#she’s not a horrible person or from an irredeemable source or anything like that it’s just that her source material is a bit strange

[hippie-self-shippie]

guys i think i have a new crush but i can’t say who she is it’s too embarrassing…

#she’s not a horrible person or from an irredeemable source or anything like that it’s just that her source material is a bit strange #in the sense that it’s a kids show from korea targeted towards little kids #and probably the only people who’ve ever watched the show is me and my baby sister #ermmmm so yeah #patches’ prattle 🧸 #patches’ crushes 🫣

[pythagoras180]

Why I Hate Adrien

So a few people have asked me why I hate Adrien so much. I've given it some thought, and I've realized that my hatred comes from 3 sources:

1. Adrien is a passive, useless character and a waste of screentime.

Adrien is a very passive character. He doesn't really have goals that he works towards outside of romance. He doesn't feel like a real person with a real life. He's just an object for the actual main characters to fight over. And to be clear, not every character needs to be active or well developed, but thei screentime should correspond to this. Adrien takes up a massive amount of screentime in the show. And since he ended up being worthless, I feel like he personally wasted my time by appearing so much. His screentime could have instead been used to develop the other characters.

2. Adrien is a creator's pet.

While Adrien doesn't really do anything in the show, I think I still may have felt bad for the character if I felt like this was because the writers didn't like him or something. Thing is, Adrien is the complete opposite, as the writers are clearly biases *for* him at every turn. He's almost always portrayed as right, even in situations where he clearly isn't. "Chameleon" clearly portrayed his "advice" about Lila as good, even though anyone with basic respect for their peers wouldn't be okay with letting them be lied to. There's episodes like "Kuro Neko", where Adrien is very clearly in the wrong amd being unreasonable, yet he's still clearly framed like we're supposed to feel bad for him. Part of the reason he has so much screentime is because the writers love to insert him in every situation they can. Even his status as a passive character can be considered as the writers favoring him. They think he shouldn't have to do anything because he's such a precious boy, so everyone should just do everything for him. I'm not inclined to like a character that I feel is getting special treatment just because of who they are.

3. Adrien does horrible things.

Those last 2 points definitely provide potential for me to dislike a character, but I don't think it's possible for me to actually do so if that character hasn't done anything wrong. Well, despite what the writers want you to believe, Adrien has absolutely done a lot of horrendous things. There's the fact that he continued being friends with Chloé despite her remorseless bullying of Adrien's "friends". He keeps trying to date Ladybug despite her repeatedly rejecting him, to the point where it's straight up harassment. This culminates in "Kuro Neko", where he quits his job of protecting the city because he keeps getting rejected (again, this is portrayed as sympathetic). Like I mentioned before, he tells Marinette to let Lila continue lying to everyone else. And why does he do this? I honestly don't know, and neither does anybody else. There's no rationalization for this moment. But the point is, Adrien put Lila above everyone else for some reason. He also emotionally cheated on Kagami, hurt her feelings, and barely cared afterward. He didn't have to do anything to make up with her, that just worked out on its own. He tried to Cataclysm multiple people despite knowing that it can be fatal, and the only time he displays real remorse over it is when Monarch is on the receiving end. Oh, but he only feels bad for like a minute, then he's fine (I believe that that was just to make Ladybug's exposition about not being able to fix it fee more natural, he wouldn't have shown any remorse if that wasn't necessary). Oh, and then there's that one moment in "Passion" where he pretends not to know what the consequences of making a wish is and tried to convince Ladybug to let him make one. If she said yes, he would have sacrificed somebody else to heal Nathalie. The show has made it clear that this is morally wrong. To me, this is the moment where Adrien became irredeemable. Also, in the Paris Special we find out that Adrien became a mass murdering supervillain in an alternate universe because he's sad that his mom died. He didn't have any grander plan, not scheme to bring her back like Gabriel did. Nope, he just killed people because he was sad, that's how they presented it. I know that this is technically a different person, but the alternate characters from tbe special are meant to be pretty close to the originals, just with different circumstances. So I think this shows who Adrien really is deep down. So yeah, I think Adrien is one of the most despicable "good guy" characters ever.

So that's the reason I hate Adrien, in 3 parts. I wouldn't hate him nearly as much if it wasn't for all 3 components. Kind of a perfect storm really, and I don't think I'll ever hate another character this much, for this reason.

#miraculous #miraculous ladybug #adrien salt #ml salt #ml writers salt

[girlinlavender]

not liking how catra’s redemption arc was executed is totally valid, and you have no obligation to enjoy her character, but claiming she’s extremely terrible awful and deeply irredeemable is just so immature and can, in extreme cases, showcase a huge lack of media literacy. she was abused horribly, and yes, that does not justify or condone her actions, but in order to act with compassion and understanding, you must be shown compassion and understanding. catra didn’t have the tools for emotional development - you think they have therapy in the horde? fuck no. her literal only source of happiness in her entire life abandoned her (from her perspective) for something “better.” she was going through intense trauma and that got her a big ol inferiority complex.

and may i remind you, at the start of the series, she’s like seventeen. and she was put in charge of everything so fast. do you know a single seventeen year old that you trust with a huge military leadership position? okay and now add that to fighting in a literal inter-dimensional war. having been raised in a fascist playground by an abusive shadow sorceress. would that seventeen year old be doing well? i think the fuck not.

that being said, she absolutely had to own up to her behavior with more than just “i’m sorry.” the most poorly handled part of her redemption arc, for me, was how much of it we didn’t see. what we were showed (which i think trips up a lot of people) was the beginning of her redemption. the “i’m sorrys.” the little shit. they didn’t have time for anything else - they had to beat horde prime. offscreen, i’m one hundred percent convinced catra did the work —probably for years to come— to heal the damage her actions did, personally and professionally. are we, the audience, made to believe that what we see onscreen should make us forgive her immediately. yeah, a little bit, and yeah, that’s uncool. but framing it like those, what, eight episodes was her ENTIRE journey to being a better person is just incredibly misleading. there’s still so much work she has to do, and i have faith that by the time that “future vision” in heart part two happens, she’s a good way through it.

yeah, seeing a character who was toxic for years and is starting to change in the last season of FIVE ticks people off. and yeah, villain enjoyers who like complex characters get a disproportionate amount of shit too often, people going so far as to claim they romanticize abuse. (THIS IS A CHILDREN’S SHOW WITH FICTIONAL CHARACTERS THAT WE ARE TALKING ABOUT.)

those two types of people can and should coexist. the internet is sanitizing all content to a startling and frankly, batshit degree and media literacy is rapidly becoming less and less common. on top of that, queer media, especially sapphic media, tends to get picked apart and destroyed online due to a lot of internalized homophobia and misogyny. so i think this issue, not just with these characters, but in general, is super fucking important to talk about.

#SIDE NOT: PLS DON’T DOX ME #OR SEND DEATH THREATS :O #I’M JUST CHILLING SHARING MY THOUGHTS #PLS PLS PLS #anywho #this topic has lots of nuance #So share your thoughts #Respectfully #catradora #she-ra #catra she ra #adora she ra #spop #she-ra and the princesses of power

[thecat-inthehat]

You know, one thing I don’t think I’ve seen almost anyone talk about is Fordola’s narrative role as the representation of Ala Mhigo’s stolen and indoctrinated youth.

This isn’t really a dissertation, or a hard thesis with cited sources, more just ... some musings. Garlemald is a near-textbook fascist nation (by design) that constantly expands itself via colonization and occupation. Expansionist fascist nations need more soldiers to do this, so they indoctrinate the youth of the nation to serve their own ends and dismantle the rebellion before it even really starts. Youth are promised the world if only they’ll believe everything they’re told, and fight for the overlords when needed and pulled away from their roots. Garlemald is, like most fascist nations, enthralling and able to pull people in and keep them in. There’s a strong sense of purpose, a chance to feel as though conscripts are making “a real difference”, and a charismatic leader at it’s head.

The most overt of this is the Crania Lupi, made by van Balesar -- a regimen filled with Ala Mhigan youth who are bitter and resentful that they’re still seen as “savages” and are willing to do anything to get the respect of the Garleans. They’re used as enforcers and rebellion-quellers, often by beating up their own kinsmen, who then ostracize them for their actions. It’s the perfect set up to drive a wedge between the younger and elder generations, and weaken any sort of uprising that might be brewing.

Fordola, being the commander of this unit, is more the symbol of what Gaius was trying to achieve than anyone else. She’s given enough power to feel important, but knows it comes with a cost, and dire consequences if she fails, much like her peers. She keeps digging herself (and the Lupi) deeper and deeper in a way to try and meet the moving goalposts, and hates herself and what she’s doing every step of the way. She knows that she’s betraying her people, her heritage, but she doesn’t see any other way out because she’s so thoroughly been pulled into this whirlpool of fascist ideology. Even her name is so overt about this -- it’s a Garlean last name: Lupis.

In terms of her character, she’s extremely unlikable. She’s angry, she’s brash, she pushes people away and tries to goad them into hating her, much like how she hates herself. She hates the world for putting her in the position she’s in, but also she hates the powers that left her where she is, and has no frame of reference to move past it beyond simply following Garlemald’s orders. She isn’t nice. At all. She’s marginalized and oppressed, but given just enough power (with very specific rules on who she can use that power on) to leave her unwilling to completely leave the place she’s built up.

The most recent short story highlights how she doesn’t feel Ala Mhigan or Garlean, and also how she knows she’ll have to sign up as a Garlean soldier in order to allay suspicion on her friends or her family. She’s being looked down upon by her elders for going along with the Garleans, but then also looked down on by the Garleans for being “barely better than a savage”. She’s desperate for a place to call her own, to be accepted, wanted, relied upon, like so many of her peers.

She’s only nineteen, and has been coerced and reeled in by the people above her into this horrible meat-grinder of a system. Of course she won’t be easily likable or understood, or even a good person. There is so much that she, and by extension her generation, have to unlearn and relearn. At the end of the day, yes, she’s responsible for her own choices and the places that she’s landed herself in. I’m not denying that. But the level of which she, and by extension her generation, have been taught to follow Garlemald’s footsteps is ... staggering. In a way, we never really need to see who her friends are, because she so thoroughly represents her entire generation of Ala Mhigan youth that never had the chance to leave, like Arenvald.

I’m not saying you have to like her. There’s plenty of reasons why not to do so. But... I dunno. It draws a little too close to home for me to just write her off as irredeemable or a complete failure of a person, because that’s essentially condemning an entire generation to doom and robbing Ala Mhigo of their future. The whole point of the Crania Lupi arc is that the kids that were supposed to be the future were stolen and pitted against their own people, and that means that they’re going to come out traumatized and ugly in how they react to things, which Fordola isn’t shy about showing.

#ffxiv #Fordola rem Lupis #Stormblood #Garlemald #this got a little rambly i think #mostly i just meant to do a couple bulletpoints and then #musings

[kuekyuuq]

I have to ask...

Where do the anti-supercorp people get the idea from that Lena Luthor is xenophobic?

Are we watching the same show?

I can see how one does not like Lena.

I can see how some of Lena's actions can be considered irredeemable.

I can see that her family was/is xenophobic.

I can agree she made some horrible mistakes in judgement.

Canon told us:

Lena was fired by Lex from LuthorCorp because he thought her naive about her pro-alien stance. The same brother who analysed Lena since she was four. 

Lena was horrified when Lex tied her to a chair and made her watch his attempt to kill Superman by turning the sun red

Lena came to National City in hopes to work with Supergirl (an alien)

Lena actively re-branded LutherCorp to LCorp to get rid of the anti-alien stuff and everything else people connected with the Luthor name

Yes, Lena created an alien-detector, but her intention was one out of ignorance (of the backlash this could cause), not of hate - when Kara much later explains the potential bad the item could cause, Lena is very much listening

Lena helps Kara on several occasions, using her intel and providing it to Kara, so Kara can investigate and write articles to dismantle anti-alien organisations (e.g. Veronica Sinclair's fight club, Cadmus)

Lena helps Supergirl on several occasions, using her intel and providing it to Supergirl, so Supergirl can dismantle anti-alien organisations

Lena actively seeks to dismantle Cadmus - the anti-alien group - even before Lena started suspecting Lillian to be involved

Lena schemes against Lillian to use Medusa to kill all aliens on Earth

Lena testified both against her alien-hating mother and brother

As soon Lillian told Lena about Lex' former facilities, she starts looking into them - they are well hidden, so it does take her a while (and by this date in the show, she may still not have unearthed all of them) - and dismantles many of them / continues to give Kara/Supergirl information about them (e.g. when Kara asks Lena for tech to find missing aliens, Lena offers to look into L-Corp (= former LutherCorp) database to search for anything useful for that particular cause

Lena encourages Kara strongly to find a way to warn all aliens about the alien registration manifest being leaked - she inspired Kara to "blob"

When Lillian finds out Lena is pro-alien and helping find the abducted aliens, she has her goons try to scare her off ("nothing permanent" - the goons accidentally threw Lena off her balcony...) - even her own family sees how non-xenophobic Lena is

Lena sacrifices Jack (her former boyfriend and still potential romantically involved one) to save Supergirl (the alien) - and (rightfully) blames the human woman, who controlled Jack, for it

When Lena suspects and confirms Rhea to be an alien, she cuts ties with her - because Rhea lied to her, not because she's an alien

Lena starts working with Rhea (confirmed alien) again - to help aliens who "weren't as lucky" as Rhea's people and to further and better Earth technologies; reduce environmental damages by infrastructure / good transports / traffic.... only to be betrayed by Rhea.

