#was for your own good

[bronzewool]

Final Fantasy VII: Traces of Two Pasts by Kazushige Nojima is a novel exploring the backstories of Aerith and Tifa, two party members you acquire early on in the game.

Traces of Tifa starts with a young Tifa in the small village of Neibelheim, playing with the other boys her age (minus Cloud) and reconciling over the knowledge their childhood is coming to an end as each boy is already making plans to leave and follow their future career paths. The boys try to cheer her up by promising to write to her, but it soon becomes clear to her that everyone has already decided she will marry one of these boys without bothering to ask her opinion. After Cloud and the other boys leave for Midgar, she becomes lonely and has no direction in life until a wandering material artist, Rashard Zangan, shows up, scouting for students to join his dojo, and finding the perfect pupil in Tifa. Throwing herself into her training, she proves to be skilled in the art form and even starts teaching a morning class for the other villagers. Fast forward to the Neibelheim Incident, where Tifa lost her father and is mortally wounded by Sephiroth, she wakes up in a Midgar hospital that managed to save her life, but she no longer has a home or any means of paying her medical bills. The doctor's son, Rakesh, also a student of Zangan, sets her up with a room in one of the slum container rows, and a job working at a steamed bun cart. Although Tifa is grateful for the help, she is still in the process of mourning the loss of her home while recovering from a near-fatal stab wound and yet still expected to work off her heavy debts. During her time living in the slums, we see how she met Barret, and the rest of Avalanche and would eventually become the bartender of Seventh Heaven.

The segment has a well-paced coming-of-age story of Tifa having no control over her life, and becoming the confident kickboxer and math-savvy bartender we meet at the beginning of the game. The story is slow in several areas, the major one being the attention to detail it goes into regarding her workout routine (to the point it starts feeling like an actual textbook) and her work rota at the food cart and preparing the bao buns (which starts feeling like an actual cookbook). Other than that it has a satisfying twist near the end with how Tifa manages to get out of debt and find a supportive community that becomes her newfound family.

The only minor complaint I have with this story is how little Zangan is in it, considering he is meant to be Tifa’s sensei, but he is only shown teaching her through textbooks that he leaves for her to study before disappearing for months at a time and returning to test her progress and handing her the next volume before disappearing again. This works in the context of the games as characters can level up by reading textbooks, but from a story standpoint, it's rather disappointing how little these two interact.

Traces of Aerith covers the timeline after Aerith and her mother escape Shina and hide in Sector 8 Slums, right before she dies and Aerith is adopted by Elmyra. The game briefly covers how Aerith and Elymra first met, but the book goes into greater detail about how they became a family and that it wasn't as smooth a transition as was implied. Elmyra's husband was a soldier who had been deployed during the Wutai War and was finally coming back home. Elymra would stand at the train station waiting for him with each passing day and on one such day, she finds Aerith weeping over the corpse of her mother and takes the girl in before Shinra finds her. Aerith is in the middle of mourning her mother and Elymra is overloaded with the responsibility of being a single parent while trying to maintain peace within her husband's business. Aerith's presence complicates things for Elmyra and they come up with a fake identity for Aerith which quickly backfires the more people learn of her existence.

The book tries to address minor details in the framing device of a polygon game and has various degrees of success while doing it. For example, Aerith's home is strangely bigger than the rest of the slums, with a two-story house and a garden filled to the brim with flowers. In the game, this area is heavily detailed because it's a set-piece that represents Aerith and the party spends quite a bit of time here. In the context of reality, this area makes no sense when just outside the gate the rest of Sector 8 is a shanty town. The book works around this by giving Elmyra a backstory where her father-in-law owned a construction company and stayed in the slums to oversee that company, as opposed to other businesses that would start a shop in the Slums and immediately abandon it once they earned enough to move onto the upper plate. Her father-in-law employed all those redundant employees and gained a lot of respect from the community for providing employment, hence why they live more lavishly in comparison.

