#anime nerdery

[rottenbrainstuff]

Lol. Well.

A while ago I convinced a friend of mine to watch the fourth season of Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure, because I told them it was the best season (and I think it is). They really gamely watched the entire thing but it just never clicked for them, they just did not get the tone of the show, did not like. And that’s fine, totally fine. It was nice of them to watch the 40+ episodes even though it really wasn’t their thing.

So sort of to reciprocate I guess, they now want me to watch Demon Slayer, which is one of their all time favourites, they are telling me it’s amazing character development, etc, blah blah blah.

I….. I’m not really enjoying it so far lmao. Me and my friend are doing like a country mouse city mouse thing here.

I just don’t like these shonen series. They’re not my thing. They’re silly and boring and they’re way way too serious for how silly the plot is. That’s why I can enjoy Jojo, it’s weird and bizarre and it doesn’t take itself seriously at all. If your show is going to be silly, might as well go all out and name your characters after food and songs and dress them in clothes that belong on a fashion model. Without that or something like that, the show feels like it’s missing some seasoning somewhere.

Granted I’m only a few episodes in. Maybe it’ll hook me later.

At least I can’t deny, it’s definitely got quality animation.

#anime nerdery

[markscherz]

The eye of Uroplatus garamaso, the new gecko species my colleagues and I described yesterday. Check out that weird pupil! Four little diamonds in a chain.

#gecko #lizard #animals #eye #herpetology #wildlife #Uroplatus #Uroplatus garamaso #I have always loved the eyes of these weirdos #why would you want four separate images on your retina? #while you are at least ostensibly asleep? #sounds like orc mischief to me #also I don't know if you guys are aware that we named another one of these geckos after Treebeard #Uroplatus fangorn #so happy about that one #it's the only species I've named after something by Tolkien so far #which is kind of surprising given that my personality is composed largely of Tolkien nerdery #but there are other fandoms I have not yet acknowledged at all with species names #so keep your eyes out for some Star Trek names in the future #there's taxonomy in that nebula #this has been your evening tag ramble #enjoy

[frogshunnedshadows]

Army guy from AKIRA costume completed.

Details below:

I think I was up just past eleven last night hanging the flak jacket to dry. Got up at 6:30 AM to finish work this morning.

Took a little time to try to iron in some creases to accentuate the top stitched details on the front and back.

Decided on the back symbol and redrew it in Illustrator. Cut an adhesive black vinyl version, which would not stick to the vest fabric (?!), so I cut a stencil out of some other adhesive vinyl. Mixed up a 'primer' coat of orange by eye to seal the edges of the stencil, quick dried it with a heat gun, then applied the black paint and heat gunned that.

Clumsily hand-sewed the shoulder patch on. And, of course, forgot the gloves in the car.

Moderately proud of this. Pretty accurate, all things considered. All cotton, so about as cool as it could be. Flak jacket made entirely from scratch, based loosely off a store-bought pattern. Fully lined and interfaced! Wire in the collar, fully functional box-pleated pocket, and fully functional zipper! A big, dumb, sweaty, sore, pain in the ass to make, but mission accomplished.

#akira #cosplay #anime cosplay #costume #アキラ #1988 #happy anniversary #otaku #oldtaku #nerdery #コスプレ

[bookgeekgrrl]

the slowest-climbing chart-topper ever

the oldest living person to score a No. 1 song in America

the longest gap between career chart-toppers

the Hot 100’s first-ever septuagenarian chart-topper, but with a song she recorded at age 13

#fuck yes brenda lee #beyond delighted she's still alive to see this #record a song at 13. wait 65 years for it to become number one. #legend #music chart nerdery #the top five pop acts of the 1960s based on Hot 100 performance: the Beatles‚ Elvis Presley‚ Ray Charles‚ Brenda Lee‚ and the Supremes #rockin' around the christmas tree #is chrimmus #merry chrysler #merry crimes #christmas shit #merry christmas ya filthy animals #’tis the season #Youtube

[curator-on-ao3]

This probably sounds like a weird question but it's something that's been on my mind for a long time.

