#who can we blame this one on?

[wntw-virtuemoir-edition]

Since you are the wntw page, may I respectfully critique the color of the graduation dress? She’s so pale I felt like it blends in too much. I understand the professional and formal look, just wish this had been in a pretty spring color.

ty😚 and yes, terrible choice tbh!!!!!

it’s the same colour as her skin (!!!!) and a not flattering fit AT ALL.

ps: its maybe this dress

[crabsnpersimmons]

"Your heart was in the right place. Don't blame your earnestness and efforts for their lack of understanding—the right people will appreciate your heart."

EDIT: i mention this in the tags already, but please don't copy my vent tags in your reblogs. thanks for understanding.

[drenched-in-sunlight]

saying this as respectfully as possible but. Do not put fandom content creators on a pedestal. We are also just fans contributing to a community just as you are. We have boundary on our own work and that’s it. What I say is not and should not be considered sth the whole fandom should listen to. I’m just a normal ass person ranting about things on my blog. If it does not have a fandom tag for others to engage in, do not make it out to be me trying to start fights or addressing the whole community. Because it’s not.

I’ve said it before and I will say it again, my art, my lore talk, is biased. I’ve never tried to hide that I view Marika a certain way and will always develop my theory following that base assumption.

Aside from translation stuffs and pointing out in-game items, everything else I say you can look at it, agree or disagree, and move on to form your own opinions. Just because I draw stuffs doesn’t mean you get to saddle me with responsibilities about managing fandom expectations. What the hell? I’m a fan artist, I’m the last person who you should look at for “leaderism” (?) WHAT?

I can and will be a hater in my own space, like I know sometimes other artists will just post their stuffs and not engage too heavily with fandom, and for a while I did try to do that here (because I’m already a dramatic ass on twitter), that’s just not me though.

You will get art and you will get my opinions as well.

[turtleblogatlast]

That middle child feel when you’re the one who successfully gets you and your siblings out of trouble only to immediately get jumped by them afterwards

[mollysunder]

I have a problem with the idea of a Jinx redemption arc. It's not that I have any issue with the fact that Jinx will be viewed as a hero to the people of Zaun. It's pretty obvious Jinx would be admired, she did a thing the people of Zaun wanted en masse for a long time. The thing about Jinx being the savior of Zaun is that it isn't really a redemption arc, because that's still just Jinx being militantly opposed to Piltover, a thing she always has been.

My problem is that the insistence that Jinx NEEDS to have a redemption arc takes away from the larger complexity of Arcane's worldbuilding. What does Jinx have to apologize for in order to be redeemed? Why is there so much emphasis on Jinx's character specifically to rectify her wrongs? And the way the fandom often defines Jinx's wrongdoings centers around a vague discomfort in her acts of violence and general instability.

What does it look like for Jinx to be "good", when the actions of many well-intentioned characters that the audience has an easier time being morally-aligned with either generates very little benefit or actual harm? No one in the cast sans Jinx and Silco have taken the material steps (as controversial as they may be) to deal with the problem that is Piltover, and Piltover has always been THE problem for Zaun.

The concept of a redemption arc for Jinx is so backwards because it asks Jinx as an individual to do "better" when it should be demanded of Piltover instead. How do you live to a standard that makes you morally good when the environment around you necessitates violence as it's own form of capital?

Sidenote: This all leads to the one real worry I have about Jinx and Ekko's inevitable partnership. Ekko is the character the showrunners treat as a guiding light in Zaun, which unfortunately makes Ekko an agent of the showrunners' biases. Case in point, Ekko's friendship with Heimerdinger, the architect of Zaun's despair.

If Jinx and Ekko team up, there's a chance she'd up end up working with Heimerdinger too. And it's like, "C'mon, really????"

[bietrofastimoff23]

spoilers, kfp4

I can say that Chameleon was not lying when she called herself a big fan of Tai Lung, because he is the only master to whom she allowed to demonstrate his skills and with whom she had a dialogue (she didn't give the others a chance, taking their kung fu even before they completely passed through the portal). She also sounds excited when she's about to apply Tai Lung's signature nerve punch. and this is not to mention the frequent use of his appearance.

She's really a big fan of his.

