#like... this is fr my ideology about every show i watch

[tinylilvalery]

"your fave isn't a good person" pls stop watching succession if u think anyone on the show is a good person. no one will ever tell u shiv is a great person. but neither is tom or greg

Babe I know😭😭😭 that's why I said it. You tried so hard to be condescending and superior but instead came off as someone who's loud and has no reading comprehension.

Everyone is shit on Succession, so getting into arguments or making posts that are morally superior and condescending to other fans because "they're a bad meanie and my fav is good" is dumb as shit when they're all abhorrent 1% assholes without ethics who we'd all hate irl.

And yes I've seen PLENTY of people make out that Sh*v is a great person that deserves the best. Sh*v and R*man stans are the biggest perpetrators of trying to spread hate for other characters (such as Connor, Kendall, Tom, and Greg) and shame + talk down on their fans despite the fact that the show is fictional and we're here cos we enjoy the characters and plot, not because we think they're angels who have done so much good.

"no one said that!!" Is literally the funniest cop out that people love to say online cos 1. Yes people do in fact say that, that's obviously why I comment on it and 2. It goes to show how unaware you are or willfully ignorant you are.

#i guarantee I've been a part of the fandom longer than you and know what I'm talking about #“pls stop watching” I've been watching the show longer than you stfu 😭😂 #a sh*v stan definitely wrote this #like... this is fr my ideology about every show i watch #in that it's not real and doesn't matter so there's no point in playing moral superiority #so you saying i shouldn't watch a show cos of this is ridiculoussss 💀 #the names are starred out cos i dont wanna be in the tags of those characters #cos funnily enough i don't hate them #i love R*man and Sh*v but the fact that fans act like they're blameless babies that have done no wrong #and vehemently hate other characters that give them shit #is ANNOYING AS FUCK #and I'd hate if fans of the other characters did the same thing #but funnily enough they tend not to #cos there isn't a cult/pack/horde mentality

[fratricideknight]

top 5 merlin characters go !

AHHHH I LOVE THEM ALL I CAN'TTTTTT. bc i adore them all, i'll name them in no particular order depending on how compelling i think they are.

i can say that lancelot is my favourite in every way. listen. he's just so lovely and cool and softly spoken. and i just. i make jokes about him being perfect, but i honestly don't think he is. i might not like him if he was. he's sad and overly devoted to the point of self-ruin, and his humility and endless pursuit of nobility sometimes do more harm than good. e.g. when he left gwen bc arthur liked her without asking how she felt. he's "everything the knight's code stands for" so he's also something of an examination of the knight's code and its ethics?? where those ethics fail, where the rules must be bent for the sake of goodness (for instance, lance keeping merlin's secret even though he hates lying). which, of course, i want to see when watching a medieval chivalry show. he's just so compelling to me. he's just like me fr. i, in no way, shape or form, self-insert as sir lancelot. absolutely none. he was so underutilised. i was robbed of self-insert content. i am normal about him. not to mention his dynamic with every character he interacted with was gold. he deserved to spend time with more characters. e.g. morgana. i would KILL to have an arc about his response to the oppression of magic users and morgana's ideology. he trusts in systems of power and wants so desperately to be a knight of camelot - how would he respond when that quite possibly contradicts the righteous course of action?? which is more important to him?? would he be swayed by the allegiances of the people he loves, thereby showing a major chink in his nobility?? please. i need this to be explored more in fanon.

okay listen. gaius. it's widely acknowledged that his dynamic with uther is almost the grown-up version of merlin and arthur's. by the time season 5 rolls around, merlin has been groomed very well into becoming the next gaius. he would watch his kin burn at the stake for the sake of a "promised kingdom" "a better future" which he is convinced will be brought about by arthur even if he hates magic. literally what gaius did. he was kept alive despite practicing magic bc he was uther's friend and confidant. but he isn't just loyal to uther in the way that merlin becomes doggedly loyal to arthur. he also adores merlin. it's super interesting to think about where the hope for the chosen one who will help arthur unite albion ends and his devotion to his surrogate son begins. if he had to choose between merlin and arthur, who would he choose? has he been utterly sucked in by the prophecy like merlin eventually is or does he retain enough love for merlin that he would toss it aside? i need answers

