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prettynalilmagic · 4 months

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ℙ𝕚𝕔𝕜 𝕒 ℂ𝕒𝕣𝕕: 𝕊𝕙𝕒𝕕𝕠𝕨 𝕎𝕠𝕣𝕜

I believe me and everyone else should be focused on shadow work, because it's a new year and I know shadow work doesn't sound fun but in my opinion its more fulfilling than love readings because there's already so much of those on any tarot platform/community.

Pick a Pile from 1-2-3-4

Pile one

Bride in a Cage

With the deck I use for the overall tone of the reading an oracle deck by Laura Sava and its overall meant is to be used for shadow work. And each card has a moon phase attached to each card, the phase attached to your card is Denial. So that's the first thing I noted and the card itself is based on how situation and environment being fulfilled by materials that wont in the long run fix or solve any issues. You can buy certain items that will fill something that is unpleasant till you die and still be unsatisfied with where you are in life. It's a cycle, there's something deep down you don't want to accept weather you know it or not, sometimes we have issues that we cannot see, and that's the sole purpose of therapy and shadow work. There's no shame here, everyone at some point uses something to avoid reality that we find unsatisfying. Now I pulled some more cards from a different deck to support and get more information on what spirt really wants to call out. And overall, I see a lot of personal belief that sometimes it better to see the positive or more so focus on what you can do to walk away from the bad things you are faced with. I think this is something that you learned from a young age where you were shamed by reacting to the negativity that happened. That being any sort of sadness or anger. Yes, being happy and not sad or mad, sounds good at first but that completely neglects the reality of hardships. Your smart about how you react to life, and you understand where when something bad happens, you can avoid being in that victim mode by ignoring whatever that is upsetting. The great thing about life is that life is not black and white. There's a lot of good things that will come your way but in order for you feel fulfilled and appreciative of those things, you have to accept all the bad stuff as well. It's not something that something to avoid. I am getting strongly that pile one is afraid of being pessimistic and that they will do anything to show themselves or others that they are filled with love and good and nothing else, but your human. To be human means to be unperfect. You think strongly that the way you think shapes your reality and yes that is true but there's only so much that can achieve until you have to face truth. Some things can't be fixed with positive thinking and manifestation. Unfortunately, life isn't some LaLa world like that, don't get me wrong, I'm not shitting on positive people, but there is a such thing as toxic positivity. You're stopping your own growth by looking at life through rose-colored glasses. Your shadow wants you to accept being a victim at times and being someone who can be pushed down by something. Understanding where you got hurt is how a real breakthrough can happen, you're not allowing the cycle of acceptance to come through as beautiful as it can.

Pile 2

Sacrifice

Pile two, your shadow wants you to acknowledge that you are suffering for the well-being of something else. And your moon phase is associated with anger, which tells me that while you are acknowledging the suffering you are being subjected to tells me you aren't happy or pleased with it. Kinda like it's an "Oh well what can I do about it, it fucking sucks but it is what it is." That type of vibe. I'm not just pulling an oracle card I am pulling from a separate deck and what I can see that you have basically given up yet there's still this sense of hope that things will change and that whatever situation happened or is happening is making you feel like you have to wait and just continue to be sacrificed till you can leave and move onto better circumstances. But there's also a sense of given up hope it's kind of up and down energy. I had to pull a second shadow card because the energy was little too confusing and I needed more to back up to why the cards were popping up with somewhat different messages, and I got Temple of my body and its essentially telling me that people/situations have/are doing stuff to your body. Something has been making you feel like you cannot win, there's always going to be something that is disrespectful to your own wants and needs in order for them to obtain the power and wants that they desire. This can be anything from school, money, family, love or work. It can be one or multiple things at once or at different points in your life. And it's very overbearing for yourself. It's too many hardships, feeling like you're never going to be able to fulfill something else outside of yourself. That must be so challenging, and you must feel like you have to be as strong as you can be and that you might not be able to. I'm getting maybe you think you're forced to suffer until your old enough to run away from whatever it is that you're sacrificing yourself to. Your shadow wants to advise you that in order to overcome the sacrifices, you need be able to see you don't have to be a worm left out for the birds. You're not a sacrifice, yes it feels like you have to keep doing stuff to just exist whilst still feeling like whatever you do is never enough but learn to structure yourself. How can you slowly overcome this feeling? What I need to do to overcome this feeling? Why am I so depressed and angry about it? Truly dive deep into yourself, because wither or not you are truly stuck, which you most likely are, it won't always be that way. Acknowledge your pain, struggles and see what you can do to overcome it, not avoid it. Or dwell in it. Just understanding what you are able to do silently will give you at least some form of control and I can see that there's clearly very little control you have with where you are in life. What are things that make you feel in control? What makes you feel not in control? Can you overcome it? If not, what can you do besides just see that? You can find little ways to feel a sense of control and relief from just reflecting and doing small things to fulfill your needs in tiny ways. If you need to escape or walk away from something in the future, plan and make goals on what needs to be done in order to be prepared for when that can become your new beginning.