My only complaint about Aerith’s segment in particular is how it glosses over major details in her childhood that fans were probably picking up the book to read about. We know the Turks have been spying on Aerith since she was a child, but they barely have a presence in this segment beyond one vital scene that needs to exist because it happened in the game and the climax where we can assume they saved Aerith’s life. Instead, we spend a lot of time setting up Aerith having a fake identity, and her panicking and using another girl’s name, and this somehow causes everyone to panic because two girls can’t have the same name I guess? (it's as stupid as it sounds and I don’t know why the book dives into this when we know Aerith uses her real name in the present timeline).

Is this book well written? Yes. Did it need to exist? No. There is nothing new we learn in this book that changes your worldview of the game or about Aerith and Tifa as characters. Hardcore fans will enjoy it but casual fans are not going to get anything out of it.

[sanguinifex]

You gotta read and watch some old books and films that aren’t 100% modern politically correct. I’m not saying you should agree with everything in them but you need to learn where genres came from to understand what those genres are doing today and where media deconstructing old tropes is coming from.

Also, more often than you might think, they’re not actually promoting bigotry so much as “didn’t consider all the implications of something” or just used words that were polite then but considered offensive now.

Kill the censor in your head.

[1-800-dreamgirl]

this is what everyone has been saying!! no one is looking at celebrities for political statements, but they should and must use their platform to amplify the voices of those who need and most importantly be against this genocide!!

[camilleflyingrotten]

[prolibytherium]

One of my all time biggest pet peeves with historical(ish) fantasy is when the writer constructs a religion with a clear bias that it's stupid and false and therefore only the Stupid People and/or commoners believe in it and all the smart/elite main characters are like, quasi-atheists or otherwise just routinely flout established religious conventions of orthodoxy and/or orthopraxy because they're Too Smart for it or etc.

It's usually an extension of assumptions that people in the past were just less intelligent than in the contemporary, just being like "I know that the sun is a star millions of miles away that the earth orbits, but this ancient religion describes it as a chariot flying through the sky" and not really bothering to learn the context and just (consciously or subconsciously) settling on 'that's a crazy thing to think and was probably believed in because they were Stupid'.

And that whole attitude pisses me off so much. People were as 'smart' 10,000 years ago as they are today. These beliefs aren't just desperate, random flailing to explain phenomena that could not directly be accounted for either, it's not like people just looked at the sun and went "Uhhh I don't know what the fuck that thing is, actually. I guess it might be a chariot or a boat or something?? Yeah let's go with that." and based entire religious practices on this. Every well-established belief system exists within broader contexts of cultural values/subjective perceptions of reality/knowledge systems/etc, and exist as part of a historical continuum of religious practices that came before. Even when not Materially Correct, they have context and internal logic, they're not always dead literal with zero levels of allegory, and they're never a result of stupidity.

[soranatus]

The Spider Target By Dan Martins, a character designer and illustrator

[bean-spring]

Hot take and not to be a killjoy or the shipping police but people treating Viktor or Jinx's aroace headcanons as if they were canon is not the revolutionary take people think it is.

Headcanons are always all right but we have to acknowledge that they are somehow damaging when they apply to stereotypes. It might not be the case for everyone but most of the time people unconsciously assume that disability/mental illness=asexuality. These headcanons erase the freedom of attraction from people who are already seen as unable to have sexual/romantic experiences/desires, when it's completely untrue and harmful.

You can headcanon Viktor and Jinx as aroace, but I have seen people changing their minds once Viktor is no longer disabled (s2 with all of his other forms) and Jinx is no longer as mentally ill (alternate universe Powder). And it speaks wonders of how people see these characters.

"I never thought about Jinx being able to feel romantic/sexual attraction until s2!" To believe she's actually only capable of that when she's not "damaged" is incredibly disturbing. Especially since Jinx has always had a bit of a flirty personality too.

"I've always seen Viktor as asexual, I don't know why!" That's fine. You can headcanon him as ace. But I believe there is a reason behind it, most of the time, if for some inexplicable reason the "vibes" of the disabled character are making you think he's ace.

