#when people tell you who they are

[unmotivational-motivation]

okay. People seem to be forgetting how to human. One does not represent all. It would be like getting beaten half to death by someone called Jade and suddenly every Jade is now that Jade that hurt you. Intersectionality is a lens: you’re supposed to take it off at some point, not use it as a cudgel disguised as a trump card. humans are horrible at calculating odds properly, especially when it comes to other humans. Everyone, including the people you view as safe, has the capacity to hurt you. The flip side of that is they most likely won’t. About 95% of people you meet aren’t going to hurt you. Hell most won’t remember you in a week. Stranger danger is a lot less prevalent than you’d think (especially since most harm is done by people known to you), what you need to pay attention to are the peoples words and actions. If someone consistently says that a certain class of people are subhuman, given the lack of repercussions they will act on that belief.

or, when people tell you who they are, listen

you kill most most evil by not letting it take root. you refuse to let it take root by treating people like humans, not things. you recognise most people aren't mostly good or evil, mostly they're humans as controllable as the rest of the universe.

most people are human, and most people won't hurt you. don't tell other people to shut up, make the discussion longer. discourse is so focused on being right that it's more important to people than other people please, reach for your neighbour not the heavens

So here is my problem with the "by virtue of being a man, you have to make your peace with the fact that some people will be uncomfortable with you, and thus you have to make yourself a safe person"

I've heard the same thing about being black. A lot of people have taken my very presence as hostility. I have had people escalate situations just because I am present as a black person in front of them. Before, and after transition.

You know what the problem with bending over backwards to make other people comfortable with your presence even though you haven't actually done anything to them besides breathe the same air?

It's never enough. You can be One Of The Good Ones for ages and at some point you will fail your Good One inspection and people will turn on you at the drop of a hat. People who you thought you had a good rapport with. People you thought were your friends.

I have *experienced* this, both online and in person.

The onus is on everyone to be safe people to be around. Singling someone out and blaming them for daring to share a demographic with someone else who has caused harm isn't cute when people do it to me because I'm black, and it's also not cute when they do it because I'm a man.

People are uncomfortable about my blackness all the time. I didn't magically stop experiencing racism when I started taking testosterone. So it's absolutely wild to me that people think "well, you know, with what you look like, some people won't want you around" is going to fly when I was explicitly taught *not* to tolerate that shit by every single one of my black relatives.

Someone doesn't like that I'm occupying a space? Well I'm not hurting them, so that's a them problem and not a me problem. That's how I've learned how to exist as black in white-majority spaces. Why do you think you can change the demographic and get me to agree with you?

[inkskinned]

the tradwife movement is the same as it has always been - back in the kitchen, back to breeding - it just has better branding.

when i was younger, i hated pink. i was not like other girls. this is now something i'm embarrassed of - this was not me being a "girl's girl."

but it was expressing something many of us felt at the time: i literally wasn't what girlhood was supposed to be. this is a hard thing to explain, but you know when you're not performing girlhood correctly. it isn't as easy as "i liked x when girls liked y" - because there were other girls that liked x, too - but i never figured out exactly the correct way to like x, or to be interested in y.

now there is the divine feminine. this is the same rhetoric it has always been: women are biologically driven to like pink and ribbons and submitting to our husbands.

the problem is that the patriarchy found a better PR team. because yes, actually, i want every woman to have the choice to be a homemaker. i also want her taken seriously for her legitimate home-making labor. i want her to be recognized as also having a job, just unpaid. i want men to have this opportunity, too.

but it is no longer "i made this choice and I love it." instead it is a sixteen-paragraph rant about how selfish it is that my generation isn't having kids. instead it's long videos about how if you feed your children processed foods, you're going to kill them. instead it is "this is what womanhood is supposed to be. i feel bad for any other choices you're making."

the shame spiral is just prettier. it is large houses devoid of personality. it is the implication: if you don't have this, you aren't happy. the solid, everlasting assurance: women are actually supposed to be submitting. this is the default. this is the natural state of things. all other attempts inflict suffering.

but you can no longer say i'm not like other girls. you can no longer reject this image completely. you cannot find it revolting, even if you know that the underbelly is toxic and festering. sure, it is the same repackaged patriarchy. but the internet does not have shades of grey. you should support and reward other women! your disgust is actually internalized misogyny. not because you are seeing a vision of yourself the way they're trying to train you to be. not because you feel her ghost pass within an inch of your earlobe. not because your father will eventually ask you - why can't you be like her?

because they figured out how to make it beautiful: women will sell other women on this idea, and we will find the singular loophole in feminism. sure, she's shaming you in most of her videos. sure, she implies that a different life is obscene. but she just wants you to be happy! you'd be happier if you were listening!

and the whole time you're sitting there thinking: i'd actually just be happier if i had that kind of money.

