#war declared

[newyorkthegoldenage]

Britain and France declared war on Germany on September 3, 1939. The afternoon and evening papers blared the news in extra editions.

Photo: Bettmann Archive/Getty Images

[mushtoons]

Hi! Declaring war, don't mind me

WAIT NO I WAS ASLEEP REMATCH

[tiffaluvr]

for all you serial boopers... you're all under my watchlist.

[agentfascinateur]

A reminder about Palestine:

Firstly, the existence of the country of Palestine was never in question. And secondly, as per the UK's own words in the oft-referred to "foundational" "Balfour Declaration":

"NOTHING SHALL BE DONE WHICH MAY PREJUDICE THE CIVIL AND RELIGIOUS RIGHTS OF EXISTING NON-JEWISH COMMUNITIES IN PALESTINE."

Plain as day.

[homeforclones]

The difference between Season 1 and Season 3 of the Bad Batch

Season 1: Omega: Crosshair, can I have a hug? Crosshair: The audacity??? Of this Child??? Nothing would revolt me more than to show any kind of weakness to sate your neediness. Season 3: Omega: Crosshair, you're getting a hug. Crosshair: The charity??? Of my Sister??? Nothing would give me more joy than to be hugged by the Literal Angel that you are, though I am a lowly worm.

[homocinematicus]

Red Army/PFLP: Declaration of World War 1971 Masao Adachi, Kôji Wakamatsu

[genevawrenn]

Foolish and Tubbo : Attempt to set up a prank with a nuclear creeper in Phil's basement for some forceful renovation.

Philza Minecraft : Kills it in seven swings with insane reaction times after he is dropped inside the hole with the creeper.

Clip from Twitter

[feanorianethicsdepartment]

look if finwë’s kids are like this, and his grandkids are like that, i feel pretty secure in saying the elf himself must have been an absolute fucking nightmare. melkor made sure to take him out early because if given the slightest opportunity to level up he would immediately become unstoppable

[ectoheart]

Dramione heartlines ~

[floef-likes-minecraft]

Grian being killed by the Bamboozlers twice and respawning in their base both times is the funniest fucking thing.

[kekstala]

Here’s another reminder that S&S D exist lol

Sweet and Sour Dipplins by @dipplinduo

[lotsabuns13]

Ep 10 got me like

[cenvast]

Laios, Monsters, & Toshiro: On Racialized Desire and Identification with the Other

Arguably, the most significant part of Laios' character is the societal ostracization he faces because of his non-normative interests and behavior. For the majority of his life, Laios struggles socially, and other humans mistreat him. When he rescues Marcille from the Nightmares, his nightmare dredges up his inability to fit into school and the army. During his early dungeoneering days, he's lied to and exploited by his fellow party members.

One of his earliest and most formative negative experiences with people is his village's abuse of Falin as a magic user. He shares that after the villagers discovered that she can use magic, "adults who were just kind yesterday, all began to bully [her]." Instead of protecting Falin, his parent tell her to leave the village. The prejudice Falin faces and his parents' response to it upsets Laios to the point that he leaves home.

While Laios cares about his friends, the Demon points out that Laios understandably does not care for people in general. Laios doesn't disagree with the Demon's assessment and suspects that the Demon "can sense all [his] thoughts." The Demon goes on to say that Laios actually "despise[s] all humans." Laios denies this assessment, but given the Demon's uncanny ability to sniff out people's desires and Laios' ashamed expression, at least part of Laios likely agrees with the Demon. It's not a stretch to assume that he's held onto some hurt and resentment towards humans due to their mistreatment of him and Falin in their youth.

In response to how human society has othered him, Laios distances himself from humans and invests his time and energy into monsters and demi-humans instead. In the DunMeshi world, monsters and demi-humans are the ultimate societal Other. People fear them, exploit them, and even hunt and kill them. As someone who's similarly been mistreated by human society, Laios resonates deeply with monsters.

His desire to become a monster and/or beastman reflects his desire to reclaim agency over how society has ostracized him. If he chooses to become a monster, he gets to place value on what society has deemed despicable. He gets to choose why society hates him and be different on his own terms.

Both textually and thematically, Laios' identification with the Other bleeds into the erotic. More blatantly, he says that he'd have sex with orc women, and his succubus is a monstrous version of Marcille.

The entire story is also steeped in the theme of consumption as carnality. Laios and his party spend the entire manga eating monsters — a taboo physical act which they reap pleasure from; the underlying eroticism isn't difficult to see.