I'm not sure if your familiar with TAS but the last episode "Counter clock Incident" established that Starfleet had a mandatory retirement age of 75. Do you see a logical reason for that? I know the US military has a mandatory Retirment age (which I think is 60). I just think the mandatory age in the 23rd century should be higher than 75--at least ten years higher).

I love any kind of Trek question, @marymoss1971! 💕 Thanks for asking!

I think you’re probably right that the US military is, once again, a model for Starfleet. (Whoa, that’s a troubling sentence.)

I’m actually against any mandatory retirement age. I have a friend whose father fell into a depression after being forced to retire from his job as a commercial airline pilot. (Currently 65 years old in the US, source: FAA website.) Imagine feeling like you’re at the top of your game, good at your job, in part due to decades of experience, and you’re told a number you can’t control means your work is over. It’s cruel.

Now, I’m certainly in favor of tests for eyesight and reaction times and all that, especially for pilots (and many more occupations). But people are different and a set age for everyone doesn’t make sense to me, especially when we consider Starfleet and how aging could work differently for different species or in different environments. Not to mention things like time travel and time reversals and transporter-induced de-aging and all the rest.

So, yeah, I think the logical reason for the mandatory retirement age is production-side ageism. But, in-universe, if I want to pretzel my Trekkie brain over it (which I usually enjoy doing), I would say Starfleet might want to ensure a place for new recruits or to transition older service members into teaching/training over exploration or any number of options.

Also, I think it’s worth noting that Tuvok’s age in Voyager (much less in Picard) is proof Starfleet either rolled back the requirement at some point or, at minimum, used age equivalents per species. Personally, I hope for the former.

Thanks for asking, @marymoss1971! 💕

#ask me questions about star trek and behold my nerdery! #i love asks #marymoss1971 #star trek #star trek the animated series #star trek voyager #tuvok #the animated series was on nickelodeon when i was a kid and i watched it sitting cross-legged in front of the tv #good stuff #ageism #tw ageism

[moinsbienquekaworu]

Man I want to reread Not a Catholic Thing again. I've already read it like 5 times in the last two months. It attracts my brain so much. Absolutely fascinated by it. Enthralled. And the author's Constantine fics. Absolutely feral about those 7 fics in particular. I mean I'm feral about a lot of fics on top but right now yeah

#like holy shit!!!! fanfiction!!!!!!!!! #one day i will draw john constantine all bruised and it will be because of jupitermelichios. i'm not even kidding #i've never read a comic with him in it to be clear. i know him from like a dozen fanfics and one animated movie. #he's the blorbo equivalent of an acquaintance with whom you overshared a lot drunk at 3am one time and nothing else #there are so many good fics...... so many.......... #okay it's 2am i'm going to put on the fool by jain and think mattfoggy thoughts until i fall asleep #wow i have a ramble tag now #fandom nerdery

[aaronshattuck]

#Lum #urusei yatsura #fan art hell #vampirella #warren comics #horror comics #classic manga #classic anime #classic comics #horror #70s horror #80s manga #rumiko takahashi #frank frazetta #deep nerdery #Halloween #inktober #drawtober #lumtober #cartoon illustration #cartoony #I could see #forrest j ackerman #becoming the fifth Lum’s stormtrooper #artists on tumblr

[trilobiter]

Lawl

#art #animation #weebl #weebl's stuff #animals #badgers #snakes #memes #never not awesome #rampant nerdery #hilarious #Youtube

[babblingbat]

not to be a pedant (I’m a pedant) but I think if you’re going to have an animal in your tv show that isn’t a domestic animal and it has an interaction that is notable or plot important, you should have a behavioral zoologist on staff.  a lot of this comes from the fact that I watched the recent television show Kung Fu (2021) and they had a scene with a wolf that 1) was alone (can be excused a couple different ways, but makes the subsequent points worse) 2) attacked a human 3) stole a bag.  This is not in line with wolf behavior at all and sure I may be annoying but that, out of all the fantasy elements of this magic martial arts TV show, really broke the immersion.  Wolves do not change their behavior (their pack social structures, their aversion to humans, etc.) just because there are some people in the world who can bend physics.  Istg.

