#what a sad but common story :'(

[carpp]

gonna say something about arcane that might piss people off but i think it needs to be said:

the reason so many people ignore vi's issues and trauma is because the show itself does so

[cielkie]

idk how this would work in the OIAR bc i just feel like they wouldn’t let anyone from outside look at their files, but i think it would be really funny to have like. a college age researcher show up to the og magnus institute or the OIAR who’s like studying the paranormal or folklore or some shit (cue guy with an actual degree in parapsychology which makes martin shit himself when he tries to start conversation HELPP) who’s just like oh hi guys this is my honors project! :) can i look at some spooky stories? 🤗 and the OIAR/MI staff are like NO. DO NOT LOOK INTO THIS ANY FURTHER RUN FOR YOUR LIFE. but i feel like elias would 100% require that they help this person out, bc he’s evil and he’d want a fear to eat them, and like… it’s just funny to imagine like. the staff trying to keep the true nature of the institute/OIAR away from this totally clueless 22/25 year old and feeding them the silliest statements possible that don’t connect at all to throw them off track so this poor kid is confused and hopefully gives up. but also kinda bittersweet imagining them all coming together to protect a stranger from falling into a world they can no longer escape… the old “it’s too late for me but it’s not too late for you” makes my heart hurt

[why-bless-your-heart]

Okay, but no. I’m sorry. My mom tried so hard to find me a different fantasy book series to redirect my somewhat worrying Redwall obsession, and she couldn’t. It’s not that the Redwall books are inimitable, they’re actually very imitable. But it is that Brian Jacques wasn’t setting out to write fantasy, he was setting out to write a story that kids would enjoy and that he would enjoy telling to them. I wasn’t reading 350-page novels in one sitting because I loved fantasy, I was reading them because I loved Redwall. Obviously I can’t speak for every kid, but I didn’t branch out by being handed more books in the same genre, I branched out by being given books that were written with the same genuinity.

[96percentdone]

It is deeply frustrating to me that it is a relatively common opinion that Amame murdering Uru was a moral good because it was "justice", and she "stopped Uru." To be clear, they're right that he needed to be stopped. His plan was evil, whether he has the sanity to parse that or not (and he demonstrably does not), but I think that's entirely beyond the point of the claims about the morality of Amame's actions. Whether or not Uru was in the wrong (he was by every possible metric) is not a worthwhile question to ask when it comes to evaluating what justice is.

First, and I cannot emphasize this enough, Amame literally didn't stop him. She just objectively didn't! Yes, he died, but the present day half of the plot plays out fucking anyway because it turns out the genocidal maniac had contingency plans to carry out his scheme! His guys do it for him! He says in his own tapes he planned for this just in case! Is that stopping him? The Nirvana Initiative gets as far as the genocide missile launching before his plan is actually ended. I cannot stress this enough; ya boi straight up almost won at KILLING EVERYONE posthumously. Sorry, but the in universe team "Amame did nothing wrong" is like suffering terminal hindsight bias, which is hilarious, because all of them were literally there when Uru almost killed everyone on the earth from beyond the grave.

Moreover, because Amame (and Gen who is helping her) spend that entire period of time trying to keep the murder a secret, she ends up actively getting in the way of stopping his plan until on the day of the initiative she finally steps forward because she can't take the pressure and the guilt any longer. She keeps critical information about the exact problem they are dealing with--like the fact that the guy they're looking for is fucking dead--a secret on purpose! Whether or not the police would have gotten anywhere faster if he lived is irrelevant; her actions for what actually happened made things worse. And there's a good reason for this! It's the same reason she is utterly ravaged by guilt for her own actions, despite how hard she tries to convince herself and the world she has no regrets: murder is always wrong, and Amame wanted revenge.

