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#he's so fucking interesting I can't
floworence · 5 months
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Coriolanus had one bad break up and made "manipulate, mansplain, manslaughter" his life motto
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lord-squiggletits · 2 months
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I think the key component to my personal reading of post-Delphi Pharma is that he's trying to be a horrible person on purpose. Not "on purpose" in the way that people have free will to exercise their own choices, but in that Pharma's "mad doctor" persona is a performance he puts on to deliberately embrace how much everyone else hates him. Basically, if people already think you're a "bad Autobot" and a horrible doctor who just kills his patients for fun, why try to prove otherwise to people who have already made up their minds about you? Just fully embrace the fact that people see you as an asshole. Don't try to change their minds. Don't plead for their forgiveness or understanding. Just stop caring. If you're going to be remembered as a monster, you might as well be a memorable monster, and eke as much pleasure and hedonism as you can out of it before karma catches up to you and you inevitably crash and burn.
I mean, I guess you could just go the route of "Oh, Pharma was always a fucked up creepy guy and Delphi was just him taking the mask off," but I really don't like that interpretation because, for one, it feels really wrong to take a character like Pharma becoming evil under duress and going, "Oh well clearly he did the things he did because he was evil all along," as if somehow Pharma breaking under blackmail/torture/threat of horrible death was a sign of him having poor moral character. As opposed to, you know, suffering under the very real threat of horrible death for himself and everyone he cares about while being manipulated by a guy who specializes in psychological torture.
The second reason is that it just doesn't make sense to write Pharma as having been evil all along. I mean...
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Occam's Razor says that the best argument is the one with the simplest explanation. Doesn't it make way more sense to take Pharma's appearances in flashbacks, his friendship with Ratchet, his stunning medical accomplishments, and the few we see of him speaking kindly/sympathetically (or in the least charitable interpretation, at least professionally) towards his patients and conclude "This guy was just a normal person, if exceptionally talented." Taking all of these flashback appearances at face value and assuming Pharma was being genuine/honest is a way simpler and more logical explanation than trying to argue that Pharma for the past 4 million years was just faking being a good doctor/person. I mean, it's possible within the realm of headcanon, but the fact is Pharma's appearances in the story are so brief that there simply wasn't room in the story for there to be some sort of secret conspiracy/hidden manipulation behind why Pharma acted the way he did in the past.
I just can't help but look at things like Pharma's friendship with Ratchet (himself a good person and usually a fine judge of character) and the fact that even post-Delphi, pretty much every single mention of Pharma comes with some mention of "He was a good doctor for most of his life" or "He was making major headways in research [before he started killing patients]" which implies that even the Autobots themselves see Pharma's villainy as a recent turn in his life compared to how for "most of his life" he "used to be" a good doctor.
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And although Pharma doesn't know this, we as the readers (and even other characters like Rung) know about Aequitas technology and the fact that it actually works, so... if Pharma really was an unrepentant murderer, why couldn't he get through the forcefield too? The Aequitas forcefield doesn't require that a person be completely morally pure and free of wrongdoing or else how could Tyrest get through, just that they feel a sense of inner peace and lack feelings of guilt. Pharma has murdered and tortured people by this point, and put on quite a campy and theatrical show of how much he sees it as a fun game, so why then can he not get through?
It circles back to my headcanon at the start of this post that the "mad doctor" persona is just that-- a persona. Delphi/post-Delphi Pharma's laughing madman personality is just so far removed from every flashback we saw of him and everything we can infer based on how other people see/saw him before that, to me, the mad doctor act is (at least in large part, if not fully) a persona that Pharma puts on to put his villainy in the forefront.
To avoid an overly simplistic/ableist take, I don't think Tarn tortured Pharma into turning crazy. To me, it's more like the constant pressure of death by horrific torture, the feeling of martyrdom as Pharma kept secret that he was the only one standing between Delphi and annihilation, the physical isolation of Messatine as well as the emotional separation from Ratchet, being forced to violate his medical oaths (pretty much the only thing Pharma's entire life has been about), etc. All of that combined traumatized Pharma to the point that the only way he could avoid cracking was to just stop caring about all of it. Because at least then, even if he's still murdering patients to save Delphi from a group of sadistic freaks, Pharma doesn't have to feel guilty and sick about doing it. As opposed to the alternatives, which were probably either going off the deep end and killing himself to escape, or confessing to what he did and getting jailed for it.