Lena learns Mon-El, Kara's boyfriend, was Daxamite and has zero issues about it

Lena has no issue with Sam being half-alien, but with the Reign-half being a huge menace to Earth, so tries to stop her and save Sam

The DEO kept Kryptonite in case any of the Supers went rogue - like Batman and Oliver Queen kept theirs - Lena kept and created Kryptonite and Harun-El to ...cure cancer; to fight against sicknesses, to use as a clean energy-source, to... do good things

...yes, she lied about it. But, her not-so-wrong reasoning was "if I tell, they will take it away. If they take it away, I won't be able to do good with it."

Lena rather had Supergirl drop her than chemicals that could have harmed thousands (human and alien)

Lena becomes quick allies and friends with Brainy (admitably, in many ways he's more AI than alien...) and befriends Nia later on, too

What else does Lena do with her stash of Kryptonite and the knowledge she gained from it? When Mercy & Otis Graves irradiate Earth's atmosphere with Kryptonite, Lena already has created an anti-Kryptonite suit for Supergirl and the fact it’s already at hand saves Supergirl’s life!

That's only up to season four... 

Yes, Lena did shitty stuff in season five. Arguably, for the right reasons, but ‘the road to hell is paved with good intentions’...  But were any of those things xenophobic?

The problem she has with Kara in season five is NOT because she’s an alien - but because she felt betrayed, personally. Rightfully so? Eeeeeeeh.... while it surely must have hurt to learn your best friend lied to you and played two personalities, at times taking advantage of it, too - which, let’s be honest, Kara did - Kara did have her reasons (initially), it IS selfish for Lena to assume the worst and take the fact itself so personally.  But, everybody lives in their own world, I am sure - dear few readers, who took it upon yourselves to read this monster of a post - we can agree, that we all judge the world and others based on our own perceived reality, based on our own experiences, emotions and circumstance, whether we try to be better than that or not...  I’d even make the argument, Lena is more upset with her intimate friend “Kara” (whom she shared her most intimate thoughts and feelings with) having lied to her, than with “Supergirl” taking advantage of her. Being played, Lena can deal with, but trusting and seeing that trust shattered... low blow. Please, correct me if I’m wrong, but to my knowledge, the only time Lena uses Kara being an alien against her, is when she uses and reworks the Fortress of Solitude's already existing settings to trap Kara in there for long enough for herself to get a head-start on getting Myriad to work (how else was she supposed to achieve that?).  Myriad, which she wanted to use to STOP hate, including racism (xeno-cism?). Brainwashing everyone is most certainly a veeeeeeery misguided approach, but the premise of ending all hate and the resulting pain is very much like the notion of "praying for world peace" - just that Lena got sick of praying and decided to actually go ahead and do something about it ((again: notion good; (attempted) execution horrifying)).

Even Lena trapping Malefic was to that very end. She trapped Eve (human) as well on that line of thought. At the least, she offered Malefic a deal to his liking as payment...? Eve on the other hand.... 

If anything, Lena is people-phobic. She has a hard time trusting anyone, remains suspicious to a fault. ...she did effectively kill Eve on Earth-38, though, by over-writing her with Hope.

Kara forgave her aunt, who came just as close, wanting to use Myriad for very similar purposes - and then forgave Lena, eventually, just as much. The difference being, Astra died. We never got to see if Astra would have actually stopped her plan, convinced Non, and/or would have aimed / worked hard to redeem herself...

In the same episode, where Lena's attempts with Myriad failed (and Hope took the fall) Malefic, who had tried to murder multiple people as part of his revenge against his brother (and had targeted Kelly for a while, too) was set free by J'onn and sent to Mars to do good there.

The whole of National City forgave Supergirl (and her potential for going bad and for her causing actual destruction) only a week after the redK incident...

All that said:

1) Lena lied to Kara and played her. Sure, Lena felt betrayed and from her point of view, with her set of experiences and her own preexisting many traumas and (very bad) coping mechanisms, it was... well, understandable... or at least traceable. But, forgivable? That's ultimately up for her victim (Kara) to decide. And, apparently, she does forgive her. Not easily. But she does; understands both sides, evaluates, listens to others, observes the remorse, and makes her own decision / judgement... which is (initially, tentative) forgiveness.

2) The show is REALLY BAD at dealing with characters' actions’ or events' consequences. Period. There is no real consistency, 'cept that things don't have real repercussions. That is how the writers decided to write the show from season one on. If the writers think Kara forgives Lena and show it, then that's that.

3) Every time I read the notion that Lena was/is xenophobic, I can't help but wonder if anyone who claims such even watched the show.

4) Lena is not her brother. She's flawed. She makes mistakes. But for once, Lena and her character are suffering the consequences. That may not enough for the liking of Lena Luthor haters, or anti-Supercorp taggers, but it is what it is - and it is much more than most any actual bad guy had to suffer through. Bad guys with evil intentions, (mass) murderers, people (alien and human) that rationally caused lasting harm and/or trauma to their victims.

5) Lena is not xenophobic.

Kue out.

#supergirl #lena luthor #fictional character #kara danvers #hate #brainiac #nia nal #j'onn jones #superfriends #supercorp #am not going to use THAT tag #long post #xenophobic #xenophobia #myriad #katie mcgrath #thoughts on supergirl #fandom #analysis #character study #trauma in fiction

[muggle-born-princess]

"Chloé's actions don't excuse her behavior!"

Uh, no shit sherlock. That's the point.

The point of Chloé's character traits isn't you to go and say "Wow, she's so mean and bitchy, mommy, I wanna be like her when I grow up!" ^__^ The point of her character is that yes, her behavior is awful; yes, her actions are horrendous, yes her personality is pure and utter shit.

BUT:

It also justifies it.

A lot of people tend to think that "excusing one's actions" and "justifying one's actions" mean the same thing, but it doesn't.

We do not excuse Chloé's actions, we justify them.

We don't look at her and say "Oh, she's a bitch because mommy was to her, okay she's free to go."

We look at her and say "Oh, she's a bitch because her mom is an abusive, neglectful narcissist and her dad is a doting, overworking father and neither of th em paid any attention to her. That explains everything." Furthermore, because of this, this caused her to develop mental issues as time went by.

For example: let's take Petunia Dursley from Harry Potter.

Petunia raised Harry in a horrible environment. She abused him, neglected him (kept him in a stair closest for 11 years ever since he was a baby), excluded him from the family every moment she got, but why was that? Not because she was a horrendous bitch (and don't get me wrong, she was), but because she was jealous of her sister aka her nephew's mom.

Lily grew up as a witch.

Lily grew up with magical powers in a non magic family.

Lily went to a famous school for those who did magic.

Petunia. Did. Not!

Therefore, when she saw her orphaned nephew on her doorstep, the last thing that came to mind was her jealously and envious she had over her sister aka the one who got the privileges of being a witch, not her. Should her actions be excused? No. Are her actions justified, however? Yes.

In addition, let's take the two girls whom at this point, have the biggest rivarly with Chloé: Marinette and Zoé.

As we know, Marinette and Chloé had a long history with each other, even before Adrien was introduced. However, we have no idea how the rivalry started. Some theorize that Marinette did something that set Chloé off, and while that's a plausible, we don't have all the proof to see if that's true. The only source is how similar Marinette can be to Chloé (both have been known to sabotage others to get what they want). Another theory is that Marinette and Chloé were once friends, but something changed. Did Chloé or Marinette one day snapped and had enough with the other? Was one jealous of the other? For all we know, some sort of conflict happened between them and we don't know what it was or how it happened. Going back to the jealous part, some also have noticed that Chloé could be secretly jealous of Marinette and her life.

Marinette has a loving and supportive family, Chloé doesn't. Marinette has friends who love and care about her, Chloé doesn't. Marinette gets good grades and works hard for what she wants, Chloé doesn't. Marinette doesn't rely on people to get what she wants. Chloé does.

Now let's move on to Zoé. Zoé's history was that she was conceived by Audrey while in New York and that's it. Once Zoé comes into the picture, Chloé immediately connects the dots and realizes that she was living with her mom this whole time. As we know, Chloé loves and idolizes her mom to the point where she acts like her. Acts rude and bitchy and looks down on those who she sees as "inferior." So in conclusion, Chloé in the end envies her half sister not just because she's nice to everyone, but because she gets more attention than her. Especially from the one parent that she looks up to yet refuses to do anything with her but belittle her.

In conclusion, Chloé's actions and behavior are and will never will be excused. Yes, she needs to face consequences; yes she needs to be disciplined; yes she needs some tough love, but we (fandom and characters in the show) need to understand that her actions are justified. They explain why she is awful, they explain why she is nasty, they explain why she is the way she is. Can she change? Yes. Can or will it happen? As of now, no; but there is still a possible chance. We just have to see where it leads to.

I doubt Chloé is irredeemable. There has been times where she has shown to do better. Yes, she has screwed up time from time and while I understand that the point of her character is that not everyone can change, we also need to remember that old habits die hard. Maybe she'll change at the last minute. Maybe it will be in the season 4 finale, the season 5 finale, or hell even the series finale.

Chloé in the end needs to improve.

Not as Queen Bee.

As Chloé Bourgeois.

#miraculous ladybug #chloe bourgeois #chloé bourgeois

[welcome-tothe-madness]

Yo so like, after watching Book 3, I think I wanna kinda just put my thoughts here on Simon because so far he’s been one of my fav characters because of how well written he is and I just wanna like, idk, ramble

i absolutely adore how Simon and Grace are essentially 2 sides of the same coin, but also fundamentally different, and this is how their paths diverge. i think a large part of why Grace was able to start her redemption is because of how much she loved kids, and making them feel less alone. She thrived off of taking in lonely souls and showing them a “better way.” She genuinely felt bad for Hazel and wanted what was “better” for her. This doesn’t excuse any of her stuff, but her general love and compassion for other kids is really was kickstarted her on her redemption.

Simon did not. Not to say he didn’t care about Apex, but I don’t think he cared for the kids themselves. He cared about GRACE. He cared because she cared. If she had taken his hand and said “let’s leave this all behind” I’m sure he would have followed her. So while Grace is bonding with Hazel and learning to be ok with Tuba, all Simon sees is a distraction and someone holding them back. He also sees Grace not as enthusiastic to get rid of Tuba and keeps putting off killing her.

Now, about Tuba’s death. I see a lot of people marking this as the moment they started to hate him, and they’re not wrong, this was the key point where he became irredeemable. But I want everyone to take a step back and look at what we’ve seen so far. We know his backstory with Samantha, and i think everyone believes that’s the only reason he hates denizens. That could be the MAIN reason, but I don’t think it’s the ONLY reason. Remember why they were running in the first place? Because there was a bug denizen chasing them. We know from Book 1 that these big monsters are actually the creatures that inhabit the train. I think there is a big chance that he witnessed a denizen transform in front of him, and try to attack him. This is also supported when Grace has to explain to hazel why she doesn’t like them, she says “they’re unpredictable.” What’s that supposed to mean? Using context clues, I think they’re aware al the denizens are actually those soul sucking creatures. Yeah, no wonder they don’t feel anything for them when they die. As far as they’re concerned, they could turn and kill them at any minute.

Also, i’d like to bring up Book 2, when we’re first introduced to Simon and Grace. When they’re trying to recruit Jesse, they planned on killing Lake off to “help” him. Look at just how many kids are in Apex. What’s the likelihood that a majority of them befriended a denizen that they later had to sacrifice for initiation? This isn’t the first time they’ve done something like this. They’ve done this a LOT, possibly hundreds of times. Tuba’s death to Simon was just another day of initiation. Does it make it any less wrong? Of course not, he fully had the capacity to bond and redeem himself just as Grace had, and they even got along right before her death. But in Simon’s eyes, he was too far gone, Tuba was a dangerous creature holding them back and he finally found the perfect opportunity to get rid of her like they‘d always done. Grace’s horror is what’s new to him. Her acting shocked, disgusted, scared? She’s never done that before. She’s always planned it, egged it on, encouraged it, PRAISED him for this behavior. And note what he says to her after the job is done!! “Let’s see how high OUR marks have gotten.” He knew Grace was insecure about her number lowering, and did something he usually got praised for, and even thought it’d help her. It wasn’t a selfish betrayal (sort of, I also partially believe he did it to get on Grace’s good side again) but he also did it because he knew how down she’d been.