Revenge murder really isn't this incredible healing force people can hype it up to be in their heads. Amame says she went because she wanted to hear what he had to say. She wanted closure. Now of course he's severely out of his mind and everything he said in that moment pissed her off, understandable, and she'd have to wait like 100 years for him to maybe parse he was wrong, so okay, but did the revenge work? "I'm going to make you suffer the same pain..." She waits for him to be conscious when she kills him, she is explicitly out to make him hurt, but like...was it actually effective? No, lmao. The funny thing is, that first line we see of that flashback where she kills him is Uru referencing his own torture: "Yes, this world is an imperfect one. I was put through much hardship." At this point, even if he didn't tell her the details, we the players know he was held prisoner in a cell for over two decades and had his organs harvested so frequently anesthetics stopped working on him. We are being deliberately reminded of this fact so that when Amame says her classic one-liner, we'll know it was for nothing.

Revenge isn't justice. You can convince yourself that it will be satisfying, it's what he deserves, it's what you deserve to do, but what's left when it's over? What did you really gain? Amame didn't gain anything. This didn't heal her at all. She still mourns her father the same, only now she has to deal with new, worse problems of her own making. She spends the last of her free days catatonic from fear and guilt, she hates that she betrayed Shouma and Gen and her actions will force her to leave them, because she lost sight of what matters most in the name of punishment. It will never matter that Uru was wrong. Amame killed Uru for the same reasons he killed her father, and Horadori, and Jin; how could she ever be right? The fallout of her actions on her own psyche and on the world at large is the greatest proof of that.

If your definition of justice is just "we destroyed the bad guy most responsible for the problem" your definition of justice is worthless. The world is not meaningfully made better by punishing wrongdoers, but by healing the social and political ills that lead to their creation and that ravage to the victims they left behind.

[spotsupstuff]

Salutations!

I have come from the depths to proclaim that Sparrows is an absolute Joy to see! As well as Sparrow's family as a whole. Brook has entirely stolen my heart, and has melted it into nothing but a puddle of "aww"s

greetings greetings! gjlksdmclksdmglk i'm glad to hear they are enjoyed!

oh heavens know i never expected for Sparrows n now slowly her fam too to be this liked. it's really sweet <3 never would've thought i'd become a fandom ancients blog either! Puzzling....

[chemicalarospec]

it makes me sad how many aspec posts (and videos and other individual-generated content) are just being upset about this depiction or that one. we NEED more (semi-mainstream) aspec rep so bad, so that nobody has to feel hurt when 1 kind of aspec that they are not is represented and the only 1 they see :(

[wellzofyouth]

That one post of my mine predictably aged like fine wine. Never let somebody on comic twitter in the writer's room😭😭😭 Like imagine a 1 to 1 adaptation of literally any event?? -1b at the box office. "Who are these people???"

[alchemiclee]

I hope someone writes a good fic about the high cloud quintet with all the messy pieces of lore we have because i'm very unsatisfied with what we got and I want MORE OF THEM. don't know why i'm so obsessed with this tragic group of friends but 😭 IM SO FEELINGS ABOUT THEM but also empty because they didn't satisfy me with what they gave us lmao I require more. but that was the end and i'll never get more....unless someone writes a great fic about them.....!

[lesbiangiratina]

I like testament’s speech patterns i need to learn more i need to understand them better theyre such an interesting critter.

[reachexceedinggrasp]

It's a problem for me how every frame of his face needs to be a painting. I paint way too slow for this kind of workload.

[stillfruit]

it's so difficult to articulate the feelings i get when i see my friends engaging in healthy and good behaviors like asking for emotional support and taking the time they need to arrive because i just can't and i know i'm wrong for it but it still feels incredibly isolating

[the-acid-pear]

Okay I'm home now and i can fully and freely type. Anyway mild spoilers for into the spiderverse i guess?

❌❌❌

Anyway uh. Yeah it... It was a tiny bit of a disappointment. It didn't do it for me at all. I feel like this movie is more of an art exhibit and i mean that as a fucking insult. Like sure the animation fucks my ears are ringing and my head aches horribly (that's on me for thinking i can be autistic and watch this on theaters) but like, the story man? It just so much (DEROGATORY).