Pile 3

Alone In the world

The phase attached to your card is Acceptance. There's been months, weeks, days, hours, and seconds that you have waited for something. Weather its love from friends, family or a significant other, you have been on edge waiting for some reassurance and presence of hope for love. And nothing really has fulfilled you. Maybe someone did come by, but it wasn't what you thought it would be or maybe no one ever will be able to fulfill you to the extent you have believed you needed. Now your shadow self is saying it hasn't happened, will it happen for you ever? If it does will it be the same as what you have longed for? There's a concerning lack of separation of satisfaction and love, those are two separate things that should not be used to mean the same thing. With love does not fulfill satisfaction. You do not need to be in love or loved to be satisfied, why have you allowed yourself to feel controlled by the presence of love. You should not allow yourself to be bitter, spiteful of life or yourself, you have to learn to see yourself as the one thing that is enough. A person will never be something to fulfill you unless its yourself. You're turning yourself into a victim of loneliness because you're attaching too much value onto someone who isn't you. Do you know yourself enough? Do you think you aren't enough to feel fulfilled on just yourself? If so, why? Why do you not see how easy it is for you to love yourself. You already have the desires and wants you could get from someone else? If you don't have those desires and needs that you seek from others, how come it's not possible for you? Do you only seek that in others because you are uncomfortable with you lacking something? You shouldn't be afraid to know yourself or be afraid that you think you're not enough. Being in a relationship before fulfilling your own self-worth is not as great as it sounds, personally I'm in a relationship but I will accidentally ruin moments that can be good because of my own fear of myself and how unfulfilled I feel with how much I love myself and I'm not even the type of person who struggles with always feeling to need to be loved to be happy. If the situation arises that you stumble into a relationship or situationship that's fine but understand that you should love yourself before allowing someone else to fill in that worth. Prince charming may never come and if that is something that is too upsetting, there's some work that needs to be done to begin understanding why that's so upsetting.

Desiring someone else is okay but in a healthy doses, your partner should be an added plus, not your entire happiness. Stop romanticizing unhealthy attachments to others.

Pile 4

The child I was Meant to be.

Your shadow wants you to accept that you are capable of growing. I'm getting that there's a lot that needs to be done, in order to become replanted. Some change has to be made, and that's okay. Life is full of growth and decay. Don't villainize yourself, the worst you can do is avoid the bad things in life because then that stops your own growth. There's a repeating issue that is very uncomfortable for you pile four. There's this greed to fulfill with your own needs. It's always about your issues and not others' problems. Your shadow wants you to learn how to manage that greed and "evil" (nobody is truly evil if you can prevent yourself from repeating negative cycles. What is it that makes you think that your too broken or off-putting to be fixed or reborn?

You might need to tie up some loose ends and heal others that you knowingly did wrong. Make sure you give the justice the people you have hurt. You have to let go of an unhealthy attachment to your own self and that desire you feel that is stopping you from being "a good person." You might have to leave something behind that you think is so good or desirable. It's difficult but you're not a hopeless cause, nobody is unable to never work on themselves, if that means walking away from what you have projected yourself do that. It's seems scary to work on becoming a better you for yourself because then you have to accept the aspects you repress but once you accept you can learn to work through it. You can mourn over who you were and accept the new you when you're healing and yourself work is fulfilled. You are capable of it but are struggling to see that it can happen. In order to plant that seed to grow the new you, you have to cut off the old ways that poison your growth. It's going to be hard but it's doable. Forgive yourself and learn why you say or do things. don't justify them, learn from who you are in order to learn about who you can be.

#tarot reading #oracle #pac reading #free tarot #shadow work

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azurecrystalz · 1 year

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[Translation] Scout! Romantic? Date / Love and Hate Quantified Chapter 10

Content Warning: Depictions of a character having murderous intrusive thoughts.

Tatsumi: HiMERU-san...?

HiMERU: (Aah, how loathsome. I want to wipe the composure off that face of his. No, it would be even easier to get rid of it entirely. It doesn't matter what the consequences are. I'll strangle him, change my looks, make my escape, and then "I" will become "myself"--a nobody--again. Today will be the last day that I would be "HiMERU".)

Tatsumi: You look unwell. Here, please rest on my shoulder.

HiMERU: .....

Tatsumi: There, there. Ufufu, HiMERU-san is human too. I'm guessing you didn't want Kohaku-san seeing you in such a weak state. And that's why you rushed to this alleyway...but I'm glad you allowed me to see this side of you.

Tatsumi: I've always just wanted to be your friend. Not a saint and his follower, not rivals at work...but the kind of relationship where we go out together during vacations, talk about simpler things, and laugh at each other.

HiMERU: (Just like always--)

HiMERU: (--You don't understand anyone or their feelings, and all you spout is nonsense. You've always been like this--)

HiMERU: --Kazehaya Tatsumi.

Tatsumi: Yes, what is it, HiMERU-san?

HiMERU: Kazehaya Tatsumi, Kazehaya Tatsumi KazehayaTatsumiKazehayaTatsumi----

Tatsumi: Yes. You don't need to keep calling for me, I'm right here.

HiMERU: ---Marry "me".

Tatsumi: Eh? I don't want to.

HiMERU: ........

Tatusmi: .......

Tatsumi: .....HiMERU-san?

HiMERU: --Why did you refuse?!