[sunny-luna]

SBI (and many others*) are all aro in some way methinks

*i was gonna draw those many others but I forgot oops sorry

[snakeunderyourboot]

sometimes I think about how the book that contained John wasn't meant for Arthur.

At any point in time, before it reached Arthur and Parker's office, anyone could open it. It could have been Noel before he sent it. It could have been Roland. It could have been the guy from the bookstore or a random customer. It could have been even just Parker.

But it was Arthur who opened up that book, it was Arthur who miraculosly survived and it was Arthur who managed to retain most of his body. Out of all people who held this book in their hands it was Arthur who eventually got John.

And sometimes I think how much does this fact matters towards John's journey to humanity. Considering that Kayne only talked about other Arthurs and Johns I can only assume that only they managed to get as far(or as far as they could)

Just....this idea that neither Arthur nor John were meant for each other. If fate was a little bit different, they would completely miss each other. John would be in some other body and maybe he wouldn't even be "John". And Arthur would be still in Arkham, working as an PI (even if he continue to do so)

They weren't meant for each other, but the idea that despite that they are ultimately perfect for each other. Because only if it's them they manage to get this far. Only if it's them they manage to continue their journey. Only if it's them they are on the path to becoming a better version of themselves.

And I think that this particular instance of them being two different entities that ended up together by a stroke of fate but despite that managed to carve something beautiful is super annoying to Kayne. Considering how much he states himself as the one who controls the narrative, who can change the location and time and fates of characters how he wants - THIS ONE moment he didn't change. It just happened. And we deal with waves that this caused.

I think it's beautifull

[everytaylorswiftsongisaboutcats]

[m4rs-ex3]

from "your dad" -> "who do you think sent runaan to kill dad"

[cockroachesunite]

i have no explanation for this

[bunny-banana]

something so extremely loser-core about not one single ghost being present when Cap died. Like they could have known how he died all 80 years ago but somehow literally all of them missed it😭

[worstloki]

there is a difference between being born to a throne, maliciously vying for a throne, stealing a throne, and having a throne thrust upon you when you are already in the midst of an identity crisis. And I fear Loki's place in the line of succession has people unable to differentiate between any of these

[good-to-drive]

Abuse, Silence, And Why Kevin Can Fuck Himself

I recently finished watching Kevin Can Fuck Himself on Netflix, and, aside from being the most brutally honest portrayal of domestic abuse I have ever seen, I discovered a beautifully written examination of narrative as power and silence as abuse and how this manifests in our larger culture. 

Without going into too much detail, the show is filmed in two distinct styles that are interleaved throughout each episode to tell a cohesive story. Allison and Kevin’s relationship as seen by the rest of the world is told through a multi-cam, laugh-track sitcom that depicts a very typical “goofy husband, shrewish wife” mainstream comedy. Allison’s life through her own eyes is told through a single-cam drama/thriller about Allison planning to murder Kevin to escape his abuse. 

It’s an absolute masterclass in screenwriting, but more than that, every episode explores the difference between truth, fact, and reality, and how none of these things are quite as much or as little as story. But while the process of transforming the chaotic and plotless reality of life into a story is as involuntary and essential as breathing, misogyny and the degradation of women is just as ubiquitous in our society, and a story that exists at the expense of another person’s lived reality is a refutation of their humanity. 

It's also just a great show for anyone who likes to engage with history (or reality TV or true crime or “real life stories” in general), because while we have to tell ourselves stories about her own lives, we have to tell ourselves stories about other people as well. Eternal silence is narrative death, and the perpetual silence of an unspoken narrative is often the last death we can visit on someone whose story we’d rather ignore. 

I also pulled up some books – Lolita and Disgrace – that dealt with similar themes, but from the perspective of the abuser. And what strikes me the most is that, across three beautifully written stories about narrative and silence within a culture that normalizes abuse, Allison, who began her story within a state of narrative death, was the only point-of-view character who had any chance of surviving. 

One of the main themes of Kevin is that a compelling story is often a story that reinforces what we already believe or like to believe, and while the story may be factual and true it often also exists at the expense of someone's lived reality. The exact same series of events can be a silly joke or a harrowing tale of abuse depending on the lens through which we view it, but historically we've only been willing to see the multicam, laugh track, sitcom perspective on unbalanced relationships.

