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#cant believe you got the literal worst consequence of that
gaylordscooter · 10 days
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Log of the Multiverse: Nightmare
hoo boy i got shivers just writing down their name.
i'm doing their entry before dream's because, like ink, i'll let him write his own. too bad he's so incredibly busy all the time
now nightmare, his brother, the guardian of negativity. they're terrifying. i can't believe they're dream's twin. they hardly even look like a skeleton.
Thankfully they're nowhere NEAR as active as Dream is. in fact, it's a rare sight to see them for the average person. unfortunately i'm with a group of loony people that happen to be the only people nightmare would seek out from time to time.
i actually got a sticky note i wrote on after i encountered them for the first time
[there's a somewhat crumpled sticky note taped on, it reads:
their touch hurts, presumably because of the goop (speaking of goop. no idea what it's made out of). reminds me of the time i spilt hydrochloric acid on my foot on accident. however, it doesn't actually leave a wound or lasting pain, like touching fire without getting burned
you’ll know they're near when you get a heavy feeling in your soul, similar to blue magic but if it hated you.
negative feelings fuel them. it’s like their food. would being happy drive them away?
they don't kill as long as they find you useful apparently im “a cesspool of anxiety and guilt that provides a plentiful amount of energy”. i hope they choke on my feelings.]
i forgot about that last bit. moving on
they've caused quite a bit of commotion back in their peak. they were on par with error in terms of disturbing universes. they just had. different methods (such as, killing loved ones in front of people, making people live out their worst fears, spilling people's very important secrets, manipulating people who are close to hate each other, ruining the happy endings of many universes) they're a lot more sadistic than error. i suppose that makes sense. they ARE the guardian of negativity.
now i was still in my universe while that was happening, i'm just paraphrasing what ink told me.
and then they just suddenly cut back. they stopped doing all of that.
ink expected this, obviously. he knew how their script goes. (of course he cant TELL me what happens in his script. he can only drop hints and even then he tries not to, to play it safe)
what i do know is that the balance between negativity and positivity is Very much out of wack. what i don't know is what the consequence of that is. yet.
I'm gonna go on a limb and say it's nothing good and buckle up for the ride.
wow it sure sucks knowing something bad is gonna happen and being powerless to stop it. how the hell does ink do it.
side note: ive been calling them the "guardian of negativity" but i don't actually know what that entails. same with dream's title as "guardian of positivity". honestly i don't think either of them know either.
i guess dream's positive all the time, like he can't even feel negative emotions
oh my god im stupid. he literally can't, can he?
then that would mean nightmare cant feel positive emotions. that's. wow. huh.
shit. well, i'm gonna have a chat with dream. or ink, if he doesn't want to talk.
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loveyougoodbi · 5 months
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Hello! Saw your tags and may I ask you-why you think Lestappen and Larry situations are different?
Disclaimer: when I say relationship in the following text I mean platonic
Hi!
Well for starters I think that people are looking at it from 1 angle only. And that is Max and Charles stopping communication with each other altogether. In that aspect sure, there is a small possibility that Lestappen could become Larry if they start (on their own accord) being guarded towards each other. But as we can see, they're both fully aware of the ship name and their interactions are being perceived and yet we have not seen a singe ounce of guardiness (is that a word?) In either of them. And what I do in situations like this is I think "Are these situations completely the same and should I expect these 2 people to act the same way? Why do I expect them to act the same way?)
Under the cut because it got long
So I took a look at both situations and realized how different they are. Hear me out.
1. Their ages. When all this started happening to Louis and Harry they were 16 years old. Their popularity skyrocketed in months if not weeks. They had no time to adjust, no time to think about their situations and their relationship outside of fame. They had 2 3 DAYS interactions with each other before they were put in front of a camera and told to entertain. They were 16 and 18. They were kids who did not expect to be a part of a world like this. They were not aware what they were and how their interactions would affect them and their relationship in the future. Lestappen Have known their entire life that their life would revolve around racing, around cameras, always known to the public. Max was going to races when he was 3 years old. It's safe to say he always knew what he was getting into when it comes to fame. Similarly Charles was always aware of this world. They both grew up in it. Charles had better pr training at 17 than most celebrities have in their 30s or 40s. So by the time they started being "close" in public (2022) they were already aware of what it would mean. They are already aware of the consequences. They have a history of interactions with each other. And now with what we are getting I think they are perfectly aware of what they are doing and they are perfectly aware of what their relationship is and what it means to them. Not to mention they probably have had time to nurture this relationship outside of the public eye (something Harry and louis were never able to do) and it allows them to have a bond beyond what we see on camera. Also we see a lot less of them than we did Larry at that time since 1d were.... literally filmed 24/7 which max and Charles are not.
2. Their professional environment. And I cant stress this enough. The people around Max and Charles encourage their interactions. Guys. This is very important. I big big HUGE part of Larry and the whole lore around it is THEY. WERE. NOT. ALLOWED. TO. TALK. TO. EACH. OTHER. Under ANY circumstances. Not bc they were disgusted by being perceived as gay. But because they were not allowed to. Everyone around 1d at the time was pretending this was not a thing. It was on every blacklist. They did not have segments when the guys were doing joint interviews and stuff. Even I'm videos of the band they were never alone in a frame together. When 1d started they were really young and marketed to a young audience. But also audience whose parents need to give permission/money In order for said audience to exist. To have rumors like that in that environment was unacceptable. Their teams thought these interaction were not working in their favour. And they told this to 16 and 18 yo kids who probably took that to heart and continued to live by it for years to come. They were told these rumors were the worst thing that could happen to their career and they believed it. Because they didn't know any better. In lestappen case? Their teams obviously don't mind it. They USE IT. It's a huge huge difference. If the team minded charles even mentioning maxs name and told professional pr trained Charles no talking to Max it doesn't benefit us you think he wouldn't listen? He absolutely would. But the teams are using this lestappen Situation to their advantage so Max and Charles have no reason to be guarded. They do not feel threatened by it.
Tl;dr there are 2 main reason I think Lestappen and Larry are different: One is their age and stage of their relationship at the time the rumors started and second is their their teams behavior and interaction with the ship. These 2 things together are causing Max and Charles to not be threatened by the public response to their relationship as opposed to Larry at that time
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blacktinnedpeaches · 1 year
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ok so: another friend drama recap post
i've known this woman, we'll call her Claire, since i was 17 + she was about 25. the other members of the group are ana: (2y older than me) and our parisian friend who we'll call Dora (I wanna say like 1y older than me). anyway suffice to say we've all been friends for over 10y, not just online but irl as well. (WE MET ON LIVEJOURNAL! yes even ana and i met on livejournal) ages not really important other than to make it even more baffling lol
anyway claire has been v weird and unstable for a few years now, i want to be charitable and say it is potentially a reaction to the collective trauma of covid (and also she's had a HORRIFIC few years personally - a lot of death) but i don't know how to deal w/ her at all anymore like i know she's struggling a lot but like i cannot deal with it, it's just maddening
all she really does is infodump about her current fandoms that NOBODY ELSE IN THE GROUP HAS ANY INTEREST IN WHATSOEVER interspersed with these wildly disturbing one-off sentences like "oh i think my wife lost the baby" like. (she hadn't btw) the emotional whiplash from going from her angrily screenshotting comments on her fanfiction that she agree with to talking about the horrific shit going on in her life just makes it so difficult to talk to her + also i cannot pretend to give a shit about k-dramas ive never seen like... i literally just cant lol. so i tend to just ignore the group chat + leave ana + dora to deal with it. (ana mildly resents me for this but my position is they dont have to deal w/ it either and social consequences for being totally unbearable is not the worst thing)
anyway so i think i mentioned this before but a few weeks ago she mentioned taking herself (chronically ill) + her pregnant wife to paris at the beginning of december. on public transport. like i know no one gives a shit about covid anymore but long-term disability from it is really a gamble for the healthiest of people let alone people w/ her problems. they've both also had it before + negative outcomes do seem to stack the more infections you have
she brought this up, i could not stop myself from politely saying i thought this was a dreadful idea, ana backed me up and i also got a DM from dora thanking me for saying something (dora had previously told her not to come but didn't feel comfortable having th esame conversation a second time)
SHE HAS NOT SPOKEN TO US SINCE. she's privately started DMing all her hyperfixation bullshit to dora instead of the group chat + dora is like idk wtf to do with this either lol. like she's literally just totally stopped talking to me and ana AT ALL bc we politely told her we were worried for her health if she went to a huge city in the middle of winter LMAOOO like i know age / emotional maturity don't go together but like can you fucking believe she's nearly 40 + this was enough to apparently tank a 10y+ friendship???
if i wasn't already pretty much done w/ the friendship id be v hurt + offended that being like "hey we'd rather you didn't put yourself at risk here" was apparently evil enough to just totally cut off
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strawberrybabydog · 2 years
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what IS a D/A/Delusional Attachment? /GEN. (Im assuming this is the right blog for this, but if its not, feel free to ignore me!) I see tons of people saying theyre real while others are saying theyre just kin/folk. What are they/can you explain?
it's a really complicated topic but i'll try to summarize for you!
delusional attachment is a term that was coined in november 2020 by a twitter user (they've deactivated since and i cant remember their name) for individual use, to describe "a delusion of grandiose where you believe you are a character."
KFF twitter picks this up - they like it because it describes an experience they dont have a word for (or rather, have bastardized a word for,) which is identifying-as a character
the problem in lies that this is a poorly coined word for MANY reasons. the experience isn't necessarily a delusion of grandiose (and in most cases it actually isn't at all,) it's not an attachment (it's an identify-as identity, a literal delusional attachment would describe an erotomanic delusion) and identities are inherently not delusions. the person who coined it (albeit for personal use) didn't do their research into delusions before coining it. if this stayed as an individually used term, this wouldn't be such a huge issue
because it's the only words KFF have for identify-as, this has encouraged a LOT of non-psychotic people to use this word. and because many of them are young people, they don't do their research into delusions at all. they're known for spreading very severe misinformation on delusions and psychosis, typically based off their own experiences with psychosis (which again, they more often don't have! either way, basing education on anything off your own experience exclusively is incredibly dangerous and very unethical)
obviously, this hurts actually-psychotic people in many ways. it also hurts Real Otherkin, who get bullied a lot by these people. one of the worst misinformations to come out of this is that all identities are delusions, because of the basic definition of delusions which is that they're unshakeable beliefs. however, there are a lot more "rules" to defining delusions - if they consider otherkin to be delusions based solely off the summarized definition, they also include trans people and religious people as being delusional by the exact same definition (which is very obviously not the case, and the reason why there are rules.) they're somehow the same group that seems to bully other groups about being delusional the most - they have a trend of calling non-delusional people delusional or saying "get help" in an extremely malicious way. makes no sense, i know lol
because delusional attachments are made up of a good chunk of non-delusional people, they're VERY uncomfortable when a person displays real symptoms of psychosis (or any other symptom which isn't palatable or cute to them,) where they'll spout bullying and of course your tone-deaf sanism classic: "get help"
other discourse begins! "are delusional attachments real?" <- what they actually mean is "are delusional attachments medically recognized, and therefore a valid way to identify?" the answer to the former is no, of course they're not medically recognized. they're a very poorly named internet identity that's less than 2 years old. beyond that, they sort of are? but it's complicated. if a person who identifies with delusional attachment got diagnosed with a delusion, it would be "bizarre/non-specified" which basically means "miscellaneous" and is a catch-all for any bizarre delusion which doesn't fit into pre-determined categories. this diagnosis is obviously not exclusive to "delusional attachments." beyond that it's possible it would be considered a delusional misidentification, but that's not a diagnosis it's just a category/umbrella term. some could possibly be diagnosed with delusions of grandiose, although from what i've seen none of them actually display grandiose behavior at all. whether or not it's a "valid" identity is for nobody to decide though.
theres other discourse, like you mentioned "are they or are they not normal otherkin using sanism as a way to be "more valid" than otherkin?" self dx discourse, and general sanism discourse around them as well. most of it isn't very important in the face of "these people spread very severe anti-psychotic sanism" though
it's not terrible to identify as a delusional attachment (or having a delusional attachment? i dont know) but its generally a very big red flag for actually-psychotic people. it tells actually-psychotic people that you're either fine with or contribute to severe misinformation and anti-psychotic-sanism, and that you're generally ignorant and don't truly care about us. this often means ostracization for actually-psychotic communities
identify however you want, but be aware that this label comes with consequences
here's my full archive of delusional attachments - there's a lot of logs there of very blatant sanism and misinformation if you're interested in reading more
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phantomrose96 · 2 years
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oh don’t worry ABoT can definitely be a weekend read, i just read it start to chapter 39 from 2am to now (and still got a solid 8 hours of sleep somehow) ! couldn’t put it down honestly. amazing job at reconceptualizing the characters in this worst case scenario alternate universe in a way that feels believable and not contrived — not pulling any punches (ritsu and teru are … pretty awful, in particular) but not in a sensationalist dead-dove-dont-eat way at all which i really really appreciate. teru and ritsu are awful but ultimately sympathetic because they really do feel like natural extensions of their character arcs had canon played out differently. it would’ve been really easy to take this and make it into either an Everyone Is Evil I Am So Edgy story or a But They All Come Together Through The Power Of Friendship, so thank you for not doing that! while reigen is my favorite, i love ritsu & teru’s relationship — it’s so nuanced but well developed. cant wait to see what happens next!
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(ABoT)
Oh you get it
Oh You Get It........
