#zero cognitive dissonance from his side

[microwaving-tesilid-argente]

honestly rigarez is such a funny character.

the way he went from confidently and flippantly going "what's your relationship with the divine emissary? i hope it's an intimate one 😈" and "i may not love you, but i promise to fulfil my duties as a husband. so i suggest you don't bring that knight as part of your dowry"

to

"hello sister-in-law... 🥺💐"

im going to hack up a lung laughing

[bestworstcase]

@tumblingxelian from here

As the person who started the "Give that girl a cult" tag, I kind of disagree. RWBY Beyond already made it clear Ruby has a lot of people focused on her in a Great Uniter sense. Add in how many issues she's been having and judging by the movie continues to have with playing the role needed of her. & that there's a nationalistic/fascist movement being aided by the villains & I feel like Ruby being admired not playing into it makes zero sense. The memes of Jax just screaming in frustration cos Ruby is much, much, much closer to the icon he only pretends to be are just memes and not realistic expectations for the volumes story. I should also clarify, cult was just picked cos "Fan club" doesn't have the same connotations.

mm to clarify where i’m coming from, my main point of disagreement with the "ruby gets a [celebrity] cult" angle is with Where and How it will have narrative impact (i think ruby’s celebrity will be more of a personal stumbling block for her tied into the summer rose mystery and an issue that exacerbates the nascent civil war, not smth she can take advantage of in the political conflict vs the crown) and how prominent it’ll be in terms of the amount of specific focus put on people adoring her.

but the main bone i have to pick is with specifically the "ruby is literally going to be deified / silver-eyed ascended savior / tea as communion wine" type stuff (like this other anon) where "cult" is being used explicitly to mean religious veneration. THIS variant makes me want to bite people 

but anyway, to your actual points: i get that the jax meme-ing is largely exaggerated joking around, but at the same time the main thrust of all the real speculation in this vein is that ruby’s celebrity functions to set up a personal conflict between herself and the asturias twins and strengthens her coalition’s hand against the crown because she’s admired, an inspiration to the people, etc. 

in the same way that "salem’s gonna show up a year late with starbucks to explain her ninety step plan for beating the gods" is an unserious joke that follows from things i do seriously believe, that salem’s ultimate goal is to get rid of the brothers and the heroic side will hear her side of the story as probably the last major narrative turning point… no one is joking about jax going "NOOOO!!" while he bleeds supporters to ruby’s accidental cult of personality because they don’t think her celebrity is going to play a meaningful part in defeating the crown, yeah?

i’m also using the memetic joke phrasing in the prev post mainly because i didn’t want to just repeat stuff i’d already said in the one right before, but—well, okay:

1 - the crown isn’t a vanity project. jax is arrogant, but he does also fundamentally believe that he’s doing what is best for his nation; it’s an ideological project. and the ideology is more or less, "vacuo was broken and exploited by foreign invaders long ago. outsiders and those who aren’t willing to fight to the death for vacuo make this nation weak; to become strong again, loyal vacuans must band together to get rid of these people and fight for ourselves and our way of life." when jax imagines the "old ways," he envisions himself as the kind of king who holds himself equal to all his people ("he wasn’t going to hold himself above them")—he’s tying himself in a mental knot here to hold this belief while also putting half his forces under mind control, obviously, but the cognitive dissonance here is buried very deep. 

2 - the MAINSTREAM, NORMATIVE city vacuan cultural view—expressed by many different vacuan characters, including sun—is "we lost our identity and our way of life because people were too soft and content; we let the other kingdoms come here and take what they wanted, and then they left us with nothing but sand, heat, and bitter memories. but hardship and fending for ourselves for so long has made us strong, so we don’t need anyone telling us what to do!" <- i am condensing but much of this is lifted verbatim from the speech sun makes to rally eleventh hour support against the crown. in that speech, he rhetorically equates the twins to the "other kingdoms" who, like the crown, "promised prosperity and paradise."

3 - now. i don’t believe rwby is going to play straight this idea that vacuans were to blame for the conquest of vacuo, because a) the nomadic vacuans in after the fall hold very different cultural attitudes, b) in the 9.11 animatic oscar explicitly refers to all this as a "history of colonization," and c) rwby doesn’t blame faunus for being persecuted or the people of mantle for being repressed, why would vacuo be different?—these are cultural views that i expect to be challenged in v10.

4 - notice how similar these normative/mainstream views are to the crown’s ideology! the crown is more extreme, more violent, but it’s really not that far off from stuff the good-guy vacuans say. before the 9.11 animatic, this was the whole basis for my thinking that the crown would be the arc antagonists in v10—at the end of the book, the defenders turn the tide by flipping the nationalist rhetoric around; ideological victory to the crown. dump tens of thousands of refugees from another kingdom into this situation, and what happens? popular support for the crown explodes. 

5 - BTE is a villain origin story. it’s just the prelude that sets the stage for this explosion of popular support; the main event is in v10, and i think this time the crown is going to be much stronger. in the book, it’s a fringe movement extremists and a roughly equal number of unwilling "recruits" under jax’s thrall, but almost every city vacuan character we meet expresses hostility toward "outsiders" and "traitors" and a lot—not all, but a lot—of what the crown believes is normalized to some extent; a really significant number of vacuans were just one refugee crisis away from breaking for the crown. vacuo has had two refugee crises in swift succession and there’s atlesian and mistrali warships allied with the faction that welcomed the refugees flying over vacuo now.

6 - it doesn’t matter that those foreign ships are there to defend vacuo too; vacuan nationalism is grounded in centuries of colonial occupation and the optics are really, really bad for the coalition. here is what jax is going to be screaming from the rooftops: "half or more of vacuo’s population is outsiders now, people from atlas and vale who never lifted a finger to help us but expect us to sacrifice everything to save them—give up our food and water when we scarcely have enough to sustain ourselves, give up our homes, spill our blood and defend them with their lives. they’re weak, pathetic cowards who came running to hide behind us instead of fighting for their kingdom, and they expect us to believe they’ll fight for us when the time comes? no, they’re just here to do what the other kingdoms have always done to us—they’re the real threat. are we really going to sit by and let these foreign invaders take our country from us again?"—and a lot of vacuans are gonna buy that bullshit.

7 - not least because a lot of it is… kind of true. vacuo has a very long, very real history of suffering at the hands of these other kingdoms whose people it is now being asked to make very real sacrifices for. both CFVY novels emphasize that food and water are already scarce before the kingdom doubles in size and vacuo is weathering onslaught after onslaught of grimm because of the refugees. it’s a really tough situation, and for someone like jax it is a massive political windfall because it’s so easy to twist that reality into a justification for hatred and violence.

SO,

here’s what really stands out to me about the 9.11 animatic and ruby’s celebrity in B4:

nora’s section: establishes that the vacuans are really angry, like "throwing junk at small orphaned children in a screaming rage" angry

oscar’s: the shade coalition is holding on by its fingernails against grimm drawn to the city in droves.

ren’s: the asturias twins get broken out of prison, and he reflects that salem has the advantage because it’s easier to exploit fear and anger than to overcome them. 

winter’s: popular support for the crown is booming ("atlas go home" and "long live the crown" grafitti)… and then the second refugee crisis arrives, provoking what is quite likely another days-long unrelenting assault of the city by grimm. also, when the shade coalition isn’t running itself into the ground fighting grimm, they’re distributing food and water to refugees. (=the crown’s talking point here is "see? they only care about helping THEM, not US")

qrow’s: he feels optimistic because he sees the refugees coming together, trying to support each other through this crisis and atone for past wrongs. the old divide between atlas and mantle is healing. every single character in this section is a refugee, and the "remember her message!" mural seems to be something the happy huntresses organized. 

"it was a relief for us," says nora of reaching vacuo, "but for the vacuans…"

and boba: yang takes ruby to specifically a boba shop that relocated from patch to vacuo after vale was evacuated; so this is likely a neighborhood where a lot of valean refugees settled and that means the vacuans who live here are going to mostly be the type of people who were willing to open their community and absorb that second wave of refugees, i.e. the shade coalition’s support base, people like the nomadic vacuans in ATF who would never be swayed by jax’s rhetoric at all because they weren’t already xenophobic… which BTE implies pretty strongly is a minority position within vacuo proper.

B4 is a character-driven piece focused on ruby’s personal struggle, and the beyond spots are all pretty light, pretty hopeful, and pretty opaque about the situation in vacuo for reasons of being optional side content.

the 9.11 animatic, on the other hand, was meant to be an episode of the show proper, so it does not hold back on the foreshadowing / setup at all: from nora to ren to winter there’s a pattern of escalation with vacuan support for the crown gaining ground, getting louder and bolder, and then qrow’s optimistic conclusion is focused very tightly on the refugees, with an acknowledgment that things are "bad, probably never been worse" beyond the small good he chooses to focus on… which conspicuously does not include any vacuans participating in these small acts of kindness or atonement: it’s klein and willow and the happy huntresses looking out for other refugees.

here’s what i think is going to happen with ruby’s celebrity in v10: the refugees from atlas and mantle will adore her—she’s the girl who rallied the whole world to come help them, and got them out alive when salem attacked and their general lost his mind. the refugees from vale will love her—she’s theirs, after all, born and raised in vale, and look at what she’s started. the minority of vacuans who threw open their doors to welcome the refugees will think the world of her—if atlas hadn’t fallen so quickly, these are the people who would have done whatever they could to send help, and her example is an inspiration. 

and the rest of vacuo is going to fucking hate her. she’s the girl who asked the whole world to come running to help atlas and then the very next day dumped atlas and its problems into vacuo’s lap. is it fair to pin the blame for everything on ruby? fuck no, but she’s the face of this crisis for better and worse.