In that light, Pharma becoming a mad doctor makes sense. It avoids the bad writing tropes of "oh this character who was good his entire life was actually just evil and really good at hiding it" as well as "oh he got tortured and went crazy that's why he's so random and silly and killing people, he's crazy" and instead frames Pharma's evil as something he was forced into, to the point where in order to avoid a full psychological breakdown and keep defending Delphi, he just had to stop caring about the sanctity of life or about what other people might think of him.
Then, of course, the actual Delphi episode happens, and Pharma's own lifelong best friend Ratchet basically spits in his face and sees him as nothing more than a crazy murderer who went rogue from being a good Autobot. Then Pharma gets his hands cut off and left to die on Messatine. At that point, Pharma has not only been mentally/emotionally broken into losing his feelings of compassion, he's received the message loud and clear: He is alone. Everyone hates him. Not even his own best friend likes him any more. No one even cared enough about him to check if he actually died or not. He will only ever be remembered as a doctor who went insane and killed his patients.
So in the light of 1. Having all of your redeeming qualities be squeezed out of you one by one for the sake of survival and 2. Having your reputation and all of your positive relationships be destroyed and 3. People only know/care about you as "that doctor who became evil and killed his patients" rather than the millions of years of good service that came before.
What else is there to do but internalize the fact that you'll forever be seen as a monster and a freak, and embrace it? People already see you as a murderer for that blackmail deal you did, so why not become an actual murderer and just start killing people on a whim? People already see you as an irredeemable monster who puts a stain on the Autobot name, so why beg for their forgiveness when you could just shun them back? You've already become a murderer, a traitor, and a horrible doctor, so what's a few more evil acts added to the pile? It's not like anyone will ever forgive you or love you ever again.
Why care? Why try to hold on to your principles of compassion, kindness, medical ethics, when an entire lifetime of being a good person did nothing to save you from blackmail and then abandonment? Why put yourself through the emotional agony of feeling lonely, guilty, miserable, when you could just... stop caring, and not hurt any more?
#squiggposting#pharma apologism#i'm sure the doylist reason for the writing is just that pharma was a designated villain#so since he's a villain and 'crazy' it's fine for everyone even the good guys to treat him like complete trash#i just think from a watsonian perspective taking a sympathetic approach is way more interesting and logically consistent#what i mean is like. from a meta perspective one of the best ways to show that a character is super evil and not worth saving#is when even the good guy heroes. the ones who are supposed to be kind and compassionate and wise. see him as dirt#and this is also kind of a necessity in most plots bc TF is the kind of series that just needs action villains and long-term antagonists#so not every villain is written or has a plot to be made redeemable. and pharma is one of these bc he's not important or a legacy character#so from a doylist (meta) perspective you could read the autobots' disregard of pharma as a sign of#'this guy is not meant to have your sympathy as a reader. pay no attention to him'#but from a watsonian (in universe) perspective it paints a miserable picture of pharma being utterly forsaken by the ppl he served alongsid#and like yeah i'm super autistic about pharma so of course i view him with sympathy but like#the idea of being a loyal and good person for years only to be subjected to a Torment Nexus of#being blackmailed into breaking all of the oaths you held sacred. under threat of you and all your comrades dying horrible torturous deaths#then when your comrades find out about it they focus solely on the 'harvesting organs' and not on the 'blackmail' part#and then you get literally left for dead by your comrades and best friend hating your guts#and then you get rescued by a guy who uses you as a test subject for his evil machine#this is a fucking nightmare scenario like pharma could hardly be suffering more if the author TRIED to make him suffer#and for me it's like. the evil pharma did can't be decontextualized to what drove him to that. as well as the question of like#how easily ppl can write someone off as evil and turn a blind eye to (or even find satisfaction in) their suffering bc theyre evil#and either brought it on themselves or it's just karma paying a visit#like. i feel like if pharma WERE a shitty doctor and a terrible person his whole life then the delphi situation would feel like karma#but the way it's written and the lore retroactively put in makes it feel more pharma getting thrown in a torture carousel#and THEN becoming evil. but then being treated as if he was always evil or was some sort of bad apple#bc like i'm not opposed to LOLing when a villain gets a karmic torture/death related to the wrongs they committed#but in pharma's case it feels less like karma and more like endless torture + being abandoned by ppl who should have been more loyal
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bixels · 2 months
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I feel like I've seen most of what interests me in FiMFiction for the time being, so I read through some good ol' reliable Stardew Valley fanfics last night, only to realize.
Haley x Female Farmer is basically Rarijack. Rarijack adjacent.
