch just because other PS2 era characters get something