#mine #television #animal behavior #behavioral zoology #geekdom and nerdery

[iggy-licious]

I got the Important Blue Checkmarks™ for this blog, to give a little monetary love to Tumblr, 💙 and also because it seems like something that would make Iggy laugh.

#What if Iggy was on Tumblr? #Music nerdery #Animal videos #Long discourse posts on various topics #Nekkid selfies 👀 #I don't know that he would post often #But he would fit in

[bakuhatsufallinlove]

Omae: Complexity of Self-Expression and Intimacy with the Japanese “You”

(Update: I have written a follow-up to this post wherein I exhaustively examine Katsuki's "you" pronoun usage, including every time he uses omae. Please be sure to read both posts! :D)

The anime adaption of chapter 322 is rapidly approaching, so I wanna talk about something really interesting: as far as I can tell, Izuku is the only person Katsuki has ever used the pronoun omae (おまえ) towards in-canon. Furthermore, he has only used omae towards Izuku on three occasions.

The first time is after Deku vs. Kacchan 2 in chapter 120.

The second time is right after his apology in chapter 322. (Katsuki actually uses omae four times in a row in this scene.)

(We'll get to the third time later, just you wait.)

Why does Katsuki address Izuku differently in these scenes? To answer this, we’re gonna commit some language nerdery.

First, let’s be real about the fact that Japanese pronouns can be complicated. There are a ton of them. You learn the common uses—like you could say that, broadly, omae tends to be used by guys for their friends and romantic partners. But the reality is that in a high-context language like Japanese, pronouns can come across wildly differently depending on who uses it, to whom, with what tone, and in what context.

It is difficult to generalize real-life usage, so to be clear, I am talking about MHA as a piece of media. I could try to tell you that omae is rude but also friendly but also condescending but also comedic but also confrontational but also affectionate—and so on, but that wouldn’t help you understand what Katsuki’s omae to Izuku means and why it feels significant.

The thing is, Izuku and Katsuki can each say omae and mean completely different things, because their normal way of speaking tells us how to interpret their words.

When Izuku speaks, he is polite and considerate. He uses the boyish first-person pronoun boku (僕). In Japanese, avoiding second-person pronouns is the polite thing to do; you use the person’s surname and an appropriate suffix instead, and this is the tactic Izuku uses to address others. When he does say “you,” it is usually the familiar kimi (君) towards Katsuki.

We see Izuku use omae in only a few circumstances: he uses it towards himself during inner monologues when he is trying to figure out what to do or compel himself to act, and he uses it when he faces All For One.

Both of these involve what I think of as “tough talk”—Izuku talks tough to himself to push past his fears and be a hero. With AFO, he is talking to a villain, someone he has to defeat. From someone like Izuku who speaks with such politeness and humility, omae reads as aggressive and confrontational.

Katsuki, on the other hand, is always aggressive and confrontational. He uses the masculine, somewhat boastful first-person pronoun ore (俺) and the second-person pronoun temee (てめえ) towards just about everybody. Temee is an extremely rude, combative word; Japanese descriptions usually point out that it reads like fightin’ words—it’s what you’d call an opponent, someone you are confronting, challenging, or belittling. As mentioned, you’re supposed to avoid “you” words to be polite, so the fact that Katsuki whips out temee constantly and makes up insulting nicknames instead of using anybody’s real name is just like, damn, dude!

Unlike Izuku, Katsuki sounds like he is challenging everyone all the time. This means that, coming from him, omae actually seems gentler.

After Deku vs. Kacchan 2, he opens his sentence with omae, and Izuku looks startled by this.

They just had a huge, emotional fistfight, and Katsuki… isn’t addressing him as an opponent, like he always has before. For once, he is addressing Izuku not as his enemy, but his equal.

This scene is the first time Katsuki properly grapples with the truth of their mutual weaknesses and comes to an understanding about it. It leaves him frustrated and unsure, but he walks away seeing himself and Izuku as being on the same side.

Because he takes All Might's words to heart: they are two halves of what makes a hero. They need to learn from each other and push each other to truly reach their best—as rivals, not enemies.