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introspectivememories · 2 months
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me after scrolling through the strollonso tag for like 5 hours straight
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blorb-el · 11 months
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Calling golden age Clark an anticapitalist/socialist paragon is only true for prewar golden age Clark (1938-42). The instant the US entered the war and the character started to be used to sell war stamps, he couldn't act as anti-authoritarian; destroying a car factory for its use of unsafe, inferior materials (action 12), trapping a mine owner in his own mine to force him to improve conditions for his workers (action 3), or tearing down tenement housing in order to force the government to build better, safer apartments (action 8) are all actions that would be seen as actively traitorous in the wake of Pearl Harbor. The Superman office contributed enthusiastically to war propaganda in all the forms of media the character was appearing in (comics, newspaper strips, radio show, and the Fleischer animations). By the end of the war Superman the Character was firmly established as Establishment. Postwar golden age Superman is still devoted to doing the right thing, of course, but now he helps raise money for charity, donates his time and labor to build orphanages, that sort of thing. He's not trying to tear the system down... much as I wish DC would let him try.
Instead of Siegel's original justice cryptid, the furiously kinetic Champion of the Oppressed outsider Superman, postwar to modern day we get a Clark who shifts back and forth on the spectrum of establishmentarianism depending on the writer, but who is generally not allowed to act directly against institutions (Wolfman, Morrison, Waid, Byrne, and Maggin for example all have WILDLY different takes on the relationship between superman and Authority). My personal favorite Take is that Clark as a person is not establishmentarian, but the establishment of superheroes and their conduct codified (or calcified, if you prefer) itself around him and his personal conduct. Both in a Doylist sense and in the continuities where he's the First Superhero a Watsonian one. How does your behavior change when you know people are looking to you to determine what's right and what's allowed for themselves? How does that constrict you, when your actions are dissected and taken for justification? That's why I always think of him as a person whose natural inclination is to be chaotic good, but who restrains himself into being lawful good. Clark would sure LIKE to Solve Capitalism. But he both can't, and will never be allowed to... and that tension, far from being a bad thing, can fuel a good interpretation.
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quietwingsinthesky · 7 months
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it ever hit you out of nowhere that castiel is living in a dead guy's body and the show just does not care. it does not care. jimmy novak might as well not exist the moment he or claire is out of sight. cas stole a guy's body and his face and his life, and we can't ever talk about it or discuss it in detail because of how fucking horrifying it is that sam and dean's best friend just walks around in a dead guy suit. there's not even a human soul in there anymore. it's just a corpse. stone-cold body snatcher indeed.
#castiel spn#spn#this is not like a Castiel Crime (tm) to be clear. this is more me being (un)surprised that the show is Like This.#castiel is a horror story he is so much a horror story in the rapture#and then they just uh. never bring up again how horrifying and fucked up this is for another like 7 seasons#and when they do its to briefly go :( claire lost her dad :) but its okay! she forgives cas for it!#which!! NO SHE SHOULD FUCKING NOT!!!#but we can't have that discussion. we can't talk about that. because to acknowledge that it's fucked up would mean making cas kind of. evil#in a way that would vastly improve his later character arcs btw. if we had to reckon with not only this massive transgression#but with the fact that cas himself STILL DOESN'T SEE IT AS ONE.#that on a lot of fundamental levels. he is still functioning as he did in s4. a lot of that base programming is still there.#something something how cas never changes out of his suit under his trenchcoat#but it's like. jimmy said yes. so it's fine. that's what it is to him.#anyway. i wish they hadn't been scared of making all three of the boys more fucked up in later seasons.#thank GOD for dean being interesting in how he becomes Worse <3 because they were not bringing that for castiel.#again. good version of spn where jimmy's bloodline is an off-shoot of the lucifer vessel bloodline. explaining a) how lucifer Got In There#and b) letting lucifer possess claire later so that the two of them can have daddy issues together.#something about cas being the monster-not monster that jimmy let in that destroyed his life.#something about lucifer being the monster-not monster that castiel lets in later. the cycles. they are cycling.