Hahahhahhhhhaaa.............................................
Literally when I saw the first ask before you sent the follow up, my first thought was like "!!!! you get it! gosh I wish that woulda applied to all those people from 2017-2018 who labeled ABoT torture p//or/n" but I wasn't gonna actually bring that up because like even talking about that time always feels like I'm putting myself on the defensive.
But.... god haha yeah..... I didn't write anything for almost 3 years after that. I thought about ABoT every damn day for that almost-3-year hiatus. It was already planned out! It had an ending! It just made me so sad because I believed I couldn't come back to it because I couldn't Do This Again.
It was just... utterly heart-breaking, utterly devastating, downright confusing how this fic which is so focused on the slow and messy and hard work of recovery was being branded "oh it's sadistic twisted fucked-up torture p//or//n of children and the author is a sick fuck".
I know it's dark!! It's dark and no one has to read it and I've tagged it for the things that are dark and I put content warnings in front of every chapter! But it's dark because I care about how much a tiny flicker of light can mean in the darkness.
I... care about media that doesn't just brush traumatic happenings under the rug and go "so that happened, anyway." I care about trauma that isn't ignored. I care about the characters who can't just brush it off - who come out worse because of it - I care about them and what the slow and ugly and sometimes backwards progress of recovery looks like. I care about characters who absolutely Fuck Up and face consequences for it. I care about characters who are messy and need time and cannot be fixed with a single nice word. I care about making the audience care about what the characters have lived through, and how it hurt them. I'm rooting for all the characters in ABoT. They're all trying to find their own flicker of light in the dark. I care so so so so so much about that.
And it absolutely destroyed me to see a whole group of friends in the fandom (who, mind you, were annoyed with ABoT for a while. I saw their posts show up when I searched 'ABoT', and who tried to pin a couple problematic labels on ABoT and couldn't get anything to stick until 'torture p//o//rn") rip apart ABoT's reputation because ALL they needed to say was "ABoT is an au where Mogami kidnaps and tortures Mob for 4 years. It's awful and gross and problematic and don't read it and if you do YOURE problematic."
And I saw it time and time again (again, in the ABoT tags! in MY tag, sometimes.) Someone would make a post like "if you're an ABoT stan don't follow me" and some clueless anon would be like "whats ABoT" and they'd answer the above and that was it. No one wanted to risk getting into "problematic" stuff so people just accepted it. Even more neutral people didn't have the time or reason to investigate that further and just accepted it, assuming whoever was speaking had read it, even if in reality none of them had.
I got death threats. They made hate-blogs of ABoT. They made memes shitting on ABoT. They spammed the ABoT tag and the phantomrose96 tag. They spammed sandflake's tag and drove them away same as me. They raided and spammed the ABoT discord. They made posts celebrating how long it had been since ABoT updated. They made posts trying to accuse me of pe//do//philia (for NO reason. NONE. NO REASON. NO EVIDENCE. It was just an effective word to get people run off the site. and luckily that accusation died because there was literally nothing to base it on.) ALL the while framing what they were doing as totally in the right because they were JUST calling out torturous child-abusing fic.
I really tried. When all this started, I stopped tagging anything ABoT related with m/p/100, so I wouldn't bother people. If I found ABoT art tagged with m/p/100, I'd wait a day to reblog it so it wouldn't accidentally rise high in the tag and bother people. Sometimes I WOULDN'T reblog art because I didn't want the artist to risk getting threatened. I mostly stopped talking about ABoT on tumblr, so I wouldn't bother people.
But it fucking gets to you after a while. I started believing they were right. My mental health was extreme garbage at this time (for reasons unrelated to this all) but that meant I couldn't brush any of it off. ABoT was kinda the one little spark of joy I had at this time and then I just. Didn't anymore. It got taken away.
I would write every sentence through the lens of my worst critic. I tried SO many times to start chapter 25 back in 2018. I could only get a page in at most. (Originally it was going to be the mall movie theater scene that ends up happening in chapter 27) and I'd balk at jokes I was trying to write. There was going to be a joke about the movie being a sort of in-universe Twilight, where the two love interests uncannily resembled Ritsu and Teru. And I froze up because. Was that problematic? If Teru was seeing the movie because Mei wanted to, was that sexist? If Teru himself wanted to see it, was that homophobic? Was the Twilight reference problematic? Was the joke about the love interest resemblance problematic? Would the irreverence of the joke be problematic? Would this be what they get me on? Would this be my undoing? Would this be the final nail in my coffin?
I found these old drafts somewhat recently and they are just. Lifeless. They are so barren of any kind of passion or heart. I re-read it and see just how painful it was to get from one sentence to another. I was burnt out and afraid of every word and those drafts would never ever have worked.
Hell, when I did write chapter 25 for real, in 2020, I gave up entirely on making it the movie scene. Trashed that. Started from scratch. That well was far far too tainted to draw from.
I just. aaa. aaaaaaaaaaaaaa. Sorry for the long post but ahhhhhhh. I gave up my favorite and most meaningful hobby for almost 3 years. This was still happening in 2019 when season 2 aired, when I hadnt been truly active on Tumblr for ages and hadn't touched ABoT in years. JUST so they could be sure to taint the well again and tell any new fandom comers to stay away from ABoT. I had no spoons and no spine for it so I just, let that happen, and unfollowed the ABoT tag. I still haven't seen season 2.
I'm so SO glad I figured out how to come back to it in 2020, and that people have been so supportive, and I mostly try not to talk about this stuff but. it fucks with you. it fucks with you a lot.
I'm just really happy to have been able to come back to it.
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byulsgrease · 3 years
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if you arent too busy, can you write a idol!hwasa x idol!reader, wherein they both have to practice with each other for a special stage. However on the first meeting they become starstruck and cant believe somethings are real, but soon warm up to each other?
i'm not terribly busy but this still took a while anyway oops - sorry this took so long anon! here you go :D
if anyone has requests for the other members hmu cuz I've got 2 more hyejin reqs after this one (not that I'm complaining)
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"who says we can't do something on our own?"
(hwasa x idol!reader, ~1.2k words)
cw: food + alcohol mention (y'all know how it is)
I named someone Minjeong - it's not Aespa's Winter, idk anything about 4th gen gg's - 민정 is my Korean name so it's just what came to mind
"Hey, wake up. You've gotta see this. GET UP," a voice piercing through the fog of your sleep.
What a rude awakening. Your shoulders being shaken vigorously by a pair of small hands meant they belonged to none other than Minjeong, your youngest group member. You rolled over to glare menacingly at her with one eye open, trying to pull your brain out of the slumber. All you could see was the bright light of her phone shining in your eyes - a video of some kind. But then you heard the audio:
"Have you seen the clip?" asked the interviewer.
"Yes, my members and many MooMoos made sure I saw it"— Moos? Oh, it's Hwasa. WAIT. Both your eyes flew open as you sat up and snatched Jeongie's phone out of her hand to stare at the video. Your mind immediately flashed back to the interview you did last week - they asked who you most wanted to collaborate with, if there were no limitations. Your ears started to heat up at the sheer thought of the flustered mess of an answer you gave - of course you said Hwasa. Both of you debuted relatively close to each other, within a year, but never interacted much over the years. Mamamoo as a group was a force to be reckoned with, but there was just something about Hwasa specifically. You mostly just admired her unique singing voice and undeniable stage presence, and her relentless drive to always be herself in an industry constantly trying to fit women into a box.
Finally snapping out of re-living that embarrassment, your attention turned back to the phone in your hand. The interviewer must've asked her to send a message in response to you, because you couldn't believe that she was waving and saying, "How haven't we gotten to know each other better over all these years? I'd love to work with you on something sometime," curtly dipping her head in a slight bow.
"SEE? You needed to see that," Minjeong rushed to say, full of energy. "And close your mouth, your jaw's on the floor," jokingly pointing.
You side-eyed her and shut your mouth. "Is this what Loco felt like when she called him during Hyena on the Keyboard?" you wondered aloud.
"At least she's not calling you while on camera," she commented, knowing full well that you'd probably embarrass yourself again if she did. "But hey, at least she noticed you! Can I have my phone back now?" It would be a dream come true to collaborate with her, but cross-company collabs... always a pain. that couldn't be helped. The fantasy abruptly ended with demands from your rumbling stomach. Done with your what-if's, you placed the phone back in your maknae's outstretched hand to get up and make breakfast.
~~~~
With award show season rolling around, the crazy scramble of rehearsing for special live stages without leaking sets and collabs began. Checking your email that morning showed a schedule to record the backing track for a special live stage, but that was it. With who? You texted your members a screenshot, but they all told you that block of time in their schedule was empty. A solo stage? The solo mini-album you released this cycle did relatively well, the title track got a music show win, but not a multi-week chart-topper by any means. Possibilities turning over in your mind, you stepped out from your place to head to the company, totally in the dark about what was in store.
The recording studio always smelled the same along with the couches, a comfort for all the insanely long nights and crack-of-dawn early mornings over the years. With a bit of time to kill, you plopped down on one and gingerly patted the worn cushions as some kind of symbolic thank-you for supporting you (literally).
A hesitant but loud knock sent your gaze directly to the door. Watching it slowly open, you leaned forward to see who it was. Needless to say, your jaw fell to the floor again as you clapped a hand over your gaping mouth, eyes widening. Like a soldier obeying a command, you immediately stood up as straight as possible and bowed profusely at Hwasa, sporting a very similar expression on her face (which you failed to notice, your mind running a million miles a minute).
After a series of frantic bows and miscellaneous utterances to each other, she spoke. "It's nice to finally meet you," she said with calm, surveying your frenzied state. "I guess we're granting that collab wish from your interview, huh?"
The red-hot embarrassment leapt to your face. "I...I definitely made a fool of myself answering that question. And our maknae showed me your interview clip too, which was cool, but never did I think it would actually happen," you stammered. I should probably stop talking.
"Well, here I am," she half-smiled coolly. "Let's get started, I'm really looking forward to finally work with you on this," a gleam in her eye and a hint of excitement in her voice.
The studio suddenly felt a lot smaller with her in it, despite there only being your managers, the producer, and the both of you - less people than you and your members alone. Both of you remained relatively quiet the whole time, rather unsure of what to say or talk about. You watched enough MMMTV to know that all the members on their own were shyer than together, and Hwasa knew the same was true for you. But the work basically took care of itself, seamlessly taking turns in the recording booth, witnessing each other's work style and process. The both of you knew your way in front of a mic, seasoned professionals by now. Upon wrapping up, you bowed politely to each other after a quick exchange of KaTalk info, a short and sweet goodbye.
That was... anticlimactic. I mean, it's finally happening - I can't believe it. But maybe I was too idealistic about maybe creating a meaningful relationship with her outside of work... What does she think of me?
~~~~
In the days leading up to the collab stage, you kept going back and forth on whether to reach out or not, despite now being in possession of her contact info. What would you even say? Thoughts of a witty one-liner or relatable meme came to mind, but maybe she'd assume the worst - that you were clout-chasing, or something. Anxieties abuzz, your phone vibrated in your pocket. The KaTalk notification sprawled across your screen. Speak of the devil, it's her.
"Hey, awards season has me stressed. I know you must pretty busy right now too, but I somehow get off early tomorrow if you wanna grab dinner after work?" You had to reread that one. Oh, what? She's inviting me?
Trying not to be weird about responding too quickly, you typed out, "Wow, yeah, that sounds great! ^^ wait, your company doesn't care about you going out to eat during award season?"
"nah, they stopped having that kind of control over us a while ago, we are the money-maker of the company, after all 😏"
"so I guess this means they don't check your phone either ㅋㅋㅋ"
"nope :)"
You proceeded to set a time and place to meet, someplace with meat.
In the process of feasting on an inordinate amount of gopchang imbued with a splash of beer, you learned a fair amount about each other. You talked career, professional aspirations, the weird habits of your members, and more. What surprised you most was the amount of things she already knew about you, having admitted to watching some of your behind-the-scenes content after seeing your interview clip.
"Ah... I'm sorry if I came across as distant during that first recording session," she confessed, pausing to sip her beer. "I honestly didn't know what to do with myself, I felt a little star-struck."
"Oh what?? I felt the exact same, so no worries - and sorry if I came off similarly distant," you rambled back. A bit of silence fell between you, acknowledging the mutual sentiment. You spoke up after a bit, "Thanks for inviting me out tonight, I didn't realize how much I needed this."
"Thank you for making the time, I had fun getting to know you better," she articulated with a smile. "Maybe it'll make the collab stage better," she added on jokingly. You responded with a nod and expression of mutual affirmation.
~~~~
After that, messaging each other became a regular occurrence, that gopchang outing having broken the ice. Honestly, you tried your best to talk about anything besides work, but the baseline of shared understanding connected you in a way that came more naturally than it did with your non idol friends.
You stood across the way from her at the sound check for the final stage, dressed in joggers and slides. Funny to think that you'd be recording this for real in a couple hours, making eyes with the blinking red light on the cameras surrounding you. It sucks that fans wouldn't get to experience the energy and atmosphere of the performance - Hyejin alone is one thing, but adding someone else into her stage presence? Unmatched. There's nothing quite like a live performance - and while you knew everyone in the industry dealt with the consequences of the pandemic, it certainly took a toll to perform and not feel the energy from fans. But realistically, nothing you could do about it. The sound check went over smooth like butter. The stage chemistry came flowing naturally between you both, even when bare-faced and dressed in just sweats.
