#me acting like i don't use the same reason to justify buying things

[miserye]

bought myself a little gift like i really needed another little gift for myself

#chatterye #me acting like i don't use the same reason to justify buying things #anyways i got myself a new expensive ass tote bag and i'm excited i've been wanting a new one #the excuse in question as of recent is my day of birth #i actually do not enjoy it that much because there's too much attention and i don't do well w it #but the big 2 0 is coming up #everyone i am getting old #also i rarely dream like almost never but recently i had one where me and my sisters were in japan #which is close but not quite because we will be going to korea but moving on the whole #dream was about me and one of my sisters going out to buy booze because i am legal in other countries that aren't america #and it was such a weird experience in my dream #not that i am going to drink when i'm there i doubt it we will be w extended family not tryna be drunk like that #but we will see i guess #look forward to rye in korea i guess that'll be a thing

[xaverie]

Honestly...

I know I am far far from the first person to say this. But it's times like this where I especially wish Fandom (understood to be the aggregate of fans who interact with media by sharing fanworks or commentary) would stop viewing art only through the lens of shipping or character apologetics.

No one loves a good in-depth character analysis more than me, but at the end of the day

A character is not a person, the same way a window is not a house -

no matter what you can see inside of them. Characters are tools for telling a story exactly the same way the setting is a tool, or a camera is a tool, or a costume is a tool. Sometimes Fandom has a tendency to talk about characters outside of the context of what they contribute to the story, and most of the time extracting a window from a house makes both things useless.

AMC's Interview with the Vampire is - in part - a story about abuse, domestic violence, and racism. This has been textually the case from the first episode, both in the depiction of the characters' behavior and as explicitly stated in the framing device.

The narrative does not ask you to make moral considerations for Lestat or approve/disapprove of his relationship with Louis because romance is not the function of Lestat as a narrative device. The story is unconcerned with whether or not Louis and Lestat make a good, or even an "acceptable" couple, because shipping is not the way an audience is expected to interact with this narrative.

With so much of the Fandom discourse after this recent episode centering around whether any one fan likes or dislikes the characters' romantic relationship because or despite it being "toxic," - I am begging you to question why that is.

"Louis also did bad things / he or Claudia might be exaggerating" - Louis cannot do anything, he is a character that writers depict doing harmful things. There is a motif of Louis's unreliable narration and the 'Odyssey of Memory' but that doesn't mean there's a truer, more accurate version of events that is more fair to the real Lestat because Lestat is NOT real. The writers depicting Louis as changing his story, being dishonest to himself and others, participating in violence, and lashing out at Lestat serves to create a nuanced portrayal of abuse and domestic violence grounded in emotional reality. The actual story being told. Recanting this to make Lestat's violence less extreme or to make him seem victimized in this relationship accomplishes none of that, so why should that be part of the story.

"Daniel is an asshole to Louis / he was too invasive about Claudia's diary" - that's because he's fulfilling his narrative purpose. Which is to remind the audience that Louis is an admitted, extremely prolific serial killer. That Louis almost killed Daniel once and then went on to kill again for 27 years after that. To remind the audience that in Louis' love for Lestat and Claudia he ceaselessly excuses, justifies, and tolerates their horrific mass murders, and that we don't also have to do that. That as glamorous and interesting and seductive as they are - that was a little girl's father and he wanted to buy her a pony.

As Eric Bosogian said, Daniel is frightened and when he is frightened he gets angry. Daniel is not a person, he is a reminder to the audience that there is every reason to be afraid and angry. He is a device to show an outside perspective into an abusive relationship. He is alternate plot point showing that letting the story seduce you is: 1, not the only reaction - 2, that our reactions to stories reveal things about us - and 3, being seduced by the story is part of how Louis got to this point.

None of these characters need defending or admonishing any more than ink or paper does. Characters cannot change and grow because they aren't people. But we are and we can. How does the way you feel about the story make you feel about yourself? The world around you? Which acts of violence and deceit did you care about? Has that changed? Have you learned anything? Charisma and attractiveness are tools that Lestat uses to simultaneously perpetuate and obfuscate his abuse. Louis uses them to intimidate and manipulate. Have we been seduced?

With nothing but respect to the impact of Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles fandom on fandom culture and the history of fan made transformative works, please. When we, as fans, engage with works of art, why not engage with the whole building - including the foundation. Spend some time considering whether there are themes or images or impressions that might benefit you or speak to you (the actual human being) even more than "I like/relate to this character" or "I like/dislike this couple."

Taking a window off of a house because you can see your reflection in it doesn't make it a good mirror. It makes it a piece of glass that has stopped working as a window and a drafty house that is no longer a very good shelter.

#interview with the vampire #iwtv #louis de pointe du lac #lestat de lioncourt #daniel malloy

[imakemywings]

Hey, were you the one who posted how Maglor himself thought the oath and kinslayings were such evil acts? If so, how come there are those who still believe the second and third kinslaying is justified when Maglor himself thought it to be such an evil deed? I really need like a solid reasoning cause I was talking to someone who still believes the kinslayings were justified/needed and doesn't take my "murder is wrong" thing as a reason lol

That was indeed my post! If we're thinking of the same one. I've definitely made a post like that.

I mean I don't really know what to say besides "murder is wrong" lol If we can't agree on that um. I don't really know where we go.

The argument in favor of the kinslayings that I've seen usually boils down to property rights. Because the Silmarils are the rightful (and that's honestly debatable) property of the Feanorians, anyone who keeps the Silmarils from them deserves what they get, basically.

Which is. Kind of bonkers as a moral philosophy, even if you DO buy that the Feanorians have an uncontested right to the Silmarils. #1: We're punishing theft or conversion with DEATH now? That's acceptable to us? #2: The harm the Feanorians caused went far beyond the individual who possessed the Silmaril (Dior in the Second Kinslaying and Elwing in the Third). Even if Dior had taken that Silmaril right out of Maedhros' hand and spit in his eye on the way out it wouldn't justify the wholesale slaughter of an entire kingdom. They literally murdered children over things. Items. Stuff. Magical cool stuff yeah--but they valued it over lives. Does anyone honestly think Tolkien would have written a story agreeing with that as a moral view?

"If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world." (Thorin's final words, The Hobbit)

I don't know how you look at Maedhros and Maglor--the ONLY two of SEVEN sons to survive through the Third Kinslaying--and think THEY think they did the right thing. Five of their brothers have now died in assaults on other Elves which they began. Maglor argues for breaking the oath there, he resists Maedhros' drive to the Fourth Kinslaying (until he doesn't), and at the end of it all, he throws his precious Silmaril into the sea. Maedhros kills himself over it. These are not the actions of people who feel GOOD about where their lives have gone and the actions they've taken. Tolkien is so blatantly obvious about the Feanorians being in the wrong it's always a little wild to me that the KINSLAYINGS get defended.

On the note of the Fourth Kinslaying, let's not forget that: That after everything, after the War of Wrath is over and everyone is ready to go home and see their families and be at peace, a whole group of Elves get murdered by Maglor and Maedhros again over the Silmarils. A group--Eonwe's guard--of people who had survived a war with MORGOTH die because Maedhros and Maglor weren't willing to break their oath.

An oath which Tolkien casts as wicked from the very start--something that was always likely to bring them to evil acts.

"Then Feanor swore a terrible oath. His seven sons leapt straightway to his side and took the selfsame vow together, and red as blood shone their drawn swords...and many quailed to hear the dread words." ("Of the Flight of the Noldor," The Silmarillion)

Furthermore, as Dior points out in some versions outside Silm proper, at the time the Second Kinslaying is committed, Melkor still has two of the Silmarils. Even if Dior had handed over Luthien's Silmaril--to the people who had kidnapped and attempted to forcibly marry and presumably rape his mom; and also tried to murder her and his father later on--the oath is still not fulfilled, because Melkor has two.

The fact that the Feanorians choose to pursue Luthien's Silmaril with violence and bloodshed rather than make a go at the two that Melkor has has always revealed their hypocrisy to me. They chose Luthien's Silmaril because they knew it would be easier to get than the ones that Melkor has. Easier to kill other Elves if they don't give you what you want, than to attack or infiltrate Angband. Even now, when they know it's possible--because Beren and Luthien did it, and they had FAR fewer resources at hand than the Feanorians (and for the record, Fingon also successfully infiltrated Angband; Gwindor and others have successfully escaped from Angband)--they choose to slay other Elves instead. Say again the Second Kinslaying was "necessary"?

This is how Tolkien describes the attack on the Havens:

"And so there came to pass the last and cruelest of the slayings of Elf by Elf; and that was the third of the great wrongs achieved by the accursed oath. For the sons of Feanor that yet lived came down suddenly upon the exiles of Gondolin and the remnant of Doriath, and destroyed them." ("Of the Voyage of Earendil," The Silmarillion)

Does this description sound like people taking justified action? And let's not forget, in this battle, the Feanorians' own troops are so horrified by their actions that they turn against them.

"In that battle some of their [the Feanorians'] people stood aside, and some few rebelled and were slain upon the other part aiding Elwing against their own lords...Too late the ships of Cirdan and Gil-galad the High King came hasting to the aid of the Elves of Sirion; and Elwing was gone, and her sons." ("Of the Voyage of Earendil," The Silmarillion)

Members of the Feanorians' own people find their actions so terrible they cannot simply join those who stand by and refuse to attack the Havens, but they actively join the fight on the side of the Havens. Moreover, the heroic Gil-galad arrives intending to stop the Feanorians and aid the Havens. Sure, he arrives too late--but his intent is made clear: the Feanorians are the villains here, who need to be stopped.

And I don't think it is uncontested that the Silmarils belong to the Feanorians. For one, they were created entirely and only by Feanor; none of his sons had anything to do with it. And for two, the universe itself has deemed by the end that the Feanorians no longer have a property right in them, when the Silmarils burn the hands of Maedhros and Maglor because of all the evil they've committed. The jewels themselves will not be touched by these people who have done so much wrong. Eonwe tries to warn them about this before they even commit the Fourth Kinslaying.

"And they [Maedhros and Maglor] sent a message therefore to Eonwe, bidding him yield up those jewels...But Eonwe answered that the right to the work of their father, which the sons of Feanor had formerly possessed, had now perished, because of their many and merciless deeds, being blinded by their oath, and most of all because of their slaying of Dior and the assault upon the Havens." ("Of the Voyage of Earendil," The Silmarillion [emphasis added])

Like...I don't know how the book could be more clear that the Kinslayings were wrong and that Maedhros and Maglor were in the wrong.

I think fans are so invested in the Feanorians they're willing to bend over backwards to find some view where they didn't actually commit horrific war crimes and were in fact in the right. But that's just not the story Tolkien wrote. Also, you can like them and still admit they did horrible things. You are allowed to like characters who are in the wrong!

#asks #anonymous #mine #Hope this helps you in your quest Anon

[lucas-deziderio]

Dezi reads Pact: Null 9.6

I truly hate being negative, but it's time for me to complain about Pact's power scaling. You see, most fantasy stories where people use powers to fight one another usually scale upwards. Our protagonist gets more powerful in order to face more dangerous foes and so give the story higher stakes. We all know that. Wildbow even follow that formula in Worm, where Taylor learns new tricks she can pull with her power, gets access to more varied insects and pairs up with more powerful capes to take down increasingly dangerous threats.

Now going back to Pact: a story about wizards and magical beings battling against one another, with a very wide range of possible powers and abilities. And even then, we're halfway through our story and our protagonist has absolutely nothing on him! All of the abilities he painstakingly conquered were taken away from him. If anything, Blake is weaker now than he was in the very first act. Still, the author is throwing him on a fight against a very powerful demon.

My man here just went through the magical equivalent of a 16 hour shift at your local Arby's! His hands are mangled, one of his eyes stopped working, he just relived a very traumatic event in the last couple hours. His only weapon is a broken sword that hurts him while being wielded. There is absolutely no way he's in condition to fight against Ur. Just a couple arcs back he went into that same fight but with actual preparation, a plan and allies and still got his ass kicked. There is nothing in the narrative that can justify him being defeated then but surviving now when the odds are even more against him.