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butterflysonnets · 3 months
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yes i'm rooting for m*leven breakup because byler is neat but mostly? i'm rooting for m*leven breakup for the sake of el and mike.
to me, their romance was always a puppy love born out of a combination of social pressures, naïve curiosity, and a lack of true understanding regarding intimacy and romantic love and what it really is. it was real in that they do truly, deeply care about each other and they are close friends, maybe even shared an attraction, but a maturing romance is so much more than that. they've grown up and out of being boyfriend/girlfriend, and that's okay! i think television/film needs to show more often that most of us don't have definite "soulmates" or first childhood loves that we spend our whole lives with. it doesn't mean these relationships meant nothing and didn't impact us, it just means they've run their course and that something else is in the cards, and this is part of life!
i've always felt el was at her best and most confident self when broken up with mike, discovering who she was and what she liked alongside another girl her age instead of just relying on mike for mentorship on how to live in the real world. she deserves more of an opportunity to find herself, her autonomy, and her independence, and to love who she is, and she's made it clear she's felt insecure in the relationship with mike because she isn't being loved and understood the way she wants, needs, and deserves from someone who is her partner.
also, it's okay if mike doesn't love her in "the way he should". he is not obligated to love her romantically and stay in a relationship with her just because she's a girl, because she "needed someone", or because he cares about her a lot. he shouldn't be pressured into a romance if it's not truly coming from his heart. he deserves freedom to find out and honour who he is, too, instead of just staying in his non-functional first relationship — one he got into as a child, essentially — and defining himself that way because it's what's expected when a boy and a girl are close. he loves her in some way, yes, but it's okay if he doesn't feel comfortable or secure being her boyfriend anymore, for whatever reason that is. he's felt insecure too, and that's valid and it matters.
they are their own people and are steadily growing and changing every day. they need time to figure out who those people are, and it's become clear (at least in my opinion) that those people aren't meant to be a couple at this stage.
they deserve freedom. they deserve to grow up and be authentic to themselves and not feel like they need to lie for the sake of a relationship. they deserve to move on from this version of their relationship that isn't making them happy and rekindle the best part of their bond: their strong, beautiful friendship. they don't have to be a couple if it doesn't make them stronger and better and happier people.
i think it would be healthy and wonderful for a show, especially one consumed frequently by young adults, to show a relationship starting, progressing, and ending on good terms in this way. sometimes things don't work out, and that is okay.
#eve text#elmike#stranger things#byler#only tagging byler because i feel like yall will like this take lol#tagging tagging tagging WHAT ARE EVERYONE ELSE'S THOUGHTS#god i can't believe i'm making a post about stranger things. this feels like poking a bear#i'm not particularly anti m*leven but like... they'd have to do something pretty special at this point for me to feel like it's viable#i'm seeing the bts of s5 and it's got me Having Thoughts#elmike friendship is something i am so passionate about#even before i ever liked byler (didn't ship at all until s4 even though i knew it was a thing before) i've felt this way about elmike#i always believed they were close friends at heart and needed to break up#the romance part of them felt very distinctly young and very much “he was a boy she was a girl” to me#and it hasn't deepened into anything more mature and i don't see how it could based on the current state of the writing...#the fact that lumax exists — a young relationship that is actively maturing and is healthy — makes that clear to me#and the “love confession” in s4 and how disingenuous and miserable it felt was just the nail in the coffin#also the fact that will (who is IN LOVE with mike) was instrumental in making it happen? ... uh... okay... interesting choice…#fucked up and reductive if they make it another queer unrequited love sacrifice for the sake of pushing the heterosexual agenda YUCK#so i really hope the speculation about a m*leven breakup is real!! i think it just makes sense for their characters but who knows#i don't believe in the notion of love at first sight or one true love and i think the writers don't too???#love to me is an accumulation of experiences and we inevitably choose it at some point rather than fall into it... but idk#tv is so fixated on keeping couples together... sometimes it's just not reality guys especially with young people... LET IT GO...#like i said though i'm not 100% sold that they're going to give up their “golden couple” LMAO#stranger things hasn't historically subverted too many tropes if i'm being honest#anyway i seriously need this season to come out quickly... i'm so bored and getting my master's is crushing my soul#i need frivolity#ALSO btw i won't respond to hateful messages about this so please don't bother. it's not that serious. this is a netflix show
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randomraytrash · 1 year
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aq2003 · 3 months
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my personal hot take of the day is that you cannot fully appreciate ten if you don't also appreciate martha and the dynamic they have
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There are only so many fanfics that use the entirety of DC as cardboard cutouts to prop up bat family characters that I can read before I go berserk.
I swear to god. Every character that has ever been shipped with a bat or coexists on the same team as a bat is owed an apology.
How many Young Justice fanfics that solely revolve around Tim must exist? How many Titans fanfics centered only on Dick? Why is it a herculean task to find a Justice League fanfic without Bruce as the main character?