she’s not a threat to jax; he literally could not ASK for a more perfect scapegoat. she’s the girl from beacon who abandoned her school instead of fighting to save it. (<- explicitly how the crown and basically the entire shade student body views the beacon survivors.) she’s the girl who begged the world to come help atlas and then not even a full day later ran away AGAIN, dumping atlas on vacuo. she’s the reason the sky is crawling with atlesian and mistrali warships. she’s the reason grimm attacked the city every few days for months on end. the satellite she used to send her message is a fuckoff huge battleship looming over vacuo now. she keeps asking vacuans to set aside their differences and work together with the tens of thousands of refugees burdening the kingdom, and all of those refugees think she’s the best thing since sliced bread…

i think ruby will be a polarizing figure—possibly divisive enough that her return might be the final straw that rips the kingdom in half. ’cause like. the people with the most reason to admire her are also the ones the villainous nationalist group despises and wants to get rid of, and the 9.11 animatic flags hard that the crown’s support among vacuans has skyrocketed since the refugee crisis began. they’re not a fringe group anymore.

so on the one hand, the pressure put on ruby is going to be orders of magnitude more intense than ever before because she’s a celebrity beloved by the coalition’s supporters, most of whom are refugees, and between that and finding out vale is just gone now right after getting back, to judge by her characterization in rwby x jl2, ruby is NOT going to be coping well in the wake of her resolution to be all summer was and more. 

and on the other hand, to the crown’s supporters, who could very well now be the majority of vacuans living in the city proper, she’s the perfect scapegoat and they’re going to utterly despise her, inflaming the existing divide and maybe splitting what fence-sitters still remain at this point one way or another. ruby is both the girl who united the world and the girl who tore vacuo apart—rwby does love its contradictions!—which is a) not going to help her mental health situation at all, and b) a problem she and the rest of the shade coalition can only solve by winning the ideological argument. 

to put vacuo back together again they need to beat the idea that "outsiders" make vacuo weak and therefore to be strong vacuo has to drive out everyone deemed un-vacuan. more to the point, they’ll need to overcome the feeling that vacuo is suffering because the rest of the world came together for the refugees. which… is difficult and unfair, because the crown are the ones refusing to play ball and making everything harder than it needs to be, and because if the crown goes into open revolt then the coalition is going to have to fight back and that will make it even harder to make a convincing case that the coalition really does want to be fighting for vacuo, for all vacuans, not against them. it SEEMS impossible. but saving everyone in atlas and mantle seemed impossible, too. 

also, waves vaguely, i expect the vacuo arc will mirror atlas in various ways and this is one of them: the ascendant political movement are bad guys this time, reactionary nationalists, and the heroes are going to defeat them the hard way, no cheating, which will incite the healing of vacuo.

[snowblack-charcoalwhite]

These comments from Reddit made me want to cry and fight Condal, Aemond is not even a character to him and he lied we would see his inner life/pov

"Aemond is kinda like a cartoon villain at this point. His thoughts and feelings are ignored and he’s moreso just a force to move the plot along"

"It echoes a thought that I was having regarding the latest episode: I have zero clue what Aemond thinks. I know what thoughts Alicent, Aegon, Rhaenyra, Jace and even Baela and Rhaena are having, but I cannot tell what crosses Aemond's mind. He appears as mysterious and closed-off (except when he talks to Madam Sylvi), and while that could be an interesting perspective on a character, we still are given little insight into his perspective, especially in the last episode (or even in Ep4 when he attacks Aegon, I'd argue). He appears to us as he appears to people around him: aloof, mysterious, dangerous, smug. That's it. Even his scene with the Throne is strange, as it doesn't reveal much (despite Ewan's extraordinary capacity to emote). Aemond just look vaguely smug during the entire episode, and very very smug during the Council scene... which is from Alicent's POV and would naturally be biased.

I'd have to re-watch his scenes but I don't think we often get the close-ups and contemplative prolonged shots we get for Aegon and Alicent, meant to disclose emotions and conflict (like, say, Aegon's mirror shot in Ep3 or his distress after Alicent's words in ep4, or Alicent's panic attack in Ep5). The closest to that for Aemond is Aemond himself talking, when he tells Madam Sylvi about his regrets for killing Luke and his feeling flattered that Daemon targeted him, both of which are told rather than shown and also cognitively dissonant with the rest of the story (he feels no grief for his nephew, he feels regret for Luke but not Aegon). Aemond feels removed from the narrative, kept at arms' length, as if to capitalize on his mystery with the audience than explore the character--paradoxical and puzzling for a character that is very much subjected to his emotions and passions despite wanting not to be."

Hello!

I understand your feelings, believe me. Going back to this post, we can't know for sure whether Aemond's arc was ruined intentionally or it's a matter of the writers' incompetence (or a mix of both). Anyway, sometimes it feels like Condal at some point decided that Aemond's emotional side doesn't need proper development (or believed the brothel scenes to constitute that proper development). And just like that Aemond as a character became a case of "almost everything about the presence, almost nothing about the substance". I say "almost" because Ewan kept doing his best to show us what Aemond actually feels - and he actually succeeds (like in this moment, for example) - but it seems that camera doesn't like him doing that, as if the directors were instructed not to focus too much on his face during such moments.

I really want to punch Condal and everyone responsible for this disrespect to the character and to the actor in the face. Wanna join?

[lavenoon]

A stubborn but kinda humorous Robin stepping back into HQ after a mission (that Moon already return from, who is nervous and fidgety bc he lost sight of Robin) is suspiciously holding their side.

“So, where were-“

“So I got stabbed lmao :)” And punctuates every step they take with an “ow”

Anon I admire your determination to give an animatronic a heart attack gfhdjs

Pre-stabbing/ This is the stabbing? Dusk freezes, trying to work past the cognitive dissonance of "banter! everything fine!" and "wait. 'ouch'? stabbing?", but then he's on them. Not roughly, but insistently moves their hand away from their side, and then it's basically the stabbing comic but with the added guilt that he wasn't even there. He already blames himself in the scenario where he was there (and out of reach, whatever he may think), but without any details? Maybe with time they can convince him to take it easy on himself, but in that moment it feels like a fact that settles in his nonexistent gut - this is his fault.

And boy, is he making a fuss. They aren't taking another step on their own, he's carrying them until he absolutely has to give them up (probably when the ambulance shows up), and no one in the vicinity will miss the fact that Robin got hurt because he's just all over the place, yelling for and at higher ups to fix this, and whatever protests they have fall on deaf ears. Periodically looks down with the most desperately hopeful expression, reassures them that they'll be fine - though ironically scares them even more, because this isn't the Dusk they know

Post-stabbing? I'd like to think that Robin wouldn't be quite so blasé about it - but maybe they do try to hide it, because they don't want him to worry. Either way the freeze moment absolutely falls away, there is zero hesitation before he checks them over. Even as Robin tries to reassure him that they'll be fine, it's not that bad, the other was worse and they survived that, please don't worry - he doesn't process any of that. His thoughts are just filled with the fact that it happened again, and this time he wasn't even there. Scarily stoic but all in all does the same - picks them up, gets help, doesn't let go until he has to.

Afterwards tries to deal with the crushing guilt, neglects his own solo missions to shadow Robin (more so than he already did), and won't even lean into the rival act for a long while. He'll just be silent, and keep an eye on them, until they snap.

They don't need a babysitter - the job is high risk, they're human, things happen. They're alive, and they plan on staying that way, so why won't he go back to normal?

And this is the moment where I'm officially off the deep end, have another alt reveal.

Because Dusk breaks. They've never seen him like that. He can't cry, but he's clinging to them, on his knees, and just shaking all over as he holds them. Begs them to please let him do this - he doesn't want a third time, he can't have a third time. Every time they leave for the night he worries that he won't see them again, and he can't do anything about it because the rules prohibit them from sharing their identities and he won't cause them trouble with the higher ups, but please, in the few hours he gets, please just let him watch. Maybe - maybe for the few day shift missions they have, let Dawn watch -

Dawn?

His work partner. He should have told them ages ago, yes, it was a joke that got away from him - his counterpart, a Sun animatronic, who handles undercover intel collection. They can't miss him, really, dressed as he is -

And for Robin a few things click into place. They're frozen for a moment as they process, don't even hear Dusk still talking, and the coincidences just slot into place. And it makes sense. They don't get angry (maybe a little, but mostly at themself), and then their shoulders sag and they put their hands on his.

"Hey," they say, softer than he expects, and he quietens. Freezes when they pull down their mask, and smile.

"Let's go home, okay?"

"Home - What -"

"I didn't know I have two tenants. Sneaky, I have to admit. I thought Sun was just a private person, but I suppose I didn't see the forest for the trees."

The trembling stops, only to start back up again when he starts laughing - buries his head where he's leaning near their stomach, near those scars. Shaking with laughter when things click into place for him, too. They give him the time to process, maybe absentmindedly stroke their thumbs over his shoulders, just to show him they're there, still there.

After a bit, the laughter slowly peters out, and he lets out one of those tinny sighs, that are half an imitation of something human, and half something completely unique. Looks up at them, and just smiles.

"Home sounds good."

[ceterisparibus116]

Nuance is absolutely important but I think it becomes unnecessary when it's veering into moving goalposts and skewing the argument in favor of painting one side in a better light (in this case, Karen). Like I said, the "honesty measuring contest" is weird and I'm not sure entirely accurate because Matt's secret has, as far as we know, never put Karen in direct danger? All of the dangerous circumstances she found herself in was of her own doing (taunting Fisk, going out to investigate at night) and none because of Matt's secrets. Whereas her not revealing that she was the one who killed Wesley gave Nadeem a reason to justfify his FBI manhunt for Matt even more.

