#with flaws and virtues

[llamagoddessofficial]

Saw an icky post!!! Reminder that fictional characters are fictional, you can do whatever you like with them. They're not real. They don't exist. They are Concepts and you can do whatever the fuck you want in the privacy of your own home/blog. You don't owe anyone an explanation for what you engage with, you don't owe strangers on the internet your trauma. So long as you're tagging appropriately you're doing everything right.

I might not like your ships. I might not agree with them. I might even think they're problematic! But I don't think you're a bad person for enjoying media I don't enjoy. This blog is a safe space for people who like stuff I don't like.

[fictionadventurer]

Thinking about Rory Williams. What a character.

The completely ordinary man who doesn't become extraordinary, but is already extraordinary.

The coma nurse who can watch over patients becomes a guardian who watches over the love of his life for two-thousand years.

A man being faithful to one woman makes him one of the greatest heroes in history.

Being good, kind, honorable and faithful is a higher kind of virtue than the Doctor's flashy cleverness.

He didn't need to become a hero. He was a hero and got to prove it when put in extraordinary circumstances.

Just a fantastic character.

[gurggggleburgle]

For me a great svsss fic would be one where Luo Binghe and Shen Yuan have to go through the beautiful and emotional growth of realizing there are some things you don't unconditionally love in your partner that have nothing to do self sacrifice and dying. Because as messy as these bitches are they're also in like a honeymoon state.

I want the little annoying day to day quirks that Luo Binghe ignored or romanticized as a disciple being looked at a new lens. I want Luo Binghe being all 'I love you so much Shizun but for the love of God please finish your tax return.' And this isn't falling out of love. This is love growing and changing. This is my partner is 'I asked you to pick up milk 4 times already but it's OK and I'm not angry I'm just annoyed'.

It's noticing that even with a bookmark he folds the corners in books to mark where he's reading and that is driving him insane because it means all the books have creases in the corners. It's relearning the absurdities and habits people pick up or keep when you're not looking and knowing you don't love all of them but you love the person they're attached to.

It's realizing Binghe likes to sleep in his socks or that when he gets dressed he always starts with putting up his hair and then puts on his shoes and then puts on his pants. Shen Qingqiu doesn't know why he does it, he doesn't get it, it drives him nuts. Did he always do this or os this a post abyss thing? It's that weird way he holds his chopsticks that doesn't look weird until you stare for too long and it's just...why are you doing that? Why?

It's leaving a ton of hair in the brush. It's taking too long in the bath when they have places to be. It's waking up and needing to go to the bathroom and human starfish Luo Binghe refusing to let him get up until he needs to run directly to the bathroom or else.

It's Shizun not brushing his teeth in the morning unless being fussed. It's the idiosyncratic parts of being human that annoy each other but proof you love them. Prove loving someone means loving being annoyed. Seeing a puddle in the doorway when you come home and are annoyed but also thinking 'yeah that's how it should be'

[lord-squiggletits]

When Optimus in Chaos Theory said "Hatred may sustain you, but it diminishes me. I am lessened by it." that was so fucking deep of him

[intermundia]

if i had to guess, i would say that i developed my strong feelings about the representation of jedi in canon versus fanon in the course of writing lex talionis, my jedi critical novel with unreliable narration and a fanon interpretation of the dark side. it may seem like i hate jedi critical stuff but i literally wrote a book on it lmao. in order to develop a compelling dark side obi-wan, i had to break him away from the order, and he had to feel right and justified, so i made sure to interpret every single thing the jedi do in the worst faith, and spin everything to the least generous interpretation.

as a result i know exactly how easy it is to read across and against genre, to make the jedi into something they are not, to abuse the concept of attachment, but it's not canon! it's a commentary on and reinterpretation of main canon; it changes the genre and tone of the story, and diminishes the spiritual significance of the jedi. when i did that, it's fanfiction, an erotic power fantasy predicated on rejecting the moderation and restraint of the jedi, foregrounding their flaws and undermining their virtues. i appreciate the value of that for sure, and am fine with disney doing it too, but it starting to feel like it's all we get.

my frustration comes whenever it feels like writers are speaking from the rostrum but with a latent contempt for the ideals of star wars. it's fine that they want to switch the genre of canon and find flaws in the forces of good, but deconstruction like that feels to me like a secondary and subordinate project to the main thread of canon rather than a story on the same mythic plane! you can read a million jedi critical stories on ao3, but i want canon to be where they are shown in their good and inspiring ideal form. that's the heart of my problem, i want the big canon projects to love the ideal of the jedi as much as i do and depict them generously and in good faith.

