unoriginalityriver

[unoriginalityriver]

Damage.

Quote by @desertbcrnnobody

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Sometimes when i mention i like zhongxiao people are like “but doesnt that have a massive power imbalance” and its like well yes. You see i am here primarily for the power imbalance. I don’t want them in a conventional mutual romantic relationship i want to sentence Xiao to 20 rounds of Pearl Steven Universe flavor hopeless gay devotion

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Kaworu said he loved me. It was… it was the first time someone told me they loved me. He was like me, and like Ayanami. I loved him too.

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Episode 24 of Neon Genesis Evangelion ties up beautifully with The End of Evangelion, giving the series a circular closure, as it all ends how it began.

Episode 24 opens - just like The End - and closes in the same way: a brief shot on a lamppost, then on the beach where Shinji meets Kaworu, finally on Shinji himself, who begins, ends and restarts the cycle feeling completely helpless.

The End opens where we left Shinji, making us understand that he spent the whole night there.

Seeing the world through Shinji's eyes, in EoE, we are constantly subjected to scenes reminiscent of Kaworu's death:

After the shot on the lamppost, a sign comes off of it, falling in the exact same way Kaworu's head fell into LCL.

In the finale of "Death & Rebirth" we get a clear shot of the statue - without a head, again - that Kaworu was sitting on at the beginning of episode 24; the same statue reappears on the same beach in EoE in the form of Eva Series.

The same lamppost that we see during episode 24 and at the beginning of EoE, in the finale is completely bent.

Again, same shots, same place, different circumstances. How it began ends :

Shinji turns and sees Kaworu towering over him, Shinji turns and sees Asuka lying on the ground.

Shinji blushes, Shinji strangles her.

Kaworu smiles at him, Asuka replies "disgusting"

While episode 24 begins with Shinji temporarily overcoming the hedgehog's dilemma by opening up completely to another person, The End of Evangelion ends with a rejection of the other from Shinji's part.

Going on a bit of a tangent, Asuka is the only one to appear on the beach with Shinji because she refuses instrumentality :

During the movie, she comes to the realization that Shinji sees her not only as a sexual object, but also as a replacement. Shinji doesn't ask her for help because he loves her, but because he simply needs an anchor to hold on to, she knows that Shinji turning to her isn't an act of affection; it's him being driven by circumstances and selfishness. She makes it clear when she explicitly tells him "If you can't be mine and only mine, I'd rather not have you at all."

For this reason, she rejects the "lie" given by instrumentality.

I interpret her "disgusting" as coming from the notion that, once again, Shinji has stopped hurting her (physically, in this case) not because he's worried about Asuka herself, but because, by caressing his face, she became a new surrogate -in this case maternal- by mimicking the caress Yui gave to Shinji shortly before.

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Please don't come to the church again. I mean that...with the greatest of compliments.

Andrew Scott as The Priest — FLEABAG: Series 2 (2019)

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12 years late but you're so right

Uta Refson was really hot, not gonna lie.

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girls don’t want flowers they want the lipsticks faith wears in btvs season 3

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The problem is Buffy’s taste is absolutely atrocious but she’s right. Like look at this man he’s supposed to be some stealthy vampire guy but he’s tripping when he walks in the door. He can’t fucking stand correctly. He has social anxiety so bad he hates to talk to everybody but his girlfriends. Oh look at this other guy he’s supposed to be evil and monstrous but he’s crying to your mom about his ex and asking for marshmallows in his coco. He has one dream about a girl and that doesn’t make him think he’s just attracted to said girl, he immediately thinks he’s in love and becomes obsessed. He has to dye his hair every so often and he chooses a neon white for some reason. Oh take a look at this girl she’s supposed to be cool girl tough girl who is down and good with everything but she sits alone all the time in one of the worst parts of town. She’ll only ever tell you that she’s five by five and you or anyone else has no idea what that even means. She’ll lie about stuff that didn’t happen to sound cool, all while walking around saying she has no friends. And here’s the kicker - they all mirror each other, have a history of violent murders, look good in leather and somehow all give off pathetic wet rat and babygirl vibes at the exact same time and no one has any idea where the line is. Plus they’re all some kind of gay and in kahoots with each other.

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He's everything I hate. He's everything that I'm supposed to be against, but the only time that I ever feel anything is when…

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Faith: See, you need me to toe the line, 'cause you're afraid you'll go over it, aren't you, B? You can't handle watching me live my own way, having a blast, because it tempts you! You know it could be you!

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Buffy the Vampire Slayer 6.13 | "Dead Things"

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Buffy the Vampire Slayer 6.13 | "Dead Things"

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Your feelings for him are coloring your judgement. I can hear it in your voice. It doesn't matter if you're not physical with each other anymore. There's a connection. You rely on him, he relies on you.