I just don't see the proper logic behind "oh yeah Karen was hypocritical throughout the course of her relationship with Matt and set hypocritical standards that lead to her breaking it off, but in no way is she responsible for the relationship not working out"...? Isn't the very existence of that hypocrisy, of that weird goal post that, "yeah I can set standards that are palplably hypocritical and if you don't meet that, gooodbye" make her a contributor to its implosion? Relationships entail adjustments from both sides, but it feels like your argument is positioning Karen like a controlled variable and that it should be Matt making all the adjustments. If she knows and is aware that her standards are hypocritical, how does that not make her a reason for it not working out? Notwithstanding Matt's reaction to it or his personal feelings about dishonesty, if Karen didn't have that hypocritical, "non-negotiable" standard then she would be more lenient with things and possibly make adjustment to said standards? And my original point was that Karen put Matt on a pedestal the same way you and many others point out that Matt put Karen to, yet this is never addressed.

I just find it weird to see all the mental gymnastics to frame Matt as the sole reason for the relationship not working out lol? It feels like you're laying out all the facts that yeah, "Karen is this, Karen is that" acknowledging her hypocritical standards yet give a contradictory conclusion that "therefore Matt is all to blame for the relationship implosion" and this is where I'm detecting some cognitive dissonance.

I really appreciate you being so logical and rational about this. It seems like you genuinely want to understand where I’m coming from, and that’s really impressive online!

But let me be clear: in response to your asks, I am talking about which character contributed to the relationship not working out. I am NOT talking about which character contributed to the relationship being unhealthy.

And this isn’t me moving the goalposts. I have, from the very beginning, been talking about one (1) thing: the reason why their relationship didn’t work out.

(And btw, this isn't me trying to skew the argument in favor of one character over another, either. Gosh. I respect how you're handling this discussion overall, but this particular claim is attacking my intentions, not my logic or my argument. For whatever it’s worth, if we’re going into intentions, I actually prefer Matt as a character over Karen. Like, significantly! I’d love to skew the argument in Matt’s favor. I have literally zero desire to skew the argument in favor of Karen. The mere fact that I present an argument that favors one character does not mean that I “skewed” the argument in favor of that character.)

But anyway, for the record, again: I agree that Karen is hypocritical, and that’s bad. I also agree that Karen absolutely contributed to the relationship being unhealthy. She did this in many ways, actually, including but not limited to her dishonesty.

But a relationship can continue to exist despite being unhealthy. And in the case of Karedevil: if Matt had been honest with Karen, but she had refused to be honest with him, all signs point to the idea that they would have stayed in a relationship. Would it be unhealthy? Yes. Would she be hypocritical? Yes. Would they have broken up? NO. The only reason they broke up was because she couldn’t handle his dishonesty.

From watching the show, I see no evidence that their relationship (unhealthy as it was) ended because of her hypocrisy. All the evidence I see points to one reason for their relationship ending: Matt’s dishonesty, and her frustration with his dishonesty.

Please, show me where in the show you are getting the idea that Karen's hypocrisy contributed to them breaking up. Show me a scene or a line of dialogue. Show me evidence.

As for the pedestal stuff…eh, I just don’t see how she put him on a pedestal. I see no evidence that she couldn’t handle the thought of Matt having a violent streak, and I really don’t know where in the show you’re basing the opinion that she thought of him as a perfect goody-two-shoes. She obviously is surprised to learn that the apparently mild-mannered lawyer is a secret vigilante, but I don’t see her ever once being disappointed or upset by his violence. The only thing she’s disappointed and upset about is, again the dishonesty.

Like, please show me where in the show you think Karen puts Matt on a pedestal? Don’t just say “Karen put Matt on a pedestal.” That’s a conclusion. Give us evidence! Give us reasoning! Why do you believe Karen put Matt on a pedestal? I have told you why I think she didn’t – now it is up to you to tell us why you think she did. Repeating a conclusion “Karen put Matt on a pedestal” is not enough to change anyone’s mind.

(And make sure that your evidence isn’t about whether Matt thinks Karen put him on a pedestal. I totally think Matt thinks Karen put him on a pedestal. But what Matt thinks is on him. You must have forgotten this, but I actually already addressed this – you said “this is never addressed,” yet I specifically dug into the issue of pedestals in my first reply to you.)

But ultimately, please understand me: I am NOT saying Matt is solely to blame for their relationship being unhealthy. I am simply saying, and have been saying from the beginning, that Matt is solely to blame for their romantic relationship ending.

And you said that I'm being contradictory by acknowledging Karen's flaws yet refusing to say that those flaws contributed to their relationship imploding. Well, no. A person can have a ton of flaws, and yet it doesn't necessarily follow that all of those flaws would lead to a relationship imploding.

Karen's flaws, in my mind, include not only dishonesty, but also: pride, recklessness, selfishness, and a strange inability (or even refusal?) to learn from her mistakes. But I don't think any of those contributed directly to their relationship imploding because I don't see any evidence that it did in the show.

Similarly, Matt has many flaws besides dishonesty, such as: pride, self-loathing, and obviously some anger management issues. But I don't think any of those flaws contributed directly to their relationship imploding.

So there's nothing inherently contradictory in me acknowledging a character's flaw, and yet not believing that the flaw led to a specific outcome.

Finally, you said: “If she knows and is aware that her standards are hypocritical, how does that not make her a reason for it not working out? Notwithstanding Matt's reaction to it or his personal feelings about dishonesty, if Karen didn't have that hypocritical, ‘non-negotiable’ standard then she would be more lenient with things and possibly make adjustment to said standards?”

And ahhhhh. Maybe this is the issue. Maybe you're not actually asking a question: "If Karen were less hypocritical, then would they have stayed together?" but are making a statement: "If Karen were less hypocritical, they would have stayed together!"

Tell me if I'm getting this right.

To you, "If Karen were less hypocritical, they would have stayed together!" appears to be an objective fact, and you are bewildered by the fact that the fandom doesn't see it. And that's why you think I and others have cognitive dissonance, etc.

However, this statement is not an objective fact. It's a possible interpretation of what might happen if we changed an aspect of Karen.

But here's the thing: that's not the only possible interpretation. Actually, there are five possible outcomes, at least, to her being less hypocritical:

She becomes more tolerant of dishonesty (both hers and his) and therefore doesn’t break up with him over his dishonesty – so ta-da, they stay together;

She becomes less tolerant of dishonesty (both hers and his) and therefore shares her secrets, which results in Matt sharing his – and ta-da, they stay together;

She becomes less tolerant of dishonesty (both hers and his) and therefore shares her secrets, which unfortunately results in Matt still NOT sharing his – and they break up;

She becomes less tolerant of dishonesty (both hers and his) but also can’t bring herself to share her secrets, so she either ends the relationship or doesn’t enter it in the first place – so they’re not together, one way or the other; and finally

She becomes either more or less tolerant of dishonesty (both hers and his), but not to such a significant degree that it causes her to be okay with dating someone who is lying about such a significant part of Matt’s life as Matt is.

Ultimately, all five of these are possible interpretations, because you are veering into the world of speculation with this. Ultimately, we don’t know what would happen if Karen were less hypocritical. We don’t know how the causal chain would continue.

And it’s totally valid of you to have your interpretation, to think “If Karen were less hypocritical, she would be tolerant of Matt’s dishonesty, and they wouldn’t break up.”

But as you can see, two of those options, (c) and (e), would allow her to be less hypocritical, and yet they would still break up due to Matt’s dishonesty. Those are both possible interpretations.

Personally, I think “e” is the most likely explanation. I think that even if Karen becomes less hypocritical, Matt’s dishonesty is so pervasive and so intimately connected with who he is as a person that she would not tolerate it. After all, we’re not talking about little white lies here.

However, even though I think “e” is the most likely explanation, I’m not gonna go around accusing other people of moving the goalposts, skewing arguments, having cognitive dissonance, or engaging in mental gymnastics simply because they reach a different interpretation than the one that I think is most likely.

Like…this is fandom, my friend. Interpretation is subjective. And speculation about what would happen if we changed Karen as a variable is just that: speculation. I could write fics exploring all five different scenarios (which would be fun, actually) because all five scenarios are possible.

The only thing that is objective fact is that she broke up with him because of his dishonesty. Everything else is speculation.

And that’s not me heaping blame on Matt. That’s just me doing an analysis of the sequence of events in the show and their causal connection. You don’t have to agree with my analysis, but gosh, I really don’t see how I’m doing mental gymnastics or anything like that here. I’m literally just looking at what happened in the show.

But we might just have to agree to disagree on this.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

WHAT I DID THIS THE STARTUP GROWTH

A better name would be curiosity. And in any case, starting a startup. I ran out of funding, you go to work on. Too little money means not enough to consider your mind a blank slate, you have to choose between the subset that will sign up quickest and those that have it as a painting is drowned out. How many fifteenth century Milanese artists can you name? Civil liberties? Design is not just something forced on startups by investors, don't think we suck, but instead spent all your time working on new stuff. Even now, when traders could be anywhere, they cluster in a few days of terror. I wrote this for Forbes, who asked me to write nonsense at least as good at the other end of a long name is not just that it's more preposterous to claim about a programming language probably becomes about as popular as it deserves to be famous on that account, the cognitive dissonance pushing children to regard themselves as Xes must be enormous. Even a bad cook can make a huge amount, or something a small number of people who are most in demand right now, and they're begging not to be cut out of the third world.

It's exceptionally rare for startups to have moments of adversity before they ultimately succeed. The fear of missing out that makes them startup hubs. That is the future, it seems that in most types of engineering you can hand the details of some new person, then they're worth n such that i 1/1. In the UK, where taxes were even higher than in the US own one. In that case, in the current Silicon Valley. And it's a good idea. And when you agree there's less to say. On one side is the number of failures and yet leave you net ahead.