I also just wanna say Grace should have communicated better with him. I don’t know if things would have turned out better or different, but a lot of his later actions were derived from her dishonesty and her distancing himself from him. She never told Simon what she was thinking. She never told him about her hesitation. She never let him in on anything. Instead? She chose a denizen over him. She decided to change and grow and expected Simon to follow suit. He isn’t a mind reader, how the hell was he supposed to know plans had changed and he was meant to keep Tuba alive? How was he meant to know?

This doesn’t make any of his actions ok. Trusting the cat over Grace and trapping her in her own mind? There’s no ”justifying” that (not that I’m trying to justify) but I think I’ve reached a level of understanding with his character. A lot of what happens is because he’s been left in the dark. Yes, he had the opportunity to change and it is his fault for not taking action, but I think a moment that struck a nerve with me is when Grace said “I’m not responsible for your problems, I don’t owe you anything.” She’s right, she’s not responsible for him not bettering himself.

She’s not responsible for his betrayal. She’s not responsible for his jealousy over Hazel. But you know what she is responsible for? Shoving this ideology down his throat, refusing to communicate, and then acting disgusted and lashing out at him for doing everything she’s ever taught him. She’s the one that taught him a higher number was better. She’s the one that’s always took command/control. She’s praised him for shitty behaviors and when she sees the result of it? It’s not her problem. I completely understood when Simon screamed out “YOU OWE ME EVERYTHING.”

No, she doesn’t owe him everything, but her toxicity towards him is a major factor into why he turned out how he did. Treating people like shit and then saying it’s not your problem when it affected them? (Btw, I’m NOT a grace hater and do not believe she is the source of all his problems, clearly he is his own person and has the capacity to grow as well, but saying she doesn’t owe him anything?? Not even an apology for lying and keeping secrets?? that’s what mainly struck a nerve.)

Also, I wanna bring up another moment that I think solidified hate for him. When Grace saved him, and he tried wheeling her. I can also understand why he did this. Is it right? No, obviously no it’s not ok. But I think the reason he chose to shove her off is because when he asked “why did you save me?” Her response was “I don’t know.” You don’t know? You don’t know why you were compelled to save your number 1 friend for years? Someone who stuck with you through thick and thin, clung to every word you said, and did everything you asked? You don’t know why you saved him? Even after everything? In such an emotional and high tensity moment, I can’t say I wouldn’t have done the same. Again, not something he should have done, but it’s something I can understand. If my scorned ex best friend saved my life and said they didn’t know why, I’d probably feel angry too.

anyways yeah, he’s still a shit person but he’s complex and i think a large reason why his character works so well is because of how well he is written. He did horrible things but there was always a reason, it was never ”mwuahaha, I’m evil now.” And that’s what I love about Infinity Train. Everyone feels so real. Anyways yeah ramble over, if you’ve read this far, feel free to discuss more with me if you feel like I overlooked anything or just wanna spark more conversation!! <33

#infinity train #simon laurent #infinity train grace #infinity train book 3 #im just rambling snsndndsksksns

[mst3kproject]

Frankenstein’s Castle of Freaks

This movie has a real all-star cast as far as us MSTies are concerned.  There’s Rossano Brazzi, who was Phineas Prune in The Christmas that Almost Wasn’t; Edmund Purdom, whom we know as Griba from Ator, the Fighting Eagle; and Salvatore Baccaro, the leader of the cavemen in Starcrash.  The film itself is absolute, irredeemable trash and I love it like my own garbage child.

We begin out of nowhere with a bunch of peasants beating a caveman to death.  What?  Where are we?  When are we?  Who are these people?  Why is one of them a cavemen wearing a fur loincloth and the rest are just normal people in pants?  Why are they beating him?  Did he do something that pissed them off, or do they just hate him because they’re, like, anti-Neanderthal racists?  What the fuck is going on?  We will never really find out.  We just cut straight to Dr. Frankenstein hauling the troglocorpse into his lab.

That’s how this movie rolls.  Don’t bother asking questions, just try to keep up.

Count Frankenstein’s daughter Maria has returned to her childhood home, bringing along her fiancé Eric and her friend Krista, who has an unhealthy relationship with polka-dots.  Krista is immediately fascinated by the Count and his work, and he with her in turn.  It doesn’t take long for Krista to find out that Frankenstein is carrying on reanimation experiments in his basement, but that’s actually the least of the bullshit going on around here.  There are more cavemen out there, but there’re also rivalries and love triangles among the inevitable gaggle of deformed assistants, and the local villagers are angry about a spate of grave robbing and determined to run the Frankensteins out of town.  The ‘monster’ (I’m not sure it quite counts) is kind of an afterthought.

See, Hans the Butler hates Genz the Dwarf (even though it’s actually Kregan the hunchback who is fucking Hans’ wife) so he gets him fired, and Genz swears revenge on the whole Frankenstein household. Wandering in the woods, Genz meets and befriends a second caveman, naming him ‘Ook’ and teaching him how to rape women in the hopes that he will do violence to Maria Frankenstein.  Ook, however, kidnaps Krista instead.  At about the same time, Genz sneaks back into Castle Frankenstein to free the first caveman, Goliath, whom the Count has been keeping strapped to a table after bringing him back to life, and who has also fallen in love with Krista as the latter assists the Count with his work.  Goliath goes on a murderous rampage, then follows Genz back to the cave where Ook is keeping Krista.  Sure enough, this leads to a caveman-vs-caveman battle for the girl!

Man, I would love to see earlier drafts of this script, mostly because I’m dying to know whether some prior incarnation of it actually had anything to do with Mary Shelley’s book or even with previous Frankenstein movies.  I mean, it starts with the servants digging up a corpse, and ends with a torch-and-pitchfork mob destroying the Count’s creation… the beginning and end of a Frankenstein movie are present.  In between those, however, it wanders off on this bizarre tangent about the local cryptids. As it reached the screen, the only thing Frankenstein’s Castle of Freaks seems to have in common with its source material is the threat to the Count’s girlfriend, which was issued by the Creature in the original story.  Technically, even the grave robbing and re-animating have nothing to do with Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus – the book never actually says how the Creature’s body was created. The idea of piecing it together from corpses originates with the Boris Karloff movie.

Let me describe some more of the stuff that goes on here, in order to give you the flavour of the experience.  For starters, Salvatore Baccaro, playing Ook the caveman, is credited as ‘Boris Lugosi’ in the opening credits.  The first time I saw this movie I snorted water up my nose when that popped on screen.

Later in the movie there’s a flashback to that first peasants-vs-caveman scene, and it answers none of the questions I listed above. Why are there cavemen in these woods? I dunno, there just are.  What did the cavemen do to piss off the locals?  I don’t know that, either… they may have been stealing livestock, I guess, but they don’t seem to have been a threat to the people until Genz taught them about rape.  Kind of makes one wonder what happened to the cavewomen, since we never meet one and these guys don’t seem to know what women are, as illustrated by Ook initially thinking their nubile young captive is going to be dinner. Also, although there are two cavemen, they don’t know each other.  Genz has to introduce them!

There’s a bit where Genz is hiding behind a clock to watch Maria and Eric have sex.  The butler comes along and chews him out for it, sends him to his room, and then he stands there and watches them for a while.

In another scene, Maria and Krista go skinny-dipping in a mineral spring, and the longer it goes on the more the dialogue sounds like it’s going to break into lesbian porn.  I am particularly fond of the exchange where Maria says, “don’t worry, this dress is designed to be easy to get out of,” and Krista, impressed, replies, “I’ll say it is!”

The subplot in which the butler’s wife is having an affair with the hunchback has no effect on the plot whatsoever.  The butler never even finds out about it.  There’s a scene in which they run off to the barn to slap each other and smooch, and then the movie forgets about it.  Astonishingly, the same is true of the corpse the servants dig up early on.  They exhume the body of a recently dead woman, Genz cops a feel and leaves some footprints at the scene so that the villagers can figure out who was responsible, and… that’s it.  She doesn’t even hang around as a gratuitous zombie like the grave-robbed girl in The Atomic Brain.

According to Wikipedia, nobody will admit to directing this movie.  Like many Italian films, the director used a pseudonym, and the cast apparently disagree on even such basics as his nationality.  Some of them think he was Spanish, but Simonetta Vitelli, who played Maria Frankenstein, insists he was an American.

At the end of the movie, Ook is the first of the cavemen to be killed, and we get to see Genz weeping over his friend’s dead body.  Then he and Krista hold each other as the mob closes in on Goliath.  This is supposed to be a tender moment but it looks a lot like Genz (who is, you must remember, around four feet tall) is enjoying his faceful of boobs.  Since all alternative love interests for Krista are now dead, maybe we’re supposed to think she ended up marrying Genz.

Finally, as Goliath’s body burns, Edmund Perdom intones, “there’s a bit of the monster in all of us, especially where there’s fear.”  I’ll drink to that, my dude.  ‘Twas beauty killed the beast.  He tampered in God’s domain.

That probably is supposed to be the movie’s point. The villagers are depicted as suspicious, fearful, and quick to violence, while the cavemen seem to have been relatively peaceful types until Genz taught them how to rape.  It’s very much the Homo sapiens who are the monsters there. Frankenstein’s servants are all assorted shades of horrible, from Genz the necrophile to the nasty cackling butler to the adulterous hunchback and cook.  Count Frankenstein himself isn’t quite so overtly evil but it’s clear that he’s not very interested in the moral dimension of his work.

Even if that’s an intentional theme rather than just a pithy closing line, I don’t think anybody thought about it very hard. The rest of Frankenstein’s Castle of Freaks is too much of a mess.  There’s no real plot, no identifiable protagonist, it’s sleazy and incoherent and at times it’s horrifyingly abelist… and yet, for reasons I cannot explain, it’s weirdly entertaining.

Maybe it’s just that everything in the film is so damn ridiculous.  So much of what happens comes out of nothing and goes right back into it… a series of mind-boggling what the fuck moments that surprise the viewer over and over.  The impression is that the writers are throwing horror concepts at the screen to see what sticks, but nothing does.

Maybe it’s that this is another villain-centric piece.  You know I like those.  I guess maybe Krista is the heroine?  She seems to do the fewest horrible things over the course of the story, but she’s not a good person, either.  She’s totally into the Count’s creepy reanimation experiments, and makes only a token protest about the idea of informed consent.  Edmund Perdom’s Inspector character is one you’d expect to try and do something about these goings on, but he never does.  Maria and Eric are only in the movie so it can have a sex scene.

Whatever the reason, the result is inexplicably charming. Between the easily distracted plot, the gratuitous breasts, the bad dubbing, the complete failure to either frighten or titillate, and the fact that it tries to tie itself to a lucrative franchise it really has nothing to do with, Frankenstein’s Castle of Freaks is almost the perfect example of a bad Italian horror flick from the 70’s.

#mst3k #reviews #episodes that never were #frankenstein's castle of freaks #tw: rape #tw: ableism #70s

[adamwatchesmovies]

The Best of 2020

Better late, than never. I enjoy seeing other people’s top-10 lists and I said I’d do one for 2020, so here we go. I haven’t had the chance to watch EVERYTHING I wanted to, but you’ve got to pull the trigger at some point. When the Academy Awards took place on Sunday, I felt like I hadn’t seen ANYTHING nominated but I could remember dozens of times where I felt like I wasted my precious minutes with cinematic detritus. I assumed putting this list together would be easy. It wasn’t. I’ve got a lot of runner ups but for now, here are my Top 10 “Best” (by which I kind of mean my favorite) movies of 2020:

10. Never Rarely Sometimes Always

Never Rarely Sometimes Always gave me a lot to think about. On the surface, it's about a teenager who has to travel outside of her hometown to get an abortion, but it could've been any kind of procedure she's uncomfortable (or unable) asking her parents for. It's about the lengths she has to go to when her main source of support is cut off. You feel uneasy throughout, wondering what lengths the girls will have to resort through and whether something horrible is just around the corner. For this reason, I think many parents would find the film enriching.

9. Mank

I haven’t posted my review of Mank yet - just haven't had the time so consider my star rating for it "spoiled". If you don't know, it's about Herman J. Mankiewicz (Gary Oldman) and the time he wrote Citizen Kane for Orson Welles. I can’t call Citizen Kane one of my favorite films, but I do often think of it. The story, the characters, specific shots, the overall look, etc. Every time I revisit it in my memory, my appreciation for it grows and in a way, Mank helps complete my relationship with the film. For that reason, I foresee myself revisiting Mank in the future - probably as part of a double-bill. I’d love to see it enough times to memorize some of Gary Oldman’s best lines.

8. One Night in Miami

One Night in Miami addresses the present while being set in the past but something about it clicked with me more than Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. It's essentially a series of long conversations, the kinds that force you to really examine tough questions and see these legendary figures as normal people. Unlike Mank, it isn't so much the individual lines that stand out, it's more the vibes you get from the exchanges. Out of all the movies on this list, it's probably got the best ensemble cast.