It's not even like Wildbow wrote himself into a corner. In previous chapters we were made aware that Blake has had allies that were eaten by Ur. He could have met them again in the Drains and gotten their help. Or he could have made an actual deal for power with the dead god he found. But nope!

I came to this book waiting for battles were magic and preparation mattered. I love hard magic systems specifically because you can have tactical confrontations where the practitioners can use the rules themselves against one another. But this? This is a mangled man with zero tools in his arsenal going up against a Lovecraftian beast and surviving out of luck.

No. No, no, no! This might be a pyrrhic victory at best, but Ur has absolutely zero reasons to not swallow you up again right now. And I must emphasize:

WINNING 👏 DOESN'T 👏 MATTER 👏 IF 👏 YOU'RE 👏 IN 👏 THE 👏 DRAINS 👏 AGAIN!! 👏

That's it. I'm pissed. This is the second time that a big arc ending battle in this story has left me pissed with its plot armor. Blake should be dead right now.

Anyways, moving on, there is another detail that also pissed me off in this chapter:

Blake, you should definitely be taking a very long bath right now. First because that whole dimension was nasty and I don't want to imagine you looking like a sewage golem for the rest of the story. Second because, as someone who has experienced homelessness, you should be well aware of how people treat you differently when you're dirty or clean. And third because you desperately need power right now and we have been shown in this story that spending time on your home, relaxing and taking care of yourself can help one replenish theirs. NOW GET IN THE FUCKING BATHTUB!

OK, I think my negativity spree is over. Let's see what's next...

OK, this isn't the end of the world. Part of me was hoping he would get to reactivate his connections once he was back to our world, but it looks like that's a no-go. At least it's just a material thing. He can buy another bike or get the same back later. Don't worry, guys.

The important part is that now he's gonna meet the rest of the cast and get reintroduced into the main plot...

OH MY GOD, EVAN WAS THE ONLY ONE WHO RECOGNIZED HIM! EVAN WASN'T AFRAID!! I'M NOT WELL!!! SOMEBODY HELP ME!!!!

Previous • Next

#Dezi reads #pact web serial #liveblogging pact #pact spoilers #pactblr #otherverse

[aseriesofunfortunatejan]

Yes there are situations in which you can't boycott a brand. And I'm happy to take my turn to tell the tumblr girl* guilt trip guild to shut up. (I keep coming back to it but my reaction is generally informed by what I posted about guilt in activism earlier.)

*I'm pointing out tumblr because this platform is like home to me. But I know for a fact this is an issue portrayed all over social media.

I'm glad you're participating in boycotts for possibly the first time. I personally have been boycotting multiple brands for a long time. Because of my experience, I've had time to figure out that

you can't possibly boycott everything that's bad in some way (you must survive and live)

not everyone can boycott the same things you can

It doesn't matter how strongly you believe a brand must be boycotted if you aren't (and can't be) the person responsible for purchases in your household. It doesn't matter how much you want to boycott a grocery store if it's the only grocery store accessible to you, be it geo-locally, monetarily or within the context of disability. And when we're talking about long-term boycotts, it doesn't matter if every grocery store around where you live is evil in some way - you need groceries.

Yes, and I say that as someone who continues to boycott many brands and has largely not encountered issues with doing so, it is possible that someone can't boycott a brand.

It is completely useless to insist that they can and blindly get mad. We have to acknowledge that fact and figure out what can be done.

If there are brands you can't possibly boycott:

This doesn't mean you can't do anything right! Make sure you continue to boycott the brands you can indeed boycott. You can also help the causes you care about through other means.

There is no hypocrisy in informing others about the boycott even though you can't participate. The fact that you can't do it could in fact inspire you to convince even more people to join your cause to compensate! You can acknowledge your shortcomings and still try your best.

If you can't boycott the brand right now but could join the boycott at a later date - assuming it is still going - then don't hesitate to! It's never too late. Just because you weren't able to help in the past doesn't mean you should bar yourself from doing so in the present.

Make sure to uplift the voices of those who are participating in the boycott! Try not to let yourself get defensive, and continue to speak positively of the boycott. Try not to spend too much time justifying yourself and use your time wisely.

Hell... If you weren't a customer in the first place and never meant to become one, you can't possibly boycott a brand. It is a simple fact that not everyone can participate in a boycott, and that it must be accompanied by other acts of activism to work.

While I focused on concrete reasons why someone may not be able to participate in a boycott, it is unfortunately a fact that some people will refuse to boycott a brand for seemingly subjective reasons. If someone tells you "I'm ready to boycott everything else, but not this one, because this specific drink/game/food/location is my safe place mental health wise", you can't decide for them that it's not the end of the conversation. Because it is a fact that guilt tactics and negative practices such as name-calling have a negative impact on getting people to participate in activism, all you can do is extend understanding, try to advise them to participate within their framework, maybe suggest ways to make things work (boycott temporarily, buy less instead of not buying at all if that doesn't seem like a plausible option, speak to the brand about your upset as a customer...), and if it still doesn't, then focus on encouraging them to boycott the other brands they can indeed boycott and on convincing other people to participate.

#boycott #boycotting #i. really care about these things #boycott amazon please and thank you............................. unrelated to current events that's my lifelong battle

[wellnoe]

I love when you talk about Jean and murder! I agree so much with what you've said and how she feels about it especially in how it can be a loving gesture almost. On the other hand I'd love to hear what your thoughts on Scott and murder are? I know you've mentioned it before but I didn't know if you had anything else to add since then.

hmm i think scott basically believes in preventative murder, murder that prevents future harm. and that's probably what i've talked about before.

in my head i usually link this belief of his to a couple of different things. the first is jack winters' death in uncanny x-men #42. this is the first depiction of scott meeting xavier, and i also personally think it is the most interesting in terms of their dynamic and also like. xavier sucks. the comic clearly doesn't believe he sucks here, but i have read it, and he comes off as incredibly manipulative, in my personal opinion.

basically what happens in the scene is xavier (helped by scott) tries to capture jack winters, who is then killed in the process.

[id: two panels from uncanny x-men #42. in panel 1, scott holds his hand up to his forehead, saying: "Maybe it was Winters' own struggling against the numbing vibrations that finally tore him apart--Still I operated the machine...so that makes me--a murderer!" Charles says: "Don't blame yourself, Scott! We acted only in self-defense--Against one who would have destroyed us! And, if we had not been here-- Jack Winters would have died even more surely!" Scott answers: "Perhaps--You're right! Yet--"

Panel 2: Scott still stands with a hand to his forehead, while xavier has a hand on his arm. The narration says: "Then, the young mutant suddenly recalls his own desperate personal plight...". Scott: "I'm still alone... more now than ever! Jack Winters...the man I thought was my friend--tried to kill us both!" Charles: "You're not alone lad--not if you'll come with me! We must hurry, before the guards outside awaken!" Scott: "Yes--I'll come! I have no one else to turn to--no one but you! But, nobody can help me now! Nobody!"/end id]

i love this scene a lot for many reasons BUT the reason it's related here is that i do think that scott frames murder in self-defense as still being murder, but also kind of buys into xavier's positioning of this, where he justifies it. this is like. scott's first experience with xavier, and so i usually like to read it as being pretty influential in his later beliefs about violence/how the x-men should operate? basically murder can be justified, given specific circumstances. there's also the much more incidental killing scott is involved in in first class. which i think still matters here? scott thinks that sometimes, people he is fighting die, because he needs to prioritize the safety of other people. it sucks, but it's part of the job.

i also think that by the time he's been on the x-men for a while, like, scott has kind of recognized the stasis of the x-men? they keep fighting the same people, for a lot of the same reasons, over and over again. and as he becomes increasingly desperate to protect mutants, he starts to believe that solving this problem might sometimes involve killing people that the x-men know are threats, before these people can kill more mutants, if that makes sense.

so basically i think murder can also be a caring gesture from scott but in a different way from jean?? like. one of the things i really like about scott is his attention to consequence, his consideration. he thinks a lot about the effect the x-men's actions have, especially on other people. and i think preventative murder is a part of that? i think he sees it as defense, as protective.

also, overall, i think scott's feelings on murder, even early on in x-men, are more complex than 'it shouldn't be allowed'. i think this is something that is especially important to take into consideration when thinking about how he frames violence in reference to people like logan, for example, or when thinking about how he reacts to people who want to commit murders he disagrees with.

basically i just took this ask to talk a bit about uncanny x-men #42, so i am sorry about that. BUT i do think it is a really interesting comic if you care at all about scott and xavier's relationship, and i personally am thinking of it almost all the time so.

#idk if this makes any sense by this point but here are some thoughts ig!! #thanks for asking!! #darkphoenix #w.ask

[spurgie-cousin]

Coming from a background of extreme Christian/conservatism and LGBTQ, I am not sexuality speculating when I say I honestly don’t think Jana would even know what to do in a wlw situation. It goes against everything she has ever known and she probably only has negative references for. You can care about your friends deeply, which I think she does (see Laura attending the trial by herself the day before Jana) but also have no basis for anything further. I don’t think she would even be entertaining courtships if there were something going on and that picture of her at the Wissmann’s Xmas was last year. I don’t mean this to be rude, but I honestly can’t see her even being able to have language or actions in that regard.

Well first I think you're under the impression that I ever thought they were a couple, which I haven't. I was just explaining to that other anon how speculation in the snarking community about Jana and Laura eventually reached them and why that's bad.

Second, I'm a queer ex-Christian who has been homophobic in the past because of religion and who also has known a fair amount of ultra-Conservative Christians in their life (at least compared to most people I've met). I'm gonna use bullet points just to avoid writing an essay about this because I could:

I think you're talking more about the act of dating than recognizing feelings, but just in case it's also the feelings thing, trust me, queer, closeted Christians recognize them. They just don't know what to do with them.

As far as she 'wouldn't know what to do' I mean, my thing is she just probably wouldn't for some of the reasons you've mentioned. Christians like Jana have been told that same-sex feelings are something to be curbed like alcohol or porn addiction which, if she buys into that, would probably lead her to try about 1 million other recourses before trying a relationship.

But for the people who do end up acknowledging their feelings, you don't necessarily need a perfect example of an LGBTQ+ couple to figure it out, ya know? I've heard stories from gay ex-Amish, Mennonites, IBLP, Mormons (who were practicing at the time of their first experimentation) and my summarization of all those stories is they figured it out lol. Think of it like gays who live in really conservative or religious countries, there's almost always an unspoken protocol of sorts or underground community for queer people (unknown to the establishment).

How queer, practicing fundamentalists deal with same-sex attraction is a completely individual experience, some people are able to really bury themselves in denial, some people find a way to justify secret relationships, it can vary.

Again, I don't have any proof or any inclination really that Jana Duggar is LGBTQ+, and since I don't think it's something she'd ever disclose even if it was true, it doesn't really interest me. But I guess what I'm saying is, I think we all underestimate fundies in the area of sexuality/what they're capable of figuring out if they want to.

#there's a better and more concise way for me to say this but that's not available to me at the moment lol #my shit #religion #sexuality

[finsterhund]

Today is a frustrating day.

Went to get my prescriptions and that went well. Then I got to go to value village after begging my roommate.

Friday must be the day they put out new stuff because there were a ton of parasites there. Thrift flippers. The scalpers of the secondhand world. People who buy everything even remotely worth anything from thrift stores and then toss them up on etsy for super inflated prices. And they can afford to buy the entirety of X Y Z in value village all at once because they're upper middle class at the lowest. They're the justification thrift stores then use to super inflate their prices to near ebay rates also. And it leads to things in glass cases and security guards and essentially gentrification. And the end result is the people who actually rely on thrift stores having a harder time. God how I fucking hate them. There were two specifically that really grinded my gears. One had two carts. One piled HIGH. to overflowing. With toys. and they were an ultra mega bitch to the kid they brought with them. And pretty much anyone who entered the toy section also. The kid wanted to keep one stuffed animal for themselves from the literal mountain of toys and the grown ass adult was giving them shit and finally relented with a "shut up and put it in the keep pile then." if you have to differentiate a "keep pile" when going to a thrift store you shouldn't be going to a thrift store. Join a pyramid scheme for your military spouse #girlboss side hustle or whatever the fuck you cunts did before the invention of poshmark. Die.

