#we are being manipulated and i dont like it

[aroaceleovaldez]

the dynamic of demigods thinking which other demigod is the most powerful is always amusing to me because. like, we know the big 3 kids are all the most powerful. That's just a fact of their universe. And then we know nearly every character views Percy as the strongest demigod, and most people are very rightfully intimidated by him.

and you look at the powers of the Big 3 kids and there's Percy, but then you realize Nico is just kind of objectively more powerful than him but simply chooses to hang out in Percy's shadow like he's Percy's scary dog privileges. Like, the two of them are pretty equally capable of causing multiple different apocalypses. Nico just also has like four different instakill powers and it's not like he doesn't use them. He very much uses them! Not infrequently, even! And they don't seem to take a significant amount of energy from him! And other demigods are pretty intimidated by both of them! But Nico makes a conscious point to keep his cards close to his chest and not let on exactly how dangerous and scary he can be if he wants to. People are already scared enough of him without knowing anything about him and he doesn't like that. Percy doesn't think about that nearly as much, and so usually just goes in guns blazing and that's part of why he's considered a wildcard. And then Nico himself puts Percy on a pedestal, so those who do know more about Nico's abilities then presume Nico knows something they don't about Percy that implies Percy is even stronger than him.

And even on a meta level Nico's narrative role requires him to be functionally more powerful than Percy, because he very often serves the purpose of getting Percy out of situations he can't handle on his own. That's just part of his function as a character! But also narratively he can't overshadow Percy so he just takes a backseat of his own accord and that's very amusing to me.

[thethespacecoyote]

contemplating what exactly it was about ford that made bill feel important now

[iammissingautumn]

i hate you the need to explain how actually louis was the most toxic one in this relationships. i hate you the need to explain how actually lestat was the most toxic one in this relationship. i hate you the need to explain how actually armand was the most toxic one in this relationship. I hate you iwtv fans using the word “abused” or “X deserves better” like a weapon to destroy another characters integrity. yes they do suck in whatever way you are highlighting but also so many are getting too close to just making up shit takes bc they want to see it that way. Like just wait for marius if you need someone to hate with yr whole being

[ominous-horse-noises]

main takeaway from certain fan reactions to the finale is this:

the final scene with ankarna was so meaningful to the bad kids' arcs and how they made peace with being wronged by people they loved, and if all you can focus on is that the rat grinders didn't get much screentime, then you don't love dimension20 and you don't love this world: you want to be playing your own hs themed dnd campaign and you're mad the oc versions of the rat grinders you made up in your head acted ooc. these are not your characters and this is not their story.

[freakinator]

thinking about kab and the thing about her i think is she knows just enough to keep herself safe Generally but not enough to really predict what would happen should something more... complicated??? unforeseen??? idk whats the right word to use but something not covered by someones reputation and/or vids happen, believe it or not this also affects her view of clownpierce (we'll get to that)

for example, mapicc has a reputation for being an violent, angry, & impulsive guy and nothing else which makes sense but is incredibly surface level and something that only really works if you dont have a lot of experience working with him

another is reddoons, his betrayal after the base incident while shocking is not unforeseen but his reputation as being a guy whos seen as being a reasonable person whos fairly loyal to his team made it seem like something he wouldnt do even tho it absolutely is

regarding how it affects her view of clown, since he isnt perfectly aligned with his reputation she instead pivots in the complete opposite direction and forgiving basically every crime he does even tho hes something much more mild and complicated than either his reputation or her view of him will ever be (think madonna-whore complex which is especially obvious when it comes to kabs vs woogies view of him)

another side effect of this Just Enough amount of knowledge aside from being blinded by her own expectations is that it frustrates ppl who think shes oversimplificating things (like me and seemingly several other tumblr users as well) especially when she claims that shes objectively correct and the smartest in the room at any given moment

how this roughness in her analysis affects her in the server still has yet to be fully seen but we do still have at least a couple months until the end but 'til then shes just gonna keep stumbling as more and more complicated situations pop up as is typical in lifesteal to happen and eventually shes gonna have to learn to adapt or else she'll be suffering the consequences one way or another

[potatobugz]

buddy is surrounded by horrible horrible adults like at all times and it is deeply stressing to me. not to baby him, i do think he is easily mislead but he is not stupid. but also like. can he be given a moment to breathe actually. can he not be manipulated for one second. please put him in a normal social situation with regular teenagers his age please im begging you

[coolnonsenseworld]

Omg your instagram story is so right! I can’t believe I’ve never even noticed that, probably because in fanon keith and shiro are so close that I’d forgotten that isn’t canon :0

Deserves this awesome quote which I had to dig out of my sideblog reblogs

[licensedproldier]

brennan will really be like "is anyone gonna write six of the most tragic and fucked up teenagers in the whole world and their narrative foils having violent murderous beef with each other in a devastatingly teenage way and then tell their story through a series of unreliable narrators or" and then not wait for an answer.

