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aelie-baby · 4 years

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BUSTS THROUGH YEARS OF LURKING CAUSE TUMBLR GOT BORING FOR AWHILE THERE TO QUESTION RELATED TO RECENT THERAPY THINGS BE WARNED ITS A RAMBLE.......

Obvs, this is just my hot take. I am definitely one of these people. I find me a pretty boy and the potent autism/adhd combo latches on. Why? I have no idea, but I have theories.

Most prominent among them is that throughout my life, I’ve always been burned worst by other females. I was mercilessly bullied (I hate the word bullied, it sounds so kiddie-innocent. It’s torture for all intents and purposes) almost exclusively by girls. In fact, from when I moved in before 3rd grade until FUCKING HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATION, one girl in particular, a local queen bee, went out of her way to make my life miserable. And because she was queen bee, most other people did too. It got so fucked up that at the 8th grade dance, some girls who weren’t actively cruel asked me to go with them (no doubt prompted by their mothers) and I was so thrilled, I thought I finally had friends. I didn’t even know until I was an adult that friends are not the ones who hand you their purses so they can all take a picture together while you watch. The only reason I know this happened is because my mother was chaperoning and saw it. It was so routine by that point, I didn’t even notice.

As far as I understood through my hellacious alphabet soup of diagnoses, finding The One True Guy was pretty much the only way I was going to have any kind of meaningful relationship. My parents, though well-intentioned, are too self-centered to really be close, my sisters were either too young or were the primary bully in my life, I had no friends male or female - so when I find the romance genre, omfg you better believe I was desperately clinging to that one ideal guy. Surely this totally imaginary guy who was PERFECT could love someone so awful as me (That is teenage me, not today me. Today me has therapy to deal with that kind of self-esteem). When consuming media, I never focused on any of the female-female friendships because in my mind, they were never genuine and honestly? Focusing on them would hurt too fucking much. Hell, just writing that last sentence hurt and it’s been nearly 2 decades.

As to the Perfect Man In Shining Armor, I was consuming media in the Long Ago when the internets were still the Wild Wild Webs, and I had no real interest in forums or chat rooms. My image of The Perfect Man was always more influenced by what I needed support-wise in that very moment.

Should be noted, though, that I also had a lot of good examples growing up. My parents are still married, the majority of the people I knew growing up were happily married (or so I thought), and my grandparents were married until my grandfather died. (Yes, there is another grandfather, he that is appropriately named.(His name is Dick)) so I never really had a bad experience with the male side of humankind until I was a senior in high school. Could that be a factor in not caring really about the female friendship aspect? Possibly.

Then of course, there is the fact that it’s basically how my life has played out. After finally figuring out that shiny armor is not a good sign (thank you star wars), I found The Perfect Man Who Isn’t Actually Perfect But That’s OK. We’ve been together over a decade now and still make stupid googly eyes at each other. And in all that time, I have had maybe.... two ? significant relationships with other women? And both are still fraught with very not good memories and ghosts. The one relationship that has never burned me is the relationship with The Guy. So, yeah, that’s where all my focus goes, because I really only think of media in terms of my self-insert shiz. Because nerd. holy shit that was a ramble, I hope i answered some of the question??

I hate how the manga sucks mamoru's dick but i can't blame takeuchi for writing this self indulgent fantasy about her perfect husband because her actual husband is apparently a dick.

I know somewhere between fuck and all about Takeuchi’s personal life. I know she HAS a husband, and that husband is also a manga writer/artist, but there’s where my knowledge ends and ignorance begins. So while I’m using this as a springboard, nothing in the following is specific commentary or authority about Naoko Takeuchi’s life and experiences, about which, as just stated, I know nothing.

It’s interesting to me, in that way we can become interested in things that we can’t understand, how, in a sea of fascinating and diverse female characters, some women still have a particular (often repeated) tendency to single out and focus on a man. It makes no sense to me, just none at all. I’m not saying male characters can’t be awesome, or there’s some inherent flaw in ever enjoying a male character above a female character. But you hang around people as they drift through enough fandom circles, you begin to notice patterns. This is something I’ve seen pop up again and again and again. Why they keep going there is a question I’ve wondered, and come back to now and again when my mind is wandering, or happens to be sparked in that particular direction.

You writing this, Anon, did that for me. I’ve mulled over this Ask since you sent it, thinking about it, wondering whether it was worth even bringing up. AND MAYBE IT’S NOT I DUNNO. But apparently it’s a conversation starter I feel like finally tossing into the world.

Specifically, you got me there with this Ask, because I wondered at the correlation you were suggesting. That because Takeuchi’s husband “is a dick”, her fixation on Mamoru made sense. Not that she left her husband, or found someone less dickish, or decided marriage wasn’t for her. But that she became fixated on a fictional character of her own creation, to the detriment of every other character and the story itself (IN THE OPINION OF THIS JET WOLF), because an actual man in her actual life was disappointing.

Whether any of that is true of her husband, I neither know nor, honestly, care. Far more interesting to me is this core idea, that women do perhaps focus on these male characters, because on some level there’s this NEED to believe a man like them is possible, that he could exist.

Historically, men are -- and I don’t think I’m being particularly controversial when I say this -- really fucking shitty to women. You name it, they’ve done it. I’m personally to the point where there’s nothing I could learn about any man who has ever lived that would genuinely surprise me. Of all men throughout my life, my grandfather was the best man I’ve ever known. I love him like I have few people. And if someone told me tomorrow that he’d sexually assaulted their grandmother, I wouldn’t necessarily accept it unquestioned as stone cold truth, but I WOULD be like, “Fuck, I dunno, maybe?”