morgana was done so, so unbelievably dirty. but she's so fucking interesting. i'm just gonna toss aside botched canon characterisation for a sec and talk about her arc like it was done well. she was uther's beloved ward, valued but (bc she didn't know she was his daughter) dispensable, unlike arthur. maybe uther would never execute his son, the crown prince and sole heir, but her? uther is so mad with hatred and emotionally withdrawn that she can't possibly know where she stands. she's plagued by haunting dreams which she swears show the future but can't discuss openly, with absolutely no one to turn to. her attempt to connect with the druids ends in their being slaughtered. when she finally knows she has magic, she is forced to watch her own father figure execute people like her, alone and scared. no one tells her anything, she is in the dark and utterly alone. she clings to the first person who tries to connect with her, who also happens to be her sister - a family relation who isn't, at least outwardly, pro murdering sorcerers. then her own friend, who tells her nothing, fucking poisons her. no explanation. the only one she receives is no doubt a twisted one from morgause. before, she was conflicted by her love for uther to the point that she couldn't go through with killing him, but when she finally reaches a stage where she must resolve to murder her own surrogate father because he's a horrible tyrant, she's the villain. she's told that it's not right to kill him, that she should stand by and watch him kill. by people she considered allies. then she learns that this bastard is actually her father ;_; and then the whole "mOrGanA wANtS tHe ThRonE" "sHe'S jUsT lIkE uThEr" arc begins and it all goes downhill. (it is absolute bullshit that morgana coveted power that badly 💀 she wanted to live in the woods with the druids before they were all murdered before her eyes. if she wants power, it's so she can change things, not for selfish reasons.) the writers had to make her do drastic, ooc things like shooting innocent citizens of camelot to turn her into a villain, bc she simply wasn't wrong lmaoooo. the girl who handed out food to the poor and rode out to defend a village outside of camelot's borders for her friend's sake suddenly despises both the people and her friends. feelings do not suddenly change that drastically, i'm afraid. if they added in something about morgause brainwashing her, it would make so much more sense, but if they did that then morgana would be a tragic antagonist and WE CAN'T HAVE THAT!!! SHE MUST MAKE POTIONS WITH BABIES' GUTS JUST BECAUSE!!!

nimueh was only around for one season but she was so interesting. she's kind of a mix between gaius and morgana. used to be uther's friend, but after being betrayed by him became vindictive. she, too, was labelled a villain for attempting to strike out at a nasty tyrant 💀 young women on this show are either arthur's love interests or villains, istg. instead of playing the "why did she go about hurting uther in an evil way?" card like i did with morgana, bc we never saw her before she turned "evil" and therefore cannot speak on the legitimacy of her characterisation, i'm just going to accept that she's willing to make innocent people suffer to hurt uther. in that way, the writers could have drawn a contrast between her and morgana; nimueh goes about bringing uther down in an immoral way, whereas morgana is righteous in her actions. but ofc. we can't have that. speaking again about her relationship with uther: she gives some level of insight into the person he was and the person he became. he wasn't brought up to hate magic but rather came to that - utterly illogical - conclusion on his own and was willing to toss aside a loyal friend and an entire group of people bc he could not bear the consequences of his own actions.

everything seems to come back to uther. he's at the centre of it all, the main driving force. without him the plot simply would not exist. he's irredeemable, literally a genocidal murderer. not to mention a man who betrays his friends and unfairly pressures his son and to an extent values his pride above his people. there is no redemption arc for him. which makes these little glimpses of something else so interesting. a broken husband mourning his wife, a father worried for his son, a man haunted by visions of what he did. the concept that he built camelot from the ground up commends him as a good ruler, and to an extent he is. he's jaded, and makes heartless but practical decisions, unlike arthur in the early seasons, but ultimately he cares for the kingdom over his own son. as time goes on and arthur's burden increases, even he - our lovable hero - becomes more like uther. how did uther's rise to power change him like arthur's did? i wonder if uther built camelot with magic and what tearing out that essential pillar of his kingdom felt like. if he feels lost without its support, if he regretted his decision but his pride and the weight of what he'd already done just caused him to double down harder to avoid holding himself accountable. again, he's irredeemable, but he deserves good faith character analysis which many people don't afford him in favour of calling him profanities. understandable - but still.

it genuinely caused me great amounts of pain to choose. i mean it when i say i love all of them, and could wax poetic about them as characters. i think the reason 3 of the core 4 aren't on the list is bc they were around for so long that the writers had plenty of time to botch their arcs and it was just so much more pronounced with them. the way arthur wasn't allowed to hold an intelligent thought for more than 2 seconds?? the way gwen was gradually reduced to just "star-crossed love interest"?? it frustrates me so much that i'm not naming them just to be petty tbh. morgana suffered the worst, imo. they did her so dirty that i just want to toss aside canon and talk about her potential.

anyway. apologies for that essay. thanks for asking!!!