I say all of this being aroaspec myself, by the way. Headcanon all you want but going to people's posts commenting how "it's weird for you that they have romantic/sexual plots when they're clearly aroace" is not a win at all. It's a headcanon, after all, and it should be treated as such, and that's fine. But it also is damaging to spread stereotypes like these.

Of course the disabled character is asexual. Of course the mentally ill character is aromantic. It's not as revolutionary as you might think, tbh.

Fandom is not activism and it's all right to have any headcanons you want BUT some of them are filled with damaging stuff and perhaps we should look into ourselves more before treating these assumptions as something canon.

[marzipanandminutiae]

what's with the weird glorification of smoking that's come back lately

like

I've seen so many posts that paint opposing smoking as some impossibly Loser-ish or puritanical stance and I really don't get it

it makes you, your house, and your clothing stink, destroys your teeth, and gives you lung cancer. opposing it is. Correct. obviously addiction is very complicated and quitting can be hard, but just saying "smoking is gross and harmful as a practice (including vaping)" is True and Right actually

some of you have never grown up hearing about how some beloved family member died a slow, agonized, wasting death of smoking-induced cancer, or watching it firsthand for yourself, and it shows

[biggest-gaudiest-patronuses]

getting older can be so amazing? you get more familiar with yourself. learn tips & tricks for troubleshooting your own brain. trial & error helps you build routines that minimize discomfort, maximize reward. your preferences/interests don't get set in stone, but you do find out which ones are going to stay with you in the long-term, and which ones are fun but transient joys to appreciate in the moment.

you learn that the world is so much more complex than you were taught, and that that's okay, and that there's an endless supply of things you can learn or watch or experience or think about if you want to. if you're lucky, you loosen up, stop putting so much pressure on yourself. if you're lucky, you learn to recognize that negative inner voice, and whack it with a baseball bat until it hushes up. if you're lucky, you learn to treat yourself gently, not because you are fragile but because you are worthy of gentleness. (i hope you are lucky.)

and some things will change. some things will get better. some things will get good. and maybe you start to recover from the dehumanizing stress of childhood/education. maybe you learn the power of your own autonomy. maybe you learn how to walk away from bad situations (which is a superpower even if you don't realize it yet). and you get to choose your own clothes. and your own food. and which relationships to pursue! and what you do with your free time. and with your life (but don't worry you get to choose that gradually). and that's crazy! and sometimes scary. and extraordinarily, indescribably precious.

[mischievous-thunder]

A guide to Wade's sweet and spicy pet names for Logans across the multiverse:

Then come the pet names Wade gave his Logan:

And his Logan loves each one of them.

[artist-rat]

my sister finished her first bg3 run, here's evil gang reunion photo <333 (withers invented polaroid for the occasion idc)

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

How much longer 'til your luck runs out?

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[dalliancekay]

All the I LOVE YOUs Aziraphale didn't say

[canisalbus]

*carefully picks you up and peeks into your conch snail shell*

Ehm... Sorry to bother, but... Could we, maybe, possibly... see Vasco's wife and her lover pictured by your hand? Sorry again, thank you for listening. Take care.

*delicately lays you back into the water to prevent any stress or dehydration*

Unfortunately I don't have her lover figured out yet, but I think Ludovica looks something like this:

[mwagneto]

sorry idk but the way the world is so fast and the people in it still want it to be faster is sooo annoying to me. people groaning while standing in line for 3 minutes people being mad the train ride is gonna take 2 hours people complaining that the bus is a few minutes late people being angry that construction work is taking months even though it used to take decades. don't you see the world is already so so so fast in every single aspect can't you understand that being mad will do nothing and just make your mood worse. enjoy the moments of stillness you're given. just stand in line and look at the people around you. sit on the train and watch the scenery. you'll get there.

[minthy]

lemme just

yeah, sanegiyuu my beloved

OG meme

(i couldn't not do it)