Tatsumi: Uggghghg?! Please don't choke me! I'll die! Ah, was it because of my affinity? Because of the game you're playing? I'm so sorry, I gave a straightforward answer!

HiMERU: Do you hate HiMERU that much?!

Tatsumi: A-absolutely not! I think of you as a very important friend! But, because of the religious beliefs I grew up with as well as the laws of the country, I feel like I have to say no when a man asks me to marry him...?!

HiMERU: Maybe so! But you needed to say "YES"! Oukawa's affinity wouldn't raise above a specific level for some reason, so Tatsumi you're the only option! Your affinity is at 100--in other words, it's at it's "MAX"!

HiMERU: In "Ai-stars", when you raise someone's affinity to 100 you can ask to marry them, and if both parties are in agreement then you get married. Then the game will be over! And by extension this ridiculous situation will be over with too!

Tatsumi: R-right! Is that so? I'll do it then, I'll marry you!

HiMERU: That's it! Even if you didn't know anything, you should've assumed and did this from the beginning! Ahh, the game is cleared! It's finally over!

Tatsumi: C-congratulations?

HiMERU: Thank you! Actually, Tatsumi, it was good you were around!

Tatsumi: Come again?

HiMERU: ...We can never know what's in someone else's heart. For games this might be true, but this is reality. Therefore, whatever affinity that was shown to HiMERU was only because of HiMERU's perceptions. It was only a number based on HiMERU's five senses and subconsciousness.

HiMERU: (Oukawa's affinity didn't exceed a certain point only because HiMERU judged it to be so subconsciously. Oukawa is still innocent, and he loves easily. However, what Oukawa sees and loves is "HiMERU"--a false mask "I've" created. I don't know how much he would love the real "me".)

HiMERU: (And there's no way to know that, because "I" never allow anyone to see the real "me". The real "me" has no idea how much Oukawa loves him, and so my subconscious acknowledged that and refused to raise his affinity above a certain point. It doesn't matter how well we may get along on a surface level, if "I" never reveal the true "me" to him, then we will never attain a higher level of friendship. Fufu. Oukawa considered an online friend, someone he'd never seen before, as his best friend--)

HiMERU: (He could love "me" even if I were a scrap of paper.)

HiMERU: (Alas, that's just a theory that my conscious--my instincts--don't seem to agree with. The guilt of deceiving Oukawa was reflected in his affinity.)

HiMERU: (But. If it were Tatsumi. If it were that saint bastard...)

HiMERU: (Surely, he would love "me" no matter who I am. He would indiscriminately love "me", "HiMERU", and anyone else. That's just the kind of person you are, Kazehaya Tatsumi. A winged saint. An absurd saint bastard who would never keep a grudge against anyone, no matter how much they've trampled on him. For anyone, his affinity would be stay high and strong. Ahh, I can't stand him for being so unpleasant!)

Tatsumi: ....HiMERU-san? I-I'll ask you again, are you feeling alright? If it's an extreme condition, should I call an ambulance?

HiMERU: --No. Everything...is fine. Thank you for the assistance, Tatsumi. Because of it, any visions of affinity have all disappeared. HiMERU was likely freed from the games influence.

Tatsumi: Is that so! What a relief! Congratulations! So clearing the game really was the cure for your symptoms after all?

HiMERU: Probably...It could've also been that the symptoms wore off with time naturally. Even when wearing glasses that flip your vision upside down, your brain will correct your vision with time to the way it previously was. That's just how the human brain works. Over time it will adapt and perceive the world normally again. A constant state of confusion and illusion simply doesn't exist.

Tatsumi: That's right. If you're ever seeing things that aren't actually there, then that would just mean there's an issue with part of your brain functions.

Tatsumi: However, you will always be perfect, good, and righteous.

HiMERU: Hmph. What's "normal" and whats "right" or not is all dependent on personal beliefs. If you keep treating others reverently like that you'll only face failure again, Tatsumi.

Tatsumi: I'll keep it in mind.

HiMERU: Fufu. HiMERU is also adapting, albeit slowly, to this strange world. A rather dull world, where there's nothing to love.

Tatsumi: Yes. I'll assist you as much as possible, anytime. As your reliable "husband".

HiMERU: No. The game is over, so it's fine to go back to the same relationship we had before. That is to say, as "strangers".

Tatsumi: Fufu. I was hoping to be at least "friends"...~

← previous | next→

#aurora tls #enstars #enstars translation #crazyb #himeru #tatsumi kazehaya #jesus fucking christ what a chapter

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southshoretides · 8 months

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Type of Guy Who Fears The Void

On the object level, I think this DeBoer piece correctly identifies a certain type of person (aging white man who self-consciously and showily hates all aging-white-guy pop culture in favor of trying to stay hip), but as the commenters implicitly/explicitly point out, that type of guy is concentrated among the east-coast-grad-educated-tastemaker-social-media-part-time-writer set, i.e. Freddie's milieu, which he often tricks himself into believing is the only milieu in the world. Go to any bar in the Midwest and poll the natives on BTS-vs-Pearl Jam and you'll get different results. (Freddie is of course interminably contrarian relative to whatever his local milieu is, and if fate had brought him to Kansas instead of Brooklyn, he'd be the most red-tribe-hating, pining-for-Brooklyn's-loving-embrace guy on the internet.)