The other thrift flipper had also taken it upon themselves to clear out the trinkets section and had put every single music box in their cart and then they left their cart in the middle of the isle and fucked off somewhere. You know what I did? I took one (1) music box from their cart. I'm kicking myself I didn't take another because I fucking hate these people so much. Price gougers and thrift flippers and scalpers deserve electric chair.

So I leave with my music box and should have been in a much better mood because I got to explore the thrift store today but instead I'm reminded that people who suck exist. It's like having to breathe the same air as a landlord. I guess they're more human than landlords are. Barely.

Then on top of that my roommate got mean to me. I don't know if he tried to gaslight me or if he just forgot but he acted like he was justified in taking all my recycling money from my bottles and cans by telling me that I "didn't put the bottles in the bag" when I distinctly remember doing that. Maybe Scott dragged the bottles out of the bag who knows. But he was going off at me for wanting to go to the thrift store and wanting my bottle returns and such. I was defending myself but had to stop when a complete stranger approached him for some fucking reason to talk about stupid fucking alcohol.

Am I irrationally going of the deep end? Yes. But I'm not doing well mentally.

Also the entire time I've been writing out this vent post my roommate has been pestering the hell out of me to send him "everything you have on PayPal" as if I somehow owe HIM money. I'm not going to obviously.

Christ.

#text post #negative #long post

[mishafletcher]

Are you a Gold Star lesbian? (Just in case you don't know what it means, a Gold Star lesbian is a lesbian that has never had the sex with a guy and would never have any intentions of ever doing so)

So I got this ask a while ago, and I've been lowkey thinking about it ever since.

First: No. I am a queer, cranky dyke who is too old for this sort of bullshit gatekeeping. 

Second: What an unbelievable question to ask someone you don't even know! What an incomprehensibly rude thing to ask, as if you're somehow owed information about my sexual history. You're not! No one—and I can't reiterate this enough, but no one—owes you the details of their sex lives, of their trauma, or of anything about themselves that they don't feel like sharing with you.

The clickbait mills of the internet and the purity police of social media would like nothing more than to convince everyone that you owe these things to everyone. They would like you to believe that you have to prove that you're traumatized enough to identify with this character, that you can't sell this article about campus rape without relating it to your own sexual assault, that you can't talk about queer issues without offering up a comprehensive history of your own experiences, and none of those things are true. You owe people, and especially random strangers on the internet, nothing, least of all citations to somehow prove to them that you have the right to talk about your own life.

This makes some people uncomfortable, and to be clear, I think that that's good: people who feel entitled to demand this information should be uncomfortable. Refusing to justify yourself takes power away from people who would very much like to have it, people who would like to gatekeep and dictate who is permitted to speak about what topics or like what things. You don't have to justify yourself. You don't have to explain that you like this ship because this one character reminds you a bit of yourself because you were traumatized in a vaguely similar way and now— You don't have to justify your queerness by telling people about the best friend you had when you were twelve, and how you kissed, and she laughed and said it was good practice for when she would kiss boys and your stomach twisted and your mouth tasted like bile and she was the first and last girl you kissed, but— 

You don't owe anyone these pieces of yourself. They're yours, and you can share them or not, but if someone demands that you share, they're probably not someone you should trust.

Third: The idea of gold star lesbians is a profoundly bi- and trans- phobic idea, often reducing gender to genitals and the long, shared history of queer women of all identities to a stark, artificial divide where some identities are seen as purer or more valuable than others. This is bullshit on all counts.

There's a weird and largely artificial division between bisexuals and lesbians that seems to be intensifying on tumblr, and I have to say: I hate it. Bisexual women aren't failed lesbians. They're not somehow less good or less valid because they're attracted to [checks notes] people. Do you think that having sex with a man somehow changes them? What are you so worried about it for? I've checked, and having sex with a man does not, in fact, make your vagina grow teeth or tentacles. Does that make you feel better? Why is what other people are doing so threatening to you?

Discussions of gold star lesbians are often filled with tittering about hehe penises, which is unfortunate, since I know a fair few lesbians who have penises, and even more lesbians who've had sex with people, men and women alike, who have penises. I'm sorry to report that "I'm disgusted by a standard-issue human body part" is neither a personality nor anything to be proud of. I'm a dyke and I don't especially like men, but dicks are just dicks. You don't have to be interested in them, but a lot of people have them, and it doesn't make you less of a lesbian to have sex with someone who has a dick.

There's so much garbage happening in the world—maybe you haven't noticed, but things are kind of Not Great in a lot of places, and there's a whole pandemic thing that's been sort of a major buzzkill? How is this something that you're worried about? Make a tea, remind yourself that other people's genitalia and sexual history are none of your business, maybe go watch a video about a cute animal or something. 

Fourth: The idea of gold star lesbians is a shitty premise that argues that sexuality is better if it's always been clear-cut and straightforward—but it rarely is. We live in a very, very heterosexist culture. I didn’t have a word for lesbian until many years after I knew that I was one. How can you say that you are something when your mouth can’t even make the shape of it? The person you are at 24 is different to the person you are at 14, and 34, and 74. You change. You get braver. The world gets wider. You learn to see possibilities in the shadows you used to overlook. Of course people learn more about themselves as they age.

Also, many of us, especially those of us who grew up in smaller towns, or who are over the age of, say, 25, grew up in times and places where our sexuality was literally criminal.

Shortly after I graduated high school, a gay man in my state was sentenced to six months in jail. Why? Well, he’d hit on someone, and it was a misdemeanor to "solicit homosexual or lesbian activity", which included expressing romantic or sexual interest in someone who didn’t reciprocate. You might think, then, that I am in fact quite old, but you would be mistaken. The conviction was in 1999; it was overturned in 2002.

I grew up knowing this: the wrong thing said to the wrong person would be sufficient reason to charge me with a crime.

In the United States, the Defense of Marriage Act was passed in 1996, clarifying that according to the federal government, marriage could only ever be between one man and one woman. It also promised that even if a state were to legalize same-sex unions, other states wouldn't have to recognize them if they didn't want to. And wow, they super did not want to, because between 1998 and 2012, a whopping thirty states had approved some sort of amendment banning same-sex marriage.

Every queer person who's older than about 25 watched this, knowing that this was aimed at people like them. Knowing that these votes were cast by their friends and their families and their teachers and their employers. 

Some states were worse than others. Ohio passed their bill in 2004 with 62% approval. Mississippi passed theirs the same year with 86% approval. Imagine sitting in a classroom, or at work, or in a church, or at a family dinner, and knowing that statistically, at least two out of every three people in that room felt you shouldn't be allowed to marry someone you loved.

Matthew Shepard was tortured to death in October of 1998. For being gay, for (maybe) hitting on one of the men who had planned to merely rob him. Instead, he was tortured and left to die, tied to a barbed wire fence. His murderers were both sentenced to two consecutive life terms in prison. This was controversial, because a nonzero number of people felt that Shepard had brought it upon himself.

Many of us sat at dinner tables and listened to this discussion, one that told us, over and over, that we were fundamentally wrong, fundamentally undeserving of love or sympathy or of life itself.

This is a tiny, tiny sliver of history—a staggeringly incomplete overview of what happened in the US over about ten years. Even if this tiny sliver is all that there were, looking at this, how could you blame someone for wanting to try being not Like This? How can you fault someone who had sex, maybe even had a bunch of sex, hoping desperately that maybe they could be normal enough to be loved if they just tried harder? How can you say that someone who found themself an uninteresting but inoffensive boyfriend and went on dates and had sex and said that it was fine is somehow less valuable or less queer or less of a lesbian for doing so? For many people, even now, passing as straight, as problematic as that term is, is a survival skill. How dare you imply that the things that someone did to protect themself make them worth less? They survived, and that's worth literally everything.

Fifth, finally: What is a gold star, anyhow? You've capitalized it, like it's Weighty and Important, but it's not. Gold stars were what your most generous grade school teacher put on spelling tests that you did really well on. But ultimately, gold stars are just shiny scraps of paper. They don't have any inherent value: I can buy a thousand of them for five bucks and have them at my door tomorrow. They have only the meaning that we give them, only the importance that we give them. We’re not children desperately scrabbling for a teacher’s approval anymore, though. We understand that good and bad are more of a spectrum than a binary, and that a gold star is a simplification. We understand that no number of gold stars will make us feel like we’re special enough or good enough or important enough, or fix the broken places we can still feel inside ourselves. Only we can do that.

The stars are only shiny scraps of paper. They offer us nothing; we don’t need them. I hope that someday, you see that, too. 

#queer stuff #lgbtq #gold star lesbians #long post #sorry #Anonymous

[themthistles]

About The Siete Gallos, Spanish Jackie and Jim's Revenge

So when Jim recounts the events of their family's murder to Oluwande they say this:

So we know that at some point Jim takes the family dagger from their father's corpse. And then hides in the woods for a while. That's it.

But between their father's murder and the woods there is a lot of lost time and unanswered questions. Why was Jim the only one unharmed? Where is their brother? We don't see him or his body anywhere. I find it hard to believe that Jim simply ran away and left their sibling to die considering they immediately try to protect him when Alfeo stabs their father.

The way The Siete Gallos act in general is strange. If they wanted to take money or any of the family's stuff (which is like three chickens and some oranges) why were they just standing there waiting for Alfeo's signal? Why did seven of 'the most dangerous and brutal killers this land has ever seen' come and rob one small household in the first place? Why kill a man who wasn't resisting and clearly said they could take all they want?

Speaking of.

I don't think Alfeo's talking about actual oranges here. It seems to me like he’s saying 'What a nice life and family you've made for yourself here'. Jim's father tells him that he can 'take everything he wants' meaning 'take all my money and possesions, just don't touch my family' but after Alfeo replies 'I will' he looks directly at the kids.

There's also the murder weapon.

Isn’t it odd to leave a knife in the wound during a simple robbery? That kind of thing seems personal.

I think Alfeo killed Jim's father because that's exactly what he and the others came there to do. I think the mercenaries knew who they were killing very well. Just look at father's reaction when he sees Alfeo. Yes, it's normal to be cautious of strangers but the man looks completely terrified, almost like he feared someone might come looking for him one day.

I also think Jim's brother might be alive. We haven't seen definitive proof of his death. I think he managed to run away and is tracking down the remaining gang members. Either he and Jim got split up or he decided to leave and take revenge on his own.

Now on to Spanish Jackie. You're telling me it's a coincidence that not one but two of her husbands happen to be in The Siete Gallos? I don't buy it. And her being 25 is definitely a lie.

She says that she wants Jim dead because they murdered her (favorite) husband but considering how easily she shoots Geraldo and then later casually sits down to drink with Jim right by Alfeo's corpse, I doubt she cares all that much for any of them. So then what's up with this reaction?

In episode 8 she tells Jim that she knows what it's like to want the people who took your family from you to feel the same loss. So if she recognized the dagger Jim used to killed Alfeo, remembered who it belonged to and maybe what was done with it then these strong words would be justified. Just not directed at Jim. But at their family name. Jiménez.

Jackie is very careful to keep identities of the rest of The Siete Gallos secret. She masterfully avoids answering any questions about them, disguising it as care for Jim's future and not wanting them to go down the same path as her. Her advice about not wasting your life on revenge is solid but you can say the right thing for the wrong reasons.

'Those bastards are probably dead' is all we get out of her. Why? Because she doesn't want Jim looking for the rest. Because she was the one who ordered them to kill Jim's father and if Jim found any of the five mercenaries left and got that information, of course they would want to stab Jackie in the face.

Anyways, that's it from me. Hope this is dramatic enough for the telenovela that is Jim's entire life.

TLDR: Spanish Jackie is closely tied to The Siete Gallos. Jim's father was the cause of death of someone dear to her or crossed her in some other way and then ran away to start a new life in St. Augustine. Jackie tasked The Siete Gallos with tracking down and killing him. Jim's brother is alive and is hunting down their father's killers.