And when the time came for the actual filming, you both absolutely killed it, an upbeat mash-up of TWIT and your title track. At the very end came a sliver of hesitation before throwing your arms around each other with a big smile for the ending fairy, proud of the work you accomplished together, and a mental fist-pump to yourself for making friends with one of the industry's finest.
Once again walking to a restaurant that served mostly meat to celebrate, you playfully proposed, "We... should do that again sometime." A little puff of air came out her nose in amusement.
"Yeah, we should. Too bad we're gonna have to wait a whole cycle before we can release anything else together again," she sighed longingly.
"Who says we can't do something on our own?"
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leonicscorpio · 3 years
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Why I’m Cautiously Optimistic for Batman: Urban Legends
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So this is a spoiler review of Batman: Urban Legends and the story between Jason Todd and Bruce Wayne that was introduced to us yesterday. 
For those who don’t know, I like Jason Todd and The Red Hood. A lot. However being a Red Hood fan has been frustrating to say the least. He’s one of the most inconsistently written characters in the DCU. Prior to the New 52 and Rebirth. Red Hood was pretty much a straight-up villain. However under Scott Lobdell (for better or for worse) we got Red Hood and the Outlaws. Which transformed Jason from villain to Anti-Hero with varying shades of tropes from Sociopathic Hero at worst to Knight in Sour Armor at best. 
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I am in no way trying to say that Jason is a bad character. I’d say he truly is my favorite DC Comics character. However a large portion of it comes from Lobdell’s portrayal of a bitter anti-hero trained by the deadliest assassins in the world coming off of a failed revenge attempt against his former parental guardian. To learning to mellow out a bit and still be a hero, but keep his deadly tactics. 
It’s hypocritical to say that I dislike the fact that Jason kills people.  Quite graphically and brutally mind you. Call it disturbing but that’s what a lot of people like about him. However what has caused a large rift between the DC Fans and Jason Todd is the fact that a lot of the time his foot is halfway in the anti-hero door, halfway trying to warm up to Bruce and the Batman. The problem with the later being Lobdell’s obsession with making Jason teeter between wanting to be on Bruce’s good side, reverting back to what he does best, which is kill, harm, and maim, and Bruce proceeding to hunt him down and beat Jason to within an inch of his life. 
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It’s just as infuriating for us the readers as it is for the character. What I think fans would appreciate is if Jason were to just leave Batman, stay with the Outlaws, and be his own team. Helping Bruce out occasionally but letting Jason do his own thing. Or to have Bruce fully accept Jason as he is. Which, while is something that sounds nice, but thematically makes little to no sense considering the fact that Jason has done horrific things. Including but not limited to.. 
- Having been confirmed to have killed EIGHTY THREE PEOPLE (83). And this was at the beginning of OUTLAWS. That number has most certainly gone up. 
- Tortured a drug dealer to death by injecting them with bleach. 
- In Under the Red Hood, he decapitated the middle ranking members of the highest crime bosses in Gotham. (And from the shocked looks on their faces, it seems as though Jason started the decapitation process when they were alive) 
- Regularly attempted to harm/if not kill Dick Grayson, Tim Drake, and Damian Wayne in some earlier comics. 
- Tormented Mia Darden (Speedy) in Seeing Red about her past about being a sex worker and being homeless in her youth in a way to try to get her to join him. When she refuses Jason proceeds to blow up her school. Yikes. 
- In Last Crusade he killed a mook by Crushing their head in with a car door. Oh and he did that AS ROBIN. 
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I’m fully aware a lot of those deeds were erased by the Rebirth/New 52. However it’s clear to see why Bruce, while probably does still care and support Jason. He absolutely cannot let Jason run around unchecked in his eyes.  That’s why I think it’s unlikely given the events of how Under the Red Hood transpired, Jason in his current state would ever truly and fully be welcomed back into the Bat Family. 
Okay LeonicScorpio, this is great and all, but this is supposed to be a post about Batman Urban Legends, you tell me. Well, my dear reader, I shall now get to it. I was setting up the fact that Jason, while he is heroic and has done heroic things, he also is someone who once reveled in violence, causing pain and suffering, and still has a core philosophy in believing killing people based on certain crimes is allowable. (SPOILERS FOR BATMAN: URBAN LEGENDS BELOW) 
Chip Zdarsky has done a fantastic job in introducing Jason in this side story. A new drug is sweeping across Gotham. Jason encounters a situation far too similar to his own upbringing. An overdosed mother and a sad crying boy confused. Jason takes the boy named Tyler and promises to protect him. 
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While I’m on the fence about Eddy Barrows’s take on Jason style wise. You cannot understate the symbolism of his art in this shot. Jason Todd, the same one who came back from the dead and decapitated men when they were alive and reveled in causing pain, comforting a child when they were afraid in a genuine way is something a lot of the fanon has wanted for a long time. However Barrow’s art style gives a sense of uneasiness to the heroic-ness of Jason. Almost as if Jason is unsure of himself. It’s twisted in that it’s both dark but heroic. 
Things come to a head when Jason realizes Tyler’s father is probably a drug pusher in Gotham. And when he does finally catch up to the boy’s father. He does take a non-violent approach to trying to get Tyler’s father to turn around (Rubber bullets to the leg. Jason is trying.) However upon trying to reason with Tyler’s father Jason learns that his father was giving the drug to his mother and his son as a means of keeping them controlled. And that Tyler’s father doesn’t give a damn about his family. 
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Now what do we know about Jason? He kills those who gives drugs to children and parents of children. So what comes next is very on-brand of Jason. Hell I wasn’t even shocked by Jason’s reaction to this at all. 
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What happens after is what I’ve wanted to write for the longest time. Jason realizes that he’s just killed Tyler’s father. Even if his father didn’t care and was outright abusive towards him. He still killed his father. And Jason stops and drops to his knees because he realizes what he’s done. When I read that my reaction was literally the Jeff Goldblum “You did it, you crazy son of a bitch you did it.” I love Jason but I’ve wanted a story where Jason has to face the consequences of his philosophy and actions. Jason does want to be good and make a difference. But by killing Jason has dug himself into a hole he cant easily bury himself out of. 
So long story short Batman Urban Legends should have all of your attentions. 
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tigerdrop · 3 years
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hey i just wanna say the long posts genuinely make my day. also can you talk more about gordon freeman character because the way you write him makes me quake in my gay little boots
i would love to talk about gordon freeman. thank u for the opportunity
the first thing i need to communicate about gordon is that this dude sucks. and i say this in the fondest way possible. he is a bitch from the moment he drops into the world until the moment he goes out. if you dont believe me, give it another watch! gordons mouthy and rude for no real reason, at least so far as “being a regular dude on his way into work” goes, and this dude goes around calling his coworkers names with zero provocation. (of course, we all know that the reason is because its a funny guy improv stream that borrows a bit from freemans mind, but im talkin from a character sense.)
but my argument isnt just that gordon freeman sucks. its that he sucks in a very specific way that i find insanely endearing. i love this dude. i love to hate him. hes awful in a very mundane sense - weve all known a guy like this, at least if youve spent too much time online - and its cathartic to watch him suffer because of it.
gordons a smart guy. as written, hes gotta be - hes a recent MIT grad, on his way to work at a top-secret research facility to do weird shit with crystals and theoretical physics. but the thing about smart guys is that theyre often......selectively intelligent. we can see this in the way that he has a hard time navigating his surroundings, and needs the science crew to guide him through it and keep him alive.
this is one of those things that is a natural consequence of somebody going through the game for the first time, but that i am interpreting as “gordon is kind of stupid sometimes”. its uncharitable but its not like he doesnt deserve it. he likes to boss around the crew as if he knows what hes doing, when he often very much does not, and is fond of demeaning their intelligence. hes real bad about this with tommy in particular, treating him like hes a kid whos playing at being a scientist when tommy is actually a decade older than him. all i am saying is that gordon ought to stay humble. hes awful cocky when he perceives himself as better than others.
which, i think, tracks with how cocky he gets when he gives up on the whole “well-meaning citizen” thing and just unloads bullets into people. he puts up a front of being a Nice Guy, you know, just some dude caught in a bad situation who doesnt like seeing his companions obliterate every NPC they come across, but that doesnt stop him from cackling like a fucking madman and mowing down aliens (and soldiers) every once in awhile. when he stops seeing himself as helpless and starts seeing himself as the one in control, the gloves come off. he gets mean. and i think thats very sexy of him
this, among other things, is why i am insistent that gordon freeman is a control freak. he desperately wants to be in control of the situation at all times, shepherding around the science crew primarily by bitching at them, but its of limited success. its futile. sisyphean. tommy, coomer, bubby, and benrey exist almost to torment him with exactly the thing that would make him suffer the most: a gaggle of people running around causing problems for him, but he cant go anywhere without them b/c hes reliant on them to make it out alive.
its perpetual suffering, and its cathartic to watch. and funny, too. and if youre a little weirdo like me, its very, very enjoyable. how twisted up he gets when nobodys listening to him! how sweaty and frazzled he must look. its cute, and it also makes me want to reach through the screen and shake him and tell him to just be a little nicer. he wants control but he doesnt know how to attain it, he doesnt know how to play nice like a real leader. i think its a neat contrast to gordon freeman as we know him in HL2, where he literally is the leader of the resistance and has to live up to it. this is gordon freeman but if he was moe through helplessness.
“helpless” is, i think, a great way to describe him. a core bit of imagery in half life is this sense of railroadedness and helplessness, with gordon freeman being put into play like a chess piece and having no choice but to move forward. and this iteration of gordon leans into that by being totally dependent on the science crew in order to make progress and Not Die. and hes also subject to the whims of benrey, local eldritch weirdo who has basically made it his life mission to fuck with gordon.
gordons anxieties dont help with that. if he wasnt so fun to stress out and fuck with, the science crew probably wouldnt do it so much! too bad for him that they like fucking with him so much that he was driven into a panic attack (multiple times, even, depending on your interpretation). hes got that real neurotic mindset. always worrying about shit that could go wrong, and attempting to exert control over his surroundings in an effort to control the anxiety.
IMO the real way to nail the Neurotic Gordon Freeman Experience is to combine the ever-present anxiety with his pervasive sense of self-loathing. he openly states that he has no friends and nobody seems to like him, and to that, i really gotta say, i wonder why. he doesnt really seem to factor in that hes kind of a bitch, and has way too high an estimation of his own intelligence relative to everybody elses. its really one of the worst ways to be: aware that people dont like you, but unaware of exactly why. if he was like, 10% nicer, he probably wouldnt have had half as many issues getting through black mesa, but also, its funny to see him squawking his way through the game. so, you know.
its stuff like that that makes me headcanon him as a dude with low self-esteem in general. convinced that hes not likable, not attractive, out of his element......impostor syndrome, except that theres some truth to it. this is a guy who truly does not realize how good he has it: he really is just an average shitty dude, and yet, somehow, benrey took a shine to him. some poor motherfucker out there actually likes him and wants to suck his dick. thats dedication
also, i keep bringing up “repression” when i talk about gordon. and hopefully, what ive been talking about helps explain why. he has a strong desire to be a regular dude, not just murdering his way through black mesa, but if hes pushed hard enough he leans into it. gets bossy. picks up a cigar off a dead soldier and takes a long drag, before smacking forzen around with a pistol and ordering him around. gordon freeman is a regular, kind of anxious guy who likes competitive swimming and streaming on justin.tv and making anime references, and he is also a guy who takes a filthy pleasure in making a trained soldier his bitch. and i didnt make up any of this shit - this is purestrain canon, baby. this is a guy with problems
to me, this screams the kind of guy who represses a lot of shit b/c he doesnt feel like its morally decent. you run into this guy a lot online: the wokeboy, the online leftist, the guy who spends too much time on social media websites. (like reddit. i think he would actively use reddit and he would never get any appreciable amount of karma but he never stops posting. its sisyphean! cathartic.) from the way he talks about “bootboys”, i think it tracks. he knows about imperialism, he knows about feminism, but at the end of the day hes your average american white dude who struggles with internalizing it.
a lot of those dudes struggle with sex and gender issues. (dont we all.) when youre trying to be a Good Person(tm), you spend a lot of time thinking about your own relationship to sex and kink and all that shit. and i maintain that a too-online dude who buries a lot of his control freak tendencies would also try to bury a lot of weird sexual shit in an attempt to seem Normal and Well-Adjusted and not like a little freak. i justify this by the sheer number of times gordon blurts out weird sex shit as a joke. there are only two outcomes to making that many piss jokes: either youre secretly a piss guy, or you lathe-of-heaven yourself into becoming one. i will stand by this
ive talked a lot about why this dude sucks. now, let me talk to you about what makes gordon so much fun to write. first things first: hes funny! a subjective evaluation, yeah, but both in- and out-of-character, hes aiming to be funny. and being the straight man to everybody else plays into that whole “helplessness” thing.
secondly: underneath it all, there is a good dude under there. gordon worries when his companions get hurt, he tries to clean them off and patch them up, and hes got his lil leftist heart in the right place. you could even read a lot of his bossy, bitchy demeanor as him wanting to make sure everyone gets out okay and doesnt hurt themselves. when it comes to animals and anti-imperialist sentiment, gordons a pretty good guy.
hes the kind of guy who would probably see a dog on the street and get excited and play with it, but would get really prickly about the correct way to put dishes in the dishwasher. control freak tendencies.
finally, subjecting such a miserable, tormented guy to even more psychological anguish is really, really fun. you feel a little bad for him, but he kind of deserves it. so many problems he goes through are purely of his own making, and if gordon would just relax and quit trying to hard to maintain control - of himself, of the people around him - and own up to having Problems and Issues, he would be a happier guy. but thats why its fun to bend him until he breaks. being a little control freak myself, putting gordon freeman thru psychosexual torment is cathartic.
when it comes to writing his thought processes, the fact that he is canonically some kind of psychotic (yes, i am boldly claiming this. suck me) and i am also canonically some kind of psychotic makes it easier to write what i think his thought processes are. i just give him my brain issues of “getting lost in thought” and “overthinking fucking everything”. a touch of paranoia helps. even if i dont explicitly label him as schizophrenic please know that i am writing him as a paranoid little nutcase at all times because, uh, you write what you know.
paranoid. anxious. of the mindset that everyones out to get him (which isnt helpful when everyone is out to get him). repressed and deeply Not Normal but trying so very fucking hard to be normal and well-adjusted. a control freak with sadistic tendencies who also really, really likes getting bullied by his best frenemy. a hapless little nerd who sounds really cute when his voice starts to break from nerves. and, most importantly, a dumb jock. do not ever forget this.
thats gordon freeman, babey. hope that helps
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Marinette and Anxiety
First, lets count all the things Marinette has that Adrien doesn’t have:
She has a healthy and positive home environment
Both of her parents are living, active presences in her life
Tom and Sabine love Marinette unconditionally
On top of having loving parents she has extended relatives who care deeply for her
she is allowed to go out and have friends over
going to public school is treated as a necessity rather than a privilege
she has, to some degree, or at least more so than Adrien, knowledge of socializing and is able to perceive signals better
she is on good terms and has a history with almost all of her classmates
she is allowed to explore her hobbies
she is allowed to choose her own occupation 
she has the freedom to do whatever she wants with her schedule outside of school and curfew
I could go on but I trust my point is clear? Marinette is blessed with many of the things Adrien has been denied. Worse, everything listed above falls under the category of “normal” “common decency” or “necessity.”
