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This is incredibly cool but I have so many questions

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~ The Psychology of Mental Disorders, by Abraham Myerson, M.D., 1928

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do you condemn the grinch

Ugh. People acting as if the grinch is still cancelled really just expose the problems with the online social justice movement. Not only did he apologize, but he returned every gift, cut the turkey for the dinner, and his heart grew three sizes. Acting as if the actions of the grinch still deserve condemnation is making it known that you don’t believe that people can change

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Double Chocolate Peppermint Cookies

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i never posted the blonde motherfucker conspiracy board here did i

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Stray Scenery (1/?)

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this callout couldve been a block button

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my glasses are always dirty but it's fine. i've seen enough.

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not doomed by the narrative but saved by the narrative. yeah i know you'd rather die than keep suffering but the story doesn't actually care what you want. you have to keep going, even when it hurts. even being erased from existence won't stop you from being salvaged from the wreckage of un-being. get up. keep pushing. keep bleeding. keep living.

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3 days until Christmas - featuring Edgar

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'Pouring' by Henry Pille, 1888.

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���🤭

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i think criticism of lyse's design is extremely valid. i think if she looked more like basically every other ala mhigan (brown) a lot of the wrinkles around her stormblood character* would get ironed out. however i do think that she is overly criticized. gamers hate when a woman has an arc where she grows and learns.

lyse's story is one of diaspora, and returning to her homeland and having to learn about how people live under occupation and how to work with that. there's a reason she is paired with hien (lived under the empire, helped lead a failed rebellion, and then fled into exile) and fordola (lived under the empire, doesnt know a free ala mhigo, is a depiction of how imperialism steals away a people's future (their youths) and chews them up in its machine to further crush resistance). she is both an outsider who asks questions to be a vehicle/companion protag for our wol to learn more about ala mhigo, and provides someone who is very emotionally invested in its struggle for freedom. contrast to heavensward: the person most emotionally invested in their own people is ysayle. estinien seems very mercenary and gruff and is mostly invested in his hatred of nidhogg, aymeric is a cool-headed politician who's trying to do what's right but also politically possible (aymeric the #bluewave), and haurchefant is pretty absent for a lot of the plot and is mostly invested in the wol. nobody is as passionate about ishgard as lyse is about ala mhigo (this is my perception, YMMV, etc, i am notably rather lukewarm on hvw). the point of lyse is that she must learn about the homeland she was ripped away from and still desperately wants to help. and to learn about something, you have to start out with a lack of knowledge. you know. like a character arc.

also i feel that people often misremember lyse's job. she is not the leader of ala mhigo. that's more raubahn's job. lyse became the leader of one specific cell of the ala mhigan resistance, of which there were many. she now has a position in their armed forces. we see her a lot when ala mhigo comes up in msq because 1. we are almost always with the scions and she is obviously gonna be ala mhigo's scion liasion 2. she is the character most strongly associated with ala mhigo so of course the writers are gonna use her for that. but while she is influential in the government she does not run it. also - lyse has experience as an anti-imperial activist! she was involved in multiple castrum infiltrations and both of the empire's massive defeats on the eorzean front! she's a scion, she has experience!

i have other thoughts but it is late. obviously not loving lyse doesn't make you a misogynist. i don't even feel very passionately about her, i think she's fine. i am talking more about macro-level fandom trends than accusing you the reader of being a gamergate mra. i also think that there's a lot of unpacked misogyny in all our heads that we need to deal with, and if that part of that means stepping back and giving female characters more grace and putting some mental energy into actively understanding/analyzing them, then all the better.

*i do realize that part of the issue was that they were stuck with her 1.0 design of a blonde white girl on a middy model (since f highlanders didnt exist for a while). perhaps there is a universe where her dropping the archon mark glamour changes a lot more about her appearance, and that lyse had a few different phenotypes than her sister - but i am not qualified to say whether this would be better or worse. there would be some interesting discussions on it, though.

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Changing my answer to "Which Final Fantasy should Squeenix remake next?" from "None of them. Ever." To "Final Fantasy XI." Because every other mainline FF is fairly accessible. FFXI, both in its current form and in its heydey, is only really playable for the deranged.