Between Akashi & Furihata, if one of them died, who do you think is more likely to heal from the pain of loss sooner & moves on with his life?
When has Akashi Seijuurou gotten over anything in his fucking life? This rhetorical jest is an oversimplification of one of Akashi's character flaws which is his need for control. This is all to say, simply based on that, Furihata is the more emotionally intelligent of the two, the one more open and accepting to change. I think they both would require years to fully heal but I think Furihata would be the one to move on sooner.
I've tried to keep it short and direct above for those without brainrot but I AM going to go apeshit below the cut
Oh my god oh my god oh my GOD I'm so glad someone wants to hear me talk about THIS, THIS EXACT CONCEPT- ACCEPTING THE LOVE OF THEIR LIVES DEATH FASCINATES ME ENDLESSLY FUCK
Okay for reference there has been 2 fanfics involving this concept that I read when I first got into akafuri and they have HEAVILY influenced my perception of this question:
- The Truth About Reality; which is literally about Furihata not accepting Akashi's death and through mysticism goes to 4/5 different parallel realities to get him back. It's a favorite of mine and I read it once a year. It has themes of sacrifice and second chances which make it so crucial to the thematic elements of akafuri. Read it please
- Through the Air by Maiokoe; I love the first chapter, literally Kuroko Kagami Takao and Midorima come to Akashi while he is at work and inform him that Furihata's flight just crashed. It is so so so good. The way it plays out, Akashi's mounting fear, his resistance, the way his fear turns to anger then to despair- sometimes I cry when I reread it. And the last lines of the chapter---
What was a world without his lover?
What was this life without his easy nature and smiles?
What was this life without his affection?
What was this world without Furihata Kouki?
What did this world mean to him?
Nothing.
Absolutely nothing.
What was Akashi Seijuuro without him?
He didn’t want to find out.
Those lines have colored my opinion of what Akashi would be like if his husband died so fucking much that it really was eventual that I started my Greek fic where Akashi is Achilles and Furihata is Patroclus. So if you know the Iliad then you know how my fic will play out and exactly where I take a stance on Akashi’s terrible all consuming love.
To talk about the dissolution of happily in love akafuri by the cruel hands of death is to examine how their relationship evolved them and what being torn from their other half would do to them. To be haunted by their after image, to look at their favorite mug, to wear their favorite sweater- who would wear grief better. Who would welcome it, accept its presence. Who would repress it.
Please do not mistake what I'm saying to mean Furihata would move on quickly. Where Furihata is Akashi's light, Akashi is his gravity. He would be adrift and untethered without Akashi. The world would turn upside down. He would feel the expanse of their house, the emptiness of their bed. Furihata would be lost. It would take years to come down back to earth by himself.
Furihata would eventually move out of that house/apartment too full of memories, at the prodding of well meaning friends he would download dating apps, eventually he would go on dates and try his best to not compare them to his late husband because how could a man compare to a god. And then years and years down the line, when his heart only half aches when he sees a hair of red, when he only wears that old ratty sweater on the occasion bad day, he can look up into the sky and smile, thankful for the memories. I think he could even fall in love again, begin a new chapter.
A large chunk of Furihata is lost the day Akashi dies but he grows around the pain and walks on. Accepting the scars, accepting the love and pain, accepting it all.
As I said though, Furihata is Akashi's light. His metric on good and bad. The saving grace that redeemed him and inspired him to become worthy of such love.
Imagine if the sun was stolen from the sky and we were pitched into utter darkness. Until our eyes adjust and we can make out some shapes, you are surrounded in black black. Complete emptiness. Alone more than ever before and for a moment you think it will consume you. That is how Akashi feels for the first year until his eyes adjust to the darkness. He would continue in this shadow life indefinitely, watching everyone else patch themselves together and move on, while he.is.stuck. And he won't admit it and only those brave enough would say it to his face, but he is absolutely wallowing, sulking, in this darkness as self-punishment. that in some twisted sense, this is what he deserves. he digs his feet in, refusing to move. And if out of the corner of his eye a flicker of light dances, he would refuse to follow it. The dark is where he belongs.
He would bury himself in work. He would refuse to move out of their house. Refusing to touch any of the things that Kouki last left them, his toothbrush bone dry in the holder, the book he was reading on his bedside table.
And when his friends compare him to his father- he becomes furious, alight with indignation. He is not cold and cruel like his father had been. "No... you're empty."
It would take him so so long to accept that Furihata would want him to be happy even if its not with him. That he deserves to be happy. Only then would he take tiny half steps out of the cave he buried himself in, the cave that he would have made his grave.
As a side note, I mentioned Furihata falling in love with someone else afterwards... my personal interpretation is that Akashi could not. He would try if only just because he knows Furihata wants him to be happy and knew that Akashi is the most happy when he is in love- but The Akashi heart is a fearsome terrible all consuming thing.
Akashi Seijuurou, is a man who celebrated the anniversary of each milestone of their relationship. Akashi Seijuurou, is a man who is head over heels in love and worships the ground his beloved walks on. Akashi Seijuurou, is a man who calls their partner love- because they are the manifestation of their love. Akashi Seijuurou, is a man who would go to the far corners of the world to see if there was some way to still communicate with their partner if said partner was turned into a worm and would build a terrarium of utmost luxury for said partner and talk to the worm as if it was them, take the worm to see the sun meet the ocean, because they have to hope that their partner still has some consciousness. And if not, then he needs to do that for himself. To fool himself. And once that worm passes, he would be extra compassionate to earthworms because they remind him of them.
The Akashi heart is a blessing to the receiver for there is nothing stronger or purer. The Akashi heart is a curse to the creator if only because they have that one single heart and they are physically unable to take it back.