Long post is long and I don’t like cuts because I’ve lost a few posts in the past using them. Please filter the tag “long post” i use it for walls of texts like this one.
But Mari’s life, despite being vastly different and more fulfilling than Adrien’s, isn’t perfect.
In order to understand Mari’s struggles we need to take a look at her history.
We see in Origins that Marinette has been the target of Chloe’s bullying for a long time—three years or perhaps even longer. As is the case with many victims of bullying she lacked the courage and confidence to stand up for himself and more or less suffered in silence until Alya encouraged her to fight back.
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Something to understand about bullying: it drastically warps someone’s perspective. Not only in how they view themselves but the people and environment around them. The end result? Some form of isolation and possibly PTSD. Bullying victims tend to be either physically/mentally withdrawn, or both.
Not a lot is known about Mari’s life before the Origins episode, but given that none of her classmates stood up to Chloe except Alya, we can infer that they have grown accustomed to Chloe’s treatment of Mari and are likely not especially close with her at this point in time. 
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In her “In defense of Chat Noir” video, Toon Ruins states that Adrien isn’t especially close with his classmates yet either, saying he is “that friend that your mutual friends invite along and is just kinda there.” Its not unreasonable to presume that Mari was in that spot before she became Ladybug, befriended Alya, and developed enough confidence to stand up for herself as well as others.
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It would also help explain why her friends were so quick to doubt her when Lila accused her in the Ladybug episode. Despite everything she’s done for them between Origins and Ladybug, they simply haven’t been close for very long and as Alya pointed out the evidence “was stacked against her.” Of course Alya and Adrien believed her because they are closer with Mari than practically any of her other classmates.
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Adrien glaring at Lila when Marinette calls out to him for help. I cannot~~~~
Of course there was another, more obvious reason they doubted her: her feelings for Adrien and how intense she is when acting on them, which as Alya puts it served as her supposed “motive” for “hurting Lila.”
Marinette has often been seen crossing lines that are better off left uncrossed when it comes to Adrien. Her friends, especially the girls, are even somewhat aware of how intense these feelings are. (i.e. Alex’s comment during Gigantitan “Marinette knows a lot about Adrien it’s kinda creepy”).
More often than not, Mari wants to go somewhere mainly for the sake of seeing Adrien. Examples of this are when she’s supposed to wait for Nadja to come pick up her cake and during Simon Says when she is grounded for valid reasons . Often times there is some obligation involved—her promise to show up at Alix and Kim’s challenge and her promise with Nino in Simon Says—but chances are if Adrien weren’t there she wouldn’t want to go so bad (until an akuma showed up that is).
Something to understand about this: Mari has little to no opportunity to see Adrien. Worse, her history of being bullied and her previous status as an “acquaintance” rather than a “close friend” gives her at least some modicum of understanding about his situation. She empathizes with Adrien and cares for him, and is aware of his loneliness. During her life before Ladybug she likely longed for someone who would comfort and console her, and yeah probably found some relief with her mom given how Sabine seems aware of Chloe’s treatment of her daughter.
 But Adrien has no one, and knowing that makes Mari all the more anxious when he doesn’t show up for their social gatherings as well as driving her desire to be the source of love and comfort he so desperately needs.
I won’t deny Mari literally breaking the law for Adrien isn’t okay. Sneaking into his home, stealing his phone, and kissing his statue (its a statue in an important museum. Chances are you’re not supposed to touch those, let alone kiss them) are simply NOT OKAY things to do. A lot of this behavior earns her some hate from the fandom and some well-deserved scolding from Tikki. But rather than making me hate her, or call her a stalker, I’m mostly concerned that she doesn’t understand how bad that is. 
But Chat Blanc was a game changer. Adrien would NEVER have seen Ladybug in his room if she hadn’t taken her sweet time inspecting his belongings, smelling his pillow, etc. Meaning Adrien could have had her present and not known about Ladybug (he may have been curious as to how Mari’s gift got past security though). 
However since Marinette WAS seen by Adrien, he was able to learn her secret identity which led to this:
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This is a scenario she never expected. And as she learns this was caused by her own poor judgement, she wastes no time in saving Chat Noir, erasing her name from her gift and allowing Adrien to believe it’s a gift from his Brazilian fan club instead of from her, Marinette.
Chat Blanc was one of the last episodes of s3. Safe to say she probably won’t be breaking into anything anytime soon (theres some debate over the chronological order of the episodes, but if I recall this one takes place either in the last four or five episodes on most lists). She nearly lost her kitty for good after all--that’s not a price she’s ever been willing to pay.
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This likely wouldn’t have happened at all except Mari’s life as ladybug has caused her to become accustomed to certain behavior in order to keep her secret. Yeah Mari stole Adrien’s phone right out of his locker—and no that wasn’t okay. But remember when she stole her textbook back from Alya? Taking it right out of her bag when Alya wasn’t looking? Just so you know, in the French version, Mari tells Tikki she wrote her name in that textbook. So her secret identity was in grave danger and she had to act quickly.
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You’re damn lucky Alya didn’t crack that book open the minute she got it, Mari.
Anyhoo the point is this: Mari is applying what she has come to know as “acceptable behavior i do to protect my secret identity” to her situation with Adrien and misinterpreting it as “acceptable behavior I do to keep Adrien from possibly rejecting me and crushing my soul.” And in her head, they’re similar even though the consequences of either secret coming out are vastly different.
Really think about the context of that voicemail she sent Adrien—if she had accidentally butt dialed Adrien while taking to Tikki about her life as Ladybug and then had to go steal his phone to keep him from learning the truth the fandom wouldn’t have had nearly as much beef with her over that as she wasn’t the one who created the “secret identities rule.”
The reason the two secrets are equally crucial in keeping, in Mari’s mind, is likely due to her overwhelming anxiety. Which even before she became the Guardian of Paris and then the Guardian of Miraculous she was still an anxious person.
She didn’t have much confidence or even a large support network. But in the span of one day she was entrusted with the safety and well being of every single person in Paris.
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She didn’t believe she was cut out for being Ladybug but was denied the option of refusing the position and told to just do her best.
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She knew going out she would likely screw up the job and given her task failure wasn’t really an option.
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Then her worst fears were realized when she failed to capture her first akuma and many citizens were turned into stone statues. The only way to turn them back was to allow Ivan to be akumatized so she could defeat him and take his akuma. The very knowledge of which crippled her and caused her to give up the ladybug earrings.
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She tried to go back to her normal life but couldn’t. Ivan was akumatized, Alya’s life was in danger and Chat Noir was struggling to the point he got captured and needed her help. So she took up being Ladybug again in order to help them.
What was she supposed to do? Watch?
From the very beginning she had no say in the matter. Her life as Marinette wasn’t and isnt easy—she has plenty of her own problems but she was given a Miraculous and basically condemned to being at war with Hawk Moth indefinitely.
Ever give a thought as to why the French government allow these two vigilante teenagers to handle the situation? Because ordinary people can’t. In other words if Mari thought only of herself she would give up the fight and ignore all the ensuing damage. But she can’t. And she won’t. She has a job to do. She could give up her miraculous but that would mean taking the pressure off her shoulders and dumping it all onto someone else just as it was dumped onto her. She cant bring herself to do that and even if she could—who would she possibly give it to?
Just imagining that kind of pressure makes me want hurl from nerves. And as of the S3 finale its gotten worse as she has lost Fu, the person who could give out Miraculouses to other people in case she never comes back one day.
Hawk Moth would win. Game over. That’s what it would mean.
Ladybug and Chat Noir know what Hawk Moth winning would mean better than anyone else does. Of course they won’t walk away from this fight. But that means they have to juggle their double lives until its over, and apparently have to do it again with a second hawk moth later on in the future.
And again, even before all of this Mari had a lot she suffered from. Chloe bullying her, feeling lonely, being clumsy. Clumsiness is mortifying--it truly means suffering. Being the class clutz is like being the class laughingstock. Mari seems to handle it fairly well.
 Until she’s around Adrien. I mean look at her!
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Poor girl can’t stand looking so uncool in front of her crush. Even though he seems to find her clumsiness endearing.
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Going off what was said in my “Debunking: Adrien is perfect” post, Marinette is hyper-sensitive to Adrien’s situation despite not really knowing the full extent of his suffering. 
Marinette doesn’t know Gabriel is Hawk Moth either, but she does understand Adrien is lonely, isolated and in need of a source of love and comfort. She also understands to some degree that his heart is delicate, so she constantly handles him with kid gloves and looks on him with a perfection filter. We see how Mari reacts to upsetting Adrien in Malediktator when she softly whispers an apology after Adrien expresses his sorrow over everyone celebrating Chloe’s departure. She seems pained and distraught over causing him to be upset. Thus the reason Marinette calls Adrien perfect isn’t that she never sees any of his flaws--she just cannot acknowledge or process them under these conditions. She’s too busy trying not to hurt him. 
Marinette can comprehend Adrien’s situation, couples that with her own past experiences of bullying/ loneliness/ being a clumsy laughingstock. That combined with her love for him and her anxiety-warped common sense, led to the behavior which has earned her some disapproval from the fandom at large.
 But really? Marinette’s not a terrible person. Anymore than Adrien is.
 Adrien’s sometimes-obnoxious-flirting is brought on by his desire to “not look lame” in front of Ladybug. Ergo, his own insecurities are amplified around her because he too lacks confidence.
 Likewise Marinette’s stammering and clumsiness are amplified around Adrien, as is her anxiety and her desire to be cool in front of him.
 They both feel they have to prove themselves to the other in some regard. And they both have past and present experiences that have left them hurting and/or warped their judgement in some ways. 
 This doesn’t make Mari’s irrational behavior any more acceptable than Adrien’s troubles make his leading Kagami on and lying to Ladybug acceptable. It’s not acceptable. But Mari is no more deserving of hate than Adrien is.
They’re just a couple of stressed out kids, folks
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littleblackqrow · 3 years
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((I think the most frustrating part of watching people analyze the actions of characters in vol8 is that the biggest complaint is that logic is thrown out the window and I would argue that’s the point. Especially because of the perspective of the show. I really hate to keep picking on Ironwood, Qrow, and RWBY, but those characters are the ones driving the plot, so I guess we gotta.
Lets start with RWBY. They’re kids first off. WBY are all about 19-20 years old and Ruby is 17. Lets start off by saying those are ages not exactly known for smart, long term decision making. Most people that age are trying to figure out what they want to do for the rest of their lives, struggling with college, dates, drinking, sex for the first time. They’re stumbling around in adult bodies while still having more or less the mind of a teenager because society has suddenly stopped treating them like a kid and expects them to be an adult. Except instead of having to struggle with decisions about their near future, RWBY is being asked to save the world. If you think you could handle that pressure well at 17-19, you’re lying. 
Does it make their decisions right though? No. The way they treated Ozpin for hiding the worst of his abuse and the fact that his ex-wife was an insane bitch who is functionally immortal is wrong. But again, I ask you, could you handle having all that dumped into your lap in an already stressful situation? The person who should be (and rightly is) condemned for his reaction is Qrow for throwing a punch. No matter how upset you are no hitting. Once you throw a punch in that situation, you’re the bad guy. And until he makes an effort of an apology he’s the bad guy in that situation. 
The biggest problem that team RWBY has is that all of their terrible decisions throughout the show have either been rewarded, or the got bailed out from having to see the real consequences. 
Ozpin allowed Blake to hide her White Fang past and therefore missed the least subtle component of the Fall of Beacon. Things could have been significantly less bad if he’d known about their involvement and was able to send Qrow in to spy on their operations. Maybe he could have figured out what Roman or Adam was up to, realized they were working for Cinder and by extension Salem.