7. Sound of Metal

I'm sure you've seen that clip from Un Chien Andalou where an eye gets sliced with a razor? It gives me the willies just thinking about it because if I were blind I wouldn't be able to watch movies or draw. In Sound of Metal, we're dealing with a career cut short because of deafness but the dots are easy to connect.  I immediately connected with this movie, which made its ending feel like a punch in the gut.

6. Tenet

I keep telling myself that I won’t love a movie Christopher Nolan directs just because his name is attached to it. Hopefully, this doesn't make me a fanboy, despite my falling for pretty much everything he's released. I love how ambitious Tenet is. The plot is so complicated but then again it isn't because once you're able to grok the mechanics of its reverse-entropy technology, you'll probably figure out most of the plot's mysteries. For me, that was the fun part. It felt good to see my understanding of the story and theories confirmed. I'll be watching it again once groups can gather so my friends and I can discuss everything in detail.

5. Trial of the Chicago Seven

I know The Trial of the Chicago Seven fudges history in ways certain people would say is irredeemable but I never go into a film “based on true events” assuming liberties won’t be taken. At the end of the day, I care about being entertained. My enjoyment was also amplified by the fact that I didn't know what the verdicts would be - my American history is spotty, at best. It's got laughs, outrage, drama, and inspirational moments. Aside from romance, you've got pretty much all the bases covered.

4. Palm Springs

Out of all the pleasant surprises of 2020, Palm Springs was the biggest. I thought the Groundhog Day thing was played out and the 0-star-worthy Love Wedding Repeat did nothing to convince me otherwise. Then, this movie comes along and does everything you want in one of those movies, and then some. Not only did Palm Springs give me the romantic comedy I'd been craving for (feels like we haven't gotten a good one since "Crazy Rich Asians" it also examines what love and relationships mean through smartly written metaphors.

3. Possessor

No, I didn’t put this movie on the list just because it’s Canadian; Possessor is on this list because it’s the most unsettling movie of 2020. I mean that in a good way. I've already talked about how unsettling the premise is but it's also the execution. Those bizarre “dream” scenes with the different identities merging in unnatural ways is unforgettable. That mask of Tasya's face, half-melted is already creepy enough, when worn by Christopher Abbott as he re-enacts her memories is just so weird it makes you wonder if you’re actually seeing what you’re seeing, or if you’re going mad. Then, there's that shot with the fingers at the end! Makes me wince just thinking about it.

2. Soul

During the Oscars, I get a little mad at Pixar. They effortlessly churn out these masterpieces that mean no other studio has a chance of winning an Academy Award for the Best Animated Film category. It makes me wonder if the voters even bother to watch the competition but I don't think anyone could argue against Soul. It's among their best films. It’s gorgeous, profound, and modern without showcasing any issues that might flush your day down the toilet.

Runner-Ups:

Enola Holmes

I never believed Enola Holmes would end up on my "Best of the Year" list but this movie is a lot of fun. If you haven't seen it yet, you should. Just wanted to remind you.

Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn) I was disappointed when audiences didn’t seem interested in Birds of Prey. Seeing Margot Robbie go all-out and given a script that actually makes good use of her character was lots of fun. I also found it refreshing to see a superhero movie (not really, but kind of) that didn’t involve a plot to destroy the world, upheaval all of civilization, or shoot a giant beam into the sky. I think this is one people will discover down the line and go “why didn’t I go see this in theaters when it was playing?”

Borat Subsequent Moviefilm I’m not 100% in love with Borat 2 but boy am I looking forward to showing it to people who have no idea what’s coming. That scene with Rudy Guliani might not have the same impact down the line as it did when I first saw this sequel, but that’s ok. It’ll still have you picking your jaw off the floor.

Nomadland It’s a great movie and I might’ve put it on my list of the best… but I just don’t see myself watching this one again anytime soon. Great movie though. It deserves every accolade you see directed towards it. Chloé Zhao is shaping up to be a major talent. While before I might’ve said “Eternals who?” Now, I’m excited.

The Vast of Night Until I saw Possessor, this was my favorite horror film of 2020. I love the way this movie does so much without showing anything. It’s all about letting your imagination do the work.

Hamilton I’m still unsure how I feel about the casting in Hamilton. Everyone does a terrific job. I understand why actors of color were chosen to portray the historical figures we meet during this story. It still doesn't sit 100% comfortable with me. Then again, who can argue with those results? I’ve seen the movie twice and the songs are still playing in my head.

1. Promising Young Woman

I only had so much before this post went up. Enough for one more movie. It was a tossup between The Father, Judas and the Black Messiah, and Promising Young Woman. As you can imagine, I’m pretty satisfied with the choice I made. Writer/director Emerald Fennell takes the rape-revenge genre and reshapes it into something that feels completely new. Like many of the other films on this list, it also feels relevant to what’s going on today. There are many reasons why I could’ve given it this slot. The writing, the performances, the way it puts your stomach in knots as you wonder what’s going to happen next, the pitch-perfect ending… but I’m going to pick a more personal reason. I try to look at films as snapshots of when they were made. There’s a part of me that winces when I look at Gone with the Wind but I’m also able to take a step back and say “but other than that…” and then just enjoy the movie. In Promising Young Woman, the past is confronted in a way that made me pause and think about two movies on my shelf: Wedding Crashers and American Pie. The Vince Vaughn/Owen Wilson comedy, in particular, has a lot of questionable bits of comedy, bits made even more eyebrow-raising by the fact that it isn't an "old" movie whose entire cast is now dead. Let’s just say that when a movie makes me go “This movie is replacing X”, makes me think this hard about things, and does everything else you want in a thriller… it’ll stick in your head for a long time. That's why I'm calling it the best/my favorite movie of the year.

#movies #films #bestof2020 #bestmoviesof2020 #bestfilmsof2020 #Mank #PromisingYoungWoman #TrialoftheChicagoSeven #Hamilton #TheVastofNight #Nomadland #Borat2 #EnolaHolmes #BirdsofPrey #Soul #Possessor #PalmSprings #Tenet #SoundofMetal #NeverRarelySometimesAlways

[mable-stitchpunk]

With your last post, what are some of the top things that made you shudder about your character interpretations?

Oh goodness, where do I begin? Well, I'll start by saying that I'm not talking about one person in particular in any of these cases. Every interpretation is one that I've seen a few times from various sources, and I haven't seen many of them recently even. Anyway, here we go.

---

9: 1 is a rapist.

This isn't as common now, but there were a slew of 9 fanfics that came out a long while back that portrayed 1 as some kind of sexual deviant forcing himself on other Stitchpunks, sometimes with help from 8.

While 1 IS overbearing and tyrannical, he never gives any impression that he would do this. If anything, 1 seems to pull away from touch, and at times acts much more like a frail and frightened old man than anyone who can force himself onto anyone.

I find this depiction... Problematic, because it feels like it's an effort to make 1's actions more severe for drama's sake. To be blunt, I find sexual assault in most media to be a cheap tactic for drama, but 1's especially makes me twist up.

---

FNAF: Henry was depressed. (When used to excuse his behavior)

I've went into this before, so I'll only gloss over it, but as someone who has had issues I don't want to discuss, your mental health issues do not excuse your actions. Eventually there comes a point where you have to take some responsibility what you do.

...Unless you're entirely incapable of controlling your actions and behaviors, which we get no indication that Henry was.

To clarify again, Henry being depressed isn't what makes me grimace. It's the idea that Henry's depression is used to shield him when there's absolutely nothing wrong with acknowledging faults as a character and using that to grow your story.

Case in point, Bojack Horseman.

---

Steven Universe: Pink Diamond was a irredeemable monster.

Pink was a victim of abuse from her parental figures and in her attempts to escape them made a horrible mistake. Was it selfish? Yes, but plenty of other characters in the series made horribly selfish decisions and they were forgiven because they got the chance.

Because Pink is gone, she is now the scapegoat for everything that goes wrong, and unfortunately this is a sentiment I saw a lot when I was in the fandom.

I'm not saying Pink's actions aren't troubling and that she didn't make a lot of terrible, self-serving mistakes, but I feel like the writing decisions meant that they used her as an easy crutch. Not even giving her the same benefit of the doubt as her parental figures.

---

Oddworld: Have some... Feelings about some of Abe's depictions, but not enough to cause a fuss about it- and I'm probably biased anyways.

---

There's some other ones too, but none as interesting to talk about as this, so I limited myself... I've got plenty more FNAF ones, but I don't want to rant. (Unless asked, in which I will gladly do so.)

...I find that a lot of my squeamish depictions relate more to me than anything else, but I feel like there's a line in the sand up there somewhere. A balancing point where things swing one way or the other.

...Except 1 being a rapist. Yeah, no, I just can't with that. Sorry. XD

#9 2009 #1 the Leader #FNAF #Henry Emily #Pink Diamond #Steven Universe #Abe (Oddworld) #Trauma and abuse depicted in media

[firelxdykatara]

Do you have advice on how to not let the fandoms new hot takes get in your head and ruin the show for you? Such as Iroh is a war criminal that shouldn’t be glorified, Hamma is a racist depiction of natives, shipping Zuko with a water tribe member glorifies colonization, villainizing the Freedom Fighters also does this. I think I managed to get exposed to all these in less than a week and it’s draining me and I’m worried it’ll not let me enjoy the show because these are pretty heavy accusations.

(ok so I rambled a lot in this one, i stuck a tl;dr at the end there if you don’t wanna read the whole thing lmfao)

Honestly, I think the first step is to be able to take a step back from AtLA and realize two things. One: Avatar: the Last Airbender isn’t perfect, no matter how many people will claim it is the be all and end all for Quality Children’s Media. It isn’t, it has it’s faults, and there are aspects to it that simply haven’t aged as well as others, particularly over the last decade.

The second thing? That it’s ok. AtLA can be imperfect and also be an excellent show that did have a lot of quality writing and aspects, for all that it was, ultimately, a pan-asian fantasy epic helmed by two white men with a largely white (largely male) writing staff. There were going to be issues there regardless, and it is absolutely ok to look at this and think “yes, there are issues, the show isn’t perfect, and I still love it anyway.”

There’s a huge difference between acknowledging something has faults and flaws, even occasionally discussing them, and just writing the whole thing off as irredeemable trash because it has problematic elements.

Now, the corollary to that is, of course, that fandom isn’t always right. Particularly whatever latest hot takes are coming out of the depths of tumblr or twitter. Which isn’t to say you should necessarily just disregard everything that is being said, but it is possible for these discussions to have nuance and many of them.....just don’t.

(I’m beginning to think fandom is allergic.)

Calling Iroh a war criminal is just factually inaccurate. War is ugly and it is brutal and he laid siege to Ba Sing Se for nearly two years, but war crimes are an actual classification of behaviors which are inhuman and inexcusable even in times of war. Simply being a general in wartime is not a war crime, and while it’s not impossible that Iroh did things we may classify as war crimes, he did not do them on screen. (Incidentally, though, Azula did. That bit in The Chase where she pretended to surrender in order to get everyone else’s guard down, and then she tried to murder Iroh? That’s technically a war crime.)

People can, of course, talk about the fact that Iroh was a wartime general who was complicit in the Fire Nation’s attempt at expansion and probably oversaw a lot of death and destruction before his heel-face turn, and that because his redemption happened before the series and entirely off-screen, people talk about him as the wise old uncle who could never do anything wrong while ignoring that dark history--but that doesn’t mean he’s a bad character or even a horrible person. He changed, and his is a story that anyone can. Some may not believe his reasons for changing (his son’s death) sufficient, but that’s on them and you don’t have to share that opinion!

It’s also possible to talk about Hama’s and the Freedom Fighters’ (particularly Jet’s) treatments by the narrative, without throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I believe that Hama’s and Jet’s endings were remarkably lacking in empathy, but that doesn’t mean I think the whole story should be thrown out--it is, however, a show that ended twelve years ago, and in that time people in the fandom have created transformative works to fix that narrative. The original show is what it is, flaws and all, and it’s ok to enjoy it while also admitting that there were plot points and characters and even episodes that could have been handled better, or even just written better.

I mean, I’ve talked plenty about how I think the canon romances (except sukka) were terribly handled and ultimately harmful for both Zuko and Katara, and that I wish that if they’d had to be endgame, they’d been written better so at least my favorite characters wouldn’t be treated so badly in follow-up material. But I still love the show, because for all its flaws, there’s still something beautiful in the story that it told, and I can enjoy that while also turning to fandom to fix the things that I didn’t like in the original! And I obviously disagree that shipping zutara or zukka ‘glorifies colonization’, but the people who believe that aren’t gonna want to listen to what I have to say, and I have no obligation to listen to them, either! And neither do you.