The story also presents consumption as a form of extreme identification. Eating a monster makes the monster part of you through digestion. The line between consuming the monster and becoming the monster — between erotic desire for the monster, demonstrated by eating their flesh, and identifying with the monster — is very blurred. Note that digesting a monster is an act of absorption; it destroys the original creature. Senshi states that consuming a monster erases "its individual identity," and major manga spoilers, but Laios defeats and pacifies the Demon by consuming its desire to eat. We'll come back to this concept later.

As previously mentioned, Laios is disinterested in most humans. The notable exception to this rule is Toshiro and by extension, the Eastern Archipelago. Laios doesn't seem to know much about the Archipelago before speaking to Toshiro, so he isn't drawn to Toshiro because he's an Easterner. Instead, he's drawn to his "odd appearance."

Just like Laios views monsters and demi-humans as a visible Other, Laios views Toshiro as another visible Other. On the Island, Toshiro stands out as a foreigner at first glance. While Laios as a white tallman doesn't appear visibly strange to other people, he's drawn again and again to people and creatures who are immediately visibly "odd." He sees them as understanding what it's like to be different and be mistreated for it, and since he relates to that experience, he wants to learn about them and be closer to them.

Essentially, Laios behaves towards Toshiro and his culture the same way he behaves towards monsters; he wants to know everything about Toshiro's foreign culture — the thing which makes him different. Unintentionally, Laios unintentionally reduces Toshiro to being Japanese; if he wasn't Japanese, Laios would never have approached him.

While Laios doesn't have bad intentions, as Toshiro himself acknowledges during their fight, his behavior towards Toshiro still has negative consequences. Laios' harmless interest in monsters translates to fetishization in the context of Japanese culture. He enacts multiple microaggressions against Toshiro and crossing his boundaries.

Laios goes beyond merely learning about Japanese culture. He takes parts of it for himself when he names his sword a Japanese name. Akin to his consumption of monsters, Laios attempts to participate in Toshiro's culture while failing to respect Toshiro himself. Just as eating monsters destroys them, Laios consuming Toshiro's culture while enacting racism against him causes real harm.

Many people have already written about Laios' microaggressions towards Toshiro, but a couple include Laios telling Toshiro that he looks "odd" and asking where he's from, mispronouncing his name as "Shuro," and assuming his favorite food is rice. Laios' treatment and fetishization of Toshiro is racist and harmful. However, I'd like to dive beyond the surface of Laios' micro-aggressive remarks and examine how his obsession with Toshiro becomes a racialized mode of desire, paralleling real world phenomena.

Though no concrete canonical evidence of Laios' feelings towards Toshiro being romantic and/or sexual exists, his interactions with Toshiro have erotic undertones. Their fight dialogue, in particular, revolves around eating, an act the story consistently shows as carnal. During this fight, Laios places his thumb in Toshiro's mouth and asks him, "What's the point of even having a mouth?" Laios' penetration of Toshiro's body via his mouth and his question's potential as an innuendo lend themselves to an erotic reading of the scene's more obvious conflict. Considering the overlap between consumption and carnality throughout the story, it's not a large jump to read eroticism into Laios demanding Toshiro meet his body's physical needs.

Furthermore, Laios is more enthusiastic about Toshiro than any other human in the series. While he cares deeply about his sister and his friends, Laios repeatedly expresses how much he admires Toshiro. He retains and brings up things like Toshiro's (perceived) favorite food. He wants to go to the East in Falin's place after she rejects Toshiro's marriage proposal, and in the "What-If" extra material, he's adamant about setting up a scenario where Toshiro travels with him through the Dungeon.

Undoubtedly, Laios is drawn to Toshiro. Since he sees non-white-ness and monstrosity as equivalent markers of societal othering, Toshiro's identity as a foreigner is what cultivates and maintains Laios' interest in him. Even if Laios learns to care for Toshiro as a person, his desire for Toshiro, platonically or otherwise, is still filtered heavily through race within the narrative.

Laios' relationship with his masculinity is also fraught. He broke off his engagement with a girl from his village and doesn't express normative interest in female tallmen. Seeing how the nightmare versions of his parents ask him when he's going to give them grandchildren, Laios experiences societal pressure to conform to a normative performance of masculinity through being attracted to and marrying a tallman woman and creating a family with her.

Laios frequently talks about how cool and admirable Toshiro is when he performs masculinity through combat, etc. He might find Toshiro's Asian masculinity more appealing and more accessible to him than the masculinity that's been forced onto him, precisely because Toshiro's Asian masculinity appears non-normative in a Western lens. But co-opting the masculinities of men of color as a white man would only further feed into the white consumption of cultures of color.