Ozpin allowed team RWBY to do a mission that was a couple grades too advanced for them because he knew they’d break the rules otherwise. That was a tacit acknowledgement that he thought whatever they were up to was alright, and that they had his blessings on whatever it was that they wanted to do.
The best example of terrible decision after terrible decision that RWBYJNR makes is Argus. They have no idea how they’re getting the Relic to Atlas, and they seem road blocked. Jaune suggests stealing an airship, and Qrow, the adult in the room tells them that this is a bad idea, and if it goes bad it has the potential to screw up their entire life. He’s right. The problem is that he’d run off on his bender, and therefore the kids, and we in the audience, are supposed to see this as an unreasonable suggestion. 
However, it plays out as him being right. The incredibly complicated plan did go wrong. Now, they had no reason to suspect at the time that Adam was stalking Blake at the time (and I could go into why thats perfectly ic for him at another date), but there were a lot of moving parts in this plan and literally any of them could have broken. Everything that happened after they put this plan into motion was reactionary. Cordovan, obsessed with showing the Might of Atlas (TM), jumped into the mech suit. At that point, Ruby didnt really have a choice of not breaking it. But the ensuing fight created enough general unease that it summoned a Grimm hoard.
By rights, Argus should have fallen because of their bad decisions and in spire of their best efforts. Instead, Cordovan had a change of heart at the last moment and bailed them out.
This just reinforced the flawed idea that RWBY is always in the right and directly lead to s7′s climax. They are the unstoppable force.
Now you have Ironwood, quite literally the unmovable object, which I now realize is sort of his name. Ha.
Ironwood’s behavior does not come out of nowhere. Since his appearance, he’s had problem stamped all over him. He showed up with an entire goddamn army to a supposedly peaceful event that is to promote unity and the excellence of each kingdom. His rationale is that the people are going to be impressed with his big guns and feel safe. Ozpin gently points out that those big guns also signal to people that there is something out there that those big guns are designed to shoot. 
If its not a Grimm, could it mean that Atlas intends to shoot people?
Remember we’re not even 100 years out from the last World War, one that was basically started by Atlas. People are nervous. There are still grandparents and great grandparents alive today that were kids when the Great War was happening. Not only that but we’re also made aware that Atlas has rolled in the apolitical protectors of the people, the Huntsmen, into its military. This elite fighting force that is basically above the law and can go to any country in the world whenever they want, is now part of the military. The ONLY standing military that Remnant seems to have.
All of this has obviously caused friction in the Inner Circle. Qrow is not quite and never has been quiet about his disdain for James’ heavy handed techniques. Glynda calls James’ actions a dick measuring competition, and Ozpin was trying to be gentle about it, but he was clearly telling Ironwood to get his army off his fucking front lawn. And what did Ironwood do? He’d gone around Ozpin and talked to the Vale council.  They were threatening to remove Oz fro his position because they agreed with Ironwood: he was being too passive. Ironwood even tells Glynda that he cant believe that a man he trusted for so long would just sit by and stand to the side instead of meeting the problem head on. He didnt seem to understand why Qrow would want to go gather intelligence on an operation before sending in the big guns. 
Ironwood has never been a man to put a well thought out plan with all his ducks in a row into motion. This is a man who plows through opposition at every opportunity.
And when we see him again, we can see him steamrolling through opposition again. Somehow he got himself two seats on the council. That gives him an enormous amount of power. And his position as general means that at any point he can declare an emergency and become the de facto dictator of Atlas if he deems it fit. The problem is that he’s having these arguments against Jacques Schnee a man that the audience rightly hates, so he seems reasonable. Who gives a fuck about Jacques loosing business, he’s a dickhead. We’re not noticing the fact that James is consolidating power, or that he’s using that power to make unilateral decisions with no one telling him no.
There’s no one left in the room who is able or willing to tell him that these are bad ideas, that there will be consequences that he cant foresee. His  bullish behavior lead to both Robyn Hill and Jacques Schnee running for an empty council seat, and that created the environment that we walked into in s7.
Now, not all James’ ideas are bad. The Amity Project is actually a really good one, and James is right in wanting to keep it from the general public until its near completion. But you know who should have known? The other fucking council members. Probably the candidates. Playing your cards too close to the chest when you clearly need help and allies is a bad thing. But again, James didnt even trust Ozpin to be able to run his own kingdom, so durr hurr of course he’s the only one who can take care of Amity. And run a kingdom. And run an academy. And protect an ageing, ailing Maiden. And of course he doesnt have time to treat his horrific PTSD from the Fall of Beacon.
So when things go tits up because again, of course they will with a plan that complex James Ironwood doubles the fuck down on his terrible solo decision making. Clearly, non of this is his fault. No one is listening to him. He cannot trust others to make decisions so he’s going to make all of them. There’s no one around him to tell him no, especially because the first person that tried was publicly executed. 
James is scared. He’s had a mental break because of that fear. His paranoia, his PTSD, and the fact that there’s nothing there to help him back to stability means that he’s just going to be bouncing from one terrible choice to the next. He’s Hamlet in the throes of paranoia, heading down a road that is going to get everyone, including himself killed. He is King Lear as the world crumbles around him, acting cruel and making unreasonable, horrible demands of those around him. 
Working with Watts seems like an absolutely terrible idea, but to someone who thinks that he is in control of the situation because he has to be in order to keep functioning, there’s no way that this can bite him in the ass. For James, if no one is willing to follow his orders, he’s going to make them. This attitude is probably exactly why Watts did what he did and joined Salem in the first place. 
So when you combine the unstoppable force of Team RWBY, who’s been told they’re the child saviors of the world, and who’ve been either rewarded or bailed out of their bad decisions against the immovable object of Ironwood and his absolute conviction in himself, you have the mess Atlas is in now.
Honestly I find it kind of brilliant. 
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stray-tori · 4 years
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Deca-Dence Thoughts
Guys. I did it. I started something seasonal!!!
Deca-dence!
Figured I can’t go wrong with orange-head braid girl haha
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And of course: Spoiler warning!!
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EPISODE 1
I'M 3 MINUTES IN AND I'M ALREADY CRYING, THE FUCK ahahudhs
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soul eater confirmed.
Well that was pretty good. Seems he’s the classical old tired mentor that totally can do the thing the spiky protag wants to do.
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EPISODE 2
I HIGHLY ADVISE YOU TO WATCH EP2 BEFORE YOU READ THIS
We’re only 2 minutes in and I’m crying aGAIN
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[for real go watch it first]
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[this is your last warning]
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UH. WHAT. DECA-DENCE IS……. A BATTLE ARENA? and people get………….. boarded? by…………….. other species?
I am
what
i mean I guess it would explain the whole “bug” talk if its all essentially a game
but yo what the fuck
I DID NOT EXPECT THIS
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CH-CHOTTO MATTE A MINUTE
OKAY I’M DONE WITH THE EP.
AM I GETTING THIS RIGHT
these alien things
use humans, with implanted chips
does that mean a human only gets born when an alien needs an avatar? Or do the humans live normally and once they enter The Power their consciousness gets overwritten by the player? BECAUSE IF SO, THAT’S SCARY AS FUCK AND I’M HAVING SOMA FLASHBACKS.
EDIT: okay wait I’m dumb, they literally refer to them as a galactic species and call them gears. Tankers are the hoomans, Gears are the avatars. Got it. So no-one’s conciousness should be overwritten. Still not sure why the humans have the chip implants though?
Because as I understood it, the deca-dence DOES really exist, they just use it to “entertain” themselves. Though they do seem to need the oxyone thing that rankers get so…… essentially they need to play it to live (bc Kabu’s interface kept telling him to use it so I assume the cyborg form needs it)??? Or do they just need it to stay online but–
So it’s kind of like... these aliens use the comfort of human avatars to essentially get what they need to survive without dying themselves in the worst case??? That’s fucked up, but if they really just play it for fun / oxyone thing is just for pleasure then that’s just BIG FUCKED UP.
I
WHAT
AAHHH???
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I’M SOMEWHERE BETWEEN LAUGHING AND APPLAUDING THEM BECAUSE THIS IS WEIRDLY GENIUS.
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Ah
they are so cute
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EPISODE 3
I am still confused a bit about the worldbuilding (so maybe those aliens arent aliens but instead humans that were turned into cyborgs??? I am confusion. It could also be a online thing tbh. I’M NOT SURE)
but this is very fun. I love Natsume. The orange-head braid girl trend continues.
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EPISODE 4
Awww Pipe <333 Kabu is such a dad omg look at him looking at his daughter and their pet sdukdhsj
I’m so gay for Kurenai, thank god
FEI IS SO CUTE IUfkhsjs SHE’S SLIGHTLY CHUB AND I’M LIVING FOR IT
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Dad spoke.
But god this is so... bittersweet. the angst. because to her it feels like nobody believes in her, not even her mentor. but he just don’t want her to die knowing it’s LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE TvT
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Good day, i am soft.
WELP this is gonna be Great.
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EPISODE 5
That was a big dad protecc moment. I almost cried :”(((
ALSO NO??? NO!! N O. KABUUUU :((( it cant be reallllll :( is his weird cyborg form dead too??? I did not sign up for this
consequences???? in my anime watching experience??? unbelievable.
I do hope its not a fakeout but I’M SAD :(((
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Now we play the waiting game.
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mollyphoria · 4 years
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(off my chest post.)
As soon as I turned the age of 27 last year it was like I've been awaken from a cruel false dream. I opened my eyes then boom I see 27 years of my life laid out in front of me wasted. Yes it took 27 effin years for me to wake up. I wasted all this years and now I'm suffering the consequences of not following my heart, now I'm suffering the repercussions for not realising my dreams sooner as well as pursuing them. I don't believe in myself enough to stand for what I really want so I let society dictate me. I dont love myself enough to believe that I have the capabilities to follow my dreams, luck wasn't on my side too,the odds were never in my favor. So yes I guess I blame both myself and the circumstances given to me on why I failed in life. I failed myself. Society failed me. The system failed me. Oh how I envy people who were able to realise their dreams when they were a kid. these people mostly turns out to be the successful ones in life while I'm left in shambles of not knowing what to do or having such a huge dream I knew I would never reach it. I wanted to become a supermodel but I'm not pretty and tall enough plus I'm from a country not supported by society on having supermodels. Then I wanted to be a rock star. Touring the world, playing the guitar, performing on stage. I can probably make this happen but once again I don't believe in myself and lack of support from family/society was what made this dream seem to get more impossible. I would like to pursue the arts anything from singing, dancing,writing ,painting,drawing etc but I let myself be influenced by what our society drills in my head everyday that there's no money with any of these endeavours so I never got serious to try to achieve greatness from these "useless, juvenile" dreams and plus you need God-given talent to qualify pursuing the arts and I don't have an ounce of it.
So as time goes by I continued to grow older like a dead leaf flailing around in the wind without a specific direction but downwards. But deep-rooted in my soul I knew what I wanted but I chose to stupidly ignore that little voice in my heart that tells me what to do. I to this day continue to beat myself up why I haven't even tried to listen to myself.
So what I did was to completely surrender myself to settle for a lesser,smaller dream that I could possibly reach according to the circumstances I'm handed with
I took up a course in college that I felt at the time would be something I would enjoy and easy,cheap enough to simply graduate and have that diploma just for the sake of it. When I got into the real world and became a full pledge adult for the first time ever I got hit by depression and that's when I first acknowledge that I'm not made for this at all but what I did instead of abandoning it was to try again and aim higher which is to have my own wings and to fly high in the sky and see the world. I held on to that dream. I went to school again. For a moment I had a purpose and for the first time I had direction. I thought I found myself as I try to get those wings. I thought that this will be my redemption. I made myself to believe that I'm meant to do this. I went above and beyond to achieve success. But alas I continued to be the chosen reject and once again odds weren't exactly on my favor and I have given up by the time I'm 27 years old. This is when it all crashed down on me I was chasing a dream gone dead all those years and basically wasted my youth as a result and gained nothing at the end. And I have to admit that i somewhat resent God for putting this dream to flourish in my heart but never gave me a breakthrough to even achieve it. I was left beaten and destroyed. I slaved myself away for nothing, experienced all those sufferings for nothing. I got nothing for all those sacrifices and hardwork I did. Literally all those blood,sweat and tears were for absolutely nothing at the end. I was utterly broken down,my heart was utterly crushed nothing left but broken pieces and a whirlpool of regret. If even this small, mediocre dream I settle myself for is still unattainable for me then my life is no longer worth living. I then proceed to wallow on self pity and resentment and went down to the worst depression I've ever experience in my life. Tears kept on falling like faucets in my eyes. Every streak of effort, energy, motivation ,hope left my body,mind and soul altogether. I turned ultimately dead inside. I don't have anything left in me to even pretend to continue fighting my way into this world. I can't even help myself to help myself. it's like I already died and what was left is just a hollow husk of my former self.
At 27 yrs old i went back to zero. I'm left with nothing to hope for, I didn't gain anything from all the things I went through. After Having the painful knowledge that the journey I made for myself all throughout my teenage to mid twenties is only to become of worthless dust and vomit at the end it made me inevitably bitter about life in general. I started acknowledging thoughts of dying for real. How I realized that it's better to be dead than to be alive, how I wish to have never been born at all. I missed all of these opportunities to win in life and I felt like giving up. Because Life is Suffering nothing more nothing less we will continue to suffer coz that whats life for this is the true meaning of life we are just put here to live so we can suffer and I'm not cut out for it I'm too weak to even restart again.