In chapter 322, Katsuki talks Izuku through how he felt about him all these years. He goes over all the things he's had to face to see how wrong he was, to see his own weakness and Izuku's strength. The whole time, he uses the "you" word he always has: temee.

But when it comes time to tell Izuku his true feelings, he calls Izuku by his given name, apologizes, and then right away he says this:

This is a direct call-back to the core question that Katsuki posed to Izuku during Deku vs. Kacchan 2: "Is my way of admiring All Might wrong?"

The second half to that question has always been, implicitly, "Does that mean yours is right?"

Here, Katsuki acknowledges Izuku fully as All Might's successor and affirms that Izuku's path is not wrong, using omae to tell him so. And then he uses it three more times to convince Izuku to come back with them and fight together, "because saving people is how we win."

To me, omae in this scene comes across with such softness. He's speaking with more humility than we've ever seen, both in what he's conveying and his word choice. (There is a whole other conversation to be had about Katsuki's word choice for "I'm sorry," but that is for a different time.)

This omae is not just a sign that he sees Izuku as his equal, it's expressing care for him. Katsuki sacrificed his life for Izuku, telling him, "Stop trying to win this on your own." He is trying so hard to make Izuku understand: Come back, I was wrong. Come back, I care about you.

Which brings us to the third time Katsuki uses omae: chapter 362.

That's right, the infamous "Can I still catch up to you?" / "Can I still reach you?" line uses omae.

Here's the thing that's unique about this omae: it's in Katsuki's head. This is internal monologue; he isn't talking out loud to Izuku, he isn't trying to convey something to him face-to-face, he is just thinking about Izuku.

The word choice isn't for anyone else's benefit or any external purpose: this is just how Katsuki sees him.

I can't overstate how soft, vulnerable, and sincere this moment is for Katsuki. And what gets me about him thinking of Izuku as omae is, it makes me wonder, "How long has he thought of Izuku this way?"

When did Izuku stop being temee in his head?

Changing how you address someone is a big deal in Japanese. Whether it's a name or suffix change (Deku -> Izuku) or a pronoun change (temee -> omae), it represents a significant shift in the emotional dynamics of a relationship.

It crops up a lot in media as a dramatic moment of intimacy, sometimes even being a part of love confessions. This heightened drama is exactly what we see with Katsuki's apology when he calls him Izuku.

Katsuki addresses only Izuku with his given name and omae, and in the whole run of the series, he only uses omae in a few select instances. I would argue that this is really important, subtle character writing.

Looking at the scenes, at least to me, each omae reads as progressively more honest and intimate. Each time Katsuki uses it, he is reaching for Izuku. Each time, it means more.

#bkdk #bakudeku #dekubaku #dkbk #mha spoilers #bnha spoilers #mha manga spoilers #bnha manga spoilers #bkdk apology #meta #mha 120 #mha 322 #mha 362

[rottenbrainstuff]

Story time!

I was chatting with my kiddo this morning and I realized, I think the movie Akira was the reason (or at least, the beginning point) that I turned into a movie nerd.

So it’s the mid 90s and I’m about 13 years old. You guys have to understand how different things were back then. The internet was just a baby. I can’t even remember if we HAD internet at my house at the time. If we did, it was barely better than an online encyclopedia with a sprinkling of pictures that took minutes to load. On top of that I lived in a small shitty town, and it’s hard for me to express how BORED of it all I was, and how much I craved something interesting and different from the same old shit. The information we had access to was extremely limited.

Also remember, anime wasn’t mainstream popular. Sure, we grew up with some anime, we watched Sailor Moon and Dragon Ball and stuff, but these kids shows were it - a tiny handful of shows for children with extremely westernized and edited dubs. Honestly, I didn’t even put two and two together and realize Astro Boy, which I watched ever weekend as a small child, was actually a *japanese* show until I was a teenager.

So in these dark days, there was a thing called Columbia House. Think of it like the 90s version of a subscription box plus a mail-order-catalogue all in one. They had a cd club, they had an audiobook club, stuff like that. I ordered cds from them for years because it was easier and cheaper to find the stuff I wanted than it was to look in the one single tiny music shop we had in town.