[cronchy-baguette]

When all this is over, will you stay with me? For good?

[former-leftist-jew]

When people tell you who they are, believe them.

[cassiebones]

It's like Lucifer in Lucifer telling everybody with a pulse that he's The Devil and Chloe was still shocked to find out that he wasn't lying.

I mean to be fair to Rio, she actually wasn't hiding her identity to the coven. She came out of a literal grave. Jen, Alice and Lilia asked her if she was a green witch and she said she was THE Green Witch. All of them heard the "you kill them and I get my bodies" convo between her and Agatha. The spirit in episode 5 says they're Death and Rio starts laughing. They never stopped to consider 'THE Green Witch' part at first because they were busy beung gay for her at the moment and then just thought she was a freak. But she wasn't trying to hide who she was, honestly if one of them had asked her she would have probably just said "oh yeah, I'm Death" lmao

[spitedemon]

i really don’t think it’s “typical dragon age fandom nonsense” for people to be genuinely upset about the world state choices. combat, level design, art direction, gameplay gimmicks, those have all varied across each dragon age game. the one thing that’s remained constant are nods to our previous choices.

i wasn’t expecting my HoF to come riding in on a griffon, but i can’t find a monument dedicated to warden tabris somewhere around the anderfels? lucanis couldn’t have some lines about the time that one arainai boy was stirring up trouble in antiva city? you’re gonna tell me that making a mage the new divine wouldn’t have some impact on nevarra and antiva? on the anderfels, the supposed most devout militant andrastian nation in thedas? you’re saying nobody in the north is paying attention to who rules orlais or ferelden? come on.

[a-scary-lack-of-common-sense]

Part 2/2

By the time Stanley had realized he wasn't as alone as he believed himself to be entrapped in this ravenous abyss; he had honestly begun to suspect that he was finally starting to properly lose his mind.

In all the ceaseless miles that Stanley had journeyed during his apparent permanent residence within the dark devouring void, not once had he encountered another conscious, walking, talking being similar to himself. Every other formerly living creature that he had crossed paths with had been so... silent. Empty. Dead, in every sense of the word. It was as though the very essence of life itself had been sucked out of their bodies with a straw, their forms slowly falling apart piece by piece under the vicious gluttony of the darkness that surrounded them. They looked like they actually were supposed to be there, unmoving and comatose, unlike him.

So, when Stanley first began to encounter the twins, all of a sudden, he wasn't the only one in the dark.

When meeting the first pair of them, he found himself standing in a lake.

He hadn't even noticed the changes at first. It felt as though he had been walking for weeks on end, his body moving purely on autopilot and his aching legs leading him towards a destination only it knew. A thick fog of forgetfulness and flickering memories had descended upon his brain like a heavy blanket of numbing static as he had traveled. In this absentminded state, he hadn't even realized that the ever-present undulating, buzzing darkness surrounding him had begun to gradually shift and morph to form a horizon line; stretching into tall looming cliffsides that almost seemed to close in on him. Once the nonexistent floor beneath his soles abruptly began to ripple and warp, like the disturbed surface of a shallow puddle; only then did he finally notice his transformed environment.

The transition was seamless, almost dream-like. One moment, he was still surrounded by that filthy, overwhelming abyss; and the next, his boots were suddenly plunged deep into the cold, dark lake water.

The silence didn't leave, however. It still choked and stuffed its way into Stanley's ears to clog up his mind with thick cotton; the eerie quiet not quite matching the calm, almost serene scenery the void seemed to have abruptly transformed itself into. Like a movie with its sound cut off; leaving only the unsettling hum of the projector to fill the empty air.

It was odd. The lake was surely incredibly deep. He could obviously tell from how thin and pathetically small the shores appeared all the way from where he now unceremoniously stood in the middle of the lake. Stan could look down and see the darkness below his feet swallow what meager light that managed to break through the murky waters. The overwhelming black almost seemed to beckon him, gaping and haunting; a bottomless underwater pit of pitch black that never seemed to end.