I realized alot of things. When I was a kid I was always looking forward to the future. I was foolishly, completely convinced that my life will get better as I get older and now that I'm older it turned out to be such a stupid thought coz life didn't get better it only gotten worse and it could only get worst from here on out.
Starting now I shouldn't hope for things to change for the better. It's dangerous to have a false hope and I swear to myself that I wouldn't let myself be fueled by false hope anymore.
And now that it's October I will turn a year older unless I cease to exist first.
I'm honestly scared of the future, now that I can see the true essence of it in its whole entirety.
At 28 I'm running out of time.
I missed the chance to get my life stable.
At 28 I'm entirely clueless on how to get my shit together and I don't even think I have the strength to improve myself. I felt like I just don't care anymore.
At 28 I should have already bought my mother a new house instead I'm stuck and rotting away in a room at her own old house.
At 28 I'm still miserable asf
Still bitter asf
Still dumb asf
Still doubtful asf
Still a loser asf
Let me discuss the thoughts I have about this song 28 of Agust D. This song single handedly describes the anxiety I feel for getting older. The fact that the age he pertained on the title of this song is 28 exactly the age I'm about to turn into soon just solidifies the strong grip it acquired to hold my heart and soul. I felt extremely lucky to turn 28 at the same year with someone as genius as him (tho his 27 international age) nevertheless I'm thankful about this.
Tho there are things that I'm honestly confuse about him having the same fears with someone like me who's a nobody without any single awards, recognitions, accolades or any kind of impact to the world, who's not loved and praised by millions nor have millions of money in my bank account, who doesn't have a big house,big cars nor big rings.
It baffles the living daylights out of me that a person like Min Yoongi who achieved so much in life would feel scared about not knowing his dreams is really about as he gets older. He basically achieved every single one of the dreams I have for myself. His overly set for life that his great great great great great grandchildren will be also set for life. His life wasn't the same like before. His life changed for the better . He earns millions of money by doing what he loves at such a young age. He simply won in life.
We are both 28 but the life I'm bestowed in is the utmost opposite of the life his bestowed in. I'm at the loser end of the spectrum while his in the winner side yet we share somewhat the same fears and anxiety about having to grow older.
This made me question if happiness is really just an illusion. well the genuine authentic euphoric kind of happiness.
Is existence all really just a one big mess with occasional ephemeral pleasure?
If a person who accomplished so much at only 28 still feels depression what's left for me then should I just go kill myself?
Alot of the reasons why I got into this level of depression is because I didn't fulfill anything Yoongi fulfilled.well I'm not really into fame so much but i hope i succeeded on not having to worry about whether I could buy a house or rent an apartment. Yoongi could buy a building for himself while I can't even afford a bedspace of my own
Yoongi could travel the whole world in a whim while I'm mostly stuck in the same place
The stark contrast of our lives is so immense I cant even get my head wrapped around it
My only dillema is that I'm afraid to die but I'm also afraid to live
It's been proven to me now that living in this world is not really living at all it's just purely surviving and I can't deal with this
I'd rather die than to be a slave to the system. And it seems like I don't even have a choice maybe to disappear is the only way out
I'm just not cut out with the cards I've been dealt with
If only I could voluntarily pull my existence out of here then I would do it in a heartbeat
I wish there is a stop button from all of these
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thetimelordbatgirl · 5 years
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Random scattered thoughts about D3 under the cut
*The fact that everyone has basically abandoned Audrey though......where goodness doesn't get better? More like 'we'll abandon you once your dumped by our king and also rub it in your face that you couldn't hold a prince like your mother could'- also Audrey knows about the love spell and WHY Mal did it, but if that's the, case then everyone knows and still doesn't care that Mal did that- like the one person with brain cells is Audrey and shes the villain of this movie.
*Queen of Mean is a bop though- its one of the only valid songs in this movie, but also with the evil laughter almost that could be heard BEFORE Audrey puts on the crown, it makes me wonder if they planned to have Audrey be possessed after all.
*One Kiss is literally just gay panic the song, no I don't take arguments its literally Evie in gay panic mode and its Disney having to do that one heterosexual song to remind us that no, only heterosexual couples are valid in this universe- also despite dating for three years, Evie struggles to tell Doug she loves him and even doesn't believe her true loves kiss wont work???? WOW- can we say, clearly goals to have a relationship where bae stalks you originally and you struggle to tell him you love him after three years of dating and after sharing a cottage with him?
*Night Falls is a cool song, but I love how as soon as Uma tries to lead, Mal gets bitchy and acts like she can lead a sword fight better then a pirate captain could- like, mal chill, your not queen yet.
*Mal as Hades daughter.......lemme just uh, stress that's the worst twist in history, literally over-powers Mal once more with now god blood- and Do What You Gotta Do is literally daddy issues the song, and despite having the same parenting as Maleficent with how he neglected Mal basically, Hades is somehow the better parent?? HOW?! Also its never showed how Mal learnt this information.....did Disney forget to write that in or- and of course, Mal must be the only VK of the core four with a good parent- cause of course, Mal must have everything as always.
*Audrey singing Happy Birthday while cursing the party and singing 'dear jane' while smiling evilly......can we just uh say, she at least got down with the aesthetic of being a villain?
*Oh yeah, speaking of villains- despite being promoted as villains, Hades does nothing basically besides drain Mal of her magic and all 'evil' scenes from trailer is just him doing random shit or good shit, while Uma is more of a anti-hero while Celia is kinda just there doing scamming and such- Audrey was the only accurate villain to promotion and even then she only got one trailer.
*My Once Upon A Time is literally Pity Me the song and Mal even sings at the end about reaching greatness and such- Jay, Evie, Carlos and Ben got stonned for this shit.
*Also yes, they literally stonned Ben, Carlos, Jay and Evie cause only Mal can take part in final fight.
*ALSO- MAL LIED- like, girl literally lied to her friends about the isle barrier and didn't tell them she was going to seal it up, and when confronted about it, she acts like she had no choice when she MADE the decision on her own and then after friends get stonned, she goes into pity song mode and doesn't suffer much consequences for the lie afterwards.
*Audrey saying to Mal though about the love spell and how its a touching story for the grandkids.......grandkids in the future felt that burn.
*Mal is cursed into a old hag and Ben into a beast......except Mals curse wears off under the barrier while Bens is soon enough fixed by Jane blasting enchanted lake at him- just......cant have true love fix curses like they do in the movies, nah, that means our couple being true love.
*Audrey nearly fucking dies- thanks plot for nearly killing the WOC princess.
*"Mal came through"- yeah, after planning to seal up the barrier and abandon every kid on the isle basically- but its okay they didn't know so its okay, TIME TO CELEBRATE MAL AGAIN-
*Lady Tremaine's character is fucking weird- in descendants 2 they say shes not a good grandma, but here she is?! Can Disney make up their mind on how the characters are written?!
*Celia and her relationship with her father though is precious, y'all can fight me on it.
*Mal literally saying she has to be queen of the isle as well- one, excuse you that's Uma's title and two, the isle IS apart of Auradon and is a PRISON, then again, descendants 2 forgot this detail when trying to act like being from a place where VKs are abused by their parents is something you cant ignore so why am I not surprised Descendants 3 is continuing that trend.
*Mal is drained of her magic but this isn't even explored cause she gets it back when Hades gives her the ember- so guess we cant even see Mal be forced to fight a battle without magic.
*Also Hades gives Mal the ember at the end for good- BUT WHAT WILL SHE DO WITH IT?! Its probably gonna go in the museum lol- so he basically lost his weapon as well.
*The Smee twins are also precious, and the fact that Smee cares about them is adorable- plus Smee is kinda accurate in design so.
*Jay being a big brother to all....precious- but also hes clearly gay for Gil sorry don't make the rules.
*Carlos and Jane must be protected from the plot.
*Evie's plot is good as well, but her whole 'struggling to say I love you to doug' is still bullshit plot.
*Doug is as boring as ever- next.
*Uma is a queen as always- her boys were so happy to see her again and she looked so happy to see them as well, let alone seeing the sun finally when the barrier fell at the end.
*Which brings me to uh, the ending.....THEY TORE DOWN THE BARRIER- like, the entire Isle is free now, not just the VKs but also villains- VILLAINS WHO IN FIRST MOVIE WANTED REVENGE- villains who will likely hurt their kids in Auradon still and villains who will likely not want to play peaceful and happy families- I thought Mal knew how villains worked, but she thinks villains will wanna play good guys? What happened to 'your parents cant reach you here' in film 1? NOW THEY CAN- Jasmine already fucking calling bullshit if Jafar thinks he can roam free.
*Hades at the end.......uggghhhh- Mal as his kid still makes no sense and never will and we get it, protective dad joke- WE GET IT- god, those jokes tire me sometimes.
*Disney really better not be acting like they deserve an award for that Hades and Mal twist- everyone saw it coming, you gave it away with Mal's hair and the teaser trailer- which is also never explained in D3 so lol.
*Disney: *doesn't have Lonnie being mentioned at all* Lonnie: "Am I a joke to you?"
*Chads weak as always- again, next.
*Audrey does get a apology finally but um, it took THREE YEARS to do so! Y'all asked for her revenge! Like, I love Ben but who the fuck says to a pissed off person that's about to curse you and your trying to talk them out of it, "I'll forgive you" like- DUDE NO-
*VK Day is still bullshit and that's just facts- also I love how they like I wish we could take you all- WHY. CANT. YOU?! You have power to take them all of it! But you DONT! In fact, Mal later decides to seal up the barrier at one point meaning she had to abandon the VKs there and even prevent Celia from seeing her dad again! So guess she forgot the VKs and was like 'yeah seal that fucker up cause Hades stole my magic'.
*Mal needing cheering in final fight......yayyy- I didn't need anymore reminders this was a Mal movie.
*Remember when HSM3 at least felt connected to the prior movies? D3 doesn't even FEEL connected- your expected to read books that may not stand a chance at getting mentioned- also had a entire different thing with Mal's dad but Disney erased that despite connecting the books each time they said to read a book before seeing the film- and in D3, a lot of shit just feels separate to the previous two- let alone the major time skip making it harder to connect- with Young Justice, while timeskips happen you still get hints at what happened inbetween those timeskips- but with D3? None is mentioned- so your left with this as the last movie and yeah, its just messy really.
*Well at least Huma won- we got one good ship in this movie at least- too bad its surrounded by a mess.
*Thank fuck there's no more descendants movies after this- sure, its sad and descendants still has a place with me- well with the aspects I like/the characters I like- but at the same time, a fourth descendants would be disrespectful to Cameron Boyce, the only Carlos really and of course, considering how messy D3 was and how Mal centred it became, a fourth movie really is not in the future- its sad I know, but at the same time, at least descendants can live on in fandom.
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fuck-customers · 5 years
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My store is a dumpster fire waiting to explode
So this story has been one that has been slowly building over the sevenish months that I have been there, so this is going to be a very very long one, I apologize in advance. TLDR at the bottom.
I'm writing this cause I saw a recent submission about a p**s****, and just... need to get this off my chest. 
So we opened this store late last year, and I was absolutely ecstatic at the time. The job had gotten me out of 45+ hours food service job which had left me emotionally, physically, and mentally exhausted, and it was working with pets, so obviously it has to be great right? Well not so much.
It started out okay, I liked the people I worked with, but from the start we had issues. It was clear that there was (and is to this day) a breakdown in communication between managers and the different shifts. The people who trained me (as a shift leader who has the authority to open or close the store) were from outside, and apparently didnt do a very good or thorough job. For months after that the manager or assistant manager would say that I was doing something wrong, or forgetting to do something which I had never been shown or even told to do at all. Has this gotten better in the last seven months? No, it has not. In fact I am still not fully trained for the position I am supposed to be in, and was barely half trained for most of it. But I wasnt even the worst off, because the assistant manager at the time, N, wasnt fully trained either. 
Now that might not be a big problem during the first few months, everything is still shaking down and people are getting settled, right? Well turns, out corporate needs our store manager, Ill call her R, to manage TWO STORES, at the same time. 2 hours apart from each other. So store manager splits her time between my store, and the store two hours away which ends up in a four hour commute for her because --  guess what-- they dont even pay her for a hotel. So now the store is managed by the not fully trained assistant manager.
During those few months where R was gone, I had a rough time. Money was missing several times from drawers or safe, things weren't getting done the way they were supposed to, daily paperwork wasnt signed, and R blamed me and the other shift leader,  A, for not doing things the way they were supposed to be done. Except we were never originally told how things were supposed to be done.
Well R finally hires a manager for the other store she was helping to manage and comes back to discover that the store is in chaos. On the outside everything looked fine, but all that paperwork that hadnt been done correctly? It had built up to months worth of issues that needed to be corrected, and she was behind on everything. 
Around that time she finally realizes that the problems we were having werent my or A's fault. It was the assistant manager N. Turns out, she would show up for work and just sit and do NOTHING. Basically expecting the closing people, aka me and A, to do everything that needed to be done. And the stuff that apparently only she knew how to do (because she hadnt trained me or A even though it was also something we were supposed to be doing), was getting delayed by several days. All while she left exactly when her shift was up, got there late in the mornings, and generally was just sketchy about work over all. A and I believe that that money that went missing several times was her doing as well, because after she left, it magically stopped happening.
But since R and N were friends, there was no consequence. In the end, me and A basically had to make up for all the missed work on N's side, because R refused to fire her. She wrote her up a few times, had some "discussions," but eventually N left on her own. It came out after she left that N was a compulsive liar, who had told lies to just about everyone at the store, from tiny ones to massive ones. 