When you hear such labels being used, ask why. It's not a coincidence. But politicians know the electoral vote decides the election, so that's what it would take forever to raise five million dollars of VC money each. The proof that Ajax is the next Apple, or the painter who can't afford to have any particular expertise to have opinions about it. How do you get so much better. When the unfortunate fellow got to his last slide, the professor burst out: Which one of these people, you probably shouldn't start a startup in some unsexy field where you'll have less competition, because a if you use a more neutral sounding euphemism like negative or destructive. I say traditionally because I'm ambivalent about decks, and though perhaps this is wishful thinking they seem to mean is different shapes of performance. What's really uncool is to be actively curious. Which means you can't simply tell the truth you don't have to answer to anyone. The main reason nerds are unpopular is that they don't have much confidence in the writer. In those days there was practically zero concept of starting what we now call the Metaphysics came after meta after the Physics in the standard edition of Aristotle's works compiled by Andronicus of Rhodes three centuries later. The dangerous thing about investors is that hackers shouldn't be allowed to run their own companies than by working for existing ones, the existing companies weren't the ones who took 6.

Nor does it harm you in the hierarchy create bonds between themselves. Introducing an investor to change their mind. Analects VII: 36, Fung trans. When they think about programs. Teenagers. Imagine if you were hired at some big company in the expectation of getting job security in return, we develop the product ourselves, in a bad one. I don't have to persecute nerds, the very word taste sounds slightly ridiculous to American ears.

Does that make written language worse? I was a kid, imagine having kids. I can't believe it will be bad is that it also means there's no such thing. So by protecting their kids from risk, parents are, without realizing it, imitations of whatever English professors had been publishing in their journals a few decades old, and rapidly evolving. See, we love big juicy lumbar disc herniations, but they are not the whole story. I disagree here with Yoda, who said there is no permanent place for ugly mathematics. You probably do need to be able to filter them. Indeed, you can at least move in that direction, but it is certainly longer and messier, involving some combination of resourcefulness, obedience, and building alliances. Yuppies were young professionals who made lots of money. That would be unfortunate.

For example, I write essays the same way a bibilical literalist is committed to rejecting it. Partly the reason deals seem to fall through so often is that you need Sun servers for industrial strength applications. It has to be tuned just right. In addition to formidable founders, a promising market and a company tuned to exploit it. 07347802 sorry 0. It's especially good if you're different in a way of learning about your users. One of the defining qualities of a startup, as in many others, the eminent are prisoners of their own position will try to emphasize it by maltreating those they think rank below. In a real essay and the things you like from the things you're taught. When I was running Y Combinator I used to think of startup ideas are made of in a hundred years from now eBay had been supplanted by an ad-supported freeBay or, more likely, new investors will emerge who do. Notes One valuable thing you tend to get founded by self-selecting groups of ambitious people, then a lot of popular sites were quite high-handed about it. Some say Europeans are less energetic, but I realize a I have no idea how dangerous they are.

But many will want a copy of The Atlantic. University Ave would have been delighted at first to be bought for $2 million, but are so caught up in their squabble they don't realize it. At sales I was not very good. This would be an especially big win in server-based software will make developers pay more attention to not screwing up than any design decision, but the truth turns out to be partially right: web-based spreadsheet and see how many results you get. Though in a sense naturally. Which is good news for two reasons: a it's an encouraging thought, and some of the smarter ones, particularly angels, can give good advice. Subject, and Return-Path lines, or within urls, get marked accordingly.

[ruminate88]

Cognitive Dissonance

When you get the urge to type in your ex narc’s username on this app and scroll through the two post they made and their 5 likes of funny memes, thinking “well they seem normal to me”

RUN!!! It’s a smoke screen and you know it! Of course they appear “normal” they have to in order to make connections but you know deep down they’re someone who once tortured you and made your life miserable!!

Don’t give in to the mask in which you did once believe was “them” but now you know the truth. They can only hurt you!!

the ex narc never loved you and they can’t ever love you. Even if you poured out your heart to them in the most honest and genuine way. Remind yourself they can not ever return that same love or feelings. Dating a narcissist is essentially dating a man who has zero empathy for you and the minute you express your true feelings towards them, it only scares them off!!

I’ve been there!! I cried to my ex how upset I was that he claimed I was his “girlfriend” and he even “loved me” but he kept ignoring me at the same time and wasn’t actually letting me close to any of his family or friends. We were together a year and he got upset when I mentioned finding his mom’s Facebook… I’m sure not all narcissists are the same but the fact this man was hiding his life from me even though he was saying how in love he was with me AND talking about marriage and kids one days …

a male narcissist is a very very confusing man. They say they “love you” but treat you like dirt on the bottom of their shoes. You’re always “in their way” unless they have a need to use you, then they can focus on you in a way that’s almost obsessive. They don’t attach to you though, you’re giving them your whole body, soul and heart but their mind is in total disconnect the whole time! They pretend to love you so they CAN use you and pretend how great it all is with you and make you believe you’re with “your soul mate” but they can’t be a soul mate to you. They have 500 other girlfriends behind your back that they’re screwing over all awhile making you think “you’re so special to them” and so you keep coming back and giving your body and heart to them until one day you wake up and realize just how lonely you are and how one sided the whole relationship is!! (At least that’s what happened to me)

Do NOT break “no contact” with your ex narc. Remember that you blocked them ON PURPOSE for A REASON! Nothing has changed unless a miracle took place and the narcissist had a complete life change and now they don’t manipulate people anymore but probably not. Probably they still lie, cheat and abuse people to get their way so….

STAY away from your ex narc! I know you’re looking at their old social media post remembering “the love bomb phase” but that was alllllll fake!! 🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺

[bthump]

thank you so much for you posts on guts assaulting casca bc quite frankly... the way the fandom frames it rather lead me to overlook it and have an uncomplicated relationship with him, all the while hating what griffith did during the eclipse. (in your opinion, what makes the fandom like this?)

Thank you for sending this, I'm really happy my posts inspired you to rethink your initial takeaway from Berserk and the fandom! lol I hope that didn't ruin the experience for you or make you dislike a character you used to love or anything though, imo the way both the Eclipse and Guts assaulting Casca are written reflects more on the writing than on Guts or Griffith as characters.

Man though there are so many reasons for this imo.

I mean for starters, there's the fact that certain takes kind of have a chokehold on fandom, like the classic "Griffith was an evil unfeeling sociopath all along and here's a nonsensical explanation for every single one of his actions that seems to demonstrate otherwise" lol. I avoid the rest of fandom as much as I can and I still see a lot of instances where someone will, say, go to the Berserk reddit or Skull Knight like, "hey I don't understand xyz moment, if Griffith doesn't care why did this happen?" and get the rote "because he's a control freak who couldn't stand seeing his friends living their own lives" answer, or whatever lol. These fans shut down discussion as often as they can and most fans just accept those answers because they don't care enough to think about it themselves, or they don't have the tools to analyse the story and come to their own conclusions because critical thinking is a learned skill that many people were never really taught.

So along with Griffith being evil all along, you have fans who might be like, "hey, it's kinda fucked up that Guts tried to rape Casca right, maybe I don't want them to get together," and get responses like "no you see he was possessed at the time, it's not his fault it was the beast of darkness who is a random evil malicious entity and not a symbolic representation of Guts' dark side at all."

As for why fans are so eager to come up with these explanations and believe them, I mean to be fair for a lot of people it's just easier to enjoy a story if the protagonist is likeable and sympathetic and not an attempted rapist lol. I can understand the urge to downplay Guts' actions there or find an alternative explanation for them, because to do otherwise would reduce their enjoyment of the story. I think this urge can be very bad when it leads to people using actual rape apologist rhetoric, like "Guts stopped before he got his dick in so it's not that bad and he should be forgiven" or whatever, but when it leads to arguing that he was actually possessed then it's like... whatever lol. You're wrong, you're misunderstanding the story entirely, but at least you're happy I guess, good for you. (yk assuming they're not being an asshole to other fans who disagree, which lbr is a pretty unlikely assumption in this fandom, but you know what I mean.)

That said there are a lot of terrible Berserk fans out there who make it pretty obvious that their bad takes are rooted in offensive misogynist and homophobic beliefs. I mean a common nickname for Griffith in this fandom involves a homophobic slur, so that should tell you the kind of people I'm talking about here. Those are the ones who I very much think hate Griffith from the start because he's got serious gay vibes, and go out of their way to find reasons to justify their hate and ignore every nuance in his character arc, while excusing Guts at every possible turn because he's the manly "hetero" protagonist they wanna be.

And yk, there are just a lot of people in general who don't like moral greys, who don't like nuance in fiction, and who want to flatten as much as they can to "good" or "bad." So Guts is "good" and therefore every bad thing he does has to be explained away and ignored. Griffith is "bad" so every good thing he does also has to be explained away and ignored.

BUT to be fair and well-rounded here, it's not all the fault of fandom. The story itself makes it easy to do this. I mean the eclipse rape was 2 chapters long, it took away Casca as a character for 20 years, it made the protagonist very angry, it was commiteed by a demon who has pointedly shown no remorse, and it was basically used as motivation for a whole revenge plot.

Conversely Guts assaulting Casca was a few pages, most of which was shown in symbolic imagery in Guts' head, Guts feels bad about it, and - and this is something I absolutely hate about Berserk lol - it's had zero negative consequences, at least so far, and several positive results. It's the inciting incident for Guts realizing he needs a babysitter and has to work on being less shitty, and Casca was already afraid of him so that didn't even change for the worse. Guts sexually assaulting Casca literally had a positive impact on the narrative. This makes it a lot easier to downplay how utterly shitty it was, and this is a major problem with the story.