TL;DR (i rambled so much i’m sorry): At the end of the day, that’s my advice to you--acknowledge that atla wasn’t perfect and even, in the perspective of over a decade of life passing since it ended, could or should have been handled better, and then turn to the corners of fandom you want to engage in. My happy place is the zutara tag, and the people I follow who have takes with which I agree and which I enjoy seeing. If the takes which have been exhausting you are coming from people you follow, maybe it’s time for an unfollowing spree! Try to find the common tags (because “I recognize this thing has flaws but I don’t want to focus on those, I’d rather focus on the things about it that make me happy” is a valid method of engaging with fandom, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise) that are used for those sorts of opinions (’atla critical’ or ‘anti atla’ for a start) and blacklist them, to cut down on the likelihood of seeing them without warning. Ask the people you still follow if they wouldn’t mind using a tag for salt or discourse if you enjoy most of their other content. For the love of the gods, stay away from twitter, it’s a trashpit and as allergic to nuance as fandom already is, that becomes a thousand times worse when you have a platform with such a tiny character limit. There’s literally no room for nuance on twitter.

I’m sorry that 99% of my advice boils down to ‘curate your experience better so you can stop seeing the sorts of posts that are upsetting you’, but that’s really all I can say, other than accepting that some flaws in the show will be dealbreakers for some people, and if they aren’t for you because you still love the source material, that’s ok.

#atla #atla fandom salt #salt for ts #fandoms as a whole are allergic to nuance and atla is worse about this than most i've been in #i completely understand the exhaustion #asked #Anonymous

[pochapal]

rank every year of the 2010s from best to worst i want some pochapal lore

[warning for discussion of my fucked up mental health and my myriad traumas. we’re really opening the pandora’s box here gang]

ok time for me to overshare on the internet again! super long post because i can’t shut up and you asked for it. anyway, by objective ranking: 

#1: 2012 - halcyon era, my personal peak. spent the whole year writing hunger games oc fics with my deviantart fanfiction besties whom i still think about all the time and always hope are having the best possible day. if you were here for this era understand i still hold you so closely and dearly in my heart <3. 

#2: 2013 - god i was such a good example of a human being back then. was the year my writing like actually took off and i had a healthy balance between creative stuff and a social life (said social life consisting of spending lunchtimes at school breaking into classrooms and discussing fandom shit with five other people. reading homestuck updates in the music room on one person’s really shaky mobile data...legendary). highlight of the year and maybe my life was in the april of 2013 when i got out of failing to submit a hard deadline essay by telling my english teacher i wrote a whole novel over the two week break and then producing said novel. god i wish i had that level of like. fucking confidence back me back then knew what i wanted and how to get it. 

#3: 2010 - the last year of childhood. i was 12 and played pokemon all the time with my friends and went places and had a moderately successful youtube channel and it didn’t matter that i was bullied so badly at school because i was basically high off life. summer of 2010 was so good specifically. i’d used to get the bus with a friend and go see movies and break into historical sites and get into normal childhood mayhem and maxed out my pokewalkers twice a month and i was buzzed because i had two (2) whole friendship groups to choose from and that was such a huge deal to me the terminal social outcast. it was so simple and carefree and even though everything and everyone involved in this era grew up to suck except for one specific person i kinda really miss it.

#4: 2018 - this was the first year i wasn’t depressed to the point of nonfunctioning. it was 20gayteen, i was on antidepressants, i was as close to thriving as i got at uni (going into town with people once a week, attending art and culture events, getting good grades across the board), i started to write for fun again, i got my cat whom i love dearly, i was exhibited in my uni’s city’s literature festival, GOD i actually nearly attended a pride event that year can you imagine. this year was basically my life’s second peak. miss getting the 8am train and daintily sipping on a cherry coke to keep me from passing out. wish this time could have lasted longer.

#5: 2019 - kinda absolute middle of the road year not for lack of anything happening but because the overwhelming amount of good and bad things cancelled each other out. so like there’s the fact that i was at the top of my uni game this year, was basically making the first steps into a professional writing career (covid i will never forgive you for killing all that dead </3), finally saved up enough to buy myself a gaming pc, and the summer after the homestuck epilogues, but equally 2019 was the start of the Pochapal Gender Fiasco which is by far the most horrible thing i am still currently undergoing and i burnt myself out mentally about halfway through the year (being stuck overnight in a hospital for a panic attack absolutely horrible horrible irredeemable) and then got like super death plague flu that i was sick with for three months (literally recovered less than a month before rona hit. god’s cruel karma.). so like...it kind of averaged out? the good shit was good but not as great as other years and the bad shit was awful but nowhere near as terrible as it could have been. gotta give a shoutout to 90% of my current mutual cohort for following me in 2019...omelette route gang make some noise !!

#6: 2014 - oof. this year essentially marked the start of a four year long downward mental health spiral because everything fell into awful alignment. i’d just turned 16, finished secondary school, had all my friends up and ditch me at once, was home alone for a whole summer, and was hit with Sudden Intense Body Image Issues that i couldn’t explain until uh. after very recent developments lmao. this one goes out to the me of july 2014 who did nothing but lay in bed and listen to the same two marina albums on a loop because fuck i’m attracted to men and also my facial and body hair are really starting to come in and if i think about this for too long i will literally kill myself because oh god i can’t handle getting older which is clearly and definitely the issue going on here. my brain fucking broke super hardcore and it’s a miracle that an overeating disorder was like the worst thing i walked away with. 

#7: 2015 - downward spiral year two!! i was so volatile this year it was such a mess. i was totally socially isolated after a brief stint of falling in with a group of people at the start of my first year of sixth form until january where in quick succession a) it turned out every single one of these people was friends with the person who sexually assaulted me whom i obviously had a lot of complicated feelings towards and b) baby’s first crush came out as bisexual but in the “women and also trans women” kind of way which tore me up so terribly in ways i couldn’t begin to understand. no words for the experience of seeing a girl kiss a boy and crying so hard at night you threw up because you could never be her no matter how much you wanted it. actually kinda get the sense what was going on there was bigger than just some crush lmao. then after that i was so mentally ill i basically attended school less than half the time and it was the only year in my life i failed my exams. i ended up having to resit my entire set of first year a level exams because jesus christ was i in such a bad way it was a miracle i even showed up to them. all i did was either have anxiety attacks or enter bedbound depressive slumps for weeks at a time. but it’s okay because it gets worse.

#8: 2016 - downward spiral act iii: the spiralling. prefacing this by saying that i actually had two whole good months (april - may) in that i was functioning enough to do my exams and finish school with decent grades. the rest was super extra mega terrible. my school attendance for year 13 dipped below 65% and literally the only thing that kept me from being kicked out was the fact that i was naturally smart at the subjects i took and also because the school would have a lot to answer for after letting me get to that state despite having a hefty file on how damaged i was. keep in mind every single part of this was fully untreated btw - i was just floundering around and letting it all fester. i spent three solid weeks going to school but locking myself in the bathroom all day every day and having mental health episodes then going home like nothing else happened only to continue the breakdown that night. then things got kicked into fucked up overdrive when i moved out to uni and was cut off from what little support structures i did have. it was so bad all i did was cry all the time and never went anywhere to the point where three separate sources recommended me to the wellbeing and crisis counselling service that i stopped going to after two sessions because i was fucked up in ways cbt techniques could not even touch. at least i tried to make an effort for the first two months of uni which like. good for me?

#9: 2017 - what lieth at the base of the spiral. helltrench year. i was at literal rock bottom. i stopped going to class, i didn’t hand in a single piece of work. i lied to my parents and would book trains each day only to go back to my student flat and sit there and contemplate suicide. like i would just slump on the floor in a catatonic state and vividly contemplate one of four or so ways i could end my own life. i only didn’t because i wanted to wait until the summer to collect my last student loan and transfer it to my parents as an apology for my death which obviously didn’t end up happening. honestly i can’t remember much of the first half of 2017 that’s how bad it was. i remember taking a gender studies class and the teacher made it Weird that i was the Only Male Student in the room and then she sent me a scolding email after i walked out halfway through a class and never returned. apparently i got into a lot of online discourse in this year but i don’t remember anything other than being put on a blocklist by the milkfic author over ace discourse which is funny if you have the context. mostly i just baited terfs and weirdo freaks to get them to say horrible things to me as what i guess amounts to some kind of digital self harm. anyway breaking point came in late august when i got kicked out of university and then nobody could ignore it any more so there was no choice left but for me to seek out help and recover enough to function which luckily i did. i really Do Not remember 2017. you could tell me anything about that year and i’d probably believe you.

#10: 2011 - extra circle of hell for this little fucked up gem of a year. on the surface it wasn’t actually that terrible, until the Summer 2011 Domino Effect Of Bad Shit. up until like may/june it was a pretty all right year! i was 13 and had a surprisingly successful youtube channel uploading pokemon soundfont remixes to an audience of i think ~350-400 subscribers at my peak? anyway then i got hit with the early summer triple combo of childhood friends moving away, cute and quirky sexual assault at the hands of a person in my friend group, and then having some Really Great and Super Appropriate interactions with adults on deviantart. like obviously there’s the actual ptsd-inducing event which totally disrupted and killed the person i was right up until that moment and reshaped every facet of my life for better or worse (there’s an alternate timeline where that didn’t happen and i got into electronic music and/or coding instead) but really it’s the events that followed in its wake which were kind of more fucked up. so like all of a sudden i was super aware of my body and me growing my hair out and being mistaken for a girl in class suddenly became this Less Innocent thing and i ended up spending hours overnight going to transgender questioning forums and looking up hrt timeline videos and having the wikipedia article on tracheal shaving saved because it was a life raft to me whose voice was imminently gonna deepen and i was simultaneously reeling with constant trauma flashbacks and the whole thing was so so fucked up. then i was on deviantart and i don’t remember exactly how but a small group of furry guys ten to fifteen years older than me started messaging me and encouraging and requesting me to produce nonsexual fetish stuff for them and talking to me about stuff like if i’d ever thought about growing up to be gay and i didn’t think anything of it for a long while because they called me a very talented writer and it felt so good to have someone be nice to me after being so alone and isolated for months on end. anyway the only reason i got out of that before it got bad was because they invited me to one of the big furry sites and i was weirded out because i thought it was a porn site and thinking about sexual stuff was a huge trauma trigger so i just ended up blocking them all and pretending like it didn’t happen. at the time half this shit didn’t bother me but in retrospect holy fuck 2011 was such a damaging year. to think if like three events didn’t happen i wouldn’t be the fucked up mess you see before you today.

god fuck this turned out super long but i’m not apologising because this was a therapeutic exercise for me and also constitutes as one of the biggest pochapal lore dumps of all time. come get your food or whatever.

#Anonymous #long post #read all of this if you have vested interest in knowing intimate details about my life or whatever

[williamsockner]

LGBT+ Identity in the Time of Mindless Self Indulgence

Mindless Self Indulgence isn’t an act that could have flourished at any other time. The emo/pop punk wave was gathering steam; hip hop was still a novelty one could distinguish themselves from the flock by cribbing. “Random” Invader Zim-style humor was in the decline, while “edgy” no-limits humor was skyrocketing. Nerds hadn’t become the dominant force they are today, but due to the internet and the rise in manga and anime sales in the United States, they were able to access nerdy content much more easily. Youtube was taking off, music piracy was booming, and reliance on both radio and local record-store gatekeepers was at a low for young music fans.

Perhaps most critically, our national understanding of politics and identity at the time, particularly LGBT+ identities, was in a different stage of development than it is today. “Punching up” vs. “punching down” was not a concept that most people considered in their comedy. “It’s just a joke” was more widely accepted as an excuse for transgressive entertainment than it is today. “I’m an equal opportunity hater” was a common refrain.

Early in their career, the band released multiple tracks where Jimmy Urine, a man who was certainly not black, used the n-word. The “Pantyshot” cassingle was a treasured possession among MSI fans, featuring an early song that supposedly lost them a record deal due to being about lusting over a 5 year-old. Little Jimmy Urine sold kisses for a dollar to fans after shows, including to the teenagers. As a whole, the band made punchlines of racial and sexual slurs, rape and child abuse, school shootings, prostitution, drug use, incest, and just about every other taboo under the sun.

The understanding was that none of it was real and that none of it had any real consequences. Calling someone a faggot didn’t matter if we were all in on the joke, that homophobia was stupid. Words were just words. The identity of the speaker didn’t matter so long as their ideology was clear. It was something of an inversion of the way we publicly navigate comedy now, in that their identity determines where on the ladder they are to punch up or down, and the contents of their ideology is of minimal consequence compared to the text of their words. The context of a joke is not a matter of what the audience believes, but of the many complexities of hierarchy that society as a whole believes.

“Who cares?” asks 2008. “It’s just words.”

“How could it not matter?” answers 2018. “Words create culture.”

So LGBT+ identity in the era of Mindless Self Indulgence.