#our flag means death #ofmd #anyways i could be totally wrong but some stuff just seemed weird to me when i thought about it #also the idea of a reunion with a thought to be dead sibling who is now a cool mercenary #is way too good to not at least consider it #and you can't blame me for overanalyzing this show with all its foreshadowing and gloves and dressing gown symbolism #and if you're asking: wouldn't jim know that their brother's body was never found? wouldn't they wonder if he's alive? #i'm assuming that nana is the one who told jim everything and she's shady as hell #i mean what is a knife throwing nun doing there #why is she so obsessed with jim killing all of siete gallos #idk she's a mystery #also jackie literally shoots geraldo as soon as jim asks about siete gallos #like no hesitation #why would she do that unless she had something to hide #honestly i just want more nana and jackie #hbo this is a cry for help renew the show for season two i am becoming unhinged

[bigskydreaming]

Hi! I was reading a fanfic and it brought up Roy and Dick's fight, which I see a lot of in fics but never what they fought about and consequently why they don't talk. I thought it was a vague excuse/reason why Roy was Jason's friend not Dick's anymore but this fic brought up when Dick was batman so I was wondering if there was actually a fight between them? Btw I really enjoy your metas! They're v thought out and well articulated. Also it's v easy to separate what's your opinion and what's fact which is. Very helpful for me

Yeah this is one hundred percent a fanon thing that's kept deliberately vague to justify why Roy in his friendship with Jason seems to have no positive thoughts or concerns about Dick whatsoever. Now granted, Dick and Roy are not nearly as close in the New 52 as they were pre-Reboot. The lack of their friendship there is definitely one of the things I disliked most about the Reboot - and I actually don't care if Jason and Roy are friends tbh, its the total erasure of his history with Dick as if he can't be friends with both, that like, bugs most.

But so like, yeah, Roy and Dick aren't super close when they interact on the Titans in the New 52, but there's literally nothing in any of their interactions that explains the complete absence of him from Roy's life or a reason that Roy would like, hate him the way he tends to in a lot of Jason-centric fics.

When you factor in pre-Reboot stuff though, it starts to get a LOT more.....uh wyd? And this is why I have trouble buying that people just write Roy and Jason the way they do because its the only thing they know from recent comics. Like one, most fans talk about how they don't even read the source comics, so there's no reason their knowledge of the characters or events would be limited to just recent comics if they're going off wiki summaries and scans anyway. And second, most fans AREN'T limited in their knowledge to just recent comics.

Like, the second people start writing Roy and Jason and Kori but with their pre-52 characterizations and references to events from THAT timeline, it all gets very messy, the way they're like, completely antagonistic towards Dick a lot of the time. Because Roy and Dick were always solid. Yes, they fought. A lot. But they always, ALWAYS made up afterwards. They had conflict about Roy's drug addiction - it didn't stop Dick from being there to support him through rehab, or Dick being the first person Roy called to help him get Lian after he learned of her existence. Dick literally held Lian before Roy ever did? He's the one who first put her in Roy's arms for the first time.

(Which is the prime grudge I and most Dick Grayson fans have about Roy and Jason fics which make Jason like, the absolute apple of Lian's eye. If you want to expand Lian's circle of loved and trusted ones to include Jason as Roy's friend and thus her uncle, like go for it! But there's zero reason that should require invalidating and erasing the fact that Dick was this little girl's adored godfather and uncle for pretty much her entire life. And the way Dick is just shoved offstage from Lian's life entirely, to slot Jason into his place as though they're completely interchangeable, its like....THAT'S the kind of thing that gets people irey about how Jason 'steals' Dick's dynamics and character relationships.

Because there's nothing saying they both can't be major players in Roy and Lian's lives! But just that they're not interchangeable! You need to develop the specific role Jason plays there WITHOUT just overwriting everything Dick actually did in relation to the two of them pre-Flashpoint, which is what you're drawing from the second you write Lian, unless you're specifically going with the few appearances we've had of her within literally just the last year.

But I mean, when people just search and replace Dick Grayson in all Roy and Lian's pre-Reboot stories and act like Jason was the one doing all of that instead.....why wouldn't fans of the source material be annoyed by a character getting credit for interactions and things done for Lian and Roy that Jason literally NEVER DID, while at the EXACT SAME TIME, conjuring some mysterious, unnamed 'Falling Out' that Roy and Dick had, that was clearly all Dick's fault, and resulted from him being basically excised entirely from Roy and Lian's lives?

Same with Kori, for the record, and like despite being Dick's ex, she and Dick have NEVER been like, estranged? She and Dick have often been close even after their breakup. None of it makes any sense, and the fact that a lot of fans don't even try to make it make sense or justify it, and expect other fans to just be fine with settling for an inexplicable reversal of Dick's every actual dynamic with these characters while setting up Jason to occupy the exact same role Dick played in these other characters' lives, like.....lol. Its fun.)

Anyway, back to your question, like, there are fights you can go with pre-Reboot as the source of various conflicts between Dick and Roy - but again, I maintain its just as crucial that they're always written as getting past them. They have a very tempestuous relationship because they are the two people MOST likely to call each other on their shit, two of the two people WITH the most shit in common due to the parallels in their childhoods and the roles they've occupied in the Titans and the superhero community in general, and the two people most resistant to being called out on their shit by each other, lol. Mostly in that case because like, they do recognize that they have a lot in common and understand each other very well, so the second the other is calling them out for something, they're usually like "ugh, if HE'S saying this, its probably true and I am just not prepared yet to be wrong about this. I need more time being unjustifiably rawr about things." Its like that thing where they both look at each other doing something that feels familiar or calls back to their own reasons for doing something and they're like ugh I'm in this picture and I don't like it.

So they clash. A lot. But always with the implicit bedrock of like, there's nothing either of them can do or say to the other that will push the other away for good.

They fought over Roy replacing Dick as leader of the Titans when Dick's wedding fell apart, even though Roy actually didn't want to do it and was kinda pushed into it by the government, but again, Dick like, got over it and realized it was for the best and forgave Roy for it that very same issue. And on and on. It always went like that. So there's plenty of stuff that can be used or pointed at as a source of conflict between the two, but the part I'll always call unbelievable is the idea that they never make up after one of these fights. Why now? What fight, specifically, is so bad between them that despite everything else they've gone through AND gotten past, they can't get past this one? Y'know?

So yeah, that's my take on this. There is no definitive falling out between Dick and Roy as many fics like to point to in order to shove him offscreen and make room for Jason in Roy and Lian's lives, and personally, I just don't find it necessary and I actually think it makes Roy look REALLY bad. Because when you're not specifically detailing all the things that Dick has actually DONE for Roy, the lengths to which he's been there for his friend, and like, specifically invalidating each and every one of them as something that never happened in a particular fic, then literally anyone who reads that fic and has their own awareness of Dick and Roy's friendship is kiiiiiinda likely to be reading that and thinking wow what an ungrateful asshole, when Roy's just written as bitching about Dick with Jason and sandbagging him without any real explanation as to WHY, beyond just 'oh they had a fight years ago.'

(And coming up with some random awful thing that Dick did to justify Roy hating him now isn't like, a superior alternative, lmao, because again, its still just trashing one character for the sake of getting him out of the way of two other characters' friendship and people are going to think what they think about that).

Anyway, my now standard stock disclaimer that like, there doesn't actually need to be a canon fight obviously, for people to just write things this way and handwave that Dick and Roy had an epic falling out years ago and now they just hate one another or whatever, or just Roy hates him or vice versa. Obviously people are free to do what they want. They don't need a reason other than "I want to write it this way so Jason and Roy are friends and Jason doesn't have to 'share' him with Dick or have his friendship be overshadowed by their greater history together." That just happens to be a reason that no Dick Grayson fan is ever really going to be happy about, lol, for what should be perfectly obvious reasons, so it honestly shouldn't be surprising to people that fans of the source material often gripe about it.

Because yeah fanfic is a tremendous opportunity to transform the source material into something better, but if what's better for some fans actively takes away what was working perfectly well for other fans the original way, they're going to say that. Especially in a fandom where so many new fans take their view of the characters and their dynamics from fics rather than the source material - when fandom has that much of an influence on what new fans perceive to be 'canon,' fans are perfectly within their right to emphasize what is ACTUALLY canon and what isn't, so that new fans at least have the opportunity to determine for themselves what take they want to go with, instead of just accepting at face value that the nature of say, Dick and Roy's relationship is just that Roy hates Dick because of some mumble mumble ancient history vague mumble details not found mumble mumble fight.

[bifurious-rex]

while me and the gang are yelling we need to talk about the way middle class people perceive debt and how it affects financial status. the amount of times i've seen people much more well off than me act like we are on the same level because they have student loan debt is sickening.

do not pretend that the "progressive" position of cancelling student loan debt is anything other than a play to win back the hearts of middle class America without fundamentally fixing any other part of our society that destroys the poor.

look at the way they justify it. "it pays itself back, so our millenials and zoomers can invest in our economy." it's not about minimizing the hardship faced by being in debt. student loan debt can be devastating. i've seen it happen in my own life.

but access to student loans is a privilege. i am 28,000 dollars in debt and that is a privilege. of all of my friends i went to high school with, a handful of them went to college, and even less graduated. the amount of friends and family who live with medical debt? credit card debt? too many to count.

we don't stigmatize student loan debt the way other debt is stigmatized. medical debt? something is wrong with you. any decent person would have insurance through their job, how hard could a co-pay be to cover. what happens when you can't go to the doctor because you can't pay off more debt? don't worry about it. don't worry about the countless people in my life who wait months or years to go to the doctor because the only thing you're going to get is more bills you can't pay and more solutions you can't afford. what good is knowing your knee's bad if you can't get the surgery? medical debt kills. even if it doesn't kill us today or tomorrow, it trims years off our lives. years we live in fear and anxiety, wondering what kind of financial state we'll leave our family in when we die.

credit card debt? irresponsible with money. god forbid you use your credit card to fix your car so you can get to work, or to pay your doctor's bills or buy groceries or whatever other trivial things you wanted in the moment. how can you be trusted to rent a home, buy a car, get a line of credit that isn't egregiously exploitative if you can't pay the one you've been given?

forget the payday loans people use in desperate moments. forget the medical debt, the credit card debt, the housing foreclosures. forget all the things that poor people have held over their heads every day. forget the fact that there are those of us who have lived every day of our life with debt and will die like that. forget the fact that at every opportunity, we are told to our faces just how little our life is worth. forget the fact that many of us have no long term plan. where will we be in ten, twenty years? hopefully alive. if we're lucky, in a better home and working a job that doesn't leave us bitter and aching. what is retirement, when you can't even take a month of work off to have minor surgery.

the bare minimum is cancelling medical debt. but as long as healthcare remains a commodity and not a right, people will still die for want of it. but cancelling medical debt isn't profitable. when you cancel student loan debt, you free up millions of middle and upper middle class millenials' and zoomers' finances so they can buy homes, gentrify new neighborhoods, invest in stock, have more upperclass babies to keep up with the frightful masses of impoverished.

forget cancelling credit card debt. or anything else. there are huge swathes of industries dedicated purely to exhorting money from the poor. debt is an opportunity of wealth for the rich. the fact that middle class people ever got caught in the crossfire, with student loan debt, is a fluke, and the only reason they want to fix it is to get you to stop questioning the system as a whole.

#classism #hick manifesto #public education #healthcare #no war but class war #classism // #debt #bro idek im writing in a righteous haze.

[itsclydebitches]

some folks say it's hypocritical for rwders to criticize blake and yang for giving sensitive/confidential military information to robyn during v7, because the same rwders don't criticize oscar for handing over sensitive information to hazel during v8. what are your thoughts on this?

i personally think it's kinda dumb to assume these two situations are at the same level. oscar was being tortured and gave up information to save his own life (an act of self-preservation) while blake/yang just gave robyn information for no reason (which made them lose ironwood's trust).

thoughts?

I 100% agree that the situations are night and day levels of different, but I also don’t think Oscar telling Hazel was a smart move. I was waiting for the moment when he broke from the torture, thereby making the information reveal less of a decision—how could we ever expect a child to hold out against that?—and more of an inevitability. You lose enough hope, the pain gets bad enough, you’re scared enough... you talk.

But RWBY didn’t go that route. Not quite, anyway. Yes, Oscar is still in Salem’s clutches and in need of a way out, but rather than having him break during the torture itself, they made this decision seem strategic. It’s while Hazel is gone that Oscar is lying on the floor, chatting with Ozpin and coming up with this plan to try and turn Salem’s henchmen against her. They turn this into an active choice that Oscar had time to think over and settling on. And to be clear, I have no real issue with the general idea itself. Regardless of how unlikely we think success may be, it’s damn brave for this tortured kid to essentially go, “I’m going to try anyway.”