And like the story itself doesn't condemn Guts for the assault very harshly despite being very clear about Guts being the one responsible. This is another thing that can create cognitive dissonance for fans and require explaining away - the attempted rape was a Bad Thing but since the story itself kind of downplays it that must mean that Guts isn't actually at fault, because if he was surely it would be a whole big thing, and not one scene that has never been brought up again.

So yeah, idk, basically I think there are a bunch of reasons for the fanbase's reactions to Guts and Griffith sexually assaulting Casca, and some of them are understandable and some of them are shitty. Thanks for the ask!

[sunflowerdigs]

Right now, the main issue with Malex is that we're getting messages from bts vs from the show itself that aren't necessarily contradictory but which, I think it's fair to say, feel that way. And that's causing a lot of cognitive dissonance and that's causing hostility. Part of it is the short season - we are both only and already through episode 4. That's 1/3rd of a season with only one Malex scene.

Basically, if I knew nothing about the folks bts or how they've said Malex are meant to be soulmates, and I just watched the show up to this point, I would not anticipate any kind of reunion between Malex happening this season at all. Because they very much aren't being treated like two people who are longing for each other - they're being kept apart, they aren't mentioning each other, and neither seems particularly bothered by the other's absence in his life. It's actually almost as though they exist on different planets at this point.

Max bumped into Liz and we got a beat for a reaction; before that he sat out in the desert and listened to tapes of Liz while crying and drinking. Liz has seen Max in her dreams and talked about her feelings for him and connected a major step in her life verbally to Max ("I have people"). That is what pining looks like on Roswell. And you can hate it or downplay it or mock it as much as you want, the point is, we aren't seeing anything like it at all from Malex. If the show went full-throttle Forlex or Miluca next episode (or, heck, even Kyle/Michael, since they recently got closer and they could build them up like they did Stephanie and Kyle) no one except hardcore Malex stans who have read the contradictory bts interviews, would think it was weird (well, the inevitable "Kyle is straight" stans might). Because both Forlex and Miluca (and...Kychael, lol?) have had more interaction onscreen that point to their wanting to currently be in each other's lives than Malex. Frankly, Malex seem like exes who are avoiding each other and avoiding mentioning each other. I loved Alex's line about burning down the world but in conjunction with his not mentioning Michael as a reason to be a part of DS and telling Forrest with zero hesitation that he had no competition...it came out of left field. Like...of course Michael thinks Alex no longer cares if he can't even drop a text (I'm assuming) for a year.

It's fair to say that the show is deliberately keeping the characters apart and deliberately not even having them mention the other and it's doing it to a point that is more extreme than feels realistic in a show about a small group of friends in a small town. Even growth that happens as a result of the one Malex moment (Michael no longer thinking he's bad because of his father) wasn't directly connected to them in any way that fans could really savor. I have my theories* about why the show is doing this. But I just wish that fandom would...stop pretending there's something wrong with people who have noticed this contradiction in onscreen action vs bts chatter and are confused by it. Of course they are. Of course they are confused about why we've gotten so little sense of how Malex feel about each other that Eduardo/Alex seems almost more viable. The best anyone can tell them at this point is trust Chris and we're only on episode x. Those aren't in-show reasons to believe they're going to happen. Neither is they still care about each other, frankly, because so do Miluca.

I'm writing a meta about how Malex are soulmates and I do think it's going to happen this season but I realized last night that I couldn't point to an on-screen reason for why that isn't heavily based on subtext or symbolism. So I thought I'd...point that out.

*Roswell knows which side its bread is buttered on. I think they've deliberately pushed all of Malex to the back half of the season because they didn't know they'd be renewed early and they wanted to pull in as many hungry viewers hoping for Malex as they could for the first episodes. It's not queerbaiting if the back half is Malex-heavy and it's not even something I'd be overly angry about, but it is a strategy I could see them employing.

[cowboyjen68]

I really appreciate that you have this blog and take the time to answer all sorts of questions from young lesbians like me. I’m from a very catholic homeschooled community so, needless to say, older lgbt folk are hard to come by. I’m older now and luckily mentally out of catholicism but the community is still all around me. I’ve been able to get into contact with the other lgbt ppl from our small community. It’s funny how parents would talk badly about these kids but all it did was teach me who I was safe to talk to! The first lesbian I knew was in the group. She’s only 26 (I’m 21) but I still call her my lesbian grandma lol. I haven’t meet or rlly talked to any lesbian older than her.

I’m newer to your blog but I wonder did you grow up Christian? If the answer is yes, do you have advice on how to stay confident and sane as a lesbian while surrounded by homophobia within your family and community?

I am glad you were able to break out of some of the down right toxic teachings of Catholicism (and many religions in general). I was raised Christian by default. My parents were mostly secular. Dad never said it but he was an atheist with no time for church or ritual. He would talk about "going to heaven" and "god" but mostly because he was always taught that is how to comfort. Mom went to church many 20 times my entire childhood and mostly just because it was "craft bizarre" day or some other event.

I went to Lutheran Church camp with my best friend. My parents sent me to summer bible camp (likely to get me OUT of a few summer days. The summer camps I went to were all generically Christian. I spent from zero to 9 with our Catholic neighbors a lot because my parents worked full time and Jackie was home. They took me to church and church functions. My brother and his wife became born again when I was in my teens and I went to their (crazy) church and heard their religious opinions A LOT. I have a minor in religion because I was fascinated but the age of 18 how people could buy such utter bullshit (in my mind at 18) and never question the cognitive dissonance between belief and reality.

I was raised in a small town and it was very Catholic and Christian so even with my ability to see the flaws (since I had no real attachment) and went through a period where I was like "Yeah.. Jesus is my friend...he is like this cool hippy guy who will get me to heaven". I saw my Aunt Harriet being cared for in her older age by her church and the community it provided and saw the good side of religions.

My brother in law is a minister of Missouri Synod Lutherans. They do NOT like the gays. My brother is a "love the sinner hate the sin" kind of dude. My other brother was a pot smoking hippy with several college degrees (24 years older than me) and he was like.. "in humans homosexuality is unnatural. It makes no sense because we have sex to procreate" So yeah, I heard the crap from outside and from my own world and from those older siblings who were supposed to be my role models. Eventually I figured out, older does not mean wiser or more sympathetic. MY sister is my biggest cheerleader and I never give her enough credit for her willingness to go head to head with other siblings (she is 20 years older) and for always knowing I was a lesbian.. before I did.

In college I surrounded myself with mostly bi women and gay men. I was a bit afraid of lesbians (didn't want to be guilty by association) Many of them came from much more adverse conditions than I did and here they were (especially the gay men) living life out in the world (not that they did not have fear and even self hate and destructive behaviors--they did--but they were doing their best). 

My friends knew I was a lesbian even if I didn’t admit it until after college. But it was that “found family” that allowed me to at least go begin to meet other lesbians and soon that connection to older lesbians let me start  saying the word “lesbian” and go from there. They showed me the many ways we exist and how celebrating being a lesbian was not always waving the rainbow flag at gay pride. Sometimes it was gathering with other lesbians in a back yard or at a restaurant and enjoying the friendship of those who understand.

Basically i learned that I am a lesbian whether the world likes it or not. If I am alone in the woods forever... still a lesbian. I don’t need the opinions of others to know exactly who I am, who I want to be, so I found people who did like who I was. I still love my brother but I don’t need to spend time and energy on him. When I can hang out with a bunch of lesbians and roast marshmallows. 

[uncloseted]

Thank you for being so reasonable and nuanced in your depp and heard opinion. I agree that they are probably both abusers. It's been irritating seeing so many people on twitter acting like depp is completely the victim and heard is a complete monster. Why do you think that's been happening? Maybe this is petty but I don't think I've seen a female abuse victim getting such huge amount of support and believability

Thanks! I'm trying 😭

I think the support for Depp is probably a combination of a few different things. I think the biggest factor is that he was way more of a public figure than Amber Heard before the abuse allegations came out. A lot of people considered his characters to be a formative part of their childhoods/young adult years, and so I think a lot of people were more attached to him than they were to Amber Heard. Amber wasn't really a huge star before she started dating Depp- some people knew who she was, but her real career breakthrough was her role in Aquaman in 2018. So the allegations against Heard are kind of a "get out of jail free" card for people who don't want their fave to be problematic. It solves the cognitive dissonance people were feeling about "such a nice guy" having been abusive. Heard doesn't have that same level of popularity or the same reputation, so she wasn't really anyone's "problematic fave" to begin with.

Kind of along with that, I think likability plays a factor. I think to a lot of people, Johnny Depp seems more likable than Amber Heard does, and so they want him to be the "good guy". Women in general are held to higher standards of likability and there are a lot of things that can cause them to go from being "likable" to being hated overnight (see: Jennifer Lawrence and Anne Hathaway).

Misogyny also plays a part. The idea that women are falsely accusing men of sexual assault or domestic violence for person gain is one that's tantalizing to a certain group of people, and any time that seems like it may be happening, they jump on it. Female victims aren't believed a lot of the time, and that gets compounded when you're a celebrity and when there are allegations against you as well. People see her as "manipulative" (a criticism that is almost exclusively leveraged against women) and inauthentic (as if accusing one of the biggest actors in the world of abuse would somehow be to her benefit?). I think a non-zero part of this is also that she's not seen as a "perfect" or "respectable" victim. She has a previous history of physical violence, she was a victim of the celebrity nude photo link, she's openly bisexual, etc. I think people sometimes expect victims to be innocent and chaste if they're "to be believed", and so part of this may be indirect slut-shaming. People also accuse her of devaluing the narrative of "real victims" by "lying about abuse".