But the meta level of "People recognize that the world naturally puts them in stereotypical boxes and either fight to escape that or wholeheartedly embrace it" is something I think about a lot. That first paragraph was all about different Types of Guy, and that's all it is these days, isn't it? Type of guy, type of guy, type of guy. A whole generation of internet-raised autists can pinpoint your political beliefs based on how you dress or what kind of car you drive. "Guy who makes youtube videos while driving his SUV and wearing wraparound sunglasses" is a different type of guy than "Guy who insists that Carly Rae Jepsen is the best songwriter of the 2010s" but they are politically and culturally opposite Types of Guy, even though there's no rule that says Democrats can't drive SUVs or Republicans can't like Carly Rae Jepsen. But the trend-lines are strong enough that people notice anyway.

@max1461 occasionally gripes about how quickly and thoughtlessly people transpose is-statements with ought-statements, or in other words, take objective factual data about something and try to force it into a prefab narrative. And it certainly is annoying, but to an extent it's like making fun of cavemen for thinking every rustle of grass is a tiger. That's what their environment is giving them, and it's what their brains adapt for. What our environment is giving us is an endless parade of people who eagerly and effusively promote their political and cultural opinions, and eagerly and effusively identify those opinions with such and such group, so no wonder it's so easy for even an amateur to unearth a Type of Guy. No wonder you can look at someone with a Roman-statue avatar and predict with reasonable accuracy his thoughts on young women who dye their hair. And I think this is something the internet makes worse, not better.

I think any objective accounting of the situation would have to conclude that it's easier to be an eccentric in 2023 than in 1993. The internet has allowed weird people to find each other, talk to each other, understand each other and themselves in a way that simply didn't exist before. At the very least, you don't get that "Am I the only human on earth who's like this?" feeling. And the cheap, Hallmark version of diversity/eccentricity is still a popular cultural value: those wall-hangings and birthday cards your aunt buys say "Be Yourself: Everyone Else is Taken", not "Yourself sucks, Be Someone Else." No one wants to be seen as the stodgy, bitter old fart. Part of it, I'm sure, is a cultural thing--Americans seem to obsess over individuality and being one's truest self more than others.

And yet...there's also this ambient sense that eccentricity-in-itself has been devalued in 2023 relative to 1993, at least in my circles. Everything from eccentric tastes in art ("What are you, some kind of hipster filmbro?"), sex ("Of course I'm sex-positive but weird creepy shit doesn't count!") or politics ("You don't really think that, you're just being edgy.") People who value weirdness and eccentricity for its own sake feel hemmed in by people who either openly see it as a threat to their own culture's local hegemony. A lot of the internet really does seem to live by the 'nail that sticks out gets hammered down' and sees that as a good thing. Seems paradoxical.

(For the record, I'm not laying the blame here at any particular subculture. Conservatives blather on about freedom and liberty and then say anyone who refuses to lick an HOA's balls is a dangerous subversive. Progressives say everyone is valid and beautiful and then plaster their spaces with various 'freaks DNI' equivalents, 'freak' status being determined by vibe-centric whisper campaigns. Liberals will Celebrate Diversity up to and no further than the point where it damages quarterly profits. No "name" group is immune to this, really, but certain subgroups are.)

A theory: the normie-weirdo ratio isn't particularly different than it used to be, but the way they interact is different. In the pre-internet days, the weirdos were well aware they were weird, and in having to navigate normie-land with psychological armor on, at least they might come to understand it somewhat. Now, for those who want it, there's an unending stream of validation and insistence that you're perfect the way you are. Without shading into the "can suffering be a good thing if it leads to change for the better?" argument, I think even people who are all-in on the answer being "no" have met at least one person defined by their self-actualization curdling into selfishness and narcissism, to the point where you can't understand how they function, in a way that is directly attributable to a having a stable of pseudonymous online enablers. That's a real phenomenon the way that "Shut up and repress, you freak" is a real phenomenon. They can both suck. They can even both suck in ways that make the other one worse.

The post-mainstream, pre-social-media 'Golden Age' of the internet was when it was basically a playground for weird people. Now everyone's on it by necessity, the weirdo-in-a-small-town dynamics are back, but now the whole world is the small town with the added "no one can ever really escape for good" dynamics of the internet tracking and recording and monetizing every aspect of human interaction.

The weirdos who are old enough to remember when the internet was their turf close ranks and start watching each other for the first signs of Turning Normie--itself something that's antithetical to actually following one's own star and drawing from whatever cultural tradition you find satisfying. The weirdos who aren't old enough grin and bear it because "you're constantly being judged by everyone" is just normal life for them. The stuff that's so popular that liking it puts you in the biggest box possible will benefit; stuff that was never gonna be popular under any circumstances will keep trucking. It's the cultural middle class, as usual, that suffers the most. Again, as I keep emphasizing, this cultural panopticon being both unending and global is unprecedented in human history.