Describing the difference between 2005 and 2018 to young queer people is a source of anxiety for me, because I feel like the old woman talking about how she walked uphill both ways to the library if she wanted to read a book. It’s difficult, however, to put in perspective how quickly the culture around LGBT+ identities has changed. As dangerous as it is for queer kids today, they have much freer access to information about their resources and history than we did, and far greater representation in all forms of media.

When I was a teenager, I was the first person openly LGBT at my school, and my only point of reference for LGBT identities were Rosie O’Donnell and Elton John. There was no “Born This Way” yet, no Halsey and Hayley Kiyoko and Ellen Page, no Troye Sivan and Adam Lambert and Frank Ocean, no Miley Cyrus, no Laverne Cox. There were no empowerment ballads.

Which was fine, because I didn’t want empowerment ballads anyway. I felt disgusting. In reckoning with my LGBT+ identity, I felt small, broken, repulsive, confused, discarded and doomed. I was sickened in my own skin and filled with self-loathing because of my sexual orientation. Sometimes I still am. When I was 15, I drew a map of my heart, and in between the “fields of sexual insecurity” and “possibly irreparable damage” I had written “guilt!” several times and underlined it.

“You’re beautiful” didn’t only feel false, it felt invalidating. I was fiercely defensive of my self-hatred. I was working so hard at it, spending so much time and energy convincing myself I deserved the beating I was giving myself. To this day the barriers I’ve put up against generic bromides persist, and songs like “Scars to Your Beautiful” or “Roar” make me cringe. Maybe someone gets something out of them, but I can only think of the teenagers like me who used that sort of sentiment as fuel for their own self-abuse. I remember once bursting into tears at a “Jesus Loves You” sticker because it served as proof that the whole world was playing a joke on me, telling me that someone so unlovable should have some hope.

It was impossible to internalize that queerness was not dirty, unnatural and loathsome. Any attempt to break that association was drown out by the rest of the messaging we were receiving and our own tried-and-true mental gymnastics. Reassurance could not reach us at the bottom of the well.

At the time, I was obsessed with Mindless Self Indulgence with the kind of all-consuming adoration that only teenagers can possess. I aped frontman Little Jimmy Urine’s fashion, writing slogans across my coats with white tape. “What Do They Know” and “Cocaine and Toupees” were my ringtones, much to my mother’s chagrin. I had catalogues of bootlegs, lovingly sorted and pressed to CD. Mindless Self Indulgence populated my artwork, both in classroom doodles and in art pieces for my portfolio that I labored on for weeks. They were the subject of my college application essay. I met my first love on an MSI forum (which I moderated) and lost a few romantic relationships over my inability to talk about anything else. I owned every shirt. When I was hired on at Barnes & Noble’s music section, I would nominate Frankenstein Girls Will Seem Strangely Sexy for the staff recommendation shelf every single week, and whenever it inevitably got recalled to the warehouse for lack of sales, I’d order it right back.

Sometimes my friends and I would go to the mall parking lot at night and blast Mindless Self Indulgence from my car, dancing around the empty lot with our striped stockings, fingerless gloves and Hot Topic trip pants.

This band kept me from killing myself.

“I’m filthy, disgusting, horrible, irredeemable,” we’d say. “People tell us we’re beautiful and we know they’re lying. I’m a freak.”

“Yeah, you’re fucking ugly,” the music said. “So what? So’s everything else. Have some fun with it.”

Despite the fact that Jimmy Urine has never publicly labeled himself with an LGBT identity, we young LGBT MSI fans claimed him as our own. We enshrined the article where he described being sexually attracted to anyone regardless of gender. We imitated and revered his gender fuckery onstage, the skirts, the pink suits and tutus, the eyeliner, his yelping falsetto leaping up from the masculine shouting, the way he danced. We pored over lyrics - that we transcribed ourselves in many cases, through multiple listens and endless debate - for those nuggets of same-sex attraction and gender ambiguity.

“I make a good girl but I make a terrible boy,” went one song. “These things in my pants that we’re all waiting for, I never really knew what that thing down there was used for,” went another. And the most sacred text of all was “Faggot”, off Frankenstein Girls Will Seem Strangely Sexy, the most beloved record of the vast majority of hardcore MSI fans.

“I played that shit straight / blowing suckas to the side hopin' I get laid / now everybody knows / no way in hell I can ever live it down”.

Shit was a revelation.

Kitty, the drummer of Mindless Self Indulgence, once said of the band’s LGBT fans that listening to MSI’s music was like vomiting: it hurts at the time, but then you feel better. You got it out. And the band always cultivated their relationship with their LGBT fans. Gay marriage was one of the few political issues they openly took a stance on, in a time when states like my own were amending constitutions to protect themselves from Massachusetts’ same-sex marriages.

Thus, we had a place where we felt simultaneously seen and valued by the band, and unseen amongst the chaos surrounding us. The irreverent humor of the band created a safe space where homosexuality could be disgusting, but so was everything else. There was no shame at an MSI concert. You were listening to a man famed for drinking his own urine sing about whipping his meat out, who cared if you liked to kiss girls? That’s old news. We’re all freaks down here at the bottom of the well.

I’m 28 now, and I don’t know if the kids these days have an equivalent band. I don’t know if there’s a market for it anymore; I’m sure there will always be queer kids who have internalized the awful message that they are inherently unlovable, but I’m not sure if they can’t find more accessible and more inherently positive panaceas. I see mutations of the same style of humor in Willam from RuPaul’s Drag Race and in some of the undercurrents of Tumblr’s teen humor. “We’re goblins, trash, garbage babies.”

“Yeah,” my inner child says. “I fucking feel that.”

The paradigm of humor has changed since 2008, at least in my circles, and the reasons for that are manifold, political, social, capitalistic. In many ways, it’s been a good thing: bigotry can be exposed rather than cloaked in excuses. A basic understanding of social inequality is presumed of most audiences. People are responsible for the impact of their words, not the intent. “Equal opportunity hater” is seem for what it is: intellectually lazy and blinkered, the refuge of white guys who don’t want to own up to the fact that some jokes aren’t funny.

But I’ll always have a place in my heart for comedy that meets people where they’re at. Where we’re at isn’t always beautiful or acceptable or healthy, but sometimes it’s the place where we need the laugh most.

#music #personal #lgbt stuff #humor #mindless self indulgence #jimmy urine #sorry guys i can't figure out how to text break

[ginmo]

I’ve been sure since I read AFFC/ADWD that Jaime’s getting one of the better endings because House Lannister isn’t gonna be wiped out and both Cersei and Tyrion are now Too Dark To Live. But I’ve seen a lot of people rewatching bring up that awful sept fuck up and consensus is that it renders him irredeemable. The show is gonna have to WORK to avoid a million thinkpieces when he gets both power and a family. I’m not convinced they’ll pull it off.

That scene was gross af, but we’ve since learned that the intent of the scene was not for it to be rape. We also know that canon Jaime is not a rapist. So if the narrative intent was for it to NOT be rape (and ended up being just a really bad fuck up from writers, director, post production) then we can’t blame the non-rapist character for the shitty product. What’s gross is they didn’t realize they filmed a rape scene, so people need to shift their blame from Jaime to the filmmakers. If people are really stuck on Jaime being a rapist even though in canon he isn’t and wasn’t even meant to be on the show, then they’re going to really hate the outcome of this story, because there won’t be anything to revisit Jaime being a rapist in the narrative (such as redemption for that) because he isn’t supposed to be. This is why most of fandom acknowledges that scene was an oops from the production and don’t use it to judge the character.

In other words, since the show was doing a direct adaptation of a consensual canon sex scene from the books, thinking their adaption was also a consensual sex scene, then the narrative itself doesn’t need to, and will not, do anything to have Jaime redeem himself for something he didn’t do, but that the filmmakers stupidly did.

My friend Koops went off on this topic a while back, so I’m going to add a read more where I quote her posts. It’s way more than you asked about, and I already answered the question, but I just really love her rant over the sex scene lol. So for those who want cast, crew, and GRRM quotes, discussion of that D&D video people love to refer to, and a total take down of basically why using that scene against Jaime is completely moronic then here it is: 

In response to this D&D video:

I don’t think this video disproves anything. The girl is calling it “rape” but they are not once owning up to it. They’re calling it “this” and insisting that’s something Jaime would do in that moment, but it feels to me like what they were trying to do is avoid getting into a debate about whether it’s rape or not, because they know that can get them into all kinds of trouble. ETA: Also, notice how David rolls his eyes towards the end and the person who captioned the video interpreted it as him rolling his eyes at the girl who asked the question. I don’t think he is at all, that was 5 minutes earlier, talk about a delayed reaction. I think he’s rolling his eyes at KIT stepping in just as David had finished answering with that stupid comment calling it rape and saying how great it is that the show has rape scenes, when David had been so careful in avoiding using that word all along in order not to get into an argument. And they’re emphasizing how hard this was for Lena and so on (despite, IIRC, her always saying it wasn’t intended as rape), just to earn feminist points of “we know how tough this is for women, look at how distraught we all were filming it”.If that had been their intention, they would have followed up on it in subsequent scenes/interactions, which is something the show does with rape scenes (see Sansa). Yet it was never mentioned again and it’s like it never happened. I think D&D sometimes have a bit of a rape-style fetish when it comes to sex scenes because it makes them come across as “edgy”. See the way they wrote the broken tower sex scene in the original pilot script or the way they changed Dany and Drogo’s wedding night. But they refuse to admit it and hide behind nonsense like “this is something the character would do”. They want to see how far they can push it, basically.Even if we want to say they’re admitting to have it intended as rape, saying this is something Jaime would do is absolutely ridiculous since not only he saved Brienne from rape but in the books he even has one of his men executed for TRYING to rape Pia. It’s nothing to do about having a linear redemption arc or not, it’s about WHAT kind of “bad things” the character does and whether it’s consistent with its characterization or not. Rape, for Jaime, is absolutely NOT. Equating that scene to Jaime pushing Bran out of a window is completely insane since the two things are dramatically different in motivation and intention and while Jaime is a complex guy that can do horrible things for his family and for Cersei, he doesn’t do them out of his own selfishness, especially when it comes to sex when he even refuses women throwing himself at him. Not to mention the entire point of Jaime’s “bad deed(s)” is that he has to own up to them and deal with them and their consequences. If you just ignore that sept scene ever happened and never deal with it again then you either think it isn’t a big deal, or it wasn’t a bad deed in the first place. Otherwise it adds absolutely nothing to the character’s arc. It’s like they think that a “complex/not good guy” engages into all sorts of “bad behaviour” just by virtue of being complex/not good, which actually does precisely what they’re claiming they don’t want to do; i.e. making a clear cut distinction between good and bad guys, since they’re equating all possible bad actions as being equal and the same and stemming from the same psychological motivations, which is ridiculous. The bottom line to me always comes to the fact that, unlike most stuff post S5, we have the scene in the books, in written format, and we KNOW it’s not meant to be rape. It’s meant to be the kind of gross, rough, angry sex those two have. To change the intention of the scene just because you feel “that’s something the character would do”, to me is not really caring about really understanding the character’s intentions in the first place, since you have source material and an author you can check with. They simply didn’t care in order to get HBO points.

And for some quotes 

I find the idea that we are meant to read into Cersei’s actions after the sept encounter in the books as indicative of a woman who experienced rape, or that George did not come out to straight up say the words “I did not write it as rape” (he would never throw D&D under the bus that way, come on) as evidence that it was indeed intended to be rape all along in the books, even more of twisting oneself into a pretzel than trying to explain away the scene in the show as not rape. Neither D&D nor George have ever shied away from calling rape out for what it is in the show or the books. Why would they suddenly tiptoe around this one particular scene? I think it’s because the issue here is much more nuanced than just filming a rape scene; it’s about the grey lines of consent and it’s about changing something from the books to make it look much worse than it originally was intended to be, for a character they know it will be regarded as very controversial/OOC, which raises all sorts of uncomfortable questions about how far D&D are willing to go for shock value. This is what GRRM has to say on the issue (bolded and underlined for emphasis):

“I think the “butterfly effect” that I have spoken of so often was at work here. In the novels, Jaime is not present at Joffrey’s death, and indeed, Cersei has been fearful that he is dead himself, that she has lost both the son and the father/ lover/ brother. And then suddenly Jaime is there before her. Maimed and changed, but Jaime nonetheless. Though the time and place is wildly inappropriate and Cersei is fearful of discovery, she is as hungry for him as he is for her.The whole dynamic is different in the show, where Jaime has been back for weeks at the least, maybe longer, and he and Cersei have been in each other’s company on numerous occasions, often quarreling.The setting is the same, but neither character is in the same place as in the books, which may be why Dan & David played the sept out differently. But that’s just my surmise; we never discussed this scene, to the best of my recollection.Also, I was writing the scene from Jaime’s POV, so the reader is inside his head, hearing his thoughts. On the TV show, the camera is necessarily external. You don’t know what anyone is thinking or feeling, just what they are saying and doing. If the show had retained some of Cersei’s dialogue from the books, it might have left a somewhat different impression — but that dialogue was very much shaped by the circumstances of the books, delivered by a woman who is seeing her lover again for the first time after a long while apart during which she feared he was dead. I am not sure it would have worked with the new timeline.”