It commits the sin a lot of spiderman movies make and that is that it bit more than it could chew. Not because they're bad at handling a complex story, but because they tried to juggle like 5 at once. And that never fucking works (my ear is still ringing and it hurts I'm in pain rn -_+ just wanted y'all to know)

Like it introduced SO FUCKING MUCH and it all was cool yeah! Just like electro was cool, and Harry, and Gwen, and captain Stacy. You know what in trying to fucking say? There's only so much you can do in 2 hours and you can just throw all you have all at once at the viewer because all you'll do is leave them disappointed wanting for more of that.

I feel like a baby. They show me this cool thing but nuh uh! Enough of that! Here's this new cool thing! But nuh uh! Enough of that- and so on. Like there were so many cool characters and ideas and concepts and shit but it could barely balance it all. YOU KNOW HOW BAD I WANTED TO SEE MORE OF THE SPOT?! HE BARELY WAS HERE!

It's like, you cannot fucking make a whole movie as the introduction to your next movie. That just sucks. You're setting yourself up for failure.

Like I'm just so upset bc it was full of amaizing things but it didn't fucking deliver in any of them!!!! And God don't get me started on the references. I think this was one of the worst ways to fill your movie with references. Like at least let me fucking process what I'm seeing if you are gonna waste so much time here, but also just... Don't make it so fucking blatant.

Like man i... This was a very experimental spiderman movie which i appreciate in a way but... It's not what I was expecting. To me, personally, it was disappointing. And also not designed at ALL to watch on cinemas. I think that last bit is just a fact.

I'm just kinda sad man. Like i loved Miles and Gwen's drama and i loved Miguel but I also wanted to see more of, you know, THE WHOLE FUCKING NEW CAST AND THE NEW FUCKING VILLAIN THEY INTRODUCED BUT SHOWED ONLY FOR LIKE 2-3 SEGMENTS MAX???????

LIKE HANDS ON HEAD EMOJI WHAT WERE THEY DOINGGGGG 😭😭😭😭

[artemismatchalatte]

Books read in February 2023.

I finished 6 books in February.

I forgot to add my copy of Tales in the City but I finished that this month too. I finished it the first week of this month and totally forgot. This February felt really long for some reason.

Quicksand by Nella Larsen was an audiobook I listened to.

Wow, most of the books I read this month were either very depressing or otherwise disappointing. Kitchen was the best fiction book I read. While both Hall's and Barker's biographies were well written, engaging and sometimes shocking, they were both pretty sad. After reading about their lives, I feel pretty bad for both of them.

I'm still reading One Last Stop, Old Man and The Sea and The Common Reader.

I DNFed two books (my textbook for a class I dropped and The audiobook version of The Art of Loving because it seemed extremely dated and didn't apply to me at all).

Hope everyone has a good March and that they find books that they enjoy reading!

[proustianrevelry]

Old Yeller is just St. Guinefort for Protestants send tweet

“The most unusual martyr of the Middle Ages was a dog. This was St. Guinefort, a greyhound that had been wrongly killed by its owner on suspicion of taking the life of a baby, when in fact it had bravely protected the child. The site where the dog was buried, at a castle north of Lyons, quickly became a shrine: “the country people, seeing the dog’s noble deed and how it was killed although innocent, visited the place and honoured the dog as a martyr, invoking its help in illness and need.” The outraged Dominican Stephen de Bourbon eventually had the dog’s bones dug up and burned. The essence of martyrdom, a brave and innocent death, here transcended the line between species, at least in the eyes of the local people.”

— Bartlett, Robert. “Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things?.” Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things?. Princeton University Press, 2013.

[mariocki]

New Scotland Yard: Evidence of Character (2.4, LWT, 1972)

"Who was with you?"

"No one."

"The girl?"

"No."

"Or was she waiting for you outside?"

"No, I tell you I never saw her except to glance at, once, in the bar."

"Where did you go when you left the pub?"

"I drove straight home."

"Arriving when?"

"I don't know, about eleven."

"Anybody there when you got in?"

"My mother."

"How was she dressed?"

"My mother?"

"The girl."

[rivilu]

Wait. Logistically speaking. Would Elluin even know how to read.