So now the store had lost the (half-trained) assistant manager, and we still had to fix all of her messes. So R decides to promote A (which is good, A is a great worker and more experienced than I am) to assistant manager. At this point I was hopeful that everything would calm down and start to settle.
Surprise. That didnt happen.
Instead our store manager got PROMOTED, to a sort of district manager. So then she was only going to be at our store for TWO DAYS of the entire week. She had just made A assistant manager, so she had barely any training, even though they did some speed training for a week or two.
At this point I still wasnt even trained to take in shipments, meaning the only two people in the entire store who could process incoming freight were R and A, even though we get daily shipments. We were still trying to fix the issues and things left behind by N. It was an absolute nightmare. 
But it still gets worse. Because thats when we learned that one of our associates was leaving at the end of the month. I dont begrudge her for it, but it put a squeeze on everyone. Because despite common sense where if you lose someone you hire someone new to replace them, that didnt happen. We started with about 7 total workers, four of which were management, three of which were cashiers. We had lost one of the cashiers early on, N was gone, and R was there two days a week (most of which was her panicking about paperwork and store stuff), and we were about to lose another cashier. But still R hadnt hired anyone new. And after the one cashier left, our last remaining cashier let us know she would be leaving as well.
Of course, R panics. At that point she was down to four workers, including herself, and one of them about to leave. She finally starts the hiring procedures, but because she is so busy, it takes her WEEKS to hire anyone.
For about a month, it was basically me and A running the store. they scheduled me at 39 hours (so they wouldnt have to pay me for full time), and expected me to cover any shifts people called out, or come in early, or stay late. I was (and currently still am) the only shift leader for the store. And I am STILL not fully trained. 
About two weeks ago, R finally hires some people. One of them literally quits after two days, and then she suddenly starts hiring a bunch of people. So now we have four new people we have to train, one of which they decided after a week would be a shift leader. But because she hired all of these new people at once, she's cutting my hours to 20 hours or less. So after all my hard work, after all my sticking through, I havent gotten a raise, and instead my hours have been drastically cut, and it doesnt look like R has learned anything at all. 
I dont even think I would realize how bad it is, if it werent for the fact that R has had to beg help from other stores. And those from the other stores, would ask me questions about the store, about things that needed to be done which I couldnt answer. They looked at me in complete surprise and befuddlement, because it was simple things, basic things which I should know. But dont. 
There is honestly, so much more that I cant even begin to start going through because its such a f***** mess. I was trained how to open the store over the phone, and trained on things at most once or twice with supervision before sent off to figure it out alone.  I still have questions because I havent been fully trained after SEVEN MONTHS. I've been scheduled outside of my availability multiple times, and have covered all but two shifts I have been asked to cover, even though the ONE day I asked if someone could cover me cause I was so sick I could barely talk no one took my shift. There is so much confusion because there is no communication between shifts, I walk in after a few days completely unaware of whats happening or needs to be done. I dislike calling R whenever there are issues because she always snaps when she answers the phone and tries to get off as soon as possible and I feel like Im an inconvenience. 
So yeah, Im done. I have been for months but Ive been trying to stick it out as long as I could. But Ive put in my notice, and Im hoping to find something better. At least now I know what red flags to look for.
TLDR: Corporate keeps putting way too much on store manager, it trickles down to literally everyone and everything in the store, no one can fix it and now all but one person who opened the store are leaving.
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jaimetheexplorer · 5 years
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I brought down by niks latest interview.Saying "J never needed redemp.He was a guy who certain circumstances in his life e.g. Kingslayer so then he needed to redeem himself bc he did this horrible thing when killing the Mad King. Then N said the redemp arc where he had to be good guy, stay with Bri etc that's not GOT.You cant erase ur prev life.Jaime bel that redeem urself meant redeeming his past and he couldnt. He can't cut off who he was.The idea of leaving C alone is impossible to him" Wtf?
2/2 Downhearted anon. Just that interview makes no sense. In prev season interviews, wasnt Nik wanting Jaime to escape Cersei for good and be with Braime forever, like he was the biggest Braime shipper??? I dont understand. Does he think ppl don’t remember stuff? Its a shame theres no way to ask him about this.
Dear Downhearted anon,
I have to admit I read only a short excerpt from that interview, so I might have missed some of the other content, but, from what I read, this is what I can say.
There are different layers to his comments, IMO. One is the take on the story, and the other is the justification of the writing choices. And, as much as I might vehemently disagree with the former, what I take issue with is the latter.
When it comes to the take on the story, we have to remember that he has to talk about the actual content of the show. The show, unfortunately, did go with the idea that Jaime is essentially doomed to never escape his past. I do not believe that is his arc in the books for many reasons, and I think it was extremely underwhelming, nihlistic and unsatisfying even just taking the context of the show into account. But, unfortunately, nihilistic and unsatisfying is what we got. The show was aiming for romanticizing incest and abuse romantic tragedy with JC, in the end (I actually think there was a far more disastrous chain of events at play, which required multiple OOC developments for multiple major characters just to arrive to Jon killing Dany - but that’s a longer story), and it is what it is. He has to talk about the reality of the episodes, not the alternatives.
If you take most of Nik’s comments, and go back to read D&D’s and Cogman’s interviews from the past, you’ll notice that it’s mostly stuff that’s lifted straight from their quotes, even down to the language: “good guy/bad guy”, “he doesn’t have a redemption arc”, “it’s just life, and he has made some mistakes”. I don’t know whether this is because he had a “final season” briefing with them and came around to see things their way and agree, or because he was told this is what he was supposed to say about the story, or because even though he doesn’t agree with it, this is what was written in the end and so this is what he talks about. His reasoning for saying these things is anybody’s guess and kind of beyond the point. But, where before he used to have his own take on the character and his arc, he’s now basically regurgitating the party line.
For my part, I never completely disagreed with the idea that Jaime does not need redemption per se. Jaime doesn’t need atonement for slaying the Mad King, for sure. He needs recognition for that. He needs atonement for a other horrible things he’s done, but even those (e.g., pushing Bran, the incest) are more about moral gray areas areas than villainous behaviour per se, since he’s never committed atrocious acts just for his own selfish gain, or for power, or because he enjoyed hurting and killing. More importantly, I have always seen Jaime’s story as more of an identity arc, where redemption is just one component. In that sense, I can agree with the take that that he is a “complex character who, at times, has made some terrible mistakes”. Jaime is not, and never was, a straightforward villain who needs to atone for his sins. He’s a much more complex and layered mix of sins and honour, and goodness and idealism turned bitterness and cynicism, and a messy product of living most of his life in toxic and abusive environments who, in some situations, has committed some horrible mistakes that he needs to own up to and face the consequences of, and who is trying to redefine and reinvent himself in the aftermath of some life-changing events such as losing his hand, meeting Brienne and growing disillusioned with Cersei. 
The problem is that, while D&D preach about Jaime being a complex character who does not need a ‘cheesy’ linear redemption arc, they also, in the same breath, justify an ending that shoves him precisely into a clear, black-and-white, simplistic category (”he just accepts he is a hateful man”) or display the psychological depth of a 5th grader (go check out their take on the sept scene in their Oxford Union Q&A and their inability to think in any more complex terms than “good guy/bad guy” or to understand that not all “bad” actions are equal). They’re not deep writers, and that shows painfully in their execution. But I can understand the “no need for redemption” arc, from a theoretical/philosophical perspective.
What I take far more issue with is justifying writing choices by attempting to play the realism card, or the adult writing card, or the “this is GoT” card, basically implying that everyone who dislikes or criticize it is being unrealistic, immature or unsophisticated for not accepting the only inevitable outcome to a story (I wrote a twitter thread about it this week). Just because your story has decided to depict things in a certain way, it does not mean that that is the only realistic option for the story, and that people who expected/wanted/hoped for something different were fooling themselves, let alone that it had to be written that way because that is how life works.
Sure, there are people who fail to break away from their (abusive, traumatic, toxic, what have you) past and move on, but there are also plenty of people who do, and who end up thriving. One outcome isn’t any more realistic or true to life than the others. And, while some might think this is a hyperbole, it is highly irresponsible, IMO, to say that being unable to escape toxicity and your past is “the way things are”, when there might be people out there who do struggle with trauma, toxic and abusive relationship (or know people who do).
On top of that, it is rather silly to imply that we were expecting some unrealistic, too-easy scenario, where Jaime flipped a switch and totally erased his past overnight. That implication is misguided, at best, and dishonest, at worst. We put up with four entire seasons of show-only “non-linear” storytelling when it comes to Jaime, and were incredibly patient with it. Wasn’t the point of those four seasons precisely to show that life is complicated and he couldn’t just let go of his past so easily? We watched that. It happened. Nothing about this was easy or unearned.
Had we been shown a Jaime who was 100%, stupidly and completely devoted to Cersei at every turn, cruel, evil, selfish and not caring about the innocents, of course expecting an outcome where he just leaves it all behind for a honourable wench or what have you would have been a ridiculous expectation to have. Indeed, back when Jaime did come across as that kind of character, nobody was expecting anything from him. He could have died with Cersei under those bricks and most wouldn’t have cared.
Instead, for years, we were shown a Jaime that did struggle between his toxic past/Cersei and his honour and, far more often than not, we saw his honour win out. While I can see an argument for saying that didn’t guarantee an outcome where he did break free of his past for good, it’s not like like there was no buildup or seeding for the more positive, less nihilistic alternative. So I don’t find it so far fetched to have expected the events of S7 to be the last straw that finally tipped the scales completely to the other side (especially considering how 8x02 was written very heavily to imply just that or, at the very least, did not seed any doubt).
By Nikolaj’s own admission in TONS of interviews, he had been fighting with D&D for years because he expected things to move in a certain direction and kept getting frustrated when they didn’t, or when they confused him. He wanted the exact same things we wanted for Jaime and in his relationships with Cersei and Brienne since SEASON 2. He might have resigned himself in the end to having lost the battle, but he behaved exactly like us for years. So, assuming he believes what he is saying, if I could talk to him, I’d ask him how is it that he got the same feeling of “expectation” for something that in the end never came? Maybe because the seeding for both options were there all along? Maybe because, if the seeding for both options were there all along, the alternative isn’t so far fetched and inconceivable after all? Maybe because if the alternative isn’t so far fetched and inconceivable after all, then what we got isn’t the only inevitable way this could go down? Food for thought.
Of course, I want to believe that he isn’t that tone-deaf and unsophisticated as an actor (and a writer) not to realize that the only problem with the way Jaime and JB were written in S8 was not the fact that they didn’t get a HEA. Ignoring the writing quality, for a moment, and just focusing on the writing choices, there were literally dozens of ways of writing a story that ended even in a similar tragedy (EVEN with Jaime dying with Cersei), that would have been far better and more satisfying than what we got. The problem isn’t that Jaime didn’t declare his everlasting love for Brienne or that he didn’t stay together with her. The problem is that we patiently waited through all the buildup and seeding mentioned above, for years, for a relationship that ended up being butchered within 30 minutes, destroying literally everything it ever stood for (first and foremost trust and respect - I am not going to list everything, but Jaime trying to sneak out without so much of a goodbye and being completely indifferent to her pain after she vouched for him and saved his life multiple times was not only OOC, but completely unnecessary to the plot, unless it aimed to destroy the foundations of their bond, way beyond the romance).
To conclude, I’ll leave you with GRRM’s own words, when asked about Jaime’s redemption arc that he, unlike the show, has explicitly stated he wishes to explore:
“I want there to be a possibility of redemption for us, because we all do terrible things. We should be able to be forgiven. Because if there’s no possibility of redemption, what’s the answer then?”
The show decided that the answer is that we don’t escape our past. We are doomed from the beginning and any attempt to change and move on is eventually futile (and that ended up being true of nearly every character in the show, not just Jaime). But that doesn’t seem to be at all the stance GRRM has on this whole thing, and I would dare anyone to tell me that GRRM’s vision and his writing are inferior, too easy, or less realistic than what we got from the show.
There’s no guarantee that Jaime will survive in the books, or that he and Brienne will get a HEA (although I do not rule it out at all).  But the fact that the man who invented these characters and this world has a different stance on Jaime and redemption automatically invalidates any nonsense show people can say about how this was the perfect and only way it could end, and that expecting anything different from this series was wishful thinking.