[gibbearish]

every time i see discourse about fundraisers go by on here im just fully struck with the realization that not a single one of you people have either taken a cybersecurity fraud prevention course or bothered to take one singular second to consider the website youre on. this is the broke bitches website. none of us can afford to fund our mutuals' grocery bills, much less entire evacuation funds, and CERTAINLY not FAKE evacuation funds taking advantage of genocide victims. all this shit abt how people are deliberately choosing not to fund every post that passes their dash because they hate palestinians literally just does the work of actual scammers for them by laying the high-pressure sales tactics groundwork, and the "do you guys have any idea how hard it is to keep coming up with new attention-grabbing fundraiser posts?" ones just ring EXTREMELY hollow because YEAH! YEAH I DO! and so does everyone i follow! and everyone they follow! because all of us are FUCKING BROKE and surviving on crumbs! i just saw one that said "i make sure to keep $40 in my wallet at all times so i can give $20 to any panhandlers i see, this is the same" and its like!! good for you, thats very nice, but like!!! you need need NEED to take a step back and realize that /being able to do that/ is a position of privilege, not the default setting to be a good person. i wont discount that some people do ignore fundraisers specifically because of racism because Of Course, but like. a) yelling at them isnt gonna make them stop, or more accurately yelling at /everyone else/ isnt gonna make those people stop, and b) trying to apply that as a blanket motivation for everyone just. realistically doesnt work. not donating is a nonaction, it is the literal default status, and while in specific situations you can use CONSISTENT absence of SPECIFIC actions to track a person's motivations SOMETIMES, broadly speaking that just. doesnt work.

there are 8 billion people on this planet. most of them will never know you exist. of the ones that do, most will not be able to help you. of the ones that can, most will not be on the broke bitches website passing the same communal $20 around. consider your audience and stop shitting on fellow poor people for having the gall to need to be careful with their money. and if you are genuinely only posting your fundraiser to tumblr, like. im sorry, but you need to anticipate not reaching your goal and prepare accordingly. theres a reason the last big scam scandal people talk about actually getting the money is like. all-or-nothing era, as a website none of us have the funds to make that kind of thing happen anymore or the security to risk it. a fundraiser not meeting its goal on here is not a personal sleight against whoever made it, its just how life goes sometimes. and it's unfair and it sucks and we should help however we can, but. sometimes you just arent able to help someone else, and continuing to feel responsible serves only to torture yourself. and blaming OTHERS serves only to move that guilt from yourself off onto another person. i imagine that has to be where a lot of the vitriol comes from, is people who cant afford to donate more getting pissed at people they see as having the funds but choosing not to share them, but again, sometimes you just are not able to achieve the goals you set out towards, through no fault of the specific parties involved.

people on tumblr choosing to buy groceries rather than potentially donate to a scam are not your enemy and are not the ones facilitating a genocide. we're all victims of the same horrific system, the question is just how that system manifests its influence on each of us. poverty kills just as thoroughly as a bomb. everyone is just doing their best to survive, and as much as we like to pretend that everyone should be a perfect selfless angel that puts others before themselves no matter what, humans are by default a selfish species, and it is a lot easier to say what youd do in theory than actually do it. and there's a reason you have to put on your own oxygen mask before helping the person beside you, youre of no help to anyone if youre too dead to do anything.

[llitchilitchi]

I get hating certain political systems and trying to abolish totalitarian regimes but at the same time many of them are so interwoven with our history and society they have become tropes and when I consume media with a setting where the monarchy is absolute and revered then I am playing my part and sucking that princeling off

[scopophobia-polaris]

Oh and the best part about the whole au hyrule is about 3,000 years old is that it only dates back to the hypothetical creation date made 50 years before the first war for the triforce (the pre sksw one) so the planet is probably older then people are thinking and yet.....

Like truly no one, not even the Deku Tree knows the day or hour the world was created, what does it feel like just being born? No one is going to know how old the planet is it just popped up one day and a very short time later everyone got malice in their hearts and tried to grab the triangles all because Hylia let it slip that it's a fragment of the trio and is borderline all powerful.

[hauntingblue]

ARCANE EPISODE 7!!!!

MY GOD I WASNT READY FOR ANY OF THIS!!! WHAT WAS THAT!!!