One day I got an advertisement card in my order for a new anime VHS club. I still remember which picture was on it:

Every month they would send out a movie, and the first one up was Akira. I was curious so I signed up.

I remember being absolutely STUNNED. I had never seen anything like it. It was the first foreign movie I ever saw, it was the first cartoon that wasn’t for kids I ever saw, it was the first time I realized there were really cool things out there if you knew where to look. It was weird and cool and different and I was absolutely fascinated.

I think that was the turning point for me, when I realized movies weren’t just an entertainment to put on and be distracted by for a while. I wanted to find more weird stuff and good stuff and stuff that wasn’t available at the single little mom and pop movie rental stop we had.

I never really thought about that before talking to my kiddo today, and realizing for me it all started with Akira and that Columbia House VHS club.

#personal #movie nerdery #anime nerdery #akira

[thesimline]

Hi, I'm Amy AKA The Simline.

From the first time I saw Singin' in the Rain as a kid I've been costume obsessed, and The Sims helps me channel that nerdery into CC curation and lookbooks influenced by history, television, movies, current events and all manner of creative inspiration. Because I cover such a broad range of styles I thought I'd gather everything into a pinned master post for ease of navigation.

I'm really happy to have you here and I hope you enjoy your stay!

Medieval ✺ Renaissance ✺ Tudor ✺ Baroque

Georgian ✺ Rococo

1300s ✺ 1400s ✺ 1500s ✺ 1600s ✺ 1700s

1800s

1890s ✺ 1920s ✺ 1930s ✺ 1940s ✺ 1950s

1960s ✺ 1970s ✺ 1980s ✺ 1990s

HISTORICAL (1300s to 1800s)

Historical CC Finds ✺ Historical Lookbooks

DECADES (1900s to 1990s)

Decades CC Finds ✺ Decades Lookbooks

MISCELLANEOUS

Portraits ✺ Magazine Covers ✺ No CC

Modern CC Finds ✺ Modern Lookbooks

Adventure ✺ Barbiecore ✺ Halloween

Movie Inspired ✺ Pop Culture ✺ Sci-Fi

CAS LIGHTING

CAS Overhaul v2 by Luumia

CAS BACKGROUNDS

Photos - CAS Backgrounds by Shasims

Cutouts - Chroma Green Background by Luumia

CAS ANIMATION CONTROL

Stand Still In CAS by Helgatisha

CAS Tuning - Controlled Position Mod

SIMS APPEARANCE

Matte Smooth by Emmi Bouquet

EA Eyelashes Remover by Kijiko

IMAGES

Photo Editing - Adobe Photoshop & Lightroom

Graphics - Adobe Illustrator

HISTORICAL RESEARCH

The Chronicle of Western Costume by John Peacock

Fashion History Timeline

DEAD LINKS

I check all my posts for dead links every three months (deleted files, deactivated creators, etc) as I personally find it really frustrating when I find some great CC, only to discover the download link no longer works. If you find a dead link in any of my posts please feel free to shoot me a message so I can update the post and provide you with a working download link (if I can find one).

[padawansuggest]

Also we all know that Coruscant is the city scene of the galaxy but what is the rave/festival scene of the galaxy? You don’t normally have rave festivals without some big field for everyone to enjoy their hangover in the next day before the next party, what’s the rave scene of the galaxy? You’d get heat stroke and die if you did it on Tatooine. You can’t mix alcohol/drugs and swimming so no water planets. You can’t fit the prim and pristine aesthetic of Alderaan or Naboo by having a bunch of drugged out idiots in a club… or maybe. Idk on Alderaan but DEF not Naboo. Naboo gets underground fight clubs and garden wine parties tho. Mandalore is the heart of conventions (mainly weapons, armor and slam poetry for sure) but not much in the way of nerdery. You can find a million nerd stores in Coruscants underground (meaning not ‘surface level’) shopping districts because what the fuck else are they gonna do down there but get drunk at a cantina, learn parkour and watch anime. Stewjon and Kalevala are obviously the Actual Scottish Highlands so they’re all making yarn and fabric (which is my scene but not a rave girls scene you feel me?) and so they think the pub on the weekend is a little rough but only 17 guys came home with black eyes and missing teeth so we’re calling it a win. Idk man, who’s got the rave scene???

