#watching the world burn

[theroundbartable]

Something that worries me about political parties is when it stops being about how to run a country and starts being a populistic challenge.

If you're American, you're likely used to this. Your blue party rants against the red one, the red against the blue, and in the end, the more popular group - in a democratically questionable ratio - wins.

I grew up and live in Germany, so I wasn't used to this. I grew up watching political parties work together to achieve smth good for the country, even if they didn't always agree. They were politically middle. Not left, not right. Extreme lefts and extreme right parties were forbidden in a democratic decision to protect our integrity and guarantee the safety of the people. Since the world has drifted to the right, the voting propaganda slogans have shifted too.

Instead of "we care about the climate" , "more money for families" etc etc... Slogans you would vote them for...

Politicians now challenge each other. "Let's become bigger than this other party." "We're the democrative alternative for the fascist alternative!"

It's not about the people anymore. It's purely egoistical, narcissistic, egomanic behavior.

I've said it before, we're watching 1933-1945 unfold once more. Germany too, is going in this direction. America is already halfway there. Russia has arrived the day they started their wars, which was... When? 2014? Turkey as well.

(France and England seem to have gotten the curve in their last elections, so I would exempt them... For now)

When one country starts, others will follow. The same rhethorics, the same induced fears, the same lies. Because it's not about the people, not about 'how do we live with each other', it's about 'who is the bigger threat, who has the most power'.

It's obvious. It's placated all over the Cities.

[suavispoeta]

My friend x me doing God's work.

[captainpirateface]

[moxxiesblog]

At this point we might as well jump universes and start over somewhere else Cuz I’m so done with the world going to dogshit every fucking day. we can’t have nice things without breaking them apparently 😔😤

i think im getting better! :) [another event occurs]

[morerogue]

Man with Evil Laughter Watching The World Burn By Ukim by ukimalefu

[prommytheus]

imagine being a gavinners fan from like wisconsin or some other place like that. vermont idk and they announce a world tour, so you buy tickets for the nearest location. and they start off in LA, their home city, makes sense.

but then you get an email that says NEVERMIND and you get an immediate refund on cashapp. and you look it up and apparently someone was fucking shot at the first concert and klavgav got set on fire and the bassist went to jail for drug smuggling and murder charges. and now they’re announcing a breakup. what do you even do with that fucking onslaught of information

[trolledu]

Quite honestly, many Americans have very little idea what it means to be a slave to a system and certainly no care that many people in many places around the world are still slaving for far less than they are, and all to support their highly consumptive and degrading lifestyles. At least some of these woke Americans get a semblance of the real picture when a headline jolts them into making spoofs that provoke thoughts and reactions from other wokers, so kudos to them.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Lan Wangji might be an unstoppable force, but Xie Lian has 800+ years of practice of being an immovable object.

(poll results here for context)

[unacknowledgeable]

Imma slide in a free sample but like Serial Killer Reader won't mind a little Isha like gotham kid running around them no? 😉

The kid witness them like unalive a badguy or someone but they're like

THAT'S SO COOL

I just thought about this after I saw that kid in one of Jason's comic and he calls himself BlueHood I'm like look at the lil guy!

We just need a lil kid looking up to our clearly misunderstood and neglected reader to know we don't need the fam for love, We got this lil guy for emotional support!

also LOVE YOUR STUFF!

Hey, how'd you get access to my drafts??

Okay admittedly I've had this ask for a while and was too scared to answer until I had solidified how and when I wanted this character to show up, XD so now I know and I genuinely love this kid, they really hit the reader over the head with morals. 

This kid also helps y/n realize that hey, your mom was pretty fucked up because you would never treat your kid the way she treated you, so thats a crisis you get to deal with now. Yayyy

At first, you’d try to pawn the kid off on Gordon, he’s way better with kids, okay? You sure as hell aren't letting Bruce anywhere near the kid, so that's not an option. But after some back and forth, including a reasonable disdain for cops from the kid, you have reluctantly accepted your new role as guardian. This of course turns into unleashing your full blown older sibling energy that you've been keeping locked up tight sense Jason died.

anyway hopefully I can throw out how exactly you two met soon, we'll see

[tradingjack]

There's no turning back.