#sir lancelot #gaius the physician #morgana pendragon #nimueh the high priestess #uther pendragon #bbcm meta #bbc merlin #mine #askbox

[pip-n-flinx]

Among Us

So this is going to get long, this is going to get personal, this is going to be about prejudice and race and self-serving bad-faith arguments and flawed rhetoric. And for all of these reasons I’m going to leave the rest of this under the cut.

As a few of my friends will know, earlier this week I was delivered an ultimatum from my landlord/roommate. He disguised it well, telling me he was ‘concerned for my mental health’ that my ‘negativity was dragging the whole house down’ and that I was simply too filthy to live with. I won’t pretend I’m a neat freak, and I can honestly say that I have taken some pains to clean more since, to his surprise and delight, though its particularly hard to take coming from him.

“You’re always so down. It’s making you lazy and thin skinned” You know its funny you should say that, now specifically, because I’ve actually been on the up and up this last week and you didn’t mention this at all in January when I was actually at my worst, or February when I was afraid I was going to have to quit my job, or back during the holiday season when retail work was breaking my back... Only now do you think to check in on me?

“You left a pair of gloves, a letter, and a small wooden trinket on the table!” Indeed I have, as you have left your pair of gloves, well over 21 letters, and regularly set your packages on this same table, including today two packages to be returned to amazon. I didn’t realize I didn’t get to use the table the same way you do.

“You don’t do dishes! except that you did this week, which is cool I guess but still!” You do realize that I actually hand-wash every dish I use within 24 hours of using it, right? And that often the dishes you come to me bitching that I never cleaned are in fact your fiances, yes? Ok good, next question.

“You’re always complaining about work. I don’t mind that you vent, but its all you talk about anymore!” I have either lost or walked away from 4 jobs in this last year, and that has not been easy, or fun. I have worked essential retail jobs the entire pandemic thus far. Additionally, in the months leading up to you storming out of your 75k a year salaried sales job, I had told you to leave it because I could see that it was killing you. You got so fed up with the job that for 4-5 months before you left your grandma-paid-off-my-second-mortgage capitalism-knows-best-pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps-ass spent more time playing valorant and league of legends on the clock than doing actual work. Need I remind you that every time I stepped into your office, or simply stepped upstairs to get ready for work, you would complain about how awful your managers were, or how shitty someone had been to you over the phone? DID I EVER BELITTLE YOU FOR ANY OF THESE THINGS????

The real kicker was that the spark, the moment that started this (at least for him) was me trying to explain why racism and ‘cultural supremecy’ was bad. I had brought to him something I thought we could both agree on, that we could both laugh at. I brought him a series of tweets about how problematic Van Gogh was for studying and imitating traditional japanese painting techniques. He took this, and immediately turned into a piece of the culture wars. Now, I agree, this is an egregious example of trying to ‘cancel’ someone. How cancelling a long dead artist who couldn’t sell his art while he was alive is important is beyond my comprehension, its not as though the market value of these comes up very often, and almost no-one will ever have a chance to buy or reject a Van Gogh. But to him this was emblematic of ‘liberals’ cancelling Seuss and Rowling.

He even went so far as to say that Van Gogh probably ‘did it better’ than the artists he was studying/imitating. Now, this is a huge red-flag to me because this is straight out of the Nazi playbook. This is William Shenker, proposing a theory of music to proof ‘German cultural superiority.’ This, if you will pardon my language, is the real culture war: trying to supplant other cultures art and history with western figures and events.

Now, for those of you who don’t know who I’m talking about, this man is sexist. He doesn’t believe women are equal, complains about women’s sports, and rejects a woman’s right to choose. This man is a transphobe, questioning the logic of ‘safe-spaces’ and allowing people to change their pronouns. This man is a Trump supporter, and voted for him twice. And all of these things I found out years after we became friends. I have in the past contemplated what it would take to cut him out of my life wholesale. Despite our wealth of shared experience and our shared interests, we’ve been drifting apart as he drifts further and further to the right. And he has been drifting. He’s parroted more bad-faith arguments from Ben Shapiro and Tucker Carlson in the last 6 months then he ever did when I first moved in with him.