#star wars #galactic republic

[bestworstcase]

ALSO. IRRELEVANT SIDEBAR. i seem to be the only person in the fandom who a) took it as a given that ‘the girl who fell through the world’ was at least a century old and thus predated the great war by at least two or three decades, and b) didn’t think the author’s identity being unknown was odd enough to require an explanation.

and i’m wondering now if the xkcd average familiarity curse Got Me bfgrbxcjk

alice’s adventures in wonderland! that book is One Hundred Fifty-Eight Years Old. it was published in november 1865. through the looking glass was published six years later in december 1871. CAN YOU NAME THE AUTHOR?

if you answered “lewis carroll,” bzzt! incorrect!

(well, correct in that the books were indeed written under that pseudonym BUT I MEAN HIS REAL NAME.)

alice’s adventures in wonderland is a hundred and fifty-eight years old. it has never been out of print. it’s been translated into a hundred seventy-four languages and it’s one of the best known works of nineteenth century english literature in the world. it’s been adapted many, many times for stage and radio and film and video games. “retelling the true story of alice in wonderland” is like an entire niche fantasy YA subgenre; i could name seven different examples off the top of my head. it’s as close to UBIQUITOUS as it’s possible for a story to be in a world with seven billion people living in it.

and… in a world where the non-pseudonymous identity of the author is thoroughly documented and easily accessible via the internet, the average person who Fondly Remembers watching the disney animated film or having the book read to them as a kid doesn’t know that ‘lewis carroll’ was a pen name.

his real name was charles dodgson.

and the reason the average person doesn’t know that isn’t any kind of individual failing or whatever, it’s just that the book was published almost a hundred and sixty years ago under a pen name. the pen name is what’s on the cover. most people don’t go Looking for biographical information about the authors of books their parents read to them as kids unless they have a particular reason to be interested. such as high octane nerdery.

(i own the 150th anniversary edition of the annotated alice and have read it cover to cover multiple times. and i’ll do it again. i am an Owns Books About The Math In Wonderland kind of nerdy about alice.)

—the point. being. the real world has a lot of things going for it in terms of historical preservation that remnant does not, chiefly the absence of a Fuck Ton of monsters trying to eat everybody all the time and making international travel and communication horrifyingly dangerous on a good day. the CCTS has only existed for a few decades; before that, sharing information between kingdoms was matter of “send an armed convoy and hope they don’t get killed and eaten by The Horrors en route.”

so the scholars of remnant are at, to put it mildly, a serious disadvantage in terms of information being retained over time.

anyway. ‘the girl who fell through the world’ is established very clearly to be remnant’s equivalent of our alice’s adventures in wonderland, in that it is a quite old children’s story that became MASSIVELY POPULAR worldwide, to the point that nearly everyone alive has at least some familiarity with the plot, many remember it as a cherished childhood bedtime story, and the more bookish characters can quote favorite passages from memory.

which is to say, it isn’t just The Story is an allusion to the wonderland story. the book’s ubiquity is also modeled after alice’s ubiquity, and the lack of popular knowledge about the author’s real identity likewise takes its cue from the fact that in real life most people Don’t Know who charles dodgson is.

so!!!

it’s not at all unreasonable to think that ‘the girl who fell through the world’ is probably meant to be about as old as alice’s adventures in wonderland—about a hundred fifty years, which would mean lewis published it around sixty years before the great war even started. (he also presumably didn’t publish it as a child; if he was about the age dodgson was when alice went to print, this would have been around twenty years after the fact.)