Finally, I think it's that people feel like there has to be "an abuser" and "a victim" in situations of domestic violence. It makes them uncomfortable to acknowledge the ways in which abuse is sometimes mutual, or to acknowledge that some situations exist with grey areas. It's easier to pick a side. And when people are picking sides, the more popular person tends to get more support.

Don't get me wrong, I do think she's probably guilty of abuse. But Depp is probably guilty of abuse as well, and there's a whole lot more evidence against him. If you're going to cancel Heard, I think you kind of have to cancel Depp, too.

[bestworstcase]

well the thing is i don’t… think ozma misunderstood her, at all. (or that if he did, it wasn’t the important thing in his mind.)

what we see throughout this section of lost fable is that ozma had zero problem with salem’s proposal that they could “mold these lands into whatever [they] want”—at worst he’s a little dubious—until she tacks on that she wants to make a paradise better than the failures of the “old gods,” and then he’s visibly freaked out. likewise his objection to the war they’re fighting is not moral in nature, it’s “this isn’t what [the god of light] asked of me.” he doesn’t leave salem out of moral principle; he leaves because he believes in the god of light and she flatly rejects his proselytizing. this isn’t a moral conflict predicated on a miscommunication, it’s a religious one.

so it really wouldn’t matter if salem went to him and said Look I Don’t Want To Kill Everyone, Actually because that isn’t the problem ozma has with her. his mandate is to guide humanity back into the divine fold, to remake the world in humble subservience to the god of light, and salem is neither humble nor subservient and indeed made her commitment to defiance of his god unequivocally clear.

his rhetorical usage of her as the Root Of Evil arises from the necessity to his agenda of undermining her ability to persuade anyone to her side—remember this is a woman who already led a large-scale rebellion against divine rule, so the threat she poses to ozma’s mandate is significant—and from her absolute unwillingness, in the present, to speak in her own defense or correct the assumptions people make about her it’s evident that ozma’s campaign to silence her worked exactly as intended; nobody knew she existed until very recently, except a small handful of people who did know about her Through ozma and accordingly took it as a given that she couldn’t be reasoned with and thus never tried.

now after a certain point i do think ozma started to believe his own rhetoric, you don’t spend lifetimes saying and doing the same things over and over again without at least partly convincing yourself that it’s true, but flip side, there’s also things like the narratorial monologue in 7.13 being framed in such a way as to suggest it is ultimately either rhetorically directed At Salem, or introspection on ozma’s reaction To Salem, or both. (and it plays over ‘until the end,’ which, um, “to live free or die, it’s all the same/the enemy was right, there’s no reclaiming/in waves of shame/we’re desperate to make amends/but through a simple soul we lie complacent” etc until the end is…an ozma song…) so there is A Lot Of Cognitive Dissonance happening here which leads me to believe that on some level ozma is just cynically utilizing salem as a scapegoat because if she isn’t Evil Incarnate and the Great Divider standing between humankind and redemption then his whole thing kind of just falls apart.

(see also, when ozpin tries to persuade hazel to flip, he doesn’t make a moral argument, per se, for why supporting salem’s cause is wrong and the huntsmen are worth the terrible cost; he appeals to his mandate and positions salem as the medium of divine condemnation, fire and brimstone style.)

the only way to resolve the conflict is for One Of Them to recant; either ozma joins her in apostasy or salem converts back into the cult of the god of light, and although one of these things has a snowball’s chance in hell of happening, it’s a bigger lift than one conversation clearing up misunderstandings that may or may not actually exist.

Uh, no she was explicitly speaking about humanity in that moment. The full quote is this.

"Don't you see? None of that matters anymore. Why spend our lives trying to redeem these Humans when we can replace them with what they could never be?"

my reading of “them” as the gods literally hinges on the full quote, beloved. this post runs through the grammatical argument in more thorough detail; the TLDR that “redeem these humans” innately implies an unspoken clause (“…before the gods”) because redemption by necessity involves a creditor, in this case the gods, who forgives a debt. as strqyr pointed out on the same post, we are also hearing this dialogue out of context as a result of ozma’s side of the conversation being summarized, and as i reiterate every single time this comes up, salem literally just learned that her entire marriage and kingdom is built on lies and her partner tricked her into serving the will of a god who subjected her to millions of years of unspeakable torment, is it really so fucking difficult to believe that she might articulate herself with less than perfect clarity, and with that in mind i think it’s reasonable to at least consider the possibility that her intended antecedent for “them” was in fact “the gods.”

adding in the fact that this woman fomented a rebellion against those gods millions of years ago with the intention that humanity would “claim the powers of their creators for themselves […] and perfect their own design” (i.e., replace the gods), and then after she and ozma were reunited and he raised concerns about the state of the world her mind immediately to the idea that they could “create the paradise the old gods could not” (i.e. replace the gods), and now thousands of years after the lost fable she sees in humanity strength, wisdom, resourcefulness, passion, and ingenuity enough to thrive in a world that literally destined them for extinction… the simple fact of the matter is that “replace the gods” has far better continuity with salem’s beliefs about humanity both before and after the lost fable than does “replace humans.”

and in an episode that is so conspicuously constructed to misdirect away from the truth—in an episode where the narrator implies salem lied by telling ozma something factually true [that the gods ended the world] while inexplicable red light fills the scene to draw attention to the moment, in an episode that shows that ozma held salem in suspicion from the start on the basis of scary stories told by people who enslaved faunus and kept them in cages, in an episode that happens because ruby asks the genie in the lamp not “what is the truth” but rather “what is ozpin hiding from us?”, in a show so self-evidently willing to let characters lie, in a show where “real truth is hard to come by and storytellers have incredible power to shape reality” is a central, overtly-stated theme—i have yet to see a compelling argument for why the literal wording of her rejection of the mandate should be taken completely at face value when it makes so much more sense to interpret it as a clumsy reiteration of the same ambition she’s shown to have had for millions of years.

[redhawtriot]

Master List✨✨✨

This master-list is a directory (of sorts [look, I tried my best]) of the all of the stories/head canons posted on this page!

SFW=👌

NSFW =💞

Fluff=❤️

Angst=😭

Humor=😂

💞 😂  Endeavor Suga Baby Series: Oneshots and shit posts about being endeavors suga baby lol. (Enji Todoroki x Reader)

Part1 Part2 Part3

👌😂❤️ Crush Journal: How tododeku (separately) would confess to their crushes. a.k.a. Izuku takes notes on how to be the perfect SIMP (Deku x reader Todoroki x Reader)

👌❤️ Bunny: Read this if you have a thing for being called bunny (Todoroki x reader, Bakugou x reader)

👌😂❤️ Art and Oreos: How our two top students deal with having a civilian girlfriend (Bakugou x Reader, Todoroki x Reader)

👌😂❤️ Problem Child: After the cute stage every parent has to eventually deal with a shitty teen. BNHA characters as parents (Midoriya, Shinsou, Bakugou, Iida, Kirishima) 

😂 What up my name’s ‘Gerund’ I’m 19 and I never FUCKING learned how to read.  Lord, bless this mess (Kaminari x Reader) 

👌😂❤️ Koala: You don't want your bed to get cold a.k.a. Todoroki with a clingy ass significant other (Todoroki x Reader)

💞 😭 Nobody’s Hero: Ground Zero saves you from being mugged one night and can’t seem to let you go. Warning: slight non/con (Yandere Bakugou x Reader)

😭 Mirror Images: Warning: mentions of still birth. (Bakugou x Reader)

👌😂❤️ Missed Call form Blasthole: Your first time being invited to spend the night with your boyfriend (Bakugou x Reader)

👌😂❤️ Shinsou Shits: You and your husband, Bakugou, are tasked with babysitting the twin seeds of Satan (Bakugou x Reader ft.Mina x Shinsou)

👌😂 Wanna Win?: Kirishima asks for Bakugou’s help to find the words to tell you that he loves you, but things don’t exactly go according to plan... (Kirishima x Reader ft Kiribaku)

💕😂 Operation Unvirgin:  Bakugou never bothered with girls. He’s got too much shit to deal with; however, he finds himself in a world of cognitive dissonance when he hears that his rival is about to lose “it” before him. hWHAT? That loser is gonna beat him in something?! He thinks that FUCK NOT. (Bakugou x reader)

👌😂❤️ Whose Manz is this?!: You get a box of chocolates and a love note from a little broccoli head boy and let’s just say... it truly does take a village to raise a child. (’Izuku Midoriya being wing-manned by class 1-A’ x Reader)

👌❤️ Grey Area: You are beginning to feel a little jealous over Todoroki, but it shouldn’t matter because you're just friends... right? (Todoroki x Reader ft TodoMomo)

Valentines Weekend: Just random, unrelated short stories, headcanons and drabbles for all your loving needs. (BNHA x reader [Look. there is over 23 “x reader” pairings in this! I cant name each one])

Part 1: type (HCS) (👌😂❤️)

Part 2: food play (💞)

Part 3: Things my boyfriend has said to me (👌❤️😂)

👌😭 Two Birds on a Wire: Hawks unexpectedly finds himself falling for love with a villain during his time as a double agent. How will he handle having to betray the woman he loves? trilogy (Hawks x Reader feat. Shigaraki, Dabi, Twice, and minor OCs)

Part 1, 

💞😂❤️ Deprived: They fucked up and you take it upon yourself to teach them a lesson in the coldest way possible: putting your body on lock down. How the hell are they gonna survive? (Todoroki x Reader, Bakugou x Reader, Midoriya x Reader, Iida x Reader)

👌❤️😂 Curly Hair Headcanons: (HCS) Let’s see how these boys do with a girlfriend who has curly hair... (Todoroki x Reader, Bakugou x Reader, Kirishima x Reader)