Also ekko wallpaper I got with my fries lmao

[thedroloisms]

What’s really frustrating is seeing people say “Tommy should’ve known”/“How did Tommy NOT know about his behavior” and it’s just not something you say? Ever? It’s like asking Shelby how she didn’t see the warning signs. When you’re deep in it— when you’re THAT close to someone— you’re going to not see the red flags that someone on the outside might be able to see. Tommy’s an immature guy and he fucked over Dream, yes. However he’s probably reeling over the realization his “big brother” abused someone.

god, for sure. ive also seen people talk about how "if you saw him manipulating you and your friends why didn't you SAY ANYTHING!!!" and it's just ... i'm sorry uh. do you guys not. understand. like there's a power dynamic? there's a power dynamic here people. that's ,,, part of how manipulation in this manner works. like, i know people are saying this because they don't like the person in question, and while i'm not exactly their biggest fan either, being a shitty person doesn't prevent you from being a victim, and vice versa. like, just because you might not like this person or think that they're a shitty person bc of various reasons doesn't make victim blaming suddenly okay, you know.

[burning-sol]

me typing a post abt gaslighting and then deleting it because i think "surely no one wants to hear this" but also of course no one wants to hear it, nobody REALISES they need to hear it. here's a quick and informal PSA.

I'm telling you, if your perception of gaslighting is that of exaggerated arguments where one person is clearly wrong and where all context has been stripped away, that is not what it's like from my experience. We really need to talk about gaslighting as more than just a joke, because once I saw what was most likely a REAL case of gaslighting being downplayed by people who didn't realise they were using the EXACT language that's symptomatic of a real story and also that PERPETUATES the abuse.

The biggest thing people tend to leave out is context. Gaslighting happens between the victim and a person who they hold in regard, someone they've known for a while and love. By the time gaslighting starts to occur or is noticed, you're likely in a position where you're trying to take the other in good faith and characterise their behaviour as honest mistakes. Victims don't necessarily BELIEVE the lies are reality, in fact, it's more likely you tend to just shrug it off and drop it because you value the person above disagreements.

And next is the scaling. By the time you get to any disagreements where someone is outright saying that you're crazy or denying that abusive events happen, you are deep in the process of being gaslit. But how it starts out is that you'll have disagreements recalling smaller things whether it be what your favourite flavour of icecream is, whether they had already told you something you're sure you've heard before, slightly altering history in ways that aren't that far off but still feel wrong, explaining your feelings of uncertainty back to you in ways that COULD be plausible... When you try to explain these disagreements, it can feel humiliating or like the longer you talk about it the more wrong you start to feel and that you're sure that you're just being overly critical...

This ties back into what I said about the language that is symptomatic of real gaslighting stories. The story I read had people say the person wasn't being gaslit because, "it was just over video games?" "your friend sounds like they're just misremembering" "you seem kind of petty"... While yes, it is normal for disagreements and mistakes to happen, they shouldn't be happening to the extent that you're noticing a pattern. If it's a persistent issue in which you're starting to feel insecure and like an unreliable narrator, that is a BAD sign. It also shouldn't be entirely one sided - if you find you're the one consistently having to compromise their reality to satisfy the other, that is ALSO a bad sign.

And it's really important that, again, this is how it may just start. All these smaller things wear you down until you either start to believe the other or you're too demoralised to argue anymore, and the other may continue to escalate UNTIL the arguments become more stereotypical portrayals of gaslighting - and the person may even start to introduce other forms of abuse into the relationship. The period of "trivial" disagreements isolate the victim, especially when they go to their friends for support and their friends downplay the emotions they're feeling, resulting in the victim pulling away when they start to think their issues aren't worth bringing up.

You really just have to experience it for yourself to have tried to communicate you were being gaslit and had your issues shrugged off, to know how awful it feels when you finally get out of that abusive relationship and the people around you will say they, "didn't even know that was happening".

Like, I admit, I do find gaslighting jokes funny. They make me go heehee. But it is very very bad that we aren't actually teaching people what gaslighting realistically looks like, because you're usually only seeing the later stages of gaslighting and not all the smaller things that built up to that! You're not actually catching the signs when it's most critical to be getting out of the relationship.

But yeah. There's my rant.

[mla0]

i hate when people portray michael and/or patrick as some kind of master manipulator who was terrible to shaun and stormy. like, in the past, michael sometimes got portrayed with little autonomy, or as childish and overly innocent in a weird way. that in itself is an issue with the treatment of mentally ill characters (infantilization), but the solution isn't to argue that he's actually a monster who only wanted to hurt and mislead people. the same goes for patrick. i don't enjoy the "goofy flirty mass murderer" interpretation for very similar reasons, because in the canon patrick did indeed do some wild shit but i think it's a stretch to say it was out of malice, except maybe towards eric lol

obviously there will be different views of these characters and this isn't meant to be gatekeep-y or anything, i'm just concerned with how certain portrayals can quickly slide into negative biases towards mental illness. i think if you're going on this route you might want to ask yourself why, and consider how it could make the mentally ill people within the fandom feel when they see their own symptoms portrayed by their peers as synonymous with being dishonest or manipulative

[mxbitters]

on behalf of my gramma i think i should be allowed to tear people who make ai generated cross stitch and crochet patterns limb from limb thank you very much