The alchemical process of turning a series of disjoint facts and experiences into a narrative creates something new and compelling, and erases much of what previously existed. In this way, it’s entirely irreversible. We spin our experiences into a very thin thread, a story we can tell ourselves that elicits something within us, something we need in order to live with the complex, uncertain, and unsatisfying reality of life. In think in many ways the thing we elicit in ourselves is truth. But truth is both more and less than fact, often more a reflection of our own beliefs and desires than the events of our lives. And in telling that truth we may never stray from the facts, but we almost by definition cannot give voice to another person’s reality.

There's a scene in season 2 of Kevin when Allison is hit by a door – a la the classic excuse – because of Kevin’s carelessness. And while he absolutely did not hit her, the way it's written is such an incredible allegory for how Kevin has curated their story and curated their friends' and family’s perceptions of their story such that even if she tells everyone the exact, unvarnished truth of what's happening to her and begs for help, they will only be capable of seeing the laugh-track, sitcom, “Kevin is a harmless goofball and his wife is a total shrew” perspective on the events of their lives. 

As so often happens with abuse, their friends and family saw Allison being hurt because of Kevin. But the alchemy of creating a narrative around Kevin and Allison is irreversible, and the series of events they witness can only be spun together to a joke, an accident, a silly, childish mistake. Allison’s reality, Allison’s pain and fear, is completely elided. Like a lost sound in the middle of a sentence, her experience goes silent, and their larger understanding of her relationship never has to change. And you feel so acutely how Allison lives her entire life in that silence. 

Storytelling is human, it’s essential, there’s no other way to engage with our own lives. And it’s not lying. It’s never lying to tell the truth. But it doesn’t reflect every reality, either, because another person’s reality can’t be reflected within our own narrative, because that’s what it means to be another person. To spin two different threads.

And because narrative is the essential process by which we understand our reality, denying someone their own narrative, or denying that this narrative be heard, is inherently abusive. To allow someone a voice is to give them humanity, and to suppress it is to strip that humanity away. 

Disgrace, by J.M. Coetzee, follows the story of a professor, David, who rapes a student and then fails to protect his daughter, Lucy, from being raped by intruders in their home. He destroys his daughter’s life  – not through failing to protect her, but through twisting her rape into a story about why the rape of his student wasn’t wrong. The main theme of the book is generally considered to be exploitation, but Coetzee doesn’t deal with the exploitation of the rape. That’s too direct, too immediate, too easy for the reader to understand as misogynistic and wrong. Rather, Coetzee delves into “the innocuous-seeming use of another person to fill one's gentler emotional needs” (Ruden).

The rape is how we understand David as a fundamentally exploitative person, a person who denies others their humanity by converting them into a vessel for his own desires, who erases their voice in order to speak through them and give himself the things he needs. And that’s how we recognize that the way he absorbs and claims the stories of his daughter and his student is another kind of violation of their humanity. Another way of turning women into vessels for men’s pain and fear and need. 

What’s fascinating is that David's student finds her voice – files a complaint against him – and is eventually able to continue with her life. The woman he raped is less damaged by him than his own daughter, because she was the woman he couldn’t permanently silence. 

In Lolita, another brilliant novel about abuse, dehumanization, and storytelling, Humbert turns to the reader at the end and says, “Imagine us, reader, for we don’t really exist if you don’t.” 

It’s not that Humbert knew he was fictional, but that he knew everyone was fictional. Believed the entire world only truly existed in his own mind, because anything beyond that was irrelevant to his needs. He coped with the collapse of his ability to dehumanize Dolores (who he called Lolita) by demanding that his voice be resurrected. Demanding immortality. Demanding his narrative exist in another person’s world, and thereby be given the existence and humanity that Allison and Dolores and Lucy and David’s student were denied. 

Pushing his needs, finally, onto the reader, because we are the only person he has left, and a person like him can only exist through the use of another. In that way, Humbert was powerless. In that way, Kevin and David were powerless, too.

In Disgrace, David’s dream is to write an opera, and at the end of the book he realizes he’ll never finish his magnum opus. He’ll never be able to terminate the process of converting himself, his world, into a story. But he does learn to decenter himself in that narrative. And it’s when he loses all fear of death, and any conception of the self, that he gains the ability to give dogs – who he generally equates to women – a voice within his opera, his life’s work. 