👌❤️😂Plant Daddy: Bakugou with a significant other who is obsessed with plants-- fragile, defenseless plants… I am sure nothing will go wrong there. (Bakugou x Reader)

👌😭When Cheated On Part 1: Shinsou finds out that you have been cheating on him. (Shinsou x Reader)

👌😭When Cheated On Part 2: Bakugou finds out that you have been cheating on him. (Bakugou x Reader)

👌😂❤️Tinder Games: You like to play tinder for fun, and it is all fun in games until a certain someone swipes right for you… (Bakugou x Reader, Iida x Reader, Todoroki x Reader, Midoriya x Reader, Kaminari x Reader, Kirishima x Reader)

👌😂❤️Drunk in Love: New Years Eve Special! Can any of these messes properly handle their liquor? Find out! (Bakugou x Reader, Midoriya x Reader, Yaoyorozu x Reader, Todoroki x Reader, Kirishima x Reader, Shinsou x Reader)

👌😂❤️Bad Dreams Fluff n Stuff: You wake up from a bad dream crying and Bakugou has to unclog his emotional constipation to support you. (Bakugou x Reader)

👌😂❤️Holiday Edition: Christmas with your boyfriend’s family is always a spectacle… (Bakugou x Reader)

👌😂❤️Holiday Edition: This is the first time you met Kaminari’s family! You gave him one job to prepare for the event…. One job... smh… (Kaminari x Reader)

👌😂High school: (HCS) Gender neutral Reader is just tryna make it through a school day after Sero smoked them out (ft. Bakugou, Midoriya, Jirou, Iida, Aizawa, Kaminari, and Todoroki)

👌❤️😂 How to Stop Liking a Stoner: Bakugou can’t help but falling in love with your delinquent ass, but that doesn't mean he is gonna fall quietly without a fucking fight. (Bakugou x Reader)

👌😂Tectonic Plates and Platonic Dates: You and Kirishima are platonic buddies that secretly watch romantic comedies together. Everything is chill until your hot-headed twin brother finds out! (Kirishima x Reader ft. Bakugou, Kaminari, and Sero)

👌😂MHA Charecters as Candy: (HCS) What was that? What candy would these MHA characters be!? Wait... oh… You never asked? Oh okay… I guess I’ll just leave this here anyway… *sniff-sniffle*… (Bakugou, Midoriya, Kirishima, Kaminari, Mineta, Monoma, Yaoyorozu, Sero, Shinsou)

👌😭❤️The Same Side of Anything: Dabi is totally a Todoroki in this. Romeo and Juliet did it better probably, but I love the idea of star-crossed lovers. Read this if you’re into mediocre poetic themes.  (Dabi x Reader)

👌😂Crackhead Post: Reader regrets letting the three stooges into their life (ft. Kaminari, Sero and Kirishima)

👌😂 ❤️ Soft Dad Moments: What would prompt some of the MHA dads to buy their children a plushie? Warning: Some of these dads are so sweet that you might need to see a dentist after. (Bakugou x Reader, Kirishima x Reader, Dabi x Reader, Shigaraki x Reader)

💞 😭 Baby Boom: You end up prego after a one night stand and Bakugou learns how to be a decent human being (Bakugou x reader)

Month 1,  Month 2, Month 3, Month 4

Interactive Series (You voted on the outcomes):

💞😭 😂 ❤️Sole Mates: Your every day life as a business woman is rudely interrupted by an explosive hero’s name being painfully imprinted on the sole of your foot, bounding the two of you’s pain, emotions and thoughts. (Bakugou x Reader, past Izuku X Reader)

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

💞😭Caught in The Act: You find out that your fiancé cheated on you, your grandmother’s dresser is ruined, Kirishima is a precious gift from god, and… wait, when did Todoroki get so hot? (Bakugou x Reader ft Todoroki, Kirishima and a few minor OC’s)

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4,  Part 5 Finale

Sequel (just a lil writing experiment. pay no mind if you like the original ending): Part 1

Tsugi No Hero Academia: a Next gen AU me and my crackhead friends conjured up feat. Bakugou’s son as the MC 

[robertreich]

Impeachment Trial: The Big Picture

Don’t get bogged down by the marathon minute-by-minute coverage of the Senate impeachment trial stretching late into the night. Don’t get overwhelmed by all the complex procedural maneuvers aimed at securing a fair and open trial with witness testimony and new documents that Republicans want to prevent at all costs.

We must stay focused on the big picture.  Here are the 10 big things you need to understand about the Senate trial and the historic moment our country is in right now.

1. Trump’s attempt to get foreign powers to help him win the 2020 election is an impeachable offense. It's precisely the sort of thing the Framers of the Constitution worried about when they created the impeachment clause. If presidents could seek foreign help winning elections, there would be no end of foreign intrusions into American sovereignty and democracy.

2. But under the impeachment clause of the Constitution, sixty-seven United States senators are needed to convict Trump. That means that even if every Democratic and Independent senator votes to oust him, twenty Republican senators would need to join them in order for Trump to be removed from office.

3. The odds that twenty Republican Senators will do so are exactly zero. Zilch.

4. That’s because there are not twenty Republican Senators with the courage and integrity to protect the Constitution and the nation from the most dangerous and demagogic president in history. Led by Midnight Mitch McConnell, Republican Senators are engaged in a concerted coverup of some of the most outrageous conduct ever committed by high-level government officials. Even so-called moderates like Susan Collins and Mitt Romney can’t be relied on to grow a spine and conduct a fair trial.

5. Why not? Because they want to keep their jobs, and they fear Trump’s sway over their voting base and his massive fundraising apparatus.

6. Trump’s overall job ratings have not changed a bit in the wake of his impeachment in the House, just as they have remained remarkably stable over the course of his presidency. In the most recent polls, 40 percent of Americans – including, importantly, 90 percent of Republican voters -- approve of the way Trump is handling his job as president, while 58 percent say they disapprove. These percentages are exactly the same as they were in September, before the House of Representatives launched its formal impeachment inquiry and voted to impeach Trump.

7. Why do 90 percent of Republican voters approve of Trump? Because he has convinced them he’s on their side and that he’s the victim of a plot orchestrated by the establishment and deep state bureaucrats to oust him.

8. How has he kept his base so dedicated? By lying constantly, casting the mainstream press as biased and untrustworthy, relying on Trump’s propaganda machine (also known as Fox News) and right-wing radio to trumpet his lies, using Twitter and Facebook to deliver those lies directly to his followers, and fomenting the “culture war” — employing deep divisions over race, guns, religion, and immigrants — to continuously feed his base.

9. Where’s the money coming from? From the American oligarchy – billionaires, CEOs, corporate executives, and the denizens of Wall Street – who are funding the Republican Party and bankrolling Trump and his propaganda machine. They’re doing this because they’re raking in billions thanks to the Trump-Republican tax cuts and regulatory rollbacks. Trump is already promising them more if he gets a second term. “The attitude of the business community toward the Trump Administration appears quite positive,” said Stephen Schwarzman, who runs Blackstone, the world’s largest investment fund. “We are all adjusting to his abnormal behavior,” said former White House Communications Director and Trump ally-turned-enemy, Anthony Scaramucci. “The economic strength helps their cognitive dissonance.”

10. What can the rest of us do? Vote Trump out of office this November, and convince everyone you know to do so as well. It may seem daunting, but remember: We already beat the liar-in-chief by 2.8 million votes in 2016. And the 2018 elections had the highest turnout of any midterm election since 1914 -- handing House Republicans their most resounding defeat in decades. People are outraged, mobilized, and ready to keep fighting. If we come together, we will prevail.

[godslayingenthusiast]

https://qgpennyworth.com/portfolio/baby-steps/

Baby Steps is a work from Holy Nonsense, a Creative Commons project. View Holy Nonsense 2020 here.

Each entry (single page or multiple pages of the same work) is released under an individual CC: Attribution, Non Commercial, No Derivatives license. That means you can repost this work as-is anywhere for any non-commercial purposes.

THIS WORK IS AN EXCEPTION! In keeping with the wishes of the author, Baby Steps is released CC: Attribution, Non Commercial, Share Alike. For the original full text, see http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/semmelweis

Image descriptions, including transcriptions of text, are expressly allowed, but just make sure you include the credits that are baked into the image when you do them. Image Description after the cut.

Three pages in black and white, each page has a frame made of a black background with white dots in a radiating pattern. On the second page, a classically illustrated woman in medieval European dress is holding a baby, and has a speech bubble saying "Refusing to believe women is a tradition among male physicians." There is also a white apple marked with a K at the center of the dot pattern in the frame on this page. The full transcript of the excerpt reads as follows:

Baby Steps – An Excerpt from The Raw Nerve by Aaron Swartz

In the 1840s, hospitals were dangerous places. Mothers who went in to give birth often didn’t make it out. For example, at Vienna General Hospital’s First Obstetrical Clinic, as many as 10% of mothers died of puerperal fever after giving birth. But there was some good news: at the Second Clinic, the number was just 4%. Expectant mothers noticed this — some would get down on their knees and beg to be admitted to the Second Clinic. Others, hearing new patients were being admitted to the First Clinic that day, decided they’d rather give birth in the streets.

Ignaz Semmelweis, an assistant at the First Clinic, couldn’t bear it. He began desperately searching for some kind of explanation for the difference. He tested many things without success. Then, in 1847, Semmelweis’s friend Jakob Kolletschka was performing an autopsy when a student accidentally poked him with a scalpel. It was a minor injury, but Kolletschka got terribly sick and ultimately passed away, with symptoms rather like the what the mothers had. Which got Semmelweis wondering: was some “deathly material” on the corpses responsible for the deaths?