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When I was a kid, I regularly lost reading privileges for "having an attitude" and "acting out".
It wasn't as simple as being told not to read during other activities- one of the first times it happened, I remember being six years old, watching my stepfather pull fistfuls of books off my bookshelf and throw them to the floor in a heaping mess while I cried and asked him to stop.
It was weird. Every other adult I knew described me as exceptionally well-behaved, but at home, it was the opposite, and it was blamed on "learning bad habits from that shit you're reading".
Because I couldn't read at home, I spent all my free time at school in the library, reading with my friends.
When I grew up and moved away, I realized that my family life was toxic and abusive, and the "attitudes" I was being punished for were standing up for myself, standing up for my younger siblings, and resisting actual, real-life psychological abuse. Because I'd learned from what I'd read that my family wasn't normal, not like my parents said it was, and in my stories, the heroes were the people who spoke out when it was hard to.
It is insane to me that there are students right now who can't access books. It is insane that books are being outlawed. It is perverse that we are stealing away an entire generation's ability to contextualize their lives, to learn about the world around them, to develop critical thinking skills and express themselves and feel connected to the world or escape from it, whatever and whenever and however they need.
That is not how you raise a compassionate, thoughtful, powerful society.
That's how you process cattle.
It's fucking disgusting.
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at some point it's just like. do they even fucking like the thing they're asking AI to make? "oh we'll just use AI for all the scripts" "we'll just use AI for art" "no worries AI can write this book" "oh, AI could easily design this"
like... it's so clear they've never stood in the middle of an art museum and felt like crying, looking at a piece that somehow cuts into your marrow even though the artist and you are separated by space and time. they've never looked at a poem - once, twice, three times - just because the words feel like a fired gun, something too-close, clanging behind your eyes. they've never gotten to the end of the movie and had to arrive, blinking, back into their body, laughing a little because they were holding their breath without realizing.
"oh AI can mimic style" "AI can mimic emotion" "AI can mimic you and your job is almost gone, kid."
... how do i explain to you - you can make AI that does a perfect job of imitating me. you could disseminate it through the entire world and make so much money, using my works and my ideas and my everything.
and i'd still keep writing.
i don't know there's a word for it. in high school, we become aware that the way we feel about our artform is a cliche - it's like breathing. over and over, artists all feel the same thing. "i write because i need to" and "my music is how i speak" and "i make art because it's either that or i stop existing." it is such a common experience, the violence and immediacy we mean behind it is like breathing to me - comes out like a useless understatement. it's a cliche because we all feel it, not because the experience isn't actually persistent. so many of us have this ... fluttering urgency behind our ribs.
i'm not doing it for the money. for a star on the ground in some city i've never visited. i am doing it because when i was seven i started taking notebooks with me on walks. i am doing it because in second grade i wrote a poem and stood up in front of my whole class to read it out while i shook with nerves. i am doing it because i spent high school scribbling all my feelings down. i am doing it for the 16 year old me and the 18 year old me and the today-me, how we can never put the pen down. you can take me down to a subatomic layer, eviscerate me - and never find the source of it; it is of me. when i was 19 i named this blog inkskinned because i was dramatic and lonely and it felt like the only thing that was actually permanently-true about me was that this is what is inside of me, that the words come up over everything, coat everything, bloom their little twilight arias into every nook and corner and alley
"we're gonna replace you". that is okay. you think that i am writing to fill a space. that someone said JOB OPENING: Writer Needed, and i wrote to answer. you think one raindrop replaces another, and i think they're both just falling. you think art has a place, that is simply arrives on walls when it is needed, that is only ever on demand, perfect, easily requested. you see "audience spending" and "marketability" and "multi-line merch opportunity"
and i see a kid drowning. i am writing to make her a boat. i am writing because what used to be a river raft has long become a fully-rigged ship. i am writing because you can fucking rip this out of my cold dead clammy hands and i will still come back as a ghost and i will still be penning poems about it.
it isn't even love. the word we use the most i think is "passion". devotion, obsession, necessity. my favorite little fact about the magic of artists - "abracadabra" means i create as i speak. we make because it sluices out of us. because we look down and our hands are somehow already busy. because it was the first thing we knew and it is our backbone and heartbreak and everything. because we have given up well-paying jobs and a "real life" and the approval of our parents. we create because - the cliche again. it's like breathing. we create because we must.
you create because you're greedy.
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You know what I hate about the internet? Sometimes people will just lazily slap a “citation” on an infographic and trust that they’ll be completely taken at their word and nobody is going to dig deeper. And it works all the time. As an example, please look at this photo someone posted to dispute my assertion that garlic can be toxic to dogs.
Okay well, kind of a pain to manually type in that link but obviously I am going to look into this study that is confident enough to recommend people feeding their dogs garlic. So here’s the article, kind of a weird journal choice for this graphic to reference from but looks like a legit (though 20 year old) study
Funny thing is, almost immediately this article acknowledges that garlic can indeed be toxic to dogs. The health benefits mentioned in the graphic are referring to human health, not canine. This section is literally in the introduction of the article and one of the first things you read. Emphasis here is mine.
Crazy to me that someone would imply that this article encourages giving dogs garlic when it in fact immediately asserts that doing so has the potential to cause hemolytic anemia. The article does explore the anti-thrombotic effects of garlic components in dogs and humans, but by no means does it say that “contrary to misconceptions garlic is safe for pets”. It is dishonest to assert this in an infographic. However the creator of the image correctly assumed nobody would check, because the person who posted it took it as fact without further investigation.
I am begging you to be skeptical. Check your sources. Check their sources. Check my sources. Learn how to dig deeper and exercise that muscle as much as you can, especially on the internet. You will be absolutely shocked how much misinformation is casually stated and received as pure fact.
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