It’s in death that we discover our true unimportance as human beings, that we learn to let go of vanity and our conception of the self entirely. And David had degraded women so thoroughly in order to justify how he used them to meet his own emotional needs that it was only in losing all value for his own life that he could gain the ability to see them as equal voices. To actually put those voices into his own life story. It's at the cost of himself that he allows other people to truly exist, in the death of the self that he finally allows the world to exist outside of himself. It’s almost a positive character arc. Almost.

When Kevin finally loses the ability to abuse Allison, he, like many abusers, loses all desire to live. His world was built on a structure of superiority and inferiority, on beings and vessels, on the inherent value of men and the inherent meaninglessness of women’s lives. The system on which he based his entire reality has been destroyed by Allison’s declaration of the self. And, if he was a being because she was a vessel, then in losing the ability to treat her as a vessel, to fully and completely dehumanize her, he has lost his own humanity. 

It may be perfectly summed up here: “Become major. Live like a hero. That's what the classics teach us. Be a main character. Otherwise, what is life for?” (Coetzee).

If you’re not to be a main character, if there indeed is no split between major and minor characters, between people and the paper dolls that populate their story, between living beings and the vessels into which they pour their need – what is life for?

Nothing. At least, not for people whose narrative must exist at the expense of another. 

And that’s why I say that only a narrator like Allison could survive this kind of story. Despite beginning her story trapped in eternal silence, her reality fully elided no matter how immediate and obvious it became, Allison was the only point-of-view character of any of these three stories who didn’t establish her power through the degradation of another. Who didn’t conceptualize the world via being and vessels. Whose narrative didn’t exist, by necessity, at the expense of another person’s humanity. Whose thread could exist in a larger tapestry without destroying her sense of self.

Don’t get me wrong, she’s not generally a likable character. She’s misogynistic, cruel, selfish, jealous, desperate, afraid, and in pain. Like anyone in an abusive relationship, she’s not at her best, and she’s often pushed to do things that are ugly and disturbing because she’s simply been pushed too far. 

But, for me, the power in her character is in how her last scene never felt like a final scene. Her story didn’t have to be killed, her conception of the self didn’t have to be killed, in order to reveal the brutal reality of stories twisting and intertwining without any inherently superior truth or narrative among them. Allison’s story was one of declaring herself. And that’s why it didn’t feel like it ended at the end. Instead, this felt like a beginning.

[princessdarth-vader]

I think my ultimate thoughts re; Kipperlilly is that I wish we got a scene where a character was allowed to show her... sympathy. I know there's a tone you wanna hit with a victorious season finale, and a somber note of a teenager falling into a deep well of rage doesnt match that tone but it would've been nice to see.

In my dream world, we get an extra epilogue scene where Riz goes to see Jawbone to go and talk to him, and brings up the thing he mentioned about "seeing Kipperlilly in himself" -- relating that to what Jawbone said at the beginning of the year, and wanting to talk about that deeply set in need for control, and the latent anger he has, and all the ways he is like Kipperlilly, and doesn't want to be.

And in response, Jawbone is able to address the ways in which he failed Kipperlilly, and let her down. That she needed more help than he could provide, that she needed someone who wasn't too afraid of their own biases to shut down her anger, someone who could maybe have given her a support system to turn to instead of Porter. Someone external to the school and the social dynamics within it. Just an acknowledgement from, as far as we know, the only adult in Kipperlilly's life who earnestly tried -- and earnestly failed -- to help her find a better path than her rage.

Just a small moment of acknowledgement that Kipperlilly was a child, an angry, scared, biased and deeply insecure child who was looking for help when she first walked into Jawbone's office, and because of all the adults who failed her, she was turned into something unrecognisable by the time she was 17.

[leonardalphachurch]

temple is an unreliable narrator and is more at fault for biff’s death than he lets on/remembers: juicy. delicious. tragic. what’s the truth? does anyone even remember? how much blame falls on carolina? how much on temple? how much on biff? everyone has a different version of events and they’re all conflicting and no one knows what really happened except that biff ended up dead and temple can never, ever let that go.

temple is an unreliable narrator and is completely at fault for biff’s death and carolina had nothing to do with it: okay well you’ve made it even more boring than canon