I have been trying to push back, especially when he says the quiet parts out loud. I try to let him know that it is not acceptable to say he would rather an unarmed black man die that risk that a police officer might be injured. When he compares the people in control of Seuss’ intellectual property and works choose to stop printing less than 6% of his published works to the book burnings in Mao’s china. When he says that its more important to protect teacher from students trolling them by changing their pronouns than it is to protect trans or NB kids. When he espouses his belief that trans and NB kids are ‘just mentally ill.’ Whenever he says any of this shit, I have pushed back. I have tried to halt, or at least slow, his descent towards eugenics and white supremacy and fascism.

It has been to no avail.

And to be honest its exhausting. I wanted to believe that he would trust me, not just to be a moral and thoughtful person, but to be educated and informed on these issues. We went to school together, spent countless hours solving homework and trying to crack games together. If I don’t know the answer to his questions immediately, he often jokes ‘C’mon, you’re supposed to know everything!” and has frequently told me that I’m selling myself short.

But apparently all that trust and all that respect goes out the window when I challenge him. Suddenly I’m ‘overly negative’ or ‘too sensitive’ or he’ll ‘need to look into that, but...’

And the thing is, he is capable of great acts of kindness. He offered to rent me a room in his completely paid-off house, no mortgage at all, simply because he could see living at home was killing my mental health. He offered me 50-75% off of market rate. He buys gifts all the time, has landed tenants job interviews, set people back on their feet, and refused to press charges for several major financial loses he’s taken on the determination that it would do more harm to the defendant than he could ever recoup from it.

But he does not extend this kindness, this generous soul, to everyone. And lately, his circle grows smaller, and his kindess has waned, and it’s been so devastating to see him slip further and further towards his own worst impulses.

I know there will be people who think I should have cut him out of my life years ago, who can’t believe we never talked enough to know that he voted for Trump in 2016. I think back then he was genuinely ashamed, or at least guilty, about that vote. Now? It’s almost a matter of pride for him. I can’t tell you the number of times in the last 4 months that he’s told me that Biden “couldn’t possibly” be as “great” a President as Trump.

And he hides behind this “praise them when they do good, cuff them when they do bad” line and I used to take comfort in it but now... Now it’s clear that it was just a front or excuse for liking these abhorrent people.

I’ve had a couple of hard conversations with some of our mutual friends about what this means for me, and how I interract with the whole group of friends as a whole, in the last 3 days. None of our mutual friends seem to take any of these things as seriously as I do, with my oldest friend even telling me that he ‘can’t imagine’ breaking a friendship off over politics.... I know I know, the caucasity of it all, yes ha ha. And it does make me genuinely worried that I’ll wind up losing the 5-6 close friends that I actually rely on these days over this horrible sonuvabitch. But all this personal venting aside, there’s something bigger here I want to address:

I sat down this evening to watch Last Week Tonight and I was struck by this piece about Tucker Carlson, because while I knew some of what was said on his show, he is remarkably confident for a man who spouts the quiet parts of racism/sexism/homophobia on TV. I have a hard time imaging a more blatantly racist thing to do then declare that a woman who suggested ‘dismantling systems of oppression wherever they are found’ wants to dismantle the American system...

And I have to say, we should go back to punching Nazis. I want these fuckers afraid. I want them to crawl back to the furthest reaches of the internet, relegated to be laughed at for their bigotry by pundits of every political ideology. I want their vile vitriol hidden away where it doesn’t embolden others. I want them to know that they are out of line, out of touch, out of time. I want them to feel ashamed, like the relics of a bygone and worse era that they are, and for them to quietly fade to an ignominious death. I’m tired of seeing them on National News. I’m tired of Pewdiepie’s channel and influence refusing to die despite all the horrible things he’s said and done. I’m tired of Ben Shapiro spouting off about a woman’s place and rights, as if he has any fucking authority on the matter. I just want these people to lose their platforms and their followers. And for me the fact that they haven’t yet is so incredibly discouraging.

I know I didn’t offer any answers here I’m just tired of being alone with this defeated attitude and I guess I needed to get this off my chest as I try to disentangle myself from the losing battle of trying to save a friend from alt-right radicalization.

#tw/ white supremecy #tw/ sexism #tw/ racism #tw/ transphobia #wooow this got longer than I expected #meta: alt right radicalization #and how they're reaching people my age #plus a lot of personal venting