Overall, Laios' entitlement to and consumption of Toshiro's culture mirrors the real-life way white people co-opt and fetishize non-white cultures. Laios' fetishistic treatment of Japanese culture, because of his attraction (platonic or otherwise) to Toshiro, parallels white people's treatment of Asian people in the Western diaspora. I can only speak on the Asian American experience, but Laios immediately being drawn to Toshiro's "odd appearance," obsessing over his culture, and primarily treating Toshiro as a conduit for his said culture feels eerily close to how some white anime and/or K-pop fans act towards Japanese and Korean people.

Similarly to Laios, real queer, neurodivergent, and/or otherwise non-normative white people are marginalized by white Western society. They relate to how society others non-white cultures and/or people of color and latch onto them. While forming human connections based on curiosity and shared experiences is wonderful, white people are often unaware of the racial dynamics at play when they engage with non-white cultures and people of color and unintentionally, end up consuming and fetishizing non-white cultures in detrimental ways.

None of this negates the reality that Laios and Toshiro canonically care for each other. For instance, Toshiro's willingness to hug Laios reveals his genuine familiarity with and affection for him. The racial dynamics of their friendship complicate their relationship in fascinating ways and open up a potential path for Laios' growth. With time and effort, Laios could absolutely unlearn his racism and become a much better friend to Toshiro.

In conclusion, Laios' behavior towards Toshiro is a study in a marginalized white person's identification with and racialized desire for a non-white Other and how even a well-intentioned attempt at connection can replicate harmful racist dynamics. Toshiro's experience with Laios closely parallels real Asian people's struggles with racism and fetishization in our world today.

[juhbebbie]

The spot saying "hypothesis: I am going to put my head in that hole" is such an underrated line because while that is just not at all a hypothesis, it is pretty much exactly the kind of shit an actual scientist would bs instead of making an actual hypothesis. If fuck around, then find out

[phantoms-world-and-more]

Danny declared war

Its been years since danny took the throne and he's had enough

It started small like the GIW started shooting at the less aggressive ghosts, then it escalated to attacking non-fighting ghosts

6 months ago they started to focus more on capturing the ghosts then getting them away

3 months ago he discovered they were hunting for natural portals to the ghost zone

1 month ago he was able to locate the ghosts that were taken and being held

1 week ago he and other ghost made a rescue mission

And less than an hour ago danny watched what those...MONSTERS...they called HUMAN did to them...to HIS people

Theres alot he could do in this situation, he could call all the ghosts back, close all the portals, cut connections to the mortal world...

But he won't

His people never did anything wrong, and this is the last straw

.

.

.

The JL were in a panic

Things that looked like Lazarus pits started showing up all around the world, and creatures came out, they attacked government buildings and made as much damage they could

Then they took positions

Some were going back into the Lazarus pits carrying things and others stayed at the buildings

Others took off in different direction with no connection, they went to a place, sat down and appeared to be waiting

They sent members to deal with them, some to talk, some to fight and some to capture

All of them havent been heard off since

They were about to make a public statement when the biggest Lazarus pit so far appeared where all the press were waiting

It was covered in black armour with a glowing blade, and was followed by someone smaller than him, he had a green crown of flames, white hair and looked deathly pale

He called himself phantom,

Thats when everyone got an explanation

Phantom broadcasted footage of similar lookign creatures being vivisected, shot, burned, tourchered, and...people were doing it

It let everyone hear how the people though it was FUNNY, their pain their screams...everything

It lasted for 30 minutes of eveyone watching different videos of people expermenting and tourchering them

Then phantom spoke

Spoke of how his people have been hurt and hunted too long, told them the facility's have been distroyed, gesturing to the frozen and distroyed buildings, and how the GIW was a government founded division designed to hunt and experment on his kind

And he's had enough

He said he took the experimentation and capture of his people was a declaration of war between them

.

.

.

Batman was of the opinion that earth was fucked

They were now in a war THEY initiated with beings thay have no solid or reliable information of

Oh and over half the league that was dispatched is still missing

[littlefankingdom]

I'm developing a new pet peeve with batfam fic, and it's Tim (when he is a young child) being described as being so small that the batfam thinks he is younger than he looks, or even saying he is smaller than Jason was at this age.

No, Jason was small af, he was suffering from malnutrition. He was a small baby, he is the one people must always have thought was younger than he actually was. He would not be able to make fun of Tim's height, he was tiny! Small baby, disappears in his own cape easily, could get lost under Batman's cape!

It's also way more funny to imagine a small Tim being taller than Jaybin who is older than him. Tim discovering the new Robin's identity and that he is actually older than him when he thought he was younger. Tim admiring Dick's Robin and not Jason's Robin because, at first, he thought he was a BABY, as when you are a kid, anyone who is younger than you for even one year is a baby, but people who are a couple of years older are soooo mature and cool.

Tim is the smallest of the three oldest batboys as an older teen/young adult, but he was not the smallest one as a kid/young teen, Jason was!