That’s just the reality of our experiences, and our mother’s experiences, and her mother’s experiences,and so on down through our collective history. Which isn’t to say it’s just the way it is and men are incapable as a sex of better, just that we’re sure as hell not there yet, and none of us are completely free from the times in which we live.

So -- she asks herself hypothetically and also apparently out loud today -- is that maybe why this focus? A focus which, in the personal opinion of this Jet Wolf, is completely illogical? This drive to center our fictional worlds around the men we don’t see anywhere near enough in the real one?

NO FUCKING IDEA. Intended or otherwise, however, thank you for giving me another thing to chew over on this, Anon.

#time to lurk again #wow i forgot how to tag #i dont even remember what to tag this with #rambling? stream of conscious?#I'm just going to label it as I'm tired and sad and worn out and needed to vent somewhere and sorry Jet you just caught the attention

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aelie-baby · 7 years

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@sonorous-selkie LOL

*Puts brief case down on the table and takes off glasses very seriously* “So about that AU we discussed that one time.”

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aelie-baby · 7 years

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the three generations of fanfic:

livejournal, fanfiction.net and ao3 which one were you?

#HEYO #USENET WAS AWESOME #granted I was a pre-teen...

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aelie-baby · 7 years

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If the ocean ever disappears DONT GO LOOKING FOR IT… go in the other direction

#real thing #a very real thing #and seriously good advice

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aelie-baby · 7 years

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the force awaketh

🚨 reylos do not interact bitch 🚨

#actual literal lol

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aelie-baby · 7 years

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A Google Chrome extension that you can press when you think something may be triggering to another person out there. It’s a crowd-sourced thing, so the more people use it, the more it will be able to warn us 30 seconds in advance so we can decide if we want to keep watching. Brilliant.

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aelie-baby · 7 years

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What movie can you watch over and over again and never get bored?

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aelie-baby · 7 years

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However, this isn’t sitting well with people who actually read medieval Latin. Medieval Academy of America director Lisa Fagin Davis told The Atlantic’s Sarah Zhang, “They’re not grammatically correct. It doesn’t result in Latin that makes sense.” She added, “Frankly I’m a little surprised the TLS published it…If they had simply sent to it to the Beinecke Library, they would have rebutted it in a heartbeat.” The Beinecke Library at Yale is where the Voynich Manuscript is currently kept. Davis noted that a big part of Gibbs’ claim rests on the idea that the Voynich Manuscript once had an index that would provide a key to the abbreviations. Unfortunately, he has no evidence for such an index, other than the fact that the book does have a few missing pages.

The idea that the book is a medical treatise on women’s health, however, might turn out to be correct. But that wasn’t Gibbs’ discovery. Many scholars and amateur sleuths had already reached that conclusion, using the same evidence that Gibbs did. Essentially, Gibbs rolled together a bunch of already-existing scholarship and did a highly speculative translation, without even consulting the librarians at the institute where the book resides.

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aelie-baby · 7 years

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A Guide to Making Up Diseases (as Explained by a Biologist)

So listen up y’all, nothing drives me crazier as both a writer and a scientist than seeing alien diseases that make no fuckin’ sense in a human body.

If you’re talking about alien diseases in a non-human character, you can ignore all this.

But as far as alien diseases in humans go, please remember:

DISEASE SYMPTOMS ARE AN IMMUNE RESPONSE.

Fever? A response to help your immune cells function faster and more efficiently to destroy invaders.

Sore/scratchy throat? An immune response. Diseases that latch onto the epithelium of the throat (the common cold, the flu) replicate there, and your body is like “uh no fuckin’ thanks” and starts to slough off those cells in order to stop the replication of new virus in its tracks. So when it feels like your throat is dying? guess what it literally is. And the white spots you see with more severe bacterial infections are pus accumulation, which is basically dead white blood cells, and the pus is a nice and disgusting way of getting that shit outta here.

(No one really knows why soreness and malaise happens, but some scientists guess that it’s a byproduct of immune response, and others suspect that it’s your body’s way of telling you to take it easy)

headache? usually sinus pressure (or dehydration, which isn’t an immune response but causes headaches by reducing blood volume and causing a general ruckus in your body, can be an unfortunate side effect of a fever) caused by mucous which is an immune response to flush that nasty viral shit outta your face.

Rashes? an inflammatory response. Your lymphocytes see a thing they don’t like and they’re like “hEY NOW” and release a bunch of chemicals that tell the cells that are supposed to kill it to come do that. Those chemicals cause inflammation, which causes redness, heat, and swelling. They itch because histamine is a bitch.

fatigue? your body is doing a lot–give it a break!

here is a fact:

during the Spanish 1918 Plague, a very strange age group succumbed to the illness. The very young and very old were fine, but people who were seemingly healthy and in the prime of life (young adults) did not survive. This is because that virus triggered an immune response called a cytokine storm, which basically killed everything in sight and caused horrific symptoms like tissue death, vasodilation and bleeding–basically a MASSIVE inflammatory response that lead to organ damage and death. Those with the strongest immune systems took the worst beating by their own immune responses, while those with weaker immune systems were fine.

So when you’re thinking of an alien disease, think through the immune response.

Where does this virus attack? Look up viruses that also attack there and understand what the immune system would do about it.

Understand symptoms that usually travel together–joint pain and fever, for example.

So please, please: no purple and green spotted diseases. No diseases that cause glamorous fainting spells and nothing else. No mystical eye-color/hair-color changing diseases. If you want these things to happen, use magic or some shit or alien physiology, but when it’s humans, it doesn’t make any fuckin’ sense.

This has been a rant and I apologize for that.

#ffr

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aelie-baby · 7 years

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Something especially relevant for me to remember with so many friends and family in Houston.