where else in our culture am i going to find a philosophy and community as inspiring as the jedi, if not in star wars, where they belong? they're why i'm here. i want canon to give me something beautiful and true to react against for my fanfiction, not just giving me only expensive fanfiction, you know? i have plenty of edgy fanficfion at home lol. i crave myth. i understand my opinion is completely warped by the fact i've written 750k words of star wars analytical erotica but it is what it is lmao

[veruca4seether]

some ppls inclination to villainize or erase entirely jason todd’s parents and their role in his life says a lottttt more than you mean to

y’all ran with the nu52 versions real fucking fast

[hannigramislife]

for my own gratification bc i just ran into nie mingjue hate in the wild, would you mind making a post that defends my poor good boy? he worked so hard and got gaslit to shit before getting murdered terribly ;; literally everyone sat there telling him "youre being too harsh" and he's just responding appropriately. like yeah, if you witness a murder, ya kinda got to do something about that as a clan leader. its kinda your responsibility, even when you care about the person who did the murdering. he was also a really young when he took on the role of clan leader and idk, it just made me rlly sad to see people dunk on him cuz wtf he's literally just trying his best in an impossible situation WHILE being perpetually fucked over by his clan's own traditional cultivation cuz now the stronger he is as a leader, the closer he is to going literally insane and dying bc of it. (mingjue did nothing wrong i will die on this hill) ((sorry for going on a tirade, im just sad and defensive of my good boy rn))

Oh no! I'm so sorry you had to go through Nie Mingjue hate! Truly tragic. I went through that once when in the beginning of me reading the books, when I still had no proper opinions, and never again.

I'm more than willing to make a post about Nie Mingjue! I'm always down to talk about Nie Mingjue tbh, he's my heart and love and if I were to have been given the opportunity to be his right hand person, I would have simply never betrayed his trust and married him. Rip Jin Guangyao but I'm different.

Anyways, I, huhhh, actually think you?? Covered it all??? Pretty much?? Yet I will talk about it. This will be long and non-coherent, because I don't have the books rn to find quotes in them and honestly, I could write essays on Nie Mingjue either way.

Nie Mingjue is a central piece of the narrative, despite the limited amount of appearances he made, and the fact that he wasn't close to the main characters at all. The entire second part of the plot revolves around him- it happened because of him. His murder is a tragedy; literally, by greek standards, man has Cassandra Curse all over him, so I don't get how people can tell me, confidently, that his death was warranted. I've been told the man had asked for it, and this has mostly been by Jin Guangyao apologists.

So let me make something real fucking clear.

Nie Mingjue did not deserve to die. Let's get that out of the way, anyone can fight me on that. Nie Mingjue had more good qualities than half the people in this fucking story, despite his flaws. After his father was brutally murdered when Mingjue was only in his teens, Nie Mingjue stepped up as clan leader. We can only speculate the hardships that await someone leading a clan at such an early age. Yet, political challenges weren't the only thing he had to battle; Nie Mingjue knew about his clan's harmful cultivation, and he knew he was going to die young. So what did he do? His best. Literally his best, always. He was always giving 100% of his abilities, because that's who he was.

Let's talk about who Nie Mingjue was, shall we?

When Jin Guangyao, still Meng Yao then, describes Nie Mingjue, he finds himself perplexed, because Nie Mingjue isn't like other men. He is not frivolous, and he has no vices; Meng Yao describes how Nie Mingjue never showed an interest in arts, or alcohol, or women. All he did was train, and fight the Wens during the war. It shows that he had a one-track mind from the start, and has got a strict discipline; yet this strictly disciplined man, leader of a clan that prizes strength, continuously indulges his lazy and undisciplined half-brother, his one and only heir, despite not understanding his interests. We gather, pretty quickly, that Nie Mingjue is a bleeding heart for his brother, and for the ones he loves in general. We see the same softer side displayed in the presence of Lan Xichen, and of course, for some time, Meng Yao.

People seem to think Nie Mingjue took Meng Yao's betrayal too harshly. As if somehow seeing a man he thought to have been just and honest commit premeditated murder, then cover it up, was something he was just supposed to get over. To this day, I can't believe how Lan Xichen was so understanding of it. But not only did Nie Mingjue catch him in a cowardly act - Meng Yao proceeds to manipulate him, using the fact that Nie Mingjue cared about him, to stab him in the back. Or front, however it happened. I get that Meng Yao was in a difficult position, that he suffered at the Jins, that he felt backed in a corner; but Nie Mingjue was a man that had extended his help to Meng Yao before, and even then, he went to find Meng Yao in righteous fury, ready to help him again. To Nie Mingjue, the idea that Meng Yao "had no other choice" but to kill - to kill in the manner he did - it could have been nothing but a betrayal.