Problem is, Oscar’s version of trying is to give Salem everything she wants. That was the plan. Rather than trying to come up with a safer way to turn Hazel, or even just straight up lying to him in the hopes of securing a chance to escape (like, say, when you’re being led to the room where the Relic is located), Oscar just goes, “Here’s how you use the lamp, the exact information you’ve been torturing me for and the one thing Salem currently wants but doesn’t have.”

That is monumentally stupid. I mean, I get (generally speaking) what RWBY is going for by having Oscar be a #pureboy who tells no lies and is rewarded for putting his faith in another… but RWBY didn’t create a scenario in which Oscar was taking a calculated risk. He was just making a very, very dumb move. Hazel has never shown any hesitance about supporting Salem like Emerald has (and, notably, the characters don’t even know about that. Only we the audience see it). Hazel is driven by a terror of Salem similar to Lionheart’s and Raven’s, something that is incredibly difficult to overcome without incentive—which Oscar doesn’t offer him. Hazel currently has the man he hates most in the world bound up before him and the woman he’s terrified of somewhere down the hall. If RWBY were written with any level of consistency, Hazel would have taken the password straight to Salem, either out of fear or a desire to screw over Ozpin. Oscar’s success here isn’t born of any decent strategy, or wit, quick thinking, justified hope. He succeeded because he exists in a story where random, senseless things happen to forward the plot.

I appreciate Oscar’s determination to do something. I don’t appreciate that his "something" is to risk it all on a “plan” that wasn’t a plan at all, but rather an entirely unfounded decision to trust someone who in no way was positioned as trustworthy. “Trust is a risk,” Weiss will later say, but this wasn’t a risk. A risk implies at least some reason to believe in things concluding in your favor—an argument for what makes the risk worthwhile. This wasn’t worthwhile, in the sense that the only real goal here, escape, can be achieved by giving Hazel a random word as the password to buy himself time (YJR are coming!)/potentially provide a moment when he can get away. The truth was a horrible thing to gamble here and if Oscar had said to me, “I’m going to give the bad guys the exact thing they need to get closer to destroying the world, simply because I want to believe that they’re not really bad guys deep, deep down” I would have been SCREAMING for him to stop betting others' safety on his unfounded optimism (key word there). By all means, try to talk Hazel into stopping your torture; try to secure his help as an added bonus. Do not bet one of the world’s few defenses on it.

So I think Oscar fundamentally lost the braincell in that scene and I’ll be forever annoyed that the show treated that move as some brilliant decision that proves the group's purity of spirit, rather than the foolhardy, panicking "logic" of a child trying to get out of an unimaginable situation. Especially when this is tossed into an arc where the group keeps not trusting their established allies. It’s while he’s giving Hazel the password and telling the others to accept Emerald that Oscar is also supporting the group’s decision to not trust Ironwood, is still unsure about trusting Ozpin, and doesn’t want to tell the others about his return. Oscar doesn’t even demonstrate trust to the rest of the group by telling them all that’s been going on—talking to Ironwood, getting shot, Ozpin coming back—Ren just figures it out for him. RWBY’s ideas of when to trust and how much to risk on that trust are straight up broken at this point.

Which finally brings me back around to Yang and Blake. Regardless of how stupid I think Oscar’s choice was, he has three things going for him that they don’t: he’s still the child of the group, he’s currently being tortured, and he has a set goal in mind: to get out of this alive, as you say. In contrast, Blake and Yang are adults actively working under Ironwood. They don’t have any external pressures like kidnapping and torture to potentially warp their thinking. And they told Robyn because… having her steal resources is inconvenient? I’m not even sure what their end goal was other than, "We should trust people more, just not when it comes to these particular characters." Oscar undoubtedly risked more with the Relic password, but Yang and Blake risked enough with far less justification. As I’ve mentioned in the past, there’s a reason why so many in the fandom thought that Robyn might be a spy for Salem and that’s because everything given to us in Volume 7—everything the characters also knew—potentially pointed to that. Salem is an enemy known for infiltrating kingdoms with henchmen posing as allies (like, say, visiting students arriving for a festival), they know that Tyrian is here and he’s unlikely to have come alone, they suspect that others like Jacques are assisting them, and Robyn is a powerful figure with a thumb in Mantle’s pie and a focus on undermining Ironwood. I wonder who could possibly be helping Salem from the inside…

The fact that Robyn is innocent isn’t the point. The point is that Blake and Yang had no way of knowing she was trustworthy, had many reasons to think it was possible she wasn't, yet they handed over that information anyway. The larger point is that they decided to do that while not trusting the established ally who had actually done work to prove himself. RWBY, somehow, keeps getting it backwards. Ozpin kept a secret they agree needs to be kept under certain circumstances. Untrustworthy. Robyn is an unknown with a lot of suspicion surrounding her. Worth the risk of trust. Ironwood is a long-standing ally who has been entirely upfront with them and doing his (flawed) best to save the world. Untrustworthy. Hazel is currently torturing a teammate and has every known reason to walk away with the password. Worth the risk of trust. Whitley is the younger brother of a teammate in an abusive household who literally has nothing and no one to turn to. Untrustworthy. Emerald helped destroy their school, kill their friends, and was actively still trying to help Cinder murder Penny (again) an hour ago. Worth the risk of trust. At this point, things have been flipped so often that both situations come across badly due to past writing: "Why are you trusting/not trusting this person when you didn't trust/did trust this other?"

Oscar telling Hazel vs. Blake and Yang telling Robyn are both absurd moves in my opinion because RWBY’s idea of trust is less an ethical stance than a plot device. But if we were to pit the two against one another then yeah, Oscar absolutely has more of a justification despite the greater weight of the secret he shared. I’d challenge anyone at 14 to come up with a good way to escape capture by an evil magic grimm queen. But Yang and Blake are free, employed, capable adults who were literally on a mission before suddenly going, “Hey, the guy we still don’t trust? What if we betrayed him to instead trust this random woman we know nothing about? All to accomplish… having her as an ally? Even though we’ve never thought about or discussed what looping Robyn in would bring to the table and how that supposedly outweighs the risk of telling her? Yeah, you up for that? Sounds great."

#rwde #rwby #mymetas

[brawltogethernow]

So, I don't think I've ever asked you this... what IS the whole point of the Spider-Sense? It really seems like something that only exists for writers to ignore or work around when they want to inject Legit Tension into a story.

I’ve thought about this power so much, but never with an eye to defend its right to exist, so I needed to think about this. The results could be more concise.

Ironically, given the question, I have to say its main purpose is to ramp up tension. But it’s also a highly variable multitool that a skilled creative team can use for...pretty much anything. It does everything the writer wants it to, while for its wielder always falls just short of doing enough.

I went looking through my photos for a really generic, classic-looking example to use as an image to head this topic, but then I ran into the time Peter absolutely did not reimburse this man for his stolen McDonald’s, so have that instead.

A Scare Chord, But You Can Draw It

That one post that says the spider-sense is just super-anxiety isn’t, like, wrong. It’s a very anxious, dramatic storytelling tool originally designed for a very anxious, dramatic protagonist. I find it speaks to the overall tone of the franchise that some characters are functionally psychics, but with a psychic ability that only points out problems.

Spidey sense pinging? There’s danger, be stressed! Broken? Now the lead won’t even KNOW when there’s a problem, scary! Single character is immune to it? That’s an invisible knife in the dark oh my god what the fuck what the fU--

Like its counterpart in garden variety anxiety, the only time the spider-sense reduces tension is in the middle of a crisis. But in the wish fulfillmenty way that you want in an adventure story to justify exaggerated action sequences, the same way enhanced strength or durability does. Also like those, it would theoretically make someone much safer to have it, but it exists in the story to let your character navigate into and weather more dangerous situations.

For its basic role in a story, a danger sense is a snappy way to rile up both the reader and the protagonist that doesn’t offer much information beyond that it’s time to sit smart because shit is about to go down.

Spidey comic canon is all over the board in quality and genre, and it started needing to subvert its formulas before the creators got a handle on what those formulas even were, and basically no one has read anything approaching most of it at this point, so for consistent examples of a really bare bones use of this power in storytelling, I’d point to the property that’s done the best job yet of boiling down the mechanics of Spider-Man to their absolute most basic essentials for adaptation to a compelling monster of the week TV series.

Or as you probably know it, Danny Phantom. DON’T BOO, I’M RIGHT.

DP is Spider-Man with about 2/3 of the serial numbers filed off and no death (ironically), and Danny’s ghost sense is the most proof in the formula example of what the spidey sense is for: It’s a big sign held up for the viewer that says, “Something is wrong! Pay attention!” Effectively a visual scare chord. It’s about That Drama. And it works, which won it a consistent place in the show’s formula. We’re talking several times an episode here.

So why does it work?

It’s a little counterintuitive, but it’s strong storytelling to tell your audience that something bad is going to happen before it does. A vague, punchy spoiler transforms the ignorant calm before a conflict into a tense moment of anticipation. ...And it makes sure people don’t fail to absorb the beginning of said conflict because they weren’t prepared to shift gears when the scene did. Shock is a valuable tool, too, but treating it like a staple is how you burn out your audience instead of keeping them engaged. Not to go after an easy target, but you need to know how to manage your audience’s alarm if you don’t want to end up like Game of Thrones.

The limits of the spider-sense also keep you on your toes when handled by a smart writer. It tells Peter (everyone’s is a little different, so I’m going to cite the og) about threats to his person, but it doesn’t elaborate with any details when it’s not already obvious why, what kind, and from what. And it doesn’t warn him about anything else-- Which is a pretty critical gap when you zoom out and look at his hero career’s successes and failures and conclude that it’s definitely why he’s lived as long as he has acting the way he does, but was useless as he failed to save a string of people he’d have much rather had live on than him.

(Any long-running superhero mythos has these incidents, but with Peter they’re important to the core themes.)

And since this power is by plot for plot (or because it’s roughly agreed it only really blares about threats that check at least two boxes of being major, immediate, or physical), it always kicks in enough to register when the danger is bearing down...when it’s too late to actually do anything about it if “anything” is a more complex action than “dodge”.

Really? Not until the elevator doors started to open?

That Distinctive, Crunchy Spider Flavor

The spider-sense and its little pen squiggles go hand in hand with wallcrawling (and its unique and instantly identifiable associated body language) to make the Spider-Person powerset enduringly iconic and elevate characters with it from being generic mid-level super-bricks. Visually, but also in how it shapes the story.

I said it can share a narrative role with super strength. But when you end a fight and go home, super strength continues to make your character feel powerful, probably safer than they’d be otherwise, maybe dangerous.

The spider-sense just keeps blaring, “Something’s wrong! Something’s wrong! God, why aren’t you doing something about this!?”

Pretty morose thing to live with, for a safety net! Kind of a double edged sword you have there! Could be constantly being hyperattuned to problems would prime you for a negative outlook on life. Kind of seems like a power that would make it impossible for a moral person to take a day off, leading them into a beleaguered and resentful yet dutiful attitude about the whole superhero gig! Might build up to some of the core traits of this mythos, maybe! Might lead to a lot of fifteen minute retirement stories, or something. Might even be a built in ‘great responsibility’ alarm that gets you a main character who as a rule is not going to stop fighting until he physically cannot fight anymore.

Certainly not apropos of anything, just throwing this short lived barely-a-joke tagline up for fun.

One of my personal favorite things about stories with superpowers is keeping in mind how they cause the people who have them to act in unusual ways outside of fights, so when you tell me that these people have an entire extra sense that tells them when the gas in their house is leaking through a barely useful hot/cold warning system that never turns off, I’m like, eyes emojis, popcorn out, notebook open, listening intently, spectacles on, the whole deal.

It also contributes to Peter Parker’s personality in a way I really enjoy: It allows him to act like an irrational maniac. When you know exactly when a situation becomes dangerous and how much, normal levels of caution go out the window and absolutely nothing you do makes sense from an exterior standpoint anymore. That’s the good shit. I would like to see more exploration of how the non-Parker characters experiencing the world in this incredibly altered way bounce in response.