I really think a lot of current cultural neuroses are due to this, although I can't really prove it and don't have the resources to research it. This sense of modern technology revealing to people how fundamentally uninteresting they are and rebelling against it explains a lot to me--the tendency of people to ideologically self-sort to narrower and narrower levels, the uncanny ability of observers to categorize even the relatively-novel versions of those self-sorts, the tendency of some people to just give up and openly embrace everything the hivemind says about them, "be yourself" as a zombified and omnipresent cultural meme when millions of people are struggling existentially with exactly that, every culture absorbing ambient victim-mentality and thinking they're the only right-living people in a world gone mad, the 'cultural class' getting deeper and deeper into objectively-adolescent pop-cultural obsessions and lashing out at the idea they should try something more challenging, the aging-out-of-relevance hipsters Freddie discusses being mortified by the idea of being perceived as exactly that.

The problem, for me at least, is that I understand there is a way out, and if anything it feels worse. I may be a bit younger than the type-case Freddie describes, and am not in an industry where I have to constantly prove my relevance to myself and others, but I am doing the opposite of aging gracefully. Instead of constantly trying to convince my social circle (I don't have a social circle) that having the political, cultural, and artistic preferences of a 21-year-old means I still am one at heart, I engage in the much-healthier practice of spending every waking moment fantasizing being 21 or 18 or, shit, even 14 again. I know nobody really likes getting older. I also think that if everyone was as obsessive and self-loathing about it as I am, society would cease to function. My regrets and pining are definitely unhealthy, obsessive and all-consuming, but I don't really talk about them because there's no way it ends other than "Yeah, that sucks."

But a lot of the people in Freddie's comment section are saying things like "Once I realized I was fundamentally unimportant and my opinions didn't really matter, I could get down to raising my kids/doing my job, which matters more than my feelings." And maybe ten years from now I'll be OK with that. Hell, maybe I'll actually have kids, unlikely as that sounds now. Right now that mindset sounds like a self-administered lobotomy. Maybe I'd be OK with it if I'd actually lived it up in my teens and twenties, tried to become an actual person and discovered what I like about myself, instead of just vaguely Following Rules and assuming there was a payoff to that. Maybe I'd accept that there comes a point in life where my destiny is to be a good parent/worker and that necessarily implies shaving off the hard bits of your personality. Or maybe even the people who were good at being young struggle with getting old. Maybe our cultural/technological moment is just making that a struggle for everyone. Guess I'll never know.

But as we creep closer to no one's parents, then no one's grandparents, remembering a world without the eternal and all-consuming Now of the internet, I suspect I won't be the only one aging with a complete lack of grace, and I suspect we as a culture are completely unprepared to deal with it.

#discourse #aging #culture #the internet

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xxsakuragirlxx · 5 days

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hii i've seen u in my notes and I want to be friends but I would like to know ur thoughts on lgbt+ first if u are comfortable with sharing

Hello, I don't mind sharing, but you might not like my views and that's perfectly fine. I'm being respectful with my words and honestly, you don't have too, because of the sensitivity of the topic.

I don't necessarily support the LGBT community. NOW, that doesn't mean I'm going to go around preaching saying "you're going to hell, REPENT!"., that just means our views are going to contradict, not me hating just because you aren't straight or cis. I have seen in real life and online those who like to make their sexuality or being trans, non binary the most prominent fact about them. Like I said, not going to hate. If you're a nice person, then I don't mind talking to you, but understand when it comes to these topics, your own being, we aren't going to see eye to eye and at least should converse like civil adults. (I had too many situations where I said the same thing and people threw a tantrum). For one, I'm a Christian, or at least trying to become one. Some of my views are based off the Bible and I'm trying to practice them, even if they seem stupid and out of date to the world. (I'm trying to force myself to read the Bible, but Christians don't joke that if the devil can feel change, he gets pissed and fucks with those who aren't in his grasp.) I have friends who are in the community (I know, that's a dumb excuse. That's like saying, "I'm not racist, I have black friends. 😏". Just because I associate myself with a specific person doesn't mean it my views can't affect them.) and I am respectful towards them despite my views. I told a mutual this: God is the epitome of love, but that doesn't mean He wants you to continue living the life you have. That's withholding your true potential for a life that won't even last for long. He's not going to force His way to you though, that goes against His nature of allowing free will and having a relationship with His creation, but actions/descions have their consequences and allowing free will brings that statement into work. I'm not going to condemn or shame anyone in the community because of this. Now to true Christians, that's me walking on eggs shells. That's me "confirming" to the world while trying to represent Christ. Basically, I'm lukewarm and it's a disgusting act towards God. I try to be nice to everyone and sometimes, that makes me a doormat: I say what people want to hear. Well actually, that just makes me a hypocrite. I was like that in the past because I wanted friends. I do my best to never do that again. I try to be blunt, gentle and stern with others because most can be worst. If others chose to respond in the opposite-well, nothing much I can do. I'm not going to grovel and change my beliefs for someone just like how others won't do the same to me, other Christians, and even God. If I choose to change, that's because I chose to and it's the same for everyone else as well; You indirectly helped. In the past, I use to support the community, then I slowly stopped. Did anyone force and belittled me(only ones who would do this are non supporters)? No, it came from personal reflection and was based off of what I read and experience. No one changed me, I chose to think differently and that means everything around me shift.