One thing that I personally highly respected Nie Mingjue for was the fact that he did not judge Meng Yao for his background. This is not up for debate; Nie Mingjue stood up for him, quite publicly, quite vocally, when Meng Yao was being insulted over it. And not only that, but he promoted Meng Yao to be his right hand man, just like that. Because he's impulsive, and to prove a point, but it was still huge of him to do. Not even Lan Xichen would have done that - In a society built on power dynamics between social classes, Nie Mingjue was one of the few characters who did not let that define his actions. It wasn't because he was born privileged (though he was) but because he he didn't let anything other than his judgment direct his actions. Nie Mingjue also never shied away from anything; if it had to be done, he did it, no matter the cost.

Nie Mingjue was decisive, and had an iron will. When Meng Yao killed the Nie disciples in Qishan, he wanted to kill Meng Yao. Meng Yao told him, paraphrasing, that "don't you understand that if I hadn't done that, it would have been your corpse up there?" and Wei Wuxian takes it to mean "Translation: I saved you so you can't kill me, because that would mean you're in the wrong." So Nie Mingjue hesitated for a second, then said: "Fine! I'll kill you, and then take my own life!" And the only reason he didn't, was because Lan Xichen was there. Otherwise, Nie Mingjue would have killed his former friend, then followed him to whatever afterlife awaited.

Nie Mingjue is often portrayed like he doesn't understand stuff, like he's stupid, simply because of his black and white sense of morality. That's not correct: Nie Mingjue understands motive, but he doesn't accept the ends justifying the means. Scratch that, he doesn't accept or justify either, if they're unjust. The murder of the Jin commander, the murder of the Nie disciples, not executing Xue Yang - how can Nie Mingjue possibly understand Meng Yao's decisions, when Nie Mingjue would rather die, any day, than live thanks to vile actions?

And then, Nie Mingjue starts falling into qi-deviation. We know that it affected his temper the most, and his judgement. I don't understand how it works, really, so I don't know by the end how much was Nie Mingjue and how much was the mess that the spirit made of him - maybe a combination of the two. But what is certain, is that the rapid qi deviation changed him.

But I could write a hundred more pages on him, meticulously going over every single scene he has ever appeared in, because I find him that interesting. I find him the most interesting, and the most appealing character, because in a story where the navigation of the cultivation world's complex politics and hierarchies with tact and diplomacy is crucial, Nie Mingjue stands uncompromising in his principles, choosing duty and honor over anything else, even when it's hard.

[philosophybits]

A man who has lost all hope of rooting out of himself a certain radical defect of character, or even of hiding the flaw from others, turns round and tries to find in his defect a certain merit. If he succeeds in convincing his acquaintances, he achieves a double gain: first, he quiets his conscience, and then he acquires a reputation for being original.

Lev Shestov, All Things Are Possible

[seaweedstarshine]

Late to the game as I’ve kinda been kinda non-here for a minute but I scrolled through the Dot and Bubble tag, and thought I wanted to write this post into existence.

There's this part in Doctor Who Unleashed where RTD says this:

“What we can’t tell is how many people will have worked that out before the ending. Because they’ve seen white person after white person after white person, and television these days is very diverse. I wonder, will you be ten minutes into it, will you be fifteen, will you be twenty, before you start to think, everyone in this community is white. And if you don’t think that — why didn’t you? So, that’s gonna be interesting. I hope it’s one of those pieces of television you see, and always remember.”

And I'm like. Yeah. But the reason this works even as well as it does is largely thanks to the work of the previous showrunner with the previous creative team, which was notably the first era to have any writers of color (amongst other firsts in terms of inclusivity in directors, composer, actors). While Chibnall fumbled whenever he tried to write about race himself, he did have the self-awareness to have Black and South Asian writers writing the episodes where race is the focus (and a female writer for the episode where sexism is a focus; my point is, he seemed to know his shortcomings).

I wonder what the current creative team looks like? (not really, but I wasn't 100% sure for all of them)

To quote RTD:

“...before you start to think, everyone in this community is white.”

This is pretty non-self-aware, right? It's pretty “It is said, and I understand this, there was a history of racism with the original Toymaker, the Celestial Toymaker, who had ‘celestial,’ and I did not know this, but ‘celestial’ can mean of Chinese origin, but in a derogatory way,” right? (from The Giggle Unleashed) It's pretty “and I had problems with that, and a lot of us on the production team had problems with that: associating disability with evil,” right? (from Destination Skaro Unleashed)

—none of which are issues that should be overlooked, but think how much exponentially better they might’ve been addressed if he’d consulted with Chinese writers and wheelchair-using writers before going straight to giving the Toymaker weird fake accents and making Davros walk?

How many Black or non-white people do we think saw the Dot and Bubble script before it landed in Ncuti’s hands?

And this just keeps happening.