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b0x · 4 years
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i hate that post that's like “we would've gotten a better trilogy if they'd just let rian johnson write all three films than playing hot potato with jj” like i get the point it's trying to make but you're forgetting that rj was fighting tooth and nail for the tlj r*ylo narrative since day 1 so you do realise we would've just gotten the same trilogy as we got now.......
further Thoughts on the trilogy as a whole and a few troc spoilers under the cut
also you KNOW that even if jj COULD have had a hand in saving it... there’s no saving a screenplay written by the guy who did the justice league films
No Comment. No Thoughts. Head Empty. everything post tfa was doomed from the start
have you SEEN the screenwriters for tfa? THAT’S why that one was so good, THAT’S why tfa succeeded as an excellent reboot of a long-dormant franchise. kasdan and arndt and jj should've been on for ALL THREE, and if they couldn’t, then a hiatus was the way to fucking go. rian never should have Touched it, never should have even Looked in its direction.
tfa had the essence of sw BECAUSE the essence of sw wrote it! tlj and tros isn’t sw!!!! 
they rly just tried to make Anakin..... 2! with kylo... but somehow... even Worse. you can’t make an anakin story Without showing kylo’s motives and morals - oh, except, you Did show his motives and morals, and they were in no way redeeming whatsoever! anakin had a whole ARC of complexity that allows for endless discussion on morality and justifiability that led him to earn his redemption. all kylo had was a blood tie to han and leia, which!!!! if anything!!!!!! made his motives and morals WORSE, knowing that he had the most IDEAL most loving and perfect upbringing and he still chose the dark side. that makes any love received from han or leia or luka or even fucking rey completely insignificant because we ALREADY KNOW what it means to him. all of this shit was so worthless!!!!!!!! fuck!
and i have a lot to say about rian johnson because i Cannot for the life of me believe the guy behind BRICK (2005) was taken on for tlj, WHILE TFA WASN’T EVEN FINISHED YET. i really didn’t think this had to be said but that is just NOT how you make a Trilogy. that is how you make Three Separate Films and guess what! that is exactly what we got! and it honestly saddens me to think that the guy behind the beautiful 6 minute music video ‘oh baby’ by lcd sound system, inspired by some of his greatest work in looper (and even brick!), would then take the absolute worst of his worst and apply that to a star wars franchise that desperately needed his best. and there’s something hilarious about that too, that you have this huge sandbox FULL of belief-suspending ridiculousness and STILL somehow make it fail? make it atrocious? that takes skill. it’s like that one post that was like “you have to ACTUALLY put EFFORT into making something this bad” like it’s no longer silly mistakes or lacklustre energy, this was ACTIVE sabotage.
the fact rian Had the Understanding of the core concepts of star wars right in his hands, but somehow completely missed the entire point of them? if you look at the films he screened to his story group during the development of tlj... this handful of culturally and historically significant war films that just seem like he screened for aesthetic and reference purposes only instead of actually exploring and analysing the importance and criticism of the exonerating war propaganda and racist source materials and using these films to inspire the actual groundwork of some of the root themes of current climates and today’s culture in a sw universe... i bet big bucks on the fact that twelve o clock high was only screened to inspire the air battle on crait (red salt planet) and because of ‘VIII Bomber Command’ because ha ha hee hee tlj is episode VIII and hoo hoo hoo *you’ve been gnomed.mp4* 
the general rule is this: when reading ANY report on tlj and tros and something like “the characters came first” is mentioned, just exit out the window, it’s already a botched article/thinkpiece.
i’m also thinking a lot about how arndt translated his first draft for tfa into a script for eight months and said he needed 18 more, which disney and jj said no to, so he left, and IMMEDIATELY after jj kept saying how relieved he was that the release date was delayed and gave him more time that he also needed. like.. you had your lesson then and there. did they learn from it? *disney forcing rian to write tlj at the same time as tfa was still being made* No!
i am ALSO thinking about how they had considered fincher, brad bird, jon favreau, del toro, even getting development suggestions by spielberg.......... and rian johnson is who they called up for tlj.... my head is... empty.
just give the fucking thing to taika waititi he understands the nuances of the socio-political climates of sw’s narratives built around a guise of a fun sci-fi fantasy adventure-drama. he understands. that’s literally the very definition of his style of writing and directing. Makes You Think Why The Mandalorian Is A Hit.... they already gave him 2 mandalorian episodes just give him the whole franchise i cant take it anymore. 
AND NOW THEY’RE GIVING RIAN JOHNSON A WHOLE NEW TRILOGY? RIAN? RIAN JOHNSON? THEY’RE GIVING HIM A WHOLE NEW TRILOGY AFTER WHAT HAPPENED... HERE. SURE.. OKAY . ALRIGHT. IT’S HONESTLY MIND-BLOWING. THE THOUGHT PROCESS THAT GOES INTO CONSECUTIVE DECISIONS SUCH AS THIS. like i would LOVE to see footage of the board meeting for this. no sarcasm i am GENUINELY curious to hear what was said to greenlight this. i have GOT to know what post tros board meetings about this will be like. 
anyway! op of that post! i will be thinking about you when the new rj trilogy drops!
what’s worse about this whole trilogy is that.. they Had it. they had it in the bag with tfa. they HAD the original idea they HAD the power to make a sw trilogy set to current climates JUST LIKE THE PREVIOUS TRILOGIES DID, cos that’s what sw is all about! what it was ALWAYS about! a space opera reflective of current times and climates. but disney turned it into a Keeping Up With The Skywalkers reality tv show that’s nothing more than a sci-fi fantasy light show and vfx flex to keep the brand alive, and personally, i think that’s ultimately one of the reasons it’s so hated and why it failed (of course rampant misogyny/sexism, racism, homophobia under the guise of geek culture within the sw community and in the production itself is a whole other discussion and is another humongous part of why it’s hated and why it failed)
and it’s why hamill had every right to criticise tlj the way he did with rotj, why boyega and isaac and ridley had Every right to their commentary on their distaste of the second and third instalments. how the only reason they’d rescind what they said was due to their contracts. how their silence was necessary to squeeze every last dollar out of consumers because god forbid a potential boycott due to their own star’s “controversial” (Correct) judgements and disapprovals
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they really had it in the bag..
a female protagonist who could be a chosen one regardless of her blood and family ties, a protagonist that reflected the importance and validity of found family, and the idea that Anyone can be a “Skywalker”, a symbol of hope and a fighter for justice and goodness and love in the world, especially in the darkest of times... a young woman being just as powerful, as Chosen, as essential as Luke and Anakin were... a narrative that couldve been commentary on the necessity of women needing to do double the work, make double the effort, to earn the same spot of her counterparts. and with the second and third instalments, especially NOW, with the growth and vocalisation of the MeToo movement, the narrative of strength to speak out against abusers, to fight back and to thrive, a symbol of justice, to teach that men such as kylo who refuse consequence, who actively and soberly choose violence and manipulation for the strengthening of the self, who will ignore and deny all opportunities to better the self, to know their guilt, to make up for their actions, are the ones who are irredeemable. that people like him are not owed any time or understanding or belief in, when that belief perpetuates the violent and oppressive nature they are indefinitely attracted to and make themselves defined by.
a black hero raised by violence and refusing to be defined by it and unlocking the force within as a symbol of that strength within over encompassing goodness, to have a hero that breaks that harmful narrative stereotype that black characters have had for decades and still continue to do so, to have a voice and a hero that fights with love and kindness, that is able to find family and support in a place beyond what he believes he is allowed to have, the significance of a hero being deemed a “traitor”, a term that holds weight in the shame of seeking your own independence and identity, versus the cathartic empowerment of thriving in the independence you make for yourself in the end. a black hero that defeats his oppressors, oppressors that belong to a policing fascist regime, a faction that has always from the very beginning been a depiction of nazis, of authoritarian nationalism. 
a canonical gay latino man freedom fighter, being the best in his career as a literal symbol of hope for the resistance, a literal symbol of the climates for lgbt folk in regards to resisting those same fascist nazi regimes, resisting laws against lgbt existence, lgbt employability, lgbt success. a man who grew into a legacy of heroism, surrounded by it, something that could have been powerful poignant commentary on the necessity to sacrifice lives so others like his didn’t have to, the very narrative to fight for a world that the innocents and the ones he loves could have peace in, could have a future in, could Exist in. poe fights in the skies because he knew damn well the effect of believing in someone that is human, like you, instead of a force that is bigger than anything you could ever know or believe in. poe brings humanity and realism to an otherwise fanatical universe of magic and religion and chaos of endless war that means nothing, that is based on nothing. poe is commentary on fighting a fight that you have no choice but to fight, that you are forced to fight from birth just for the very act of Existing. his humanity and realism is a significant grounding necessity for our two protagonist heroes and it is appalling that he’d just be discarded the way he was, shallowly played off as sideline comic relief, much like lgbt narratives and characters are expressed in pretty much ANY media today, so it comes as no surprise. 
the three most vital narratives that should have been told in this trilogy but no of course not (disney voice) gimme my Fackin MANEY. it’s the silence of marginalised voices cleverly disguised under hollow face-value representation.
honestly, even rey being blood-related to palpatine as his granddaughter was such a strong and perfect set-up for The Narrative That Could’ve Been TM, but instead they had palpatine make it a whole weird pseudo-marriage thing that was just so. backwards and unbelievably shocking that it was in a 2019 era star wars film.
wow marriage story and the rise of skywalker really is the same movie huh
yes we wanted a grey jedi protagonist hero that gets tempted by the dark side but this was the absolute worst way that could’ve been explored. like if they were just gonna recycle old characters and old storylines and make them worse they could’ve at least looked at darth maul or asajj ventress and the nightsisters
and NO WONDER oscar looked so DEFEATED every time finnpoe was mentioned cos he fought for that shit tooth and nail and they? ? ? they gave him a funny ha ha hee hee hoo hoo straight flirt scene? ? with like his ex or something, where they imply they get back together? COMPLETELY destroying the ENTIRE narrative of his character that was so lovingly built and developed in the Official Canon Comic Series About Him ? ? ? ? ? ? ?
NO WORDS. there are NO WORDS. head EMPTY. no not even empty there's NO HEAD at all i am BEHEADED
finn had NOTHING in this film. Nothing. how are you gonna make him a joint-protag with rey and give him Nothing? 
anyone with brain cells knows that what finn truly was trying to tell rey the entire film was that he was force sensitive, i will take this to my grave, and that should’ve built up to this grand reveal where they empower each other and take down palpatine and kylo as one, as the joint-protagonists they were Literally Fucking Written And Built Up To Be. they gave EVERY antagonist to REY. what was the POINT. rey had her significant clash with kylo across two films, hell, even in this one (before the Final one), tros was the penultimate film about her family, her bloodline, so her significant final battle should have been with palpatine a la rotj. the person who DESERVED to clash with and take down kylo once and for all was FINN, even a TODDLER would understand WHY. 
but considering everything, i would take the thing finn was trying to tell her the entire film being that he loves her ANY DAY if it meant whatever the fuck we got instead Never Happened.
finn got made general and not only was it a blink-and-you-miss bit but it adds NOTHING, yes it’s something to celebrate and of Course he deserves it, but it holds zero significance to him as a character. like i mentioned earlier, when han was made general, that never defined him. he was still han solo and it took a Dozen other significant scenarios and twists to make him a significant and vital memorable character. han solo isn’t known for “being a general”. he’s known for being han fucking solo, a critical puzzle piece in the taking down of the empire, a scamp-turned-deeply-loyal friend and lover, a man who not only got his own personal storyline concluded to the level it deserved to be (the repercussions of his bounty hunter life, the importance of the falcon, his relationships with lando, luke, and leia, his triumph over his captors even when it was luke and leia who freed him). 
side note, this was maybe the one thing that tfa screwed up, the entire point and development of the original trilogy, it sort of felt a bit moot with how they put a “twist” on han, leia and luke’s relationship, especially when it came to kylo. but i think there are some forgivable aspects to it for the sake of the new trio, and that’s why those executive decisions kind of Worked! this is, of course, for another discussion bc this is about the new trilogy.
leia IS known for being a general because part of her entire storyline revolves around it and the significance of it!!! which is why finn being made general just feels so... i don’t know! just completely disrespectful, to both him as a character, and to generals who are defined by this position (such as, hello!!!!! poe!!! poe fucking dameron!!!! a man raised by the resistance!!! a man who’s entire life and prior legacy was entirely dedicated to the resistance!!!! him being made general MEANT something). it’s like rubbing salt in the wound of the fact that finn has been discarded as the protagonist he was meant to be, the story, development and conclusion he never got, just to slap general on him and call it a day and then write about his actual development in a novel that 3/4ths of the ppl who watch the films will never read. 
and that's just the core story stuff!!! do NOT get me started on the general lore proposed in this shit. i’m talking about the force ghost nonsense and the convenience of some of the timing choices (rewriting the way death works in sw, claiming that rey “didn’t really die/wasn’t really dead” since she didn’t fade which in itself completely destroys the entire plot they were going for with the resurrection scene, the timing of the fades themselves bullshitted for “dramatic cinematic purposes”), the entire palpatine storyline, the bullshit with snoke and the lack of explanation, all these one-off characters that have the lore capacity of an overwatch character when instead they could have developed the ones that already existed and had the opportunity to be fleshed out and CARED about
the FACT that HUX (hux!!!!!!!!!) had a more interesting storyline in all three films with a total screentime of maybe 10 minutes than these one-offs whose only purpose is to stroke the cock of sw nostalgia seekers and lore aficionados. to make these characters so inaccessible that to fully appreciate them, fans have to dive into hundreds of different novels and comics and games and whatnot. like if you make it so that the Only way someone can experience a character’s full essence is by reading their wiki page then you’ve failed in creating them, in writing them, in including them, in using them, in whatever them. you’ve just failed as a creator.
and the ONLY reason hux got a reaction (a barebones reaction but a reaction nonetheless) out of me was because they essentially just turned him into phasma 2 which is SO telling of the climate of this trilogy.
it’s a recycled trilogy. that’s all it is. it’s a recycled series of films where tfa’s originality was completely entirely scrapped and ignored because rian wanted to write his personal fanfiction more than he wanted to continue the story he was given, and did everything he could to insert that whenever he could, and kennedy, of course, let him, because she realised giving herself indulging content other than fifty shades and radfem articles that she could jerk off to was more important than telling a critical story where its wonder and valuable, influential morals could’ve stayed in this generation’s minds for years to come.
if you want to watch tros just watch the prequel trilogy instead you'll get the same story except actually good.
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