I also had another mutual come to me about the topic of LGBT because of a personal situation. As I told her, you can't change a person's sexuality. Like conversion therapy. That's you playing God in my opinion. Forcing someone to be something they are not will not only piss them off, it takes away the chance of them trying to love God. If anything, God will come to them. Whatever happens at that point is between Him and the individual.

There are some people who changed from LGBT+ to straight. I don't know anyone personally, but I have seen some state that as a testimony when they became Christian. Is it true, can your sexuality be changed by God? To be honest, probably, but I will personally never go through that journey. I'm straight. Sometimes women do look a little bit more... pretty in my eyes, but I try to stray away from those thoughts.(I fail at times because if you look through my blog, I go crazy over this OC a mutual has. That's only with that particular OC however.) When you see someone change like that, it's offensive and it's hurtful because you are changing who you are for a being most don't want to believe in. Like I tell some, you'll never know until you actually go through the experience, and to go through the experience, you actually have to have faith in God, read the Bible, and humble yourself to understand His perspective and why everything is the way it is.

Anyway, sorry for that. You asked for my views on the community and I'm here going into a different topic. Here's a summary: I may not support the LGBT+ community, but I'm not going to change you. That isn't my job. As a Christian, the job is to preach the Gospel so all that hear can gain a chance of salvation. If you hear and decide to ignore, well-that's you. I can't force you to actually listen. If you do become curious, know what all comes in the package of being Christian. Being lukewarm sucks because the further you go in, the harder it is to leave the lifestyle and it's you walking on extremely thin ice. (I did it again, going off topic, good Lord...)

As I said in another paragraph, I try to be blunt, gentle and stern. If my words offend you, then it does. I can't change how many will view me from this point forward.

I don't know who you are since you're on anon, but honestly if you want to block me or if any of the mutuals I have see this and decide "damn, Sakura actually kinda sucks. I should stop talking to her and block :/", I understand. I have in my bio that if you don't support my views, you are free to block.

I had it happen before. I'm sensitive to these things, but that isn't your problem, it's mines. That's how it is. I don't expect others to coddle or pity me just because I seem nice in how I explain things. If I ever decide to take Christianity seriously, I'll lose all what I had. I had a vent post saying the same exact thing. However, as the the end goal for most Christians are, they just want to go home. Home as in with God, in a New Heaven and Earth, where everything is the way God designed. If that means losing everything, so be it. They're tired and honestly, I'm tired as well. I just want peace and I'm already in a conflicted state of it I'll ever get that peace.

Anyway, like I said, perfectly fine it you would like to block me. Thank you for the ask and I hope you have a blessed night/day.

#Christianity #i hope i didn't make any mistakes while typing #reread this multiple times to mske sure everything is correct #cherry train delivery 🚂🌸#might rewrite this because i feel like i did make some grammatical mistakes #anon #answered

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greenandhazy · 2 years

Text

Out of the general belief that fandom discourse shouldn't play out in AO3 comments, I'm not starting a fight, but I did just see the stupidest list of Guy/Thomas red flags I've seen yet and I have to vent about it. Because in addition to the usual "he'll be a servant" point (which was rephrased three times and listed as separate points), other red flags apparently include:

Thomas would be paid to sleep with him

WHENCE are you getting this idea, my good sir? Was it from the scene where Guy told Thomas that their relationship could be whatever Thomas wanted? and just out of curiosity, have you ever met a couple where one person was a stay at home spouse, and did you tell them that their relationship was #problematic because the working partner was paying the other person to sleep with them? or did you recognize that relationships are complex and often involve some sort of power imbalance and that healthy relationships can still exist within that dynamic, and often involve attempts to mitigate the actual impact of income disparities?

Guy is older, at least 50

okay first of all cool it with the "at least"--Dominic West was 51 at the time of filming, and we don't even know if Guy is supposed to be his age. (RJC was 44 at the time of filming and most people agree Thomas is younger than that.) and secondly, Thomas is at MINIMUM 32. like, absolute minimum, like I'm basing that on the fact that he was able to join the military in 1914. but that would make him 16 at first appearance, so... he's not 32. the suggested year that seems to come up the most for Thomas is about 1890, making him 22 at the start of the series and 38 by the end of the movie.

if you think a 38-year-old is inherently too young to be in a relationship with a 50-year-old, you're just a dumbass. like I'm sorry. the man is a fully grown adult. and not to be blunt, but if Guy had deliberately wanted to take advantage of a much-younger man, he didn't need to find an almost-40-year-old Englishman for that. There were (are tbh) PLENTY of attractive 20somethings leaving their family and going for Hollywood who would jump at a relationship, even an unhealthy one, that would get them closer to stardom.

Guy used a moment someone was vulnerable to take them away from everyone they know and like

Guy used a moment someone was vulnerable... hm. hm. just checking, do we even once see any suggestion that Thomas has told Guy about Richard? do we have any reason to believe he would have, prior to their conversation in Thomas's office? how can Guy evilly, manipulatively use Thomas's vulnerability against him when he has no knowledge of it? are we not allowed to hit on people who might possibly in the recent past have suffered a possible breakup? honestly the worst we can say is that he noticed Thomas seemed generally unhappy at Downton, and "hey you don't seem to like it here, would you maybe like it somewhere else?" isn't manipulative.