And then even when you do find a fic that seems like it's balanced, everything still revolves around the bat. Like Kon, Cassie and Bart have nothing else going on in their lives except Tim and Tim's issues or thinking about Tim. Like Donna and Wally and Roy just cannot function if they aren't spending every waking moment thinking about Dick.
I'm... Guys. I'm at my limit. I swear to god. We need to make a Batman tag and surgically remove all these fics and quarantine them there. We'll keep the actual DC fics and they can do whatever the fuck they want in their own tag. It's getting ridiculous how hard it is to find fanfic that's actually DC related and isn't just 'The BatFam Show'.
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anyoldfandom · 20 days
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Sometimes I remember that line in S3 meant to show how BK keeps up appearances of running Providence more humanely than WK where Rex says WK was so cheap that he didn't even buy individual stalls for the bathroom and then I remember that Rex got his own basketball court and locker room and Providence was constantly canonically paying for repairs for damages caused by Rex fighting EVOs and fighting EVOs rather than just immediately collaring them and paying for food and cages and such for incurables and EVOs waiting for Rex to cure them and paying to keep Paradise/Purgatory base afloat and then I think maybe. Maybe there is another reason WK was cheap.
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poorlittleyaoyao · 1 month
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Taking screencaps of the Unexpected Meng Yao Mention was going to take too long, so here's the scene in full! It encapsulates several changes that the drama makes to the chronology and the character dynamics! NMJ is the active force behind his and MY's separation in CQL; rather than MY incapacitating NMJ and fleeing to escape punishment for the captain's murder, NMJ straight-up exiles him with no trickery from MY involved whatsoever. While NMJ is upset about this, it was his choice/moral obligation, so he doesn't appear to bear MY any ill will over it.
Given that lack of ill will, it makes sense for him to inquire how MY is getting on with the Jin clan even at this juncture... EXCEPT! Except. He didn't send MY to the Jin with a nice recommendation letter here. He fired him and sent him packing with an actively bleeding stab wound! Drama NMJ really thought--or really told himself--that not only would an injured MY make it to Lanling in the first place, but that the man who personally kicked him down the stairs for existing would hire him even after he was banished from another sect. He really wants him to be alive and thriving!
JZX's bewildered reaction to his questions drives home just how ridiculous that prospect is, and you can see NMJ go through it. No, his father was never going to accept him; even his awkward half-brother who doesn't even know him can tell you that. Yeah, stab wounds kill people, like JC pointed out on the day of the exile! Drama NMJ is confronting the fact that MY might in fact be dead, and this hurts him.
Once JZX exits, the scene cuts to JC sadly holding Suibian as he and JYL cry about missing WWX. That transition seems deliberate!
And then in the scene after that opens with WLJ, frightened of the WWX in her nightmares, overhearing WC complain:
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Don't worry, da-ge, he's fine. :)
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fandom-geek · 11 months
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so i finally read scum villain yesterday. got to say, i came away with one take-away:
scum villain is still a harem story, but shen qingqiu is too fucking dumb to realise he’s got the harem now.
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lewishamiltonstuff · 2 months
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With just 1 month to go until the new @ f1 season, we look back at Formula 1 superstar @ lewishamilton's collaborative custom F1 crash helmets... can't wait too see who he collabs with this year!
1. @ danielarsham, 2. @ hajimesorayamaofficial, 3. @ takashipom, 4. @ mad.dog.jones *majority of photography by @ 13thwitness
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moe-broey · 4 months
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I've only read the first volume of Dungeon Meshi but I'm convinced Laios and Marcille are both autistic but two EXTREMELY different flavors of autism, so much so it enables autistic PVP (one sided, Laios is unaware, possibly due to the autism)
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illmoraineakoi · 4 months
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What if the Pale King locked himself away in the Dream Realm to recreate what he did to the Hollow Knight? After the Vessel leaked and he realized that it most likely had capability enough to suffer, but far far too late to even hope to do anything to fix it. He was beyond the point of no return, there was nothing he could do to undo the Sealing. And even if he could, there were no other options that he could think of of what to do about the Blazing Light.
He had no choice but to keep the Vessel sealed. No choice but to watch his kingdom crumble. There was nothing he could do.
Nothing, but to seal himself away in a self-imposed punishment in the exact same way he imparted onto his only (known) living child.
A weak attempt to impose the same agony onto himself as he forced onto them.
And should the people of his kingdom stop worshiping him and forget he exists, dwindling his power and life to a pathetic end?
Well...
Perhaps that might've been for the best.
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