And yet, he didn't sink. Stanley remained perfectly level, the almost ink like waters stopping just at ankle level, as though he were held up just above the surface by some invisible force. Even the writhing waves seemed small and low, as though the waters were shy to climb up his legs further than that. It was odd, so very odd.

However, it wasn't nowhere near as odd as the sight that greeted him when he finally lifted his eyes from the waters.

Stanley had crossed paths with truly unbelievable sights in this strange somewhere; from bursting, collapsing stars; to the imploding heat death of entire universes, but none of them seemed to hold the candle to what he saw then when he lifted his eyes:

Children.

Two, to be exact. Two, nearly identical looking children stood motionless before him; completely soaked through to the bone as though they had taken a plunge into the frigid water that pooled around their ankles. It was a girl and a boy, both adorned with twin expressions utterly devoid of emotion, their wide eyed stare seeming to burn holes into his thin jacket. Their drenched clothes sagged off of their scrawny frames; thin rivulets of water dirpping off of them and disturbing the glassy surface of the water at their feet. The little girl's hair had messily stuck to her face in thin sodden strands, her cheeks still full and round with youth just like the boy's. They looked young. Too young to be in a place such as this.

Oh, but their eyes; their eyes.

They burned with such anger; such injustice, brighter than any dying star or galaxies he had ever seen. Anger towards the world, to fate, to whatever cruel deity that had deemed them fit to be sent to this wretched place so prematurely. They were too young to be here; to be entrapped like he was amongst this hungry darkness. And yet, here they were, sheer denial against their own untimely deaths being the only thing keeping them awake and conscious amongst the dead and rotting. A show of juvenile defiance to nature itself so vehement even the all-consumign darkness seemed hesitant to devour them whole just yet.

It saddened him. It saddened him to know that they belonged there, that they were supposed to be there. He could see it, he could feel it; they were dead. No amount of determination could deny that universal fact.

When they spoke, Stanley could hear anger:

Stan chuckled in a futile attempt to lighten the suddenly heavy atmosphere that threatened to crush him whole. "A lake monster? You kids and your imagination," he teased, hoping to somehow rid the poor kids of the haunted look that seemed to whirl in their glares. No child should have been burdened with such a knowing look; such eyes that looked like they had seen everything there was to see about the world, the horrid and the good.

Clearly, it had been the wrong thing to say, and Stanley's faux pas was rewarded with a scowl from the little boy. A world's worth of sour contempt etched into every contorted groove that his grimace seemed to dig into his much too young face. Stan suddenly felt guilt squeeze at his weary bones for having caused that.

"That's what they all said," the boy spat out, eyes shining with a sheen of wetness Stan wasn't sure he was prepared to deal with.

Stan left that first interaction with the twins with the feeling of guilt and sorrow still clining to him.

He couldn't have known, at the time. He couldn't have known that this wouldn't be anywhere near the last time that he would meet the pair. He hadn't realised just how many of them there were. After that first pair, his endless journeying within the Abyss was hardly be spent alone anymore. Countless more times, he came face to face with the exact same two young and impossibly worn faces; forced to meet one pair of beaten and bruised kids after another.

Not one pair had died the same death as another. Some had gotten lost, prey to whatever threat that had snatched them up out in the open; some had fallen from high up; some had been crushed under an incredible weight; some had burned; some eaten alive; some zombified. Some didn't even seem physically harmed at all, body perfectly intact, and yet that same faraway, distrubed look in their eyes remained.

He thought the worst ones were the ones he found alone. A little girl or a little boy, left all lonesome without their other half there. Twins, he remembered a pair of them telling him once.

Once, he had come across a town full of silent, stone statues. It was a rustic, shabby, almost nostalgic looking town- odd and strangely familiar. The sight of it had tugged at an aged memory that had long since wasted away in the back of his mind. It was serene, almost deceptively so. The sun shone; the air smelled crisp and fresh; numerous waterfalls continued to crash down from the tall cliffsides; and a soft nonexistent breeze whistled through the thicket of pine trees that blanketed the outskirts of the town. None of it seemed to match the gruesome scene of the hundred wailing statues that littered every inch of the town.

He had found the boy's statue on the other side of town, deep within the green forest and toppled over the gnarled roots of a towering tree. Like the rest of the townsfolk, he too, was frozen mid-shriek; his stone face twisted and contorted into a mock impression of a silent scream as his body lay paused in a writhing struggle. He made sure to be gentle when he carried the boy's statue over to place it beside the girl's, whose statue stood far deeper into the forest, sporting the same rictus grimace of terror as her brother's. It somehow felt wrong for them to have been so far apart from one another, even in death.