I also think it's dumb to paint anything as ~Thomas's vulnerable moment~ or whatever when it's been a month at LEAST since he's received Richard's letter. like yeah, if Guy had barged in the same day Thomas received it and demanded an immediate answer, that's a vulnerable moment for Thomas. but a month is enough time to-- if not "get over" the end of a relationship (if that's what the letter even was, which we don't know for sure), at least to come to terms with the fact that it has ended. Guy makes the offer, tells Thomas to let him know when he's decided, and then leaves. Thomas had time to thinnk it over. He already had the Downton job, he knows all the pros and cons, he can weigh his own options, and if he turned down Guy's offer, there would be zero repurcussions for him.

in conclusion: if you don't like the implications of Thomas working for his lover, if they're not your cup of tea, that's fair, I'm not going to convince you otherwise. but don't be a fcking dumbass about it.

#downton abbey spoilers #downton abbey sequel spoilers

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leonbloder · 5 months

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Being Open-Minded Doesn't Mean Empty-Headed

The other day, I read a fantastic quote from To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee. I have been thinking about it ever since.

People generally see what they look for and hear what they listen for...

Like me, many of you nodded in agreement as you read that line and probably thought of people in your own life who live markedly myopic and unexamined lives.

These types of people can be confronted with the truth and will still find a way to deny it or dismiss it. They also tend to be so set in their beliefs and opinions that nothing you say or do will convince them that they might be wrong about them.

By now, most of you are probably smiling grimly as you begin to list the folks you know who fit that description.

Or you're listing groups of people you assume (based on what you've seen on social media or cable TV) have those nasty characteristics- the kinds of folks you want nothing to do with.

The funny thing is that when making our lists and deciding who belongs, we never really think that our name might be on someone else's list. It never occurs to us that we would be the kind of person who would "see what they look for" or "hear what they listen for."

And by "funny," I don't mean "ha-ha" funny; I mean odd, strange, or ironic.

Here's the thing: most of us never look in the mirror when making broad, sweeping statements about people we disagree with. We seldom account for the possibility that we can become what we say we despise.

Far too many of us walk around with a dire case of confirmation bias regarding what we look for and hear. We don't want to see evidence to the contrary regarding our beliefs and opinions, and we often close our ears to anything we hear that might change our minds.

Not many of us want our minds changed.

I've spent enough of my life in and around churches and church folks to know that other than politics, religion is the one topic around which people not only have deep disagreements but are also the most intractable in their beliefs and opinions.

To be fair, in our current cultural climate, it's often hard to differentiate between people's political and religious beliefs. So there's that.

Many of us who call ourselves Christians can read the same Scripture and come to entirely different conclusions about what it says, depending on what we are looking for and want to hear.

For example, the parable that Jesus tells in Matthew's Gospel about the sheep and the goats is read by many Christians as an example of how God sends some people to Hell while others get into Heaven.

Still, others see it as an example of what God values when living a faithful life. They look to the words of Jesus as that example: ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’

Depending on how you view God and the lens you use to view the world, you might see one or the other of those interpretations in the text.

But suppose we want to get deeper into the meaning of Scripture. In that case, we must be willing to let go of our confirmation bias and dig into the context, the language, the scholarship, and the imagery surrounding the texts.

Using all the resources at our disposal allows the text to speak to us rather than speaking into the text. We let go of our need to see what we are looking for or hear what we want to hear. We let the Spirit speak as we do the good work of discipleship that comes with a faith seeking understanding.

This is why it is crucial for those who desire to follow Jesus to hold their beliefs and opinions more loosely. We need to be willing to have the Spirit work on us as we diligently seek truth where we find it.

When we impose our will on the Bible and narrow the information we take in daily, creating echo chambers of only what we agree with, it's easy to develop beliefs and opinions about God that become hardened in stone.

If we continue on this trajectory, before we know it, the God we say that we believe in looks an awful lot like us, and our views on Jesus change dramatically as well.

Instead of a Jesus who comes in peace, shows love and acceptance of everyone, even those on the margins, heals indiscriminately without demanding faith, and loves and forgives all the way to the Cross, we begin to fashion a figure that looks completely different.

Far too many leaders in mainstream Christianity today have fashioned a Jesus that takes on the traits of toxic masculinity by minimizing the role of women in the Church, embracing a triumphalism that is based on a zero-sum game of winners and losers, and more.

And all of this can be traced back to a narrow approach to Scripture and theology that seeks only to affirm what it already believes to be true.

We can do better. We have to do better.

The Spirit of God has not stopped speaking, and the path of discipleship to Christ demands the full use of all the resources and guidance available to us as we seek to be moved by the Spirit.

Having an open mind is not an empty-headed exercise. It takes discipline, fortitude, and faith. Holding our beliefs and opinions more loosely will eventually lead us in the Way of Christ and to a fuller understanding of what that means for us and the world.

May it be so, and may the grace and peace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with us all, now and forever. Amen.

#presbymusings #dailydevotion #leonbloder #dailydevotional #dailydevo #christian living #leon bloder #faith #spiritualgrowth #spirituality

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deerydear · 8 months

Text

I want to honestly write about my experience of becoming convinced I should be transgender.