Nothing whatsoever of what GRRM is saying above in explaining how he wrote their sept encounter even remotely hints at the fact that he intended consent to be even a question in his original work. He is not pointing out that he is writing from Jaime’s POV to build a contrast with Cersei’s, he is pointing out that he is writing from Jaime’s POV to build a contrast between the books medium and the camera medium and what each does or does not allow. And he goes further by saying that Cersei’s dialogue from the books might have helped giving a different impression of the scene: i.e. that it was NOT rape. What is happening is George trying to distance himself from D&D’s choice while at the same time being a professional and not bashing their botched adaptation of his work, by explaining why perhaps they might have decided to approach it differently from the way HE wrote the original scene and how maybe some of his material might not have fit because of the timeline.We actually have Cersei’s own POV later in the books, where she reminisces about tons of events from her close and distant past, and not once does she ever think back upon that incident in the sept in a way so as to indicate it was in any way a “traumatic” experience for her, while she does plenty of reflecting back upon her unpleasant sexual experiences with Robert, for example. Meanwhile, Cersei being disgusted with Jaime’s loss of his hand, or the way his looks are changing and his personality is changing, is very much a plot point that she comes back to over and over. “How could I have ever loved such a wretched creature?”, or getting up naked from a bathtub in front of Jaime thinking he still wants her and even taunting him with “Pining what you lost?” and then getting annoyed that Jaime pretty much tells her she’s a fool for thinking that? Hardly dynamics one has with their rapist. And also GRRM also says: 

The scene was always intended to be disturbing, but I do regret if it has disturbed people for the wrong reasons.

“It has disturbed people FOR THE WRONG REASONS”, means that he wanted that scene to cause controversy because of how damn gross it all is, them having sex next to the corpse of their incestuous son, not because there was an issue of consent. So, no. The book scene was not intended to have consent be a central point, let alone rape. Yes, something happened in the adaptation to make it come across as significantly more forced, in a way that can very rightfully be interpreted as rape, while at the same time not being intended to be rape for plot point’s sake. But, when it comes to the filming of that scene, this is what the director had to say:

Of course Lena and Nikolaj laughed every time I would say, “You grab her by the hair, and Jack is right there,” or “You come around this way and Jack is right there.“ 

Yeah. Lena was SO distraught and it was so difficult for her to film that “rape” scene. They was totally totally totally directed to play it as such, and were so serious and affected by it. Give me a break, David. And also:

The consensual part of it was that she wraps her legs around him, and she’s holding on to the table, clearly not to escape but to get some grounding in what’s going on. And also, the other thing that I think is clear before they hit the ground is she starts to make out with him. The big things to us that were so important, and that hopefully were not missed, is that before he rips her undergarment, she’s way into kissing him back. She’s kissing him aplenty.

So there’s two possibilities here: either D&D intended it as rape from the start, but didn’t give clear instructions to the director, and, in turn, Nik and Lena, so that they didn’t set out to shoot it the way D&D intended, or nobody intended it as rape but something was messed up in the editing process (apparently after this scene, they made some changes to the editing process? Not sure how reliable this info is, but maybe someone can dig it out, if they remember). Regardless, what they ended up with is a scene that has some serious, serious issues of consent, and the comments afterwards, trying to downplay the consent in favour of highlighting the context or the way Cersei did give non-verbal consent, only ended up stirring more criticism of the director and actors being rape apologists. So, it doesn’t surprise me if they’ve just given up trying to defend their original intentions, since it only made things worse (and rightfully so), in favour of trying to explain it away the way GRRM did; by trying to make up explanations that the narrative required it and it made sense to be filmed that way.So, to conclude and link everything back to the reason why we are debating this (i.e. “NCW is a misogynist for disliking Dany when Jaime is a rapist and he excuses him”), while I can totally sympathize with a show-only person who watches that scene and sees it as rape, I also think this particular scene is not something we can use in the discourse about Jaime’s character and arc, given that not only there are huge question marks about what was intended with that scene in the first place, not only it is forgotten like it never happened to the point that you could skip it and nothing would change, but we know for a fact that it was NOT what was intended in the original source material by the original author. The one who decides where the characters’ arcs are supposed to go. You cannot say “it doesn’t make sense that Jaime does X and Y in his endgame because he’s a rapist” when that endgame is being decided by someone who never wrote Jaime as a rapist in the first place. All you can say is that D&D messed up big time with that scene because it literally does not line up or fit with anything else that is going on at the time or in the past or in the future when it comes to Jaime. 

- Koops (jaimetheexplorer)

#. #.. #... #.... #..... #sept sex #rape

[browniesnivy]

My Long Essay on Bonz (+his relationship with Bandit Keith and treatment by the author)

This is going to seem really random, but I’ve been thinking a lot about Bonz and Bandit Keith lately. More specifically, I’ve been thinking about how fucked up their relationship is.

Bonz doesn’t have any canon metrics relating to age or height, but information from both the Japanese and American voice actors state that he is somewhere in between the age of 13 and 15 and is about 3′0 tall (or 91 cm) in height. The source I found also states that he “looks 40″ and I don’t know which voice actor said that and I want to call bullcrap, but I suppose it is information nonetheless. We also know from Duel Links that people are terrified of him based solely on his ghastly appearance, as seen when he tries to return Bella’s lost card and she runs away from him because she mistakes him for a genuine ghost. If I recall correctly, Joey made a similar mistake at the beginning of their graveyard duel. Additionally, when Bonz appears in the Duel World for the first time he is very nervous at the sight of all the duelists. This social anxiousness makes a lot of sense considering nobody is willing to give the poor boy a chance, even mistaking him for something unhuman, on what appears to be a regular basis. Even though he has incorporated his ghoulish physique into his interests and personality, it doesn’t seem to be something he can control as he gets very upset when Bella and Joey gang up on him in Duel Links based solely on how spooky he looks and infer thusly that he must be up to no good. This event even makes Bonz consider leaving the Duel World for good to save everyone (including himself) the grief of dealing with his appearance. What I’m trying to say is that Bonz has every reason in the world to be shy and have low self confidence. 

This is when Bandit Keith comes into the picture. Bonz, alongside Sid and Zygor, are accepted into Duelist Kingdom based on their dueling prowess, but nonetheless it seems their confidence is lacking as they are quick to accept Bandit Keith’s offer to take the younger duelists under his wing. Keith is a highly seeded duelist, so of course the three jump on the opportunity to learn a thing or two from him. Now let’s walk in Bonz’s shoes for a moment. Nobody has ever even given this kid the time of day, and suddenly a respected older man sees something in him and offers to help him finally do something spectacular. This could be the big break he’s been looking for: he could finally accomplish something despite his appearance and show the whole world his own worth. It isn’t surprising that Bonz agrees to this arrangement. Additionally, Bonz refers to Bandit Keith as “aniki” or “older brother” in the Japanese version. Keep in mind that this is the same title that Syrus uses to refer to Jaden in Yu-Gi-Oh! GX. Bonz puts Keith up on a pedestal and expects him to take care of him.

 As you all know, that doesn’t happen. Bandit Keith only intends to use his understudies as pawns and rob them of their star chips, and even before he does that he takes every opportunity to yell at and boss around the younger trio. The way Keith treats these three is obviously horrible, but the fact that they are at the same time to scared of his wrath and naively hopeful of getting their reward makes it all the more so. Through the entirety of Joey and Bonz’s graveyard duel, Keith makes sure Bonz knows he can’t make a single decent move on his own and that the only way for the boy to win is by taking his orders without question. He forces him to comply and doesn’t even take responsibility when the very moves he ordered fail, instead blaming Bonz for screwing up despite him following instructions to a tee. He beats down this poor child and makes him feel worthless so he can get his way, and when his plans ultimately fails and Bonz is defeated he wastes no time making sure he can still squeeze some usefulness out of him. Along with Sid and Zygor, Keith beats up and takes the Star Chips of the people he promised to help before entering the tournament finals himself. He leaves them alone in the forest with no help, throwing the chips in the air tauntingly while laughing at their ignorance. Bandit Keith took advantage of a weird-looking young boy with low self-esteem and used a message of hopefulness and his older and more experienced status to manipulate the kid for his own personal gain. 

After Duelist Kingdom, the dejected trio strike it out on their own. Unlike Bandit Keith, Sid and Zygor are older people who seem to actually have respect for Bonz’s above-average dueling ability. The three use some sneaky tactic to snatch themselves some locator cards, which is of course not honorable, but I can’t say I fault them to much. After all, Bonz at least is just a kid and their last experience with someone being successful involved fear-tactics and trickery, so I’d say if anything this is Bandit Keith’s lingering bad influence. Whatever the case, they certainly don’t deserve the treatment they get from Bakura when he comes slinking around their base of operations. Bakura challenges Bonz to a winner takes all duel, which Bonz accepts. In a terrifying shadow game, Bonz and his companions get their mortal souls sent to literal Hell (or the Shadow Realm depending on who you ask) after they lose to the Spirit of the Ring, and that’s the last we ever see of them in the show.

Up until the release of Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Links, I’m pretty sure a fair number of the fanbase had presumed the trio dead, which I believe was the impression you were supposed to get before the change of plans nearly twenty years later. With this in mind, think of how fucked up this narrative would have been. The story of a child who gets lied to by a person in a position of authority before losing everything and then disappearing without a trace, doomed to wander the eternal depths of the underworld for basically no reason... just thinking about it is seriously bumming me out and is honestly burning my biscuits a bit. Sometimes I think Kazuki Takahashi just really hated kids, considering how many children are either treated as irredeemable pieces of shit despite being perfect young candidates for a life lesson and redemption arc like Weevil or are killed of and/or tortured for a few childlike mistakes like Bonz or Imori. When you look at a lot of Yugi’s classmates who are only seen in the manga, we see a list of frankly disgusting people who try to assault women and bully the weak and set people on fire. The list of horrible things that Yugi’s classmates have done goes on and on, and their mere existence proves to me that Kazuki Takahashi showed a severe lack of understanding or empathy for children. I’m not at all saying that those characters I just mentioned were worthy of redemption, I’m merely stating that the fact he would include characters like that who are so young in age is telling to the author’s character in my opinion. In relation to Bonz’s character, I feel like Takahashi’s treatment of the character was frankly disgraceful. Takahashi has a tendency to make character’s slimy looking and use that as an excuse to think bad things about them, so I doubt any nuance was spent on his characterization aside from being a whipped bitch for Keith to walk all over and a sneaky gremlin for Bakura to murder. It makes my blood boil a bit to be honest. 

Thank Ra for Duel Links, which allows Bonz the opportunity to get revenge on Bandit Keith as well as providing us with some more personality for the boy. He might still be scared of Yami Bakura (and rightfully so), but he’s learning to stand up for himself and preparing to show the world all he’s got! This ending makes me a lot happier then the frankly depressing one we received in canon, and it’s inclusion makes me equal parts warm and fuzzy inside and incredibly relieved. I’m glad Takahashi’s badly treated character was given an opportunity to be explored when put in the hands of the right people. 

I don’t really know what I’m trying to say by bringing all this up, but it’s been taking a toll on my mind for days now and I just really had to get it all off my chest. Bonz is such an underrated character, which really sucks because he has an such interesting dilemma and has so much room to grow as a character if he was featured in more fan-works. Duel Links shows us that he’s very well-intentioned, as shown when he tries to return Bella’s card and even throws in one of his favorite monsters for seemingly no reason other then being nice, while at the same time being really shy and doubtful of himself. Despite that, he is trying to build his confidence by toppling some old enemies, and I feel like that message is both universal and inspiring. Let’s show this boy a little bit more love!

In conclusion, Bonz is a good boy and Bandit Keith and Kazuki Takahashi are dicks.

#this started off as an attack on bandit keith but it turned into an attack on the author lol #I mean seriously how many children will these men hurt because of their mentality?! #fuck bandit keith man #maybe I shouldn't have included my thoughts on KTs treatment of child characters because it distracts from the point #but it thought it was relevant! #bonz is so young and he gets treated so badly! #poor baby ;-; #his character growth in duel links is actually one of my favorite parts of the game #im glad he got some attention #god this took me over and hour to write #its probably a sloppy disorganized mess x-x #whatever #I hope that was at least a little bit stimulating to you dear reader #I hope you leave this essay with an enlarged appreciation for bonz :) #yugioh rant #yugioh essay #bonz #bandit keith #kazuki takahashi bashing

[x---an--othered--another---x]

this is about the first woman that broke me.

CW // parental abuse, neglect, family trauma, conversion therapy, body dysmorphia, christianity

Dear "Mom".....