... Is there anyone who'll be able to survive what lies ahead?

[burningcheese-merchant]

I think

Didn't Jack's reasoning develop Daddy Issus in him ??

You mean his extreme perfectionism? It contributes to it, yeah. Kind of a chicken and egg scenario tbh, hard to say which came first. Did Jack's fear of disappointing his father predate his perfectionism, and ultimately lay the foundation of its existence? Or was he born believing he always needs to be more than he is, and that impostor syndrome ended up creeping into his thoughts and feelings regarding his father? Who can say? He's not doing himself any favors regardless. In this situation, Jack is his own worst enemy. His feelings of inadequacy are like a perpetual motion machine. Always devising and "fulfilling" its own prophecies

If they would just sit down and talk to each other man-to-man, it would make a big difference. But Burning Spice hasn't been any good at talking to people in a long time (no matter how much better he's gotten as a person, there are just some things you lose that you'll never get back. Not after living a life like that), and Jack, well-intentioned little martyr that he is, never likes to talk about his problems. He buries them deep and focuses on doing right by others instead, all the time and forever. It's not healthy. It would hit a lot closer to home if his father sat him down, looked him in the face and told him he doesn't always need to put himself last, and he doesn't need to be afraid of not being good enough, because he is. He always has been.

[sentientunconsciousness]

I hope the US government chokes and dies on the oligarchy dick is has shoved in its throat

[watermelonsloth]

Hiruzen and Danzo are more complicated than people give them credit for

It says it all in the title.

Hiruzen and Danzo are among the most hated characters in all of Naruto, and I’m not entirely removed from that crowd of haters. They’re probably among the easiest characters you can argue are just bad people. Or, at minimum, people who did horrendous, unjustifiable things (or allowed them to happen in Hiruzen’s case). However, I think that because people hate them so much, no one wants to take a closer look at their characters and the more complicated/human reasons why they make the choices they do.

Hiruzen is spineless and that’s a hill I’ll die on, but he’s spineless in one of these most sympathetic and realistic ways I’ve seen depicted in media. Specifically, he’s the walking talking representation of the fallibility of compassion. Hiruzen cares about so many people so deeply that he would rather stand by and let people get hurt than to hurt them himself. He ignores the fact Danzo keeps trying to kill him because he knows he’ll likely have to execute him as retribution and he doesn’t want to kill his best friend, he turns a blind eye to Orochimaru’s dark side because he doesn’t want to fight/kill his student, Tsunade isn’t labeled a rogue ninja because he doesn’t want to put a bounty on his student/mentor’s granddaughter’s head, he let the Hizashi situation and Uchiha Massacre happen because he didn’t want to risk subjecting his people to the horrors of war that he experienced, and he died because he couldn’t bring himself to go all out against his mentors (even if they were reanimated and emotionless versions) or student.

I’m not defending Hiruzen’s actions or lack thereof. Obviously, this is a deeply flawed way to go about life, especially as a leader of a country where you have to regularly make difficult trolly-problem decisions. But Hiruzen is meant to be a deeply flawed individual. He’s like the family of an abuser that refuses to properly step in to stop the abuse because they love the abuser and don’t want to face the idea that the abuser is a bad person. I’m not saying Hiruzen is a good person or in the right, I’m just saying he’s realistic.

If Hiruzen is “the few over the many”, then Danzo is “the many over the few” with a sprinkle of “the ends always justify the means”. Danzo is, at his core, someone who is always trying to do what’s best for the village. He turned Hanzo against the Akatsuki to keep the group from gaining too much power and becoming another threat to Konoha (keeping in mind that Amegakure is adjacent to the Land of Fire), he pushed for the Uchiha Massacre to keep a civil war from breaking out, he killed the messenger toad to keep Naruto away from Konoha and the nine tails out of Pain’s grasp. He created ROOT to make sure that Konoha had a back up fighting force that was highly trained, wouldn’t turn against the village, and were willing to do what even ninja wouldn’t. Even Danzo’s choice to essentially turn on the village by trying to kill Hiruzen was motivated by him trying to do what he thought was best for the village. After all, he knew better than anyone how bad of a Hokage Hiruzen was.