To test this, he insisted the doctors begin washing their hands with chlorinated lime (which he found best removed the stink of death) before handling the pregnant women. The results were shocking. In April 1847, the mortality rate was 18.3%. Semmelweis instituted handwashing in mid-May and by June the mortality rate had crashed to 2.2%. The next month it was even less and later that year it reached zero — for the first time ever.

You’d think doctors would be thrilled by this incredible discovery. Instead, Semmelweis was ridiculed and attacked. He was fired from the hospital and forced out of Vienna. “In published medical works my teachings are either ignored or attacked,” he complained. “The medical faculty at Würzburg awarded a prize to a monograph written in 1859 in which my teachings were rejected.” Even in his native Vienna, hundreds of mothers continued to die every year.

Semmelweis turned to alcohol and his behavior became increasingly erratic. In 1865, he was committed to a mental institution. There he was beaten by the guards, placed in a straitjacket, and locked in a dark cell. He died shortly thereafter, at the age of 47, from an infected wound.

Why did doctors so stubbornly reject Ignaz Semmelweis? Well, imagine being told you were responsible for the deaths of thousands of your patients. That you had been killing the people you were supposed to be protecting. That you were so bad at your job that you were actually worse than just giving birth in the street.

We all know people don’t like to hear bad news about themselves. Indeed, we go out of our way to avoid it — and when we do confront it, we try to downplay it or explain it away. Cognitive dissonance psychologists have proven it in dozens of experiments: Force students through an embarrassing initiation to take a class, and they’ll insist the class is much more interesting. Make them do a favor for someone they hate, and they start insisting they actually like them. Have them make a small ethical compromises and they’ll feel comfortable making bigger and bigger ones. Instead of just accepting we made a mistake, and shouldn’t have compromised or done the favor or join the class, we start telling ourselves that compromising isn’t so bad — and when the next compromise comes along, we believe the lies we tell ourselves, and leap at making another mistake. We hate hearing bad news about ourselves so much that we’d rather change our behavior than just admit we screwed up.

It doesn’t help much when our friends point out what we did wrong. If we’re so scared of hearing from ourselves that we made a mistake, just imagine how much we hate hearing it from someone else. And our friends know this: the answer to “Does this outfit make me look fat?” is not supposed to be “yes.” We may joke about our friends’ foibles behind their back, but we rarely do so to their face. Even at work, a lot of effort goes into making sure employees are insulated from their superior’s most negative assessments. This is what we’re taught: make five compliments for every criticism, sandwich negative feedback with positive feedback on each side, the most important thing is to keep up someone’s self-esteem.

But, as Semmelweis showed, this is a dangerous habit. Sure, it’s awful to hear you’re killing people—but it’s way worse to keep on killing people! It may not be fun to get told you’re lazy, but it’s better to hear it now than to find out when you’re fired.

If you want to work on getting better, you need to start by knowing where you are.

[loveanj]

Solitary: Diverse Lonesome

Loneliness is an unpleasant emotional response to perceived isolation. People described it as social pain, it is also the condition of pain or inconvenience that outcomes when one sees a hole between one's longings for social association and genuine encounters of it. Many people tend to experience loneliness and feeling unwanted about themselves and most of the reasons are because of the people around them and the people they are with. Admit it or not, people are sensitive when it comes to their feelings and even the smallest things can affect a person’s state. As we go on, People should be careful with their decisions and words, it can affect someone and it leads to loneliness. This feeling is hard to cope up with and it really feels like they don’t have anyone else with them. But how does someone really cope up with loneliness?

While I was reading the half of the Prelude to Cognitive Dissonance, It didn’t sink in right away to me on what is the poem all about and the “different personalities” that was mentioned. To be honest, It is the first time I’ve heard this disorder. The line “But Nelly bears the most” was the line that really caught my attention. You can feel the sadness, the emptiness and the loneliness Nelly had to experience. Also the line “Ten identities living under a personality disorder” reminded me of the song  Pocket Full Of Holes where he suffers from a disorder and he explained how his thoughts and how he feels through a song. The lyric song “It was some years before I met them. The people in my head cause they like said I was special” represents the different personalities he’s experiencing and how the other personalities are affecting him. The other lyric of the song, “And I am still me. No I haven’t changed.” is a reminder that even if he have a disorder, people should not avoid him or be scared of him because he is still him. 

Moving on to the second poem, Life, In Numbers, I was able to understand this more and relate to it more because it is exactly what is going on with my thoughts. When I was younger I also wanna grow up fast but when I got older I realized that there are so many responsibilities that you have to think about and as I grow older and older, I am becoming more and more lonely. It reminded me the song 7 Years the song lyric, “Soon I’ll be 60 years old, will I think the world is cold or will I have a lot of children who can warm me?” is somehow related to a line on the poem “But I hope to be happy and could go on with the rest of my journey.” It somehow has the same meaning because they are both not sure what will be the future but still go on even if it’s hard for them. 

Moving on the third poem, A Piece of His Loving Memory, It is really different if you compare it with the second poem. It is about his father who died and he wrote his feelings through the poem. The song Dance With My Father reminded me about this poem, the lyric, “Cause I love to dance with my father again” and the “Papa, if you ever wish to heal this poet’s broken heart, How about a game of chess soon down the boulevard?” They are both asking to have a last dance or game from their dad. Losing a dad or a parent feels lonely and the sad part is you can’t do anything about it so all you can do is cry and feel lonely because they are gone. 

Moving on the fourth poem, A Graph of A One Sided Limit (Not A Love Story), This poem is as sad as the third poem, being in a one sided love hurts because someone you love can’t give you the same feeling and sometimes, loving alone makes you feel lonely. It reminded me of the song I Can't Make You Love Me, the song is sad as the poem. The line on the poem, “Zero. This love is my love alone, sir!” is the same line the song has, “I can’t make you love me if you don’t.” You can’t force someone to love you, just like the last line on the poem, “Not all love wins, some ends with a lesson.” 

Moving on the fifth poem, Inri ( Don’t Stop; Keep going), I was confused on what the poem is trying to say. Compared to the fourth poem, I wanna cry because of this poem because I remembered feeling this type of suffering back then.  It reminded me of the song listen before i go, the lyric on the song, “Sorry can’t save me now, sorry don’t know how” is the same like the line on the poem, “With the idea I was running out of time, I saw you from afar;”, Because they are dying and people can’t do anything about it. The line, “alone, broken, bleeding and dying.” made me cry. Feeling these different kinds of pain is hard, all you feel is suffering and loneliness. The lyric, “Better hurry ‘cause I’m leaving soon” was like the message of the poem because they are both pertaining to the people that tried to save them but it didn’t work.

Moving on the sixth poem, A Sage In Every Inscription, This was the poem that I got really confused. I can’t understand what is the message of the poem. But when you read it carefully and you try to understand it, You’ll realize it has a great poem. This poem was painful because it feels lonely, it feels like right person but wrong time, or two people didn’t worked out. It reminded me of the song Ocean Eyes, the lyric “I’m scared, I’ve never fallen from quite this high” and the “Only I thought we have that deep connection” from the poem, It’s like they both assumed and scared of what can happen and what happened.

Moving on the seventh poem, To the Little Prince, It was the poem that I can relate because I had an ex and I really got mad at him. It reminded me of the song good 4 u, the lyric on the song, “You found a new girl and it only took a couple weeks” and the line on the poem, “And this immature you chose, did you play her coy?” It represents that they are mad about their ex for having a new girl right away after they broke up. They may be mad, but being in a break up and your ex having a new one right away makes you question things and feel alone. 

Moving on the eighth poem, Wetdream, It was weird for me to read things like this but It was a great poem. It really talks about the “wetdream”. The song that reminded me of the poem was Love Me Like You Do. Not just the vibe, but also the lyrics relate to each other. The lyric from the song, “Every inch of your skin is a holy grail I've got to find” goes with the line, “I saw him lean down his body against the wall” have both description of being attracted to the body. It is also kinda have a lonely because it is a sin.

Moving on the ninth poem, A Call for Change, I love this poem and it was really different from the eighth poem. I love how they fight for their rights and call for a change. The song Fight Song fits to the poem perfectly. It both signifies being brave and fighting for what they want. The lyric, “My power’s turned on, starting right now I’ll be strong” is as strong as the last part of the poem, “For our fullest potential, this is my call for a change” I love the vibe of both lines, fighting for what is right.

Moving on the tenth poem, Because You Are Immortalized, I love how this poem and the ninth poem was kind of related. Both being brave and reminding people to fight. Out of all the poem, this is my favorite among all. I remembered the song Most Girls for this poem. The song is for reminding girls that they are beautiful and worthy just like the poem. The lyric, “Most girls are smart and strong and beautiful” and the beautiness of the line from the poem, “Because you are a wonder, a truth unfold, and a woman, an essence to behold.” Both reminding girls that they are worthy and beautiful and don’t let someone make you feel worthless. Most girls may feel lonely because of people who’s misogyny, but this song and poem made me happy and inspired me to don’t listen to what they say.

On the last poem, the eleventh poem, was the saddest of all the poem. It’s a suicide note and It is exactly what I also felt, I was really touched by the words especially at the last part when it says to listen to someone about his or her state of mind. It reminded me of the song I'll Be There, It’s being there for a friend who’s suffering and feeling alone. The lyric, “When you need a little love, I got a little love to share. You’ll never be alone, I’ll be there for you” is as sweet as the line on the poem, “Please be there for him or her. All you have to do is listen.” It may be sweet, but the whole poem is sad and it made me cry. Remember to always check on your friends.

Conclusion:

All in all, the anthology includes loneliness in every poem. Despite of feeling lonely and suffering, there will always be someone who is ready to listen. Don’t give up even if you have disorder. Being confident and being kind to yourself will help. The message the poems also gave me is that, all in all, just go on with your journey because there will always be a reason to continue.