and it’s also not unreasonable to think that lewis, like charles dodgson, published his book under a pseudonym. or anonymously, but given how certain jaune is that alyx wrote the book, even though it was lewis taking notes and lewis saying he would write the story for jaune to find his way home…

i’d put my bet on lewis having written his book as “A.L. [Surname].” A for alyx, L for lewis, a symbolic way for her to come home with him. but the girls upon discovering the ever after is real and alyx was real would of course think “oh, ‘AL’ as in short for alyx” and the use of initials is also ambiguous enough for jaune to worry his way to the conclusion that he did, after alyx poisoned him.

fast forward a century and a half or so in a setting with no internet for most of that and hordes of man-eating Nightmare Beasts inhibiting international communication and… yeah of course the Real Name of beloved children’s classic author A.L. Whoever isn’t common knowledge outside of academic and hobbyist carrollian-equivalent circles.

#this post brought to you by me having the thought #‘but why are we surprised the book is way older than the great war. it’s aaiw.’ #followed by ‘………your experiences are not universal’-ing myself GRBFJSJK #anyway. if they’re going where i think they might be going with lewis #he’s theodore’s great-grandfather #and his children were of the generation that fought in the great war #<- HIGHLY speculative but trust me it tracks.

[olderthannetfic]

I had an incredibly odd moment last night at an event night for my dorm. Basically this girl and I were the last people left painting after everyone else had finished, the conversation was going well, and then she mentioned fanfic and how cringy and bad it was. Confused by my fellow nerdy type disliking a core part of nerdery, I admitted that I wrote fanfic, that I loved canon-divergent AUs and I wasn't sure what was wrong. "It's equally fictional either way," I said, which she did seem to pause and think about before acknowledging that was true.

Then she clarified the problem was Boku No Hero Academia. (For full transparency, I have not watched it. Confused, I said, "Isn't that just some shounen series? What's wrong with that? I like shounen." So then she hits me with, "The fandom is gross. That write things that shouldn't be depicted or portrayed." I stared at her, confused. "Like pedophilia."

I admitted, because I felt comfortable with her, that I had written fanfic about CSA and a survivor finding hope for the future, a therapist, true love and his abuser eventually getting his comeuppance. She looked at the painting and not at me. I couldn't tell if she was mad or not. So I added that, over the course of the year and a half of writing it, nine people had told me that reading it had helped them either decide to seek out therapy or helped them realize what happened to them was abuse and that it mattered. And I think it's worth it to make something that makes someone uncomfortable if it helps other people out, and also, the back button is right there. No one has to read something.

Looking upset but affect flat, she said that BNHA fans write things that "glorify" pedophilia. And I, because I am a dick with no social skills, went, "Well, don't read it." She clarified it shouldn't be allowed to exist because it "does harm to people". I said that abusers are responsible for abuse they commit, and nothing they read makes them do it. Psychologists, I reminded her, since several people in her family are psychologists, study and witness things much more horrible than we can imagine, which abusers often say are necessary, justified and sometimes kinda cool, and they don't do any of it. Stephen King didn't commit any murders as a run-up to writing about murder.

She went back to staring at the paint and said I didn't understand the harm it was doing, because it was normalizing it. So I pointed out that no amount of movies where killing the bad guy is a cool, glorious, badass thing to do has made murder socially acceptable in society. "But that's killing," was the objection. "Which is violence," I said in return, "just not sexual violence. But if a hundred years of killing the person who wronged you in cinema didn't make people fine with murder, I don't think a fanfic is going to make it that way." She scoffed and looked away. In a gentler tone, I finished with, "I don't think all of the socialization someone goes through in life and everything they've been told in their entire life can be undone by some anime characters."

She did not say anything to me for the rest of the painting time. She left without a word. I thought for sure she was angry with me and we weren't going to take anymore.

Today, she smiled and waved at me on campus like everything is fine and nothing uncomfy happened.

I don't understand. I am, however, neurodivergent, and therefore bad at social signals, so I may be missing something, here. She was never visibly angry at me when we talked, nor did she raise her voice, so I don't think that I was awful, here. However, not saying anything to me for a full forty minutes or even looking at me indicates to me I had said something that made her upset.

Neurotypicals, please advise. What is going on, here?

--

Well... probably she just had her dumb assumptions challenged and wasn't sure how to feel about it in the moment.