SPIKE & BUFFY in season 7 Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997 — 2003)

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James Marsters has said in an interview that, when Joss Whedon let him know that Spike was gonna fall in love with Buffy in season five, he had assumed it would be one-sided - only for Whedon to correct him with a “Oh no, she’s gonna fall in love with you too.”

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goddamn gaiman

When the allegations against Neil Gaiman first came out, I will admit I was initially skeptical, because like so many other people, I thought nawww, not Gaiman, and this was after being aware of a few cases of false accusations (not limited to sex-related) I hoped these allegations were false because I didn't want to think that someone I had long admired could be capable of such an ugly thing.

But I'm also not one of these people who defends celebrities no matter what they do. I accepted that yes, this man admired by so many was indeed capable of something so horrible. That horribleness was really illustrated when the article about him exploiting his nanny came out. If you read that article, you know exactly what I'm talking about. And for those who have not read the article… trigger warnings ahoy (I'm not kidding!)

It was already disheartening enough when the matter first came out, and much more so when I read about just how depraved Gaiman was. Reading the article about various things he did and the way he exploited his victims made my stomach churn.

I thought back to various things I'd read in Gaiman's work. As a teenager, I was a huge fan of Neil Gaiman. I bought the entire Sandman graphic novel series as well as a bunch of various novels or borrowed them from other people. I thought to myself, wow, what a creative genius. And yeah, some of his stories were dark and weird and now people are pointing to these as proof that there was something wrong with Gaiman.

When MeToo started and all of these guys that we thought were wholesome were outed as sexual predators, I, like so many other Gaiman fans, was certain he'd never be one of those people. When he was writing about sexual abuse or other dark topics in his stories, it legitimately never occurred to me that he was a predator. After all, plenty of authors write about abuse (of different forms) in their books, but it doesn't mean they're abusers as well.

Me and my siblings and cousins watched the Cosby Show reruns when we were kids/teens so when the shit about Cosby being a rapist came out I was like oh, FFS. Then accusations came out against other guys like Kevin Spacey that I admired, etc etc, and it absolutely gave me some distress that men I laughed at (in a good way), men who presented themselves as wholesome turned out to be gross. And then there are some men that you're not surprised to hear shit about, like R. Kelly. You know there are predators out there but it's honestly distressing to see just how many there are.

And all this time, all these years since MeToo started, Neil Gaiman had stayed above it all. I will admit that at this time, I had not read any of his works for a while, I was consuming other authors so I actually had no idea of his irresponsible behavior during the COVID pandemic.

Perhaps I am naive, but it never occurred to me that Mr. Gaiman could be a predator. I thought the darkness in his work came from imagination, research, empathy, etc. A skilled author can tap into dark places and write about dark stuff without actually liking the abuses and atrocities they choose to depict in their work.

I have not read his entire library and haven't for a while since I'm always discovering new authors and shifting from focusing on one author to another, I found a couple of his works weak, but I found his overall body of work (that I read) to be solid and imaginative and his acclaim as an author is well-deserved. Like so many others, his works got me through some hard times in life.

It’s been months now since this first came out, and a few months or so since I read the article describing his abuses. I’ve heard different perspectives on this, including people complaining that they can’t enjoy his work because victims ruined it. (a similar thing I’ve heard about other artists outed as predators)

I have this to say… The victims didn't ruin the much-loved works of this artist or that author or actor or whatever. The perpetrators and offenders are the ones who ruined things. It is perfectly understandable to be upset about looking at the works/your collection of someone you admired and debating with yourself if you should throw it away, bemoaning the time you spent enjoying and consuming that person's media.

That’s not an easy thing to deal with and I understand the frustration and anger. But you know what really pisses me off? Despite various other people being outed as predators, I sincerely believed that Gaiman would never be one of them. No one is perfect but I figured whatever flaws Gaiman had wouldn’t be to the level that was revealed.

And if someone like Gaiman can be outed as a predator, if someone who was believed to be a sincerely good person, is capable of saying and doing all these gross and nasty things, it leaves me wondering about other people who are known or present themselves as a champion for feminism, human rights, children's rights, and so on. You want to believe the best of people involved in such noble causes, only to have ugly stuff come out about them, sometimes after their deaths, sometimes when they're still alive. And it's hard to not be cynical and misanthropic while contemplating that.

I mean, it's nothing new in the history of the world. People have been outed as monsters in the past and will be in the future, but it's just so sobering when the person being outed is someone you were so fucking certain would never be such a piece of shit. It leaves you wondering about other people you were confident about, leaving you feeling like you can't trust anyone, and also complicating your relationship/enjoyment with the media that they created.

Fucking hell.

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this is a comic about living with hyperfixations and how they tie into those happy feelings that are just gone after they end, that is until the cycle starts again, however far away in the future that might be, like something u can borrow but you can never really make it stay

I settled on having it look like a relationship bc the similarities kinda haunt me, this has been on my mind a lot since I've had no fixations for 6 months and I'm now trying to adjust to living without, so I wanted to put it in art form :')