And like, from some of the shocked responses I've seen from white viewers to the ending of Dot and Bubble, maybe the episode's unsubtlety was needed? From the way RTD talks about it in Unleashed, the episode was written with a white audience in mind, Baby's First Microaggressions (where of course the microaggressions come from people who are pretty self-admittedly white supremacists). Ricky September, a more seemingly normal depiction of someone in the racist bubble of Finetime, seemed like an interesting element, up until the way he died.

The ending worked for me, because I do think the Doctor's reaction is true to how the Doctor would react. I just keep thinking of how much better the core themes could've been handled by someone with actual lived experience on the subject matter.

[normal-thoughts-official]

i get and agree with all the criticism on how fictional characters have been sanitized to never have any real flaws but if you think that flaws like selfishness are inherently more interesting and better written than flaws like low self esteem you're simply not as media literate as the sense of superiority you've developed to cope makes you think you are

[apocalyptichearts]

may’s devotion to coulson in season 1…

credits — leah horlick, for your own good || richard siken, war of the foxes || @/asoftepiloguemylove on tumblr || clarice lispector, the stream of life || emily palermo, what i could never confess without some bravado || margaret atwood, speeches for doctor frankenstein

[rislyann]

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: 역대급 영지 설계사 | The Greatest Estate Developer (Webcomic) Rating: Explicit Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence Relationships: Javier Asrahan/Kim Suho | Lloyd Frontera, Javier Asrahan & Kim Suho | Lloyd Frontera Characters: Javier Asrahan, Kim Suho | Lloyd Frontera, Marbella Frontera, Arcos Frontera, Julian Frontera, Serajard Frontera, Alicia Magentano, Sir Bayern (The Greatest Estate Developer), Sir Bayern's wife, The Summons (The Greatest Estate Developer), Lady Silluria (The Greatest Estate Developer) Additional Tags: One-Sided Attraction, from both sides, yeah it was a thing, you will see, Lloyd gets exhausted, the Counts and Sir Bayern try to help, but isn't enough, Lloyd needs a nap, Javier needs to get his ideas straight for once, also some mentions of violence because they fight against some wizards, Javier chop-chops some people, the usual you know how it is, something happens with the summons here, but if you read 'Generosity' you'll know, they're okay and safe, Don't copy to another site Series: Part 3 of Flawed virtues Summary: (Don’t) Leave for tomorrow what you can(not) do today.

                         Diligence isn't always a virtue

one.-              Don’t Leave for tomorrow what you cannot do today

. . . 

“Is something the matter, Master Lloyd?”

“Uh? No. No, what could be the matter?”

“It seemed like you were watching me quite intensely.”

“Yeah, it... I was just trying to not laugh. You have a snot stuck on your face.” he pointed and Javier smirked, lifting his chin as if was showing off, the bastard.

“I do not.”

He glared at him and Javier chuckled.

“Could it be that you are, once again, jealous of my good looks?”

“Who is jealous of you? Me?  The son of a count, jealous of a dumb knight? C’mon…”  

. . . 

[astralleywright]

i do hope this whole thing compels Fearne to start speaking up more about her wants and needs. we can talk about how the Hells don't check up on her as often as they could or should, and I'd agree, but she also rarely advocates for herself or shares what's she's feeling. it makes sense given her lack of experience with everything mortal, but this proves she's not the only one getting hurt by it: what Ashton did was not at all her fault, but if she had told the witches or Orym her fears about taking the shard during their respective conversations, it almost certainly wouldn't have happened!

even in the best of circumstances, the people who care about you can't read your mind (or they can, but they're trying really hard not to in order to respect your privacy.), and the Hells are very very far from the best of circumstances. they're relying on Fearne just as much as she's relying on them, and so the need for better communication extends to her as well. hopefully she can start to put that into practice next time by kicking Ashton's ass.

[queenretcon]

I think people who know ted kind of sucks write him better than people who think he’s a perfect angel genius martyr

and I think people who know boosters rad as fuck write him better than people who think he’s a big dumb pathetic idiot

[mamawasatesttube]

you guys i have so many thoughts about tdr. i have so much to say. like i don't want to be super mean but dude that comic fucking sucks and i can't lie i think it made me kind of homophobic actually

[moralesmilesanhour]

Even though I don't really vibe with the idea of writing Miles or Miles G as "toxic" (read: one-dimensionally possessive and threatening but make it """sexy"""), I think a story where either Miles isn't able to be the best friend or partner they could be because they don't know how to healthily deal with their circumstances would be rlly interesting. Like, it's a realistic and complex premise to explore! I just haven't seen it done in a way that doesn't romanticize or fetishize it very often. What do y'all think? In general I don't think I've seen too many works where Miles is given character flaws that impact the story and his relationships (which is understandable given that most of us are writing fluff but still), so I'm curious abt that too