It’s also one of many tools in this franchise hauling the reader into relating more closely with the main character. The backbone of classic Spidey is probably being in on secrets only Peter and the reader know which completely reframe how one views the situation on the page. It’s just a big irony mine for the whole first decade. A convenient way to inform the reader and the lead that something is bad news that’s not perceivable to any other characters is youth-with-a-big-exciting-secret catnip.

Another point for tension, there, in that being aware of danger is not synonymous with being able to act on it. If there’s no visible reason for you to be acting strange, well...you’re just going to have to sit tight and sweat, aren’t you? Some gratuitous head wiggles never hurt when setting up that type of conflict.

Have I mentioned that they look cool? Simultaneously punchy and distinctive, with a respectable amount of leeway for artists to get creative with and still coming up with something easily recognizable? And pretty easy to intuit the meaning of even without the long-winded explanations common in the days when people wrote comics with the intent that someone could come in cold on any random issue and follow along okay, I think, although the mechanic has been deeply ingrained in popular culture for so long that I can’t really say for sure.

It was also useful back in the day when no artists drew the eyes on the Spider-Man mask as emoting and were conveying the lead’s expressions entirely through body language and panel composition. If you wiggle enough squiggles, you don’t need eyebrows.

Take This Handwave and Never Ask Me a Logistical Question Again

This ability patches plot holes faster than people can pick them open AND it can act as an excuse to get any plot rolling you can think of if paired with one meddling protagonist who doesn’t know how to mind their own business. Buy it now for only $19.99 (in four installments; that’s four installments of $19.99).

Why can a teenager win a six on one fight against other superhumans? Well, the spider-sense is the ultimate edge in combat, duh.

Why can Peter websling? Why doesn’t everyone websling? Well, the spider-sense is keeping him from eating flagpole when he violently flings himself across New York in a way neither man nor spider was ever meant to move.

How are we supposed to get him involved with the plot this week???? Well, that crate FELT dangerous, so he’s going to investigate it. Oh, dip, it was full of guns and radioactive snakes! Probably shouldn’t have opened that!

Yeah, okay, but why isn’t it fixing everything, then? Isn’t it supposed to be why Peter has never accidentally unmasked in front of somebody? ('Nother entry for this section, take a shot.) That’s crazy sensitive! How does he still have any problems!? Is everything bad that’s ever happened to characters with this powerset bad writing!? --Listen, I think as people with uncanny senses that can tell us whether we are in danger with accuracy that varies from incredible to approximate (I am talking about the five senses that most people have), we should all know better than to underestimate our ability to tune them out or interpret them wrong and fuck ourselves up anyway. I honestly find this part completely realistic.

*SLAPS ROOF OF SPIDER-SENSE* YOU CAN FIT SO MANY STORIES IN THIS THING

The spider-sense is a clean branch into...whatever. There is the exact right balance of structure and wishy-washiness to build off of. A sample selection of whatevers that have been built:

It’s sci-fi and spy gadgets when Peter builds technology that can interface with it.

It’s quasi-mystical when Kaine and Annie-May get stronger versions of it that give them literal psychic visions, or when you want to get mythological and start talking about all the spider-characters being part of a grand web of fate.

Kaine loses his and it becomes symbolic of a future newly unbound by constraints, entangled thematically with the improved physical health he picked up at the same time -- a loss presented as a gain.

Peter loses his and almost dies 782 times in one afternoon because that didn’t make the people he provoked when he had it stop trying to kill him, and also because he isn’t about to start “””taking the subway’’””’ “‘’“”to work”””’’” like some kind of loser who doesn’t get a heads up when he’s about to hit a pigeon at 50mph.

Peter’s starts tuning into his wife’s anxiety and it’s a tool in a relationship study.

It starts pinging whenever Peter’s near his boss who’s secretly been replaced by a shapeshifter and he IGNORES IT because his boss is enough of an asshole that that doesn’t strike him as weird; now it’s a comedy/irony tool.

Into the Spider-Verse made it this beautiful poetic thing connecting all the spider-heroes in the multiverse and stacked up a story on it about instant connection, loss, and incredibly unlikely strangers becoming a found family. It was also aesthetic as FUCK. Remember the scene where Miles just hears barely intelligible whispering that’s all lines people say later in the film and then his own voice very clearly says “look out” and then the room explodes?? Fuck!!!!

Venom becomes immune to it after hitchhiking to Earth in Peter’s bone juice and it makes him a unique threat while telling a more-homoerotic-than-I-assume-was-originally-intended story about violation and how close relationships can be dangerous when they go sour.

It doesn’t work on people you trust for maximum soap opera energy. Love the innate tragedy of this feature coming up.

IN CONCLUSION I don’t have much patience for writers who don’t take advantage of it, never mind feel they need to write around it.

#spiderman #peter parker #spiderverse #spidey #marvel #danny phantom #one day you'll see what i'm doing with it in the project i'm collabing on w/ my brother and then you'll all be sorry and hopefully impresse #mirrorfalls #asks answered #essays

[boop-le-snoot]

masterpost ☀️ main masterlist ☀️ taglist

previously on...

This chapter is very dialogue heavy. Stephen Strange being a little bit of a dick and Tony being a sweetheart. No warnings here, just plot and worldbuilding. I think Tony is his own warning to be honest... Do we want fun facts before each chapter like before or nah?

Sorcerer Strange stared at me with the heat of a plasma beam after I finished stuttering throughout my story, one accurate eyebrow raised and sharp cheekbones painting him displeased and dangerous in the yellow light of the store lamps. The whole experience shook me more than I would have liked to admit to myself and his mute reaction wasn't helping matters at all.

"Hmph," he finally cleared his throat, taking a step back and casting a thoughtful look over the shelves in the store. "You did all you could. Perhaps, we owe you gratitude," his tone was far kinder than his face. "How long have you been doing... This?" He vaguely gestured with a gloved hand.

"Long enough," I replied without thinking. My stress levels urgently rose above acceptable and the feelings needed to be let out now; Wong's dismissive attitude and Strange's half-assed apology for the attitude was still fresh in my mind.

The sorcerer sighed, briefly touching the bridge of his nose. "I won't pretend to understand the reason for your hostility but I'd like to remind you we're on the same side here," his steely blue eyes attempted to peer into my soul.

"There are no sides here," whatever he was selling, I wasn't buying it. "There are just people who get hurt, either because of unstable maniacs with superpowers or aliens who think Earth is an all-you-can-kill buffet," I stuck my dirty, bloody hands in my pockets. "You do your part in mitigating the damage, I do mine. That's all there is."

"And you would be making my job expotentionally harder if you get in the way and slow down professionals, even if you mean well," the man's temper had, evidently, won over and he immediately got on the defensive, crossing his arms and trying to glare me down.

Odette's words rang true, starting a storm of hollow anger in the pit of my skull. "Now listen here, you privileged prick," the damn burst at the seams as I squared up to give him a piece of my mind. "You and your Hogwarts rejects and the merry band of billionaires may have the opportunity to 24/7 healthcare and near-instant compensation for any damages the villain of the week decides to bestow upon your shallow little heads," I advanced half a step towards Strange, hands bailed into tight fists, internally rejoicing at the way he leaned back. My blood sang with adrenaline as I breathed the exhilaration.

"But how many people do you overlook? How many children never make it because your super secret organisation gives their parents an ultimatum just because they are different? This is a safe space for the ones you pretend not to see until it's convenient and it will stay that way, over my fucking dead body, if need be," I stared at the tall man, almost physically feeling his brain halt and pause with the cartoony sound of screeching tires. Whatever he was expecting, it wasn't this.

A pregnant pause hung in the air, both of us waiting for the other to explode.

"Don't you think I am aware," Strange finally seethed through gritted teeth, alarming golden sparks shining in his eyes. "The Avengers are not under the rule of SHIELD and I, personally, have no affiliation with either. I do not condone their barbaric methods," the man was struggling to form his sentences properly but even despite that, I understood his ideas.

I desperately wanted to believe his words to be true, I really did, but... "Then do your fucking job and let me do mine. I do not go out there and intervene, I merely clean up the mess you all leave. Something that nobody wants to do do, so unless you've got any takers, I'll keep helping those you deem unfit," in a fit of muted rage, I flew my arm to point at the abandoned cars and destroyed concrete outside of the window, the empty street and the clouds of dust rising into the moody skies.

The entrance door flew open suddenly, with a force strong enough to bang the heavy, old handle against something outside, letting in the stuffy air inside the bodega. Strange jumped at the sound of the screaming hinges, my own heart skipping a beat from the startling interruption.

Visibly composing himself, the man pierced me with a final stare before starting a dangerously quiet, "Very well, goodbye," and hightailing it out of Odette's before disappearing in a golden circle just outside the front porch.

I let my shoulders sag for a brief moment of respite, feeling the tension bleed out of me and penetrate every nook and cranny in the room. My protection charms were mostly destroyed, silver dull, glass and amber crackled. Tossing them into the appropriate recycling bin, I set to clean up the shop, flying through the motions in record time and wandering home through the damaged streets on autopilot.

My anger had cost me more than a fortune in my past but no matter how much I sought to reason with myself, I couldn't bring it to justify Strange's attitude towards my choices. The more I thought about it, the less rational my guesses became; I forced myself to stop thinking about it when my brain had unhelpfully supplied an absurd notion of him being jealous of my lifestyle: he knew next to nothing of my skills and his opinion was based solely on seeing me work the store front and one cleansing spell I'd performed on Bucky. There was simply no rational explanation for his behaviour.

NYC life wasn't affected by the battle in the slightest, it seemed; a day and a half later, I was back at Jeremy's, serving overpriced hot beverages to the rich and the busy. I'd slept on the Bucky and Strange situation, got a handle on my feelings and decided to simply put it away. There were other, more pressing things to worry about than a couple of men.

I didn't expect the flood of anxiety that turned my hands to lead upon seeing Tony Stark's signature suit-and-sunglasses wearing ass waltz into the café. He flashed me his usual easy grin but didn't remove his glasses, eyes eerily blank behind them, as he motioned for his usual order before leaning on the countertop with the entirety of his upper body. "So, Starshine, what is it exactly that you do?" Came the question I was dreading. "Are you, like, a witch? The broomstick and cauldron kind?"

"Mr. Stark, I am serving you coffee and a muffin as we speak," I replied curtly, raising an eyebrow.

"Drop the act, honeybuns. I thought we were friends," if I squinted, I could see that he was genuinely hurt by my lack of desire to communicate. Or, perhaps, he simply was unused to not satisfying his curiosities immediately.

Either way, I stood no chance against Stark patented puppy eyes. "I clock out at two," a sigh of epic magnitude left my mouth against my will. "You can interrogate me then. Until that, it's lattes and cheesecakes only."

Tony narrowed his eyes, smile warming up by a smidgen. "Interrogate you? Never," he pocketed the napkin with Dr. Banner's scribbles the doc had forgotten last time. "I'm merely curious." Another flash of his teeth and he was gone, taking what little peace I had left along with him.

The hands on the clock made their hurried rounds over and over. My chest had grown it's own set of ticking, grinding, mismatched gears as the endless possibilities coursed a steady stream through my head. Tony Stark was a wild card, his struggles with authority a widely known fact, as frequent as his strange habits in just about anything. And while I doubted I would get ambushed and locked up, I had no qualms of him berating me for telling off his boyfriend. He seemed like the possessive, overprotective type, anyways.

As soon as I exited the café, surrounded by the smells of flour and coffee grounds, my eyes immediately landed on the shiny, brand new Audi illegally parked right in front of the establishment, it's owner leisurely leaning against the hood with a face of contented boredom as passerby pedestrians shamelessly ogled him and his ride. His face lit up as he noticed me, immediately rushing to hold the passenger side door open for my comfort. "M'lady," the dorky remark didn't fail to summon a smile to my face even if it was a weak shadow of my usual camaraderie.

"Mr. Stark," I greeted him as soon as he peeled off the crowded sidewalk.

The lack of joy on my face didn't go unnoticed by him and every now and then, he snuck a glance at my face. "Relax, Starshine, I won't bite."

"Well," I mumbled, remembering the vicious way I had torn into his boyfriend. "Good to know."