He had come to dread meeting of the twins. He hated every second he had to confront yet another pair of dead children that did not belong here, but fate had decided they did. He despised having to listen to their tales of woe as they wept about the injustice of the world, of having died young; he despised himself for being unable to do more than weep with them.

"We don't belong here, Grunkle Stan," he would listen to the little girl weep, calling him a title he didn't recognize. He never remembered if they had ever told him their name, but they all seem to know his, without a fail. "If we're dead, then what about you? What about Grunkle Ford? Mom? Dad? What about them? We can't be dead, we can't be," they would say, confusion and frustration written all over their faces. They didn't understand. They didn't understand why they had come to the darkness so early, so unfairly.

He never knew what to say, he'd never been good with words.

All he could do was kneel down to their levels and engulf them in his arms, hoping he could somehow squeeze the pain straight out of their bodies in his embrace. He hugged them, because what else could he do?

[bookalicent]

yeah so this was insane

[hawkinsbnbg]

"Is it true that you and Harrington are friends now?"

Steve paused outside the drama class' door and lowered the hand that was about to push it open. He didn't expect to eavesdrop when he came back to retrieve his jacket, but he decided to make an exception because those people were clearly talking about him behind his back even when it was in the form of drilling Eddie about their sudden friendship.

And Eddie's friends were right to be suspicious about it. Because had it not been for the Upside Down, the two of them wouldn't have become close at all. Or maybe, they would eventually with their shared custody of the kids. But he was well aware that Eddie was too cool to be seen with a failure like Steve Harrington.

Without the shared traumas, they had nothing in common. And sometimes, he thought Eddie only saw him as an inconvenient cousin that he hated but had to tolerate for the sake of their family.

It hurt to think like that, but every time Eddie blushed and stammered in embarrassment when someone asked about him, Steve couldn't help but believe it was true.

So now, he wanted to know what Eddie's answer would be without him there. If Eddie had been genuine about being his friend this whole time or if Eddie would scoff and prove his worst fear right.

"Yeah, Eddie, what's the deal with Harrington? Has he been bothering you or something?"

Steve grimaced. Had he been such a douche in high school that everyone would always assume the worst of him even now?

"Nah, he's really sweet once you get to know him," Eddie chuckled, sounding fond and warm. "He's a good guy. And the world's best mom, apparently. Like I already knew our sheepies worship the ground he walks on, but I only understood why it's clearly a given when I finally met him. He's just... incredible, man."

Steve's cheeks burned at the transparent affection in Eddie's voice. He could see the way Eddie pulled a strand of hair to hide his blush behind it. God, he was a bad friend for doubting Eddie in the first place.

"Gross, you sound lovesick, dude."

"That's homophobic, man."

"You know what I mean. So it's true that you're friends with Harrington."

There was a pause and Steve felt his stomach roll with nerve. Despite having known where Eddie's loyalty lied, he still waited with bated breath.

"We're boyfriends, actually," Eddie said calmly.

As the others erupted in surprised noises, Steve blinked owlishly and walked away, forgetting about his jacket. He had so many questions right now, but first:

When did he and Eddie start dating?

[iwoulddieforienzo]

Personally I think percabeth is at its best when Grover is in it. I don’t necessarily mean in a polycule way I just think it’s great when he’s around

[rystiel]

am i right or what

[proselles]

clinging to the sex warning for arcane like an angst with a happy ending tag on ao3

[knifearo]

this year my challenge for everyone is to unlearn the association between love and morality. love is not something that is inherently morally good, and the absence of love is not something that is inherently bad. sex without love isn't morally bankrupt, it's just an action. people without love aren't less kind or less good, they're just people. when we can get past this false (and often unnoticed) dichotomy of good love/evil lovelessness then i think we are going to be able to take leaps and bounds in sex positivity, aro advocacy, certain discussions of mental health...

[teaboot]

tranny freak :)

[secretsimpleness]

Sometimes I want to bring Morrigan but then I remember I play as a face-tanking rogue and I bring Wynne. Warden Cousland, Morrigan, Wynne / Dragon Age Origins (c) Bioware

[kevindavidday]

okay but jean having a breakdown post tsc 2 interview and all three of his love interests rushing to him to console him in various ways and it overwhelms him so much he ends up leaving them behind to sit next to neil instead