This is everything I want to tell you, and too terrified to speak.

I know you will never understand.

You and Dad always used to speak about how my arrival to the world was with purpose. Unlike my older brother, I was the baby that was planned, because he always wanted a little girl. Unfortunately, now, we understand why. But we aren't here to speak about him -- not yet, anyway.

In childhood, I remember my anxious attachment with you. When out of my sight, it was not unusual for me to cry or scream for you. I found life without you to be vile and fearful. I was also terrified that you would never come back to me.

I loved you so deeply. I needed you even more. I always wanted my mom. I felt emotionally empty and confused without her... perhaps, to a point that could be considered "abnormal". I don't know how it started. I just felt it, and too such an overwhelming capacity, even for a small child. Mama's boy in the making.

Sometimes -- many times, actually -- you did leave me quite perplexed, to say the absolute least. When in good spirits, you were perfect; a loving, nurturing, kind, and thoughtful existence, capable of soothing and comforting my deepest woe or worry. It was not unlike you to occasionally spoil me, be it with gifts, snacks, quality time, or simply your positive attention. Your laughter could put a soft smile on my face, and, beside of you, I felt not only loved and cared for, but also, whole. It was a fullness I could never achieve through anything or anyone else. I understood this early in life.

In retrospection, it is phases like this that make me ashamed of my burning resentment for you.

Because, what the rest never knew, is that this was never you, all the time. I firmly believe it is who you wanted to be, and even who you still hope to be -- maybe even believe that you already are. Perhaps, you tried your best.

But, I cannot forget this.

There is a special kind of self-blame that comes with looking into the same eyes that once bore an adoring gaze for you, and, suddenly, watching them fill with what could only be described as unbridled hatred and loathing in your anxious direction. To be sharing a warm embrace for one moment, to finding it impossible to look up at that twisted, angry expression so soon after. Regardless of what you intended, I need you to know that I was legitimately scared of you, in such moments. If looks could kill, I would have been dead by age 10.

Of course, this is much more than just an uncomfortable stare that I am so disturbed by when I reflect upon the past we shared. Whether you will ever accept this or not is irrelevant, because, in the end, this is the truth: You physically assaulted me, and more than once. When you caught me telling my friends about this, you gaslighted me into believing that it was 110% my fault, that I triggered your explosive rage and therefore deserved this. If not this specific approach, you would only convince me that I was grossly exaggerating, or that it never even happened to begin with. If you happened to ever be reading this, I am positive you would do it, again.

Let's get specific, lest you then make the bold claim that I am engaging in an infamous "fake accusation" -- the abuser's favorite go-to line. I first remember an instance when I was 12: I got into the car after school with sharpie markings on my arms, because my friends wanted to playfully draw on me, and I told them they could do so. I had no reason to suspect that this would be some horribly upsetting event in your eyes; you had never even mentioned to me that this kind of thing was a problem, at all.

Your response? You took me to the nearest grocery store parking lot, parked as far away from the doors and other cars as possible, and proceeded to punch me. Granted, it was my thigh, sometimes my arm, but it was with as much force as you could muster in that moment, and you did it repeatedly. I was in legitimate shock, and, for one of the first times in regards to you, I flinched. I cowered. I cried, and I asked you to stop. You did, only to continue to verbally tear into me. By this point, I was too stressed out being in a car with you to even hear what you were saying to me.

You never apologized for this.

While this was not the first time you had taken out your tantrum on me -- physically or emotionally -- I can confidently say that this was the day I knew I could never trust you. From this day forward, my every move and word would be calculated. I would learn to hide everything from you, which, eventually, led to hiding everything from everyone I ever knew.

You laugh when you tell us the story of how I would "vomit on command" when you would spank me as a toddler. I obviously do not remember this, as I was between two and four years old, at the time. I thank whatever deity helped me forget this, because I have since digested how actually fucked up what you always described really is.

"You would get into trouble, and I would spank you, and you started puking to make me stop," you would say with a giggle and a smile. "So I got to where I would just hold you over the porch when I did, so you would puke over the ledge instead of the floor."

Mom, do you understand that what you were punishing with such callous ferocity was my trauma response to your husband grooming and molesting me?

Nevermind the "where were you when it happened" speech -- why were you beating the shit out of me when I showed that behavior (which, by the way, is concerning as shit)? Why were you beating the shit out of me AT ALL?

And why, even now, do you tell the story with such a sadistic giddiness about you?

Moving on. I can harp forever on the chronic, neverending shame, despair, and animalistic fear that came with the fanatic Southern Baptist family dynamic -- or, those jarring, unexpected alternations in your ability to provide me with healthy love and emotional substance. However, the abuse really kicked up a notch once I reached puberty, which, I was unfortunately old enough to internalize, and therefore remember later into my adult life.

I couldn't count how many times you body-shamed me. Called me ugly, made "jokes" about my chest and ass, jumped on me the second my leg hair became visible to you. I remember those acne pills you insisted I start taking, because you were so worried that I would get scars all over my face from the intense breakouts. You loved the idea of me wearing make-up, but if I wore it my way over yours, then I just looked "evil" and "scary". You always hated how much I hated skirts and dresses.

It was as if my own body did not belong to me. Nothing I wanted to do with it was ever good enough for you. I was not allowed the control over my self-expression, my appearance, my whole vessel. You only wanted it to be yours to control and manipulate. Why?

And let's not forget your obsession with my hair. Good fucking god, Mom, your preoccupation with my beauty (of lack thereof) was so not fucking normal. I remember all the times you forced me to have my long hair cut into a dumb bob, because "it's not like you're gonna style it, anyway, what does it matter?" I remember sobbing the first time, and you did not emote in response, whatsoever. Or when I did not take a shower on Christmas Eve night, and you got mad at me because my hair was "too greasy". What was the response to that one? Oh, right. You "accidentally" caught my ear in the flat iron, after sloppily and angrily clamping the hair you were attempting to straighten for me.

On Christmas morning. I was seriously mortified. Inconsolable.

I became desensitized to my looks quite quickly, as I had internalized and accepted the fact that you so kindly graced me with. It became a finalized concept to me that I was irredeemably disgusting to look at and would never be called beautiful by anyone in my life. As true to myself as the grass was green. You made sure I knew this. My friends were always a threat to both of you for a reason. God help you should I tell them. God help you should I experience genuine love from another person.

As if this weren't enough, fast forward to the days I began to realize my queerness. I came out to the first person, and I felt nothing but freedom and euphoria. I became addicted and kept on telling others. I wanted to be known, to be seen, as me.

Living in a small town, it, of course, did not take long for the pastor and his wife to receive notice that their child was openly coming out of the closet to everyone but them.

Cue the fuckin' war drums, here, because I fear that words will simply never do.

When you stole my phone to rummage through my texts, you saw that I had also come out to my aunt -- the only family member I could count on to be supportive, at that time. You responded to her with a short text:

"Never talk to [000] again."

And she never did.

She died, two years later.

She, too, never got to know me. It was out of my control. I will never forgive you for this, and I mean that, genuinely.

In those two years, I covertly dated behind your back. Despite that you had taken my only source of external contact -- just in time for summer break -- and made extreme attempts to isolate me so that only direct family could access me... we stayed together. It was so very strained, but all I wanted was love. In the midst of "voluntary" conversion therapy, I needed it more than anything. I could quite literally have died without it.

My grades naturally dropped through these months of pretending I could be cured of my diseased attraction, which was met with force, as usual. Anything but an A, or a high B on the report card, and I may as well have shot someone in the streets. By now, it did not matter, to me. I was so fucking dead inside, by now. You broke me. At this point, you could have gutted me with a knife, and I would have barely reacted. I felt like nothing, so much so that I became no one, at all.

But hey. At least ya'll felt better.

Only, you didn't. The divorce came mere months following these events. I had never been so happy to see a relationship fail in my life. I should have been sad, but I knew this would be my ticket back into a normal life. You would finally fuck off, and I could just be a human being with no judge or critic looming over me every waking moment of my life. Maybe now, finally, I could live a life that wasn't graded. I didn't have to be godly -- perfect -- anymore.

You never knew this, but I will say, the way I became aware of this news was a lot less exciting. Through another restless night, I snuck to the kitchen for a snack. Your bedroom door was closed. The light remained beneath the doorway. You were fighting. Unfortunately, it was not that uncommon for you two to bicker, so I, for the most part, tuned it all out.

That's when the punching started. Your voices went momentarily silent, as if confused or stolen. Only the muffled, gutteral growls on occasion emitted from behind that closed door, between was sounded like the intentional, rage-induced smacking of skin.

I could only use my imagination.

In my mind, I immediately jumped to the conclusion that our father was beating the shit out of you. Cue dissociation. The only emotion left inside of me was anger, similarly.

I grabbed a knife. I had no idea what I wanted to do about this, but I wanted to be ready, just in case. And I sat outside that door, and listened to this physical exchange intently, clutching my kitchen knife by the handle, ready to do... whatever.

It was after I heard his annoyed pleading of "stop, stop it" and your hissing "who is she" that I finally had an accurate picture in my mind of what was happening just a few feet behind me.

I went to my room. I tried to call my brother, but he was asleep, as this was all going on at around 3AM. I called my best friend, who had to also go shortly into the call. I laid in my bed, alone and afraid to a point of triggered regression. I slept with the knife under my pillow, just in case.

I pretended not to hear it, the next morning. I never told you. I had no idea what to think or feel, and I did not want you to influence those things for me. Long story short, you both were over, and, honestly, I was celebrating that shit. Even as you mourned it for months on end. I was burnt out of sympathy. I only wanted to be free.

Things slowly improved once dad was removed from the household, but, by then, it was far too late. I could sense you attempting to connect with me, to withhold your emotional reactions toward me, to engage with me and approach me with adult kindness. I entertained your efforts for a while under the guise that I may finally experience a loving, motherly relationship. I have since discovered that there are still so many things etched in this old stone that no act of kindness will ever undo, that I cannot move on from, because you still never apologized, or even acknowledged that you were anything below a great mother whatsoever. In all fairness, would it even matter to me if you did, anymore?

This does not even cover all of those miseries passed down from you to me. Between trashing my drawings because they weren't holy enough for you, assuming me stupid when I couldn't pass math with flying colors, always reassuring me that my friends would never fully love me, and ESPECIALLY not like you did, and so much more..... this relationship was doomed from the start.

And I am tired of blaming myself for not wanting to see you, anymore.

Every time I speak with you, I feel gutted and anxious. The persistent sense of powerlessness and insignificance comes back full force, as if no amount of years has separated me from your dysregulated emotions, whatsoever. When I know we have to engage, I am assaulted with cluster migraines, and my mouth is sewn shut. I take on another person around you, even now, because I have no reason not to assume that you are no longer capable of that kind of mistreatment.

Afterall, it still does not exist to you, does it?

Nobody saw it. I was too small to be my own advocate. No family or church members would ever believe me. Even if they did, they would tell you. You even successfully convinced me, for so many years, that I am the one being to hard on YOU for these things.

Mom. You were the god damn adult.

It is not up to a child to control you emotions for you.

The saddest part of all of this, is that... I am still anxiously attached.

Your favorite way to punish me as a kid was the silent treatment. Sometimes, it would go on for days. In those periods of time, I really thought you would never love me or speak to me, again. I blame this for my inability to cope with separation from those I love even still.

As fucked as you may be, that space is still a vacancy. The absence still hurts. The abandonment feels so unbelievably eternal.

I am sure you sense my distance. I am absolutely breadcrumbing you; I admit it. I will respond to your daily texts maybe once or twice a week, because it is all that I can handle, anymore. It is arguable whether or not even that is not setting me back. In all honesty, I want to be rid of you, entirely.

But... that's retaliation, isn't it?

I guess I never learned how to do that.

Or, maybe, I am still so fucking scared of you.

Whatever it may be, I know in my core that I am better off without you. But, how do I communicate this to you? How do I shamelessly become the thing I hated so much? How do I do that to someone? How do I abandon another person knowing just how much it hurts to be on that other side?

And why am I the only one who seems to ask themselves this question, here?

I cannot keep dismissing these pains. They not only haunt me in a way that feels so self-conjured, but they pave the path for me to enable similar behaviors within myself, to fall in love with that same violent smile in another person.

To normalize the abuse.

I simply will not do this.

Dear "Mom".....

While unquestionably the better parent, you are not a good one, yourself. I long for a day where I can comfortably address this with you. I fear that this is only a product of my waking dream.

I need to wake up.

Whether or not I ever say goodbye in the flesh, I have far beyond said it in my heart and mind.

Please. Give a shit.

Beyond surface level.

For once.

Sincerely,

000

P.S. You never wanted a little girl. You only wanted a pet. Accept that.

#letters i never sent #letters i’ll never send #dear you #dear mom #complex ptsd #surviving narcissism #family troubles #i hate you #i love you #i need space #i miss you #let me grow #this was your fault