Seeing as that didn't do much for my nerves, he suddenly swerved right, rushing into a busy intersection with the ease of a practiced manic driver. "I'm feeling like a cheeseburger," he announced unceremoniously, pulling into a parking lot of some place I never noticed.

I doubted that I could swallow anything at all but relented, sitting down opposite him in the furthest booth from the entrance. I ordered the biggest milkshake they had as Tony grinned big at the waitress, finally taking off his sunglasses when she left for the kitchen.

I rested my elbows on the table under the scrutiny of his gaze. He kept quiet. I couldn't hold back my curiosity any more. "So?"

His sharp, clever brown eyes captured and held mine for the longest second in my life. I struggled not to break eye contact until he relented, focusing on the shine of my rings instead. "RoboCop almost died from the shit that happened to him," Tony's words were curt. I inhaled sharply, assuming he was talking about Barnes. The engineer's fingers began to fiddle with his glasses. "We couldn't figure out how you helped him. Not the medical, not Banner, not me and and not even Steph," he paused to run a hand through his hair. "Barnes was hit with a poisoned arrow. There were no toxins left in his body, not even a single inflammation marker showed up on the tests." With that, Tony expectantly turned to me.

I chewed on my lip in contemplation. "Magic," I simply answered, figuring Strange had already briefed him about my occupation.

Tony shook his head with a snort. "Magic that the Sorcerer Supreme doesn't recognize or cannot detect?" The question was saved in nature.

Stephen Strange was Sorcerer Supreme and I had pissed him off and remained alive. I couldn't believe my luck, if Odette's stories were anything to go by. Inwardly rejoicing, I nonetheless resigned to answer truthfully. "Because there is nothing to detect, no foreign energy," I tried to phrase it in a way a scientist could understand. "What I use to heal, it is given me by nature and willingly. Think of me as a... Conductor. I merely store the energy short-term and direct it where it is needed."

That sparked a visible interest in Tony. He leaned forward, running my whole form, over and over, with his sharp eyes, searching for something I knew he wouldn't find. "Like... Making a blood transfusion?" It was obvious that he was thinking hard about the subject. "Like a successful organ transplant?"

"Something like that," I agreed amicably, seeing as he was talking at himself rather than engaging in a conversation with me.

"But it doesn't come from nothing, the first law of thermodynamics..." He started off in slight confusion.

"Yes, the total amount of energy remains constant," I interrupted him, making his eyes widen. "It's all around us, Mr. Stark. You cannot see it, and most people even cannot feel it, but mother Earth supports her creations. More than we like to think," the corner of my mouth tilted upward at the memories. Working with Gaia directly was like being briefly submersed in a cocoon of pure, warm sunshine; like being held in mother's arms as a babe. "She is kind and she is merciful, especially to the ones whose suffering is unjust," I let the man mull over my words.

The waitress brought our orders; my throat was parched, I took a few haste gulps of the chocolate milkshake. Tony's burger, however, remained unnoticed and untouched.

"Earth is a sentient organism?"

The question made my eyebrows rise; I coughed slightly, meeting his confused eyes with a smirk. "Mr. Stark, keep your science headcanons to yourself," the banter came easily now that the status quo was established.

He rolled his eyes, fitfully resisting the smile tugging at his mouth. "I'm telling on you to Mean Green," there was no malice behind his words.

I doubted the shy scientist would do much more than stutter out two jumbled questions but let the topic slide in favour of closing up on the issue. "Would you call a wolf sentient? No," I shook my head. "But it is autonomous, it has free will. Think of it like that," I wasn't really up to par on explaining Tony all the ins and outs of my craft. The more I spoke, the more questions danced in his eyes. It was charming but not something I wanted to spend most of my day on.

"I won't pretend to be anything but sceptical but as it is, I happen to be dating a wizard," the engineer finally chortled, making hands for his burger. He made a vague gesture with his fork, expression still not-quite out of the thinking place.

"They say opposites attract," I shrugged.

"Romanoff keeps saying we're two sides of the same coin, so," he non-commitally shrugged in return. "Can't help but wonder what the fuck did you tell him that day. He was seething," Tony raised an eyebrow, tone teasing.

"Oh lord," I briefly palmed my face. "Here comes the shovel talk."

"No, no," a fry landed on the table in front of me. I snatched it right from under Tony's hand. He pouted. "He probably deserved it. I mean, you saved the Terminator and, honestly," he paused. "I heard about one third of his rant and I distinctly remember something about 'girls way over their heads' and whatnot," he did a poor imitation of his boyfriend's deep voice. "Now, I consider myself a feminist so, respectfully, I disagree," he finished with a self-satisfied smirk.

I blanked, trying to process the avalanche of information. "That's a lot to unpack," I acquiesced.

"It means he likes you. I would know," the man had the audacity to wink at me. And that, ladies and gentlemen, was Tony Stark.

"Are you hitting on me for your boyfriend?" I couldn't resist snarking back, briefly catching his eyes as I polished off my milkshake.

Tony looked at me through his thick, long lashes, a picture perfect visage of surprised innocence. "Maybe," his tone a little too south of friendly, the direction of his eyes a bit lower than my face.

The snort escaped me before I could put a stop to it. The banter - it was easy, comforting in this situation where I found myself to be akin a fish out of water. Like I was a slightly socially awkward witch, Tony was a genius engineer and a notorious flirt. He toed the lines of appropriate with practiced gusto and I hadn't had the heart to do anything but indulge in a little bit of harmless fun ever since he first stepped foot in the café, seeing right through his stone cold facade of an alleged womaniser. Call it a hunch, if you will.

Say what you want about Tony Stark but one thing was definite: he was a gentleman. I thoroughly enjoyed my ride home in his expensive, fast, latest model car. As the city streets zoomed by in a flurry of blurred lines and flashing colorful lights, I allowed my mind to finally calm and resume it's usual even wandering pace.

A hand loosely thrown over the steering wheel, Tony quietly hummed along to the music, playing with the hem of his tee whenever it wasn't occupied with driving the car. He looked so peaceful like that.

The sound system played some contemporary rock that blended in with the moderately busy afternoon of the NYC streets, submerging the surroundings in catharsis. Grey everything with the occasional burst of colour from a traffic light; the brief car ride lulled me into a state almost drowsy.

"You with me, Salem?" Tony's voice quietly took me out of my stupor.

I blinked, seeing the front door of my apartment building. "Yeah, yeah, thanks," I didn't resist the big, wide smile of relief and rejoiced upon seeing his face return to his normal expression, sparkling and mischievous. "That's my stop," I motioned lamely.

Something hung in the air, something unsaid. It leaked through the gaps between Tony's smile and his eyes, it filled up the car with something thick and foggy. I was powerless to stop its influence on me; the daze remained just as it was when we zoomed through city streets.

Tony's fingers twitched on the steering wheel as I exited the vehicle, giving him a short wave before he put pedal to the metal, quickly disappearing into the twilight. I watched his tail lights glow red amongst the flat blacks and greys and beiges of my surroundings, blinking away the dryness in my eyes only when the car disappeared from my view completely.

My apartment was just as I'd left it, warm and slightly messy- but a new feeling had crawled up from the very gutter of me, foreign and impending. The walls didn't breathe the comfort I had hoped I would finally find: if anything, none of what I encountered on my rapid beeline towards the couch felt real.

I'd grown accustomed to the comforts of my solitude and routine, to attached to the simplest task of being. Sorting through my dirty laundry had never been a favourable ordeal for me, I'd much rather lived in a relatively wide bubble- rationally, I knew that sooner or later, change had have to come, but there was nothing ever rational about having feelings on one matter or another.

My spirit was trying to tell me big things were coming and I had no choice but to listen and let the currents of fate and happenstance snatch me up and take me whichever way they pleased.

Taglist: @couldntbedamned @mikariell95 @letsby @sleep-i-ness @toomanyrobins @mostly-marvel-musings @persephonehemingway @schemefrenzy @lillsxd @bluecrazedandbeautiful @slothspaghettiwrites @xoxabs88xox

#practical alchemy #bun writes #tony stark x reader x stephen strange #stephen strange x reader x tony stark #Stephen Strange x reader #tony stark x reader #tony stark x y/n #tony stark x you #stephen strange x y/n #stephen strange x you #mcu fanfiction #marvel fanfiction

[mellometal]

WHAT'S GOING ON? THIS IS PART TWO OF ME RIPPING APART DHAR MANN'S VIDEOS ABOUT FATPHOBIA! Whoo-hoo!

Before I get started, here's an obligatory trigger warning: This post will be talking about fatphobia, bullying, homelessness, mentioned ED, fat shaming, shaming a person FOR EATING, and the abused thanking his abuser AS AN ADULT for tormenting him as a young, impressionable teenage boy.

If any of that is triggering, upsetting, or makes you uncomfortable in any way, you don't have to read this post. Please consume media that sparks joy for you.

This time, there won't be a response from me about this video, like I usually do with all my Dhar Mann posts. If you want to see my response, refer to my first post about fatphobia (the one about the plus-size woman being fat shamed). It does tie in with this post, as my thoughts on this video are the exact same here. Yes, even though this is about a (at the time) plus-size black teenage boy being targeted. Search for the "dhar mann talk" tag and it's one of the most recent posts. I don't believe anyone should be shamed for their weight. Your weight doesn't hold any significance to your worth as a person. Don't let anything or anyone tell you otherwise.

With all of that out of the way, let's get to the video!

To sum up the video, it starts out with a plus-size black teenage boy (Kurt or "Big Boy", as he's called almost throughout the entire video) who's on a basketball court at school with his friend (Mike), a few other teenage boys, and Mike's uncle (Frank) is their coach. Mike is the captain on one team, Frank is the captain on the other team. They're picking teammates, and everyone is on a team except for Kurt and another boy. Frank says to his nephew to not pick Kurt (he called him "Big Boy" instead) because "he'd never win with him". LIKE THEY WERE PLAYING FOR THE NBA. CALM YOUR DICK. HOLY FUCKING HELL. THEY'RE KIDS.

Mike, not listening to his uncle (good for him), picks Kurt anyway. Kurt is happy and thanks his friend for picking him. Mike gives Kurt a shirt that looks at least a couple sizes too small for him and would be pretty uncomfortable to wear. This isn't Mike's fault, obviously. Kurt politely asks if they had a bigger shirt. Obviously not an unreasonable request. They're playing a sport that requires lots of movement (honestly, pretty much any sport would apply here, except for maybe golf or cricket) so it's understandable to want to at least be comfortable and have room to move around. Frank mocks A LITERAL TEENAGER with the whole "You think you're shopping at Big&Tall?" line and then says that's the only size they had (why couldn't they supply inclusive sizes in the first place, or at least ASK Kurt what his size was IN ADVANCE?), which....umm, I'm actually GLAD plus-size clothing for men (Big&Tall, in this case) is more readily available and accessible now. I'm happy plus-size clothing in GENERAL is like that now.

Mike comforts Kurt and says the shirt might fit. The shirt does KIND OF fit Kurt, but it's obvious he's uncomfortable. Look at this screenshot here:

Frank laughs at Kurt, says he looks like Barney The Dinosaur, and the other kids laugh along with their coach. This is NOT setting a good example for children, Frank. You're a fucking teacher. You're a COACH. You're supposed to be teaching these kids about sports and shit. You're supposed to be setting a good example for these kids about teamwork and sportsmanship. WHAT YOU'RE DOING TO A TEENAGE BOY, WHO IS MOST LIKELY ONE OF YOUR STUDENTS, IS TEACHING NONE OF THOSE THINGS. You're teaching these kids that bullying their peers for things they can't help having is okay. Do better. (I'd say that he's an adult and should act like one, but I'm an adult and I barely act like one a lot of the time, so that'd make me a hypocrite.)

While I may be fortunate to have had a physical education teacher who never bashed on me or shamed me for my weight and she would cheer me on for whatever amount of effort I made the first and only year I had actual P.E., I know that many other kids who are plus-size most likely has/had horrible P.E. teachers or coaches like Frank.