A lot of people oversimplify Danzo into “the selfish, corrupt asshole”—and while I can agree that he’s selfish and corrupt, he’s selfish and corrupt in very specific ways. The corruption is the most obvious and easiest to explain. Danzo is willing to do anything he thinks will benefit the village; that includes working with bad people and using backhanded tactics. As for his selfishness, it stems from one specific thing: Tobirama telling Hiruzen to become Hokage over him.

For a while I was confused why Danzo got a flashback flashbacked to this scene before he died. Now, I think I’ve settled on it being because the scene was at the core of Danzo’s character and greatest character flaws because it was also his greatest regret. It’s pretty clear that Danzo wants to become Hokage and it’s implied that he’s had this dream for a long while. However, Tobirama—his mentor, the former Hokage, and one of the people to define what it meant to be Hokage—chose Hiruzen over him. Because Hiruzen was willing to sacrifice himself for his comrades while Danzo, who knew he should’ve done the same, was too cowardly to offer himself up.

Then he never really grows out of that cowardice. Instead, he looks down on Hiruzen to cope with his own sense of inferiority, gives himself body modifications to become a stronger ninja more capable of defending the village, and obtains as much political power as he can. He remains a coward who prefers letting other people take the fall over fighting his own battles (setting up Hanzo to fight the Akatsuki, asking Orochimaru to kill Hiruzen, ordering Itachi to kill the Uchiha clan, etc.) right up until he uselessly “sacrifices” himself right before he was going to die anyways.

Most of Danzo’s selfish actions come down to him not being able to accept his failure at becoming Hokage while also refusing to learn from his mentor’s final lesson.

I honestly think that Naruto has some of the best representation of bad people simply because it consistently acknowledges two things about bad people: 1. People who do bad things usually do them because they grew up being taught that doing bad things were okay or necessary to survive (being abused, societal normalization, never being punished, early exposure to things like domestic violence, etc.) and 2. Even if they don’t necessarily think they’re good people, the large majority of people don’t think they’re bad or evil. Both Hiruzen and Danzo were raised by a generation haunted by war only to be thrust into two world wars themselves (one at a young age and one when they were older). This left them both traumatized and willing to do anything to avoid experiencing it again. And even if they acknowledge that they’ve made mistakes, they still don’t (seem to) see themselves as bad people, only people who are committing the lesser of two evils.

[fkitwebhaal]

The first time Gortash meets the Chosen one of Bhaal, he asks for their name.

No one calls them by their name in their temple, instead sticking to “Chosen” or “Herald.” The Chosen of Bhaal looks at him like he said something funny and responds.

“Pick one.”

So Gortash does. And thus begins a pattern.

Are they going on a stealth mission and need an alter ego? Gortash pick a name.

What should Gortash’s guards call them when they visit through the front entrance? “Pick a name , Enver, it’s not like I go through the front door anyway.”

What name should he give to a comrade who could use an assassin on hire? “Think of something clever, you always do.”

It’s not that the Chosen of Bhaal doesn’t have a name, he learns. They did once. But then their father called them to his service and “a surgeon doesn’t name their knife” and well, a steady name seemed kind of pointless. Titles worked just fine and well, an assassin benefits from having quite a few alter egos. Until Gortash, they really didn’t talk to anyone enough outside the Temple for a name to even be needed.

It’s a fucked up dynamic, really. Gortash can have the illusion of control over this Bhalspawn with the names , but its control that’s given freely. They are something he wants to control but never truly can. He is something they should destroy but don’t desire to.

Much later, the Former Chosen of Bhaal walks into Gortash’s coronation. He grins, and asks them “what name should I call you this time friend?”

When they respond with an actual name, he almost can’t hide his surprise.

[auuwmk]

happy yuri day

Punisher ver under the cut!!