To anyone who has/had a teacher or coach like Frank, I'm so sorry, kiddos. You don't deserve to be bullied by your own teachers. I wish I could give all of you a hug, but I can give y'all virtual hugs instead! *virtual hugs* /p

So they play a game of basketball, and Kurt is struggling to fully play because the shirt he was given was probably cutting off some circulation, especially in his arms (again, do I need to reiterate that this was NOT Mike's fault and is FRANK'S fault for his ignorance and negligence). Frank mocks his nephew Mike by saying that he told him not to pick Kurt. Why? Because according to him, Kurt will never make anything of himself in life due to him being fat. (AGAIN, THIS IS NOT TRUE.)

Then it cuts to Kurt sitting with Mike, who's working on his car and Kurt's working on his own thing. Mike says he believes one day he'll own a nice, brand new Cadillac. Kurt is very supportive and cheers his friend on. He says that he believes he'll be one of the biggest radio show hosts and has a title for it called "Big Boy's Neighborhood". Both of them are hyping each other up. Love to see men supporting men. Mike pulls out his Walkman (they were HUGE back in the 80s and 90s because you could listen to the radio from anywhere, I have a Sony Walkman mp3 player, but it's a newer model), and Kurt says that he's always wanted one but couldn't afford it. (I'll go into why in a second.)

Frank comes over to reprimand Mike, who has done NOTHING WRONG, for talking to Kurt. Instead of working, which Mike WAS actually doing. He tries to tell his uncle this, but he wasn't having it. Frank then reprimands Kurt, who also has done NOTHING WRONG, for just sitting and apparently "distracting Mike" (he wasn't). He asks if there's any work he was supposed to do. Kurt FINALLY stands up to Frank in a polite, mature manner. He says that just because he wasn't working with his hands, it didn't mean he wasn't working. Frank ridicules Kurt some more, Mike tells his uncle to leave his friend alone, and Kurt stands up to Frank AGAIN, still being polite and mature. UNLIKE THE ACTUAL ADULT ACTING LIKE A CLICHÉ MIDDLE SCHOOL BULLY WHO PROBABLY PEAKED IN HIGH SCHOOL. How fucking ironic.

What does Frank do in response to Kurt standing up to him? INSULTS THE KID SOME MORE. He tells Kurt that he must have "pig fat for brains" (which is not only insulting to Kurt, but also insulting to pigs, because pigs are intelligent animals), takes his small bag of Doritos, and says that he "doesn't need to be eating anything." He eats Kurt's Doritos IN FRONT OF HIM, tells Mike to quit letting his friend make him lazy (he wasn't doing that at all), and to get back to work.

THAT line made me livid. I've actually thought that I didn't deserve to eat anything because I'm plus-size as a teenager, and into my adulthood at a few points in my life. NEVER say that someone doesn't need to be eating anything. (Obviously except for poisonous things, inedible objects, and things that could and will kill them.) You could cause them to develop an ED, or trigger an ED if they already have one. THAT'S NOT A GOOD THING. EDs are no joke. Whether it be starving, purging, or binge eating, none of them are fun to have and/or to deal with. Even if they DON'T develop an ED, their relationship with food will be all sorts of fucky-wucky. Some even for the rest of their lives. Unless you get proper treatment, of course.

When Frank leaves, Kurt is obviously upset. Rightfully so. How he's feeling is justified. Mike comforts him and says to not let Frank get to him. Mike offers to take Kurt home, but then realizes that his friend and his mom got evicted and are homeless. (This is why Kurt couldn't afford to buy a Walkman.) Kurt, still distraught, says that he'll just walk. Mike invites him over for dinner and that he'd drop him off after, which Kurt agrees to.

They're at Mike's house, having dinner, and Mike's parents are talking to Kurt. They're being supportive. Frank walks in to have his sister's cooking. He sees that Kurt's there. Mike's parents introduce Frank to Kurt, tells him Kurt's gonna be on the radio one day, Frank laughs and says Kurt's not gonna be anything. Kurt brushes it off. He says that his mom says that he can achieve whatever he wants (which is true, to a reasonable extent), Frank cuts him off and says his mom was lying to him, and that his mom knows he's gonna be a big loser.

Mike's dad tells Frank to leave Kurt alone. Mike's mom also says the same thing. Frank asks Kurt if his mom doesn't feed him at home, and what he was doing "eating up all their food" (he wasn't; he just had a singular plate). Mike and his mom tell Frank to stop. His mom explains that they invited Kurt over for dinner, and she tells her brother to sit down and eat. Frank then asks Kurt again if his mom doesn't feed him at home. Mike tells Frank that Kurt and his mom don't have a home because they just got evicted, which is a shock to the parents. Instead of having sympathy for a teenage boy who was on the streets with his mom, HE MOCKS HIM. WHO THE FUCK DOES THAT? Especially to a teenage boy who didn't do anything whatsoever to deserve being evicted from his home and be out on the streets with his mom. I've dealt with being evicted. I've dealt with homelessness. Out of no fault of my own. It's not funny, cool, glamorous, or anything like that. It's terrifying. I'm still traumatized by that experience and it happened four years ago. Sometimes I have nightmares about that kind of thing. The very possibility of becoming homeless and going through that again scares the shit out of me. The thought of it is so triggering for me that I will resort to reverting back to things I used to do when I was a kid. It also doesn't help that I will NEVER be able to afford an apartment on my own where I live now and will probably have to rely on at least two or three roommates and/or family to get by. Thanks a lot, Boomers.

I would never wish what I went through on anyone. Anyways, back to the whole summary of the video.

Kurt gets up and leaves the table. Mike tries to go after his friend to make sure he was okay, but Frank stops his nephew. ONLY WHEN KURT LEAVES DOES FRANK ALL NONCHALANTLY SAY THAT HE'S STARVING AND THAT THEY SHOULD ALL EAT. Despite Frank making Kurt as well as his (Frank's) own family upset.

Kurt walks to where his mom is. His mom notices that he's upset. Kurt tells his mom that it's because of Frank. His mom comforts him and gives him the advice that she gave him before. Kurt is still obviously too upset to take anything she's telling him, bringing up that they're homeless and broke, and his mom is desperate to help comfort her son. She gives him his birthday present early, which happens to be a Walkman. Kurt is shocked. He thought they didn't have that kind of money. His mom says not to worry about that. She pokes some lighthearted fun at her son, he thanks her, and he asks her a question. He asks if she believes he'll be successful or if she's saying that to make him feel better. She asks if he believes he'll be successful (yep), and he tells her that when he succeeds, he'll buy them a house so they don't have to be homeless anymore or worry about getting evicted.

Fast forward to adulthood, Kurt becomes a bouncer, meets someone who works at a radio station, and he goes there. Just to have people laughing at him. He's distraught again and leaves the station, thinking that he made a bad decision. Frank happens to come by, see that Kurt was upset, and asks what's wrong. Kurt tells him what happened, and Frank mocks him AGAIN with the same shit he told him when he was a TEENAGE BOY, now as a YOUNG ADULT. He walks off, laughing.

Nice going! /s Kicking Kurt while he's down JUST LIKE OLD TIMES, RIGHT? FUCK YOU.

Kurt then decides that he's gonna lose weight and be the best radio show host. (Toxic much? Why would you try to preach that your weight = your worth as a person? If you're losing weight for yourself, great! I'm happy for you! If you don't want to lose weight, you don't give a fuck about what people say, and you're happy in your own skin, that's awesome too! Do it for yourself, not for anyone's approval. Try to love yourself and accept yourself in any form you're in. Don't fall for the bullshit that you have to be a certain size or look a certain way for you to love and accept yourself. The weight may be gone, but the rest of your issues will still be there. I have to clarify that I meant this in GENERAL, not necessarily for extremities on either side of the spectrum of weight...because there are things you MUST follow.)

Kurt gets back to the station, ignores all the people being assholes, he's doing his thing, and he's climbing up.

Fast forward to when Kurt is middle-aged. He has his own radio show, and he's one of the biggest names in the radio industry. After he finishes up his show, he goes outside to see a couple of young fans. A young black girl with her brother, a plus-size boy. They say how much they love his show, they got his merch, and the boy tells Kurt that he wants to be just like him. The boy doubts himself though because of people abusing him JUST LIKE what Kurt went through. Kurt empathizes with the boy and tells him a little bit about his own experience. Following them is Frank as an old man. They're his grandkids.

Frank recognizes Kurt, and actually apologizes to him for the torment he put him through as a teenager. WHAT A SHOCK. /srs

Kurt takes it with grace, but says that he should be thanking Frank for all the torment. Why? Because it "motivated him". The girl says that she loves that. (Okay, since she's a kid and there's still time for her to change her mind about certain things, I'm not going to be as harsh here. I don't bash on the kids unless they're doing or saying extremely fucked up things willingly. She didn't say this with bad intentions. I understand you're coming from a good place, and I appreciate that, but please hear me out. This wasn't at all like dealing with edgy thirteen year olds on the internet. This man you look up to was abused by your grandfather in his youth. Your brother is experiencing that same torment your idol went through...at a younger age too, it seems like. The kid looks no older than middle school age [ten or eleven at the YOUNGEST to maybe thirteen or fourteen at the OLDEST]. That's a huge problem. Kurt may have "toughed it out", but that might not be the case for your brother. Please don't excuse that kind of behavior.)

Dude...what the actual fuck? I can understand not being bothered by the hate, but this grown ass man literally VERBALLY AND EMOTIONALLY ABUSED YOU AS A YOUNG, IMPRESSIONABLE TEENAGE BOY, CONTINUING INTO ADULTHOOD, and you're THANKING Frank for all of that? Why should you thank your abuser for what he put you through? He didn't contribute ANYTHING to your success. So I guess abuse is a GREAT contribution to people's success now, right? /s It doesn't contribute to anything, in my opinion. Yes, what doesn't kill you can make you stronger, but can we normalize people becoming weaker to a point due to traumatic events? Because they exist. Demonizing survivors who have become weaker to some degree or just flat-out ignoring them isn't helping. You did the thing you wanted to do, Kurt. Frank didn't help you. The person who really helped you was YOU and your mom.

MOVING ON.

The boy asks Kurt if he thinks he'll ever be able to make it as a radio show host. Kurt asks if HE believes that. The boy says he does. Kurt gives him some advice and gives the boy his Walkman. The boy's ecstatic, they leave, and Kurt goes to meet up with his mom.

Keeping to his promise, Kurt bought his mom a house so she'd never be homeless again and never have to worry about being evicted. (HOW LONG WAS SHE HOMELESS FOR? OH MY GOD. THAT'S WHAT I WANT TO KNOW. I hope you at least let her stay with you or something. They never went into that, unfortunately.) She's very grateful. The video ends there.

My personal thoughts on the video: Another piss poor video....but worse! Because it was a COLLAB. And based on a true story. Good going with taking this man's story of being abused by a grown adult to exploit for your personal gain, Dhar Mann! WOW. LOVE THAT! Totally a good look. /s

What I took from this video is that if you're plus-size, according to Dhar Mann, you'll apparently NEVER be successful, let alone be taken seriously...which is an absolute lie. There are many plus-size people who are very successful. Another thing I took from the video is that apparently according to Dhar Mann, being verbally and emotionally abused as a teenager by a grown adult all the way into adulthood is "motivation" for you to work harder to reach your goals. (Nice going, Dhar Mann. Justifying grown adults abusing children. Who would've thought? /s)

Oh, and it's like MANDATORY to thank your abusers for tormenting you when you become successful! (Obviously this is an exaggeration. This is me using Dhar Mann's logic against him.) You want to thank them for making you stronger? Fine. You want to spit in their face and say, "Fuck you." to them? Also fine. You want to just never acknowledge them ever again? Totally fine. Whatever you want to do, that's fine by me, but can you not imply that "thanking" your abusers is mandatory in some way?

If you made it this far, thank you! I hope you're having a good morning/day/afternoon/evening/night. Stay safe, y'all. Love you. /p

#dhar mann #dhar mann talk #dhar mann will live to regret his decision to make these fucked up cringe videos #dhar mann will live to regret his decision uwu #dhar mann is a piece of human garbage #please stop supporting dhar mann #dhar mann is a cringe ass nae nae baby #tw fatphobia #tw ed mention #tw fat shaming #cw complicated relationships with food mention #tw abuse mention #tw homelessness #tw eviction #tw abuse #fatphobes dni #tw dhar mann