It was my own choice, of course... in my case.

No one could have straight-up "made" ME do it.

There were a lot more subtle sorts of incentives.

I could have chosen to turn away at any point. I see the mistakes I made. I have and continue to learn from them. I could have made this right.

So can any of you... if you are questioning your own choices.

The problem being: social pressure. The ego-based desires. The false ideas of "what is cool" and "what is not".

The opposite of a simple truth is a falsehood.

The opposite of a deep truth is another deep truth.

The opposite of a deep falsehood is another deep falsehood.

"Women are made to be subservient" and how some individuals try to thread that into the cultures they are weaving.

Which is that?

I see it as a deep falsehood. I've played witness to several people trying to 'run opposite' to that claim.... and so they enter another deep falsehood.

Splashing up against the sides. It can be ignored. Sometimes, ignoring someone makes a bigger statement. To respond would be to lower yourself down from your throne.

Let their ignorance speak for themselves.

I actually had a very healthy self-image around gender, when I was around twelve..... then I joined tumblr. I delved into reading the discussions around "Feminist topics".

I barely wrote anything, myself....

If I had put myself into the game of articulating my own thoughts, and having an honest back-and-forth from my own point-of-view.... I may have avoided many nasty, stagnant situations.

It relied on me just putting myself in the backseat, pretending like everyone else has the answers and that I'm always the student... except for when one of the "pretend-teachers" calls upon me in order to proselytize in "the approved manner".

The important thing being that it wasn't coming from an honest place. It wasn't in my own words. It was their words.

They would yell out into the internet: "if you ever question anything that I say about feminism, then you hate the idea of women having rights."

So fucking egomaniacal.

So it became this game of proxies.

"If you say this, then it's a proxy. You really mean something else!"

Usually because one of these 'activists' had a personal quarrel, and a nasty association to go with it..... but they take their own personal issue and they pay for a a billboard to put it up on and say, "IF YOU DISAGREE WITH ME, IT MEANS YOU HATE ALL WOMEN!

IT DOESN'T MATTER IF YOU'RE A WOMAN. THAT MEANS YOU'RE BAD AT BEING A WOMAN.

I KNOW THE RIGHT WAY TO MOVE IN THE WORLD, AS A WOMAN. I KNOW THE BEST WAY TO BE A WOMAN.

IF YOU DISAGREE WITH ME, THEN YOUR BELIEFS WILL REPEAL ALL WOMEN'S LEGAL RIGHTS!

I KNOW THE WAY!"

I have seen some of this, in my older years... but I've matured enough to be able to set it aside and realize that they're all just human beings with egos.

When I was younger, I had been taking it all so seriously.....

I know exactly what this person means.

When I was younger, I had close tomboy friends. We were sort of proto-trans together. This was before the "trans boom". This was before I had even heard of the word transgender.

...but she made me feel like this.

She grew up with her mother trying to force a bunch of girly stereotypes upon her. Her response was, "fuck you, I'm not a girl!" "Girls are fucking stupid, and I'm not one of them! You can all go love your stupid Barbie shit together. I'll be off doing my own thing."

because her mom really did like that girly stuff... so I think she really felt alone, without a neutral female role-model.

I never had stuff forced on me, by contrast...I was just kind of allowed to do whatever I wanted.

I willingly took up the girly-girl mantle as a young child. Then, I became a tomboy. Then, I found feminism, and I wanted to reclaim the girly-girlness.... because I had developed this "macho complex" where I felt like I had to maintain this tough masculine exterior.

Other people's descriptions of being a macho female are often so different from mine, because I've seen so many say that they get disrespected for dressing masculine, instead of feminine.

When I was a teenager........... well, it may have been my attitude, or my choice of "feminine attire", but when I dressed 'masculine', I felt a lot more respected.

When I dressed 'feminine', I felt a lot more disrespected by other people.

People accepted me as masculine. I didn't have really short butch hair, though. but I had a bad attitude.

People liked to "treat me like a guy" basically.... or a "sort-of male". but not really.

If I were to contrast it with the time period where I was actually assumed to be a real XY man, then people were a lot different. I don't know if it was because of my gender, or because of my mental state. Maybe I just had crazy eyes. YOU NEVER KNOW!

I'm just another person walking around with thoughts in my head. I don't represent "all ducks" or "all geese".

I'M ME!

HELLO!

As a little girl... older boys made fun of me for liking Barbie, pink, and fufu shit.

So... in my teenage years, I identified more with my imagination of a guy who is effeminate despite the exterior pressure.

I just felt different from a lot of other people.

youtube

I am really grateful to be so pretty. I have always been gorgeous. I didn't feel differentiated by my looks.

My mom never let me paint my nails, or pierce my ears.... because of the chemicals in the nail-polish, etc. Health reasons.

Other girls got to "dress like sluts", to put it colloquially.

I mean, really.... there were a lot of individual factors in my own life. It wasn't some narrative about "this demographic versus THIS demographic".

We are all just people trying to live.

Heterosexual girls get pulled into this BS just as much as lesbians.

It's funny when I see some hateful feminists who caw-caw about "teh heterosexual LARPers pretending to be gay". Then, the same people turn around and say with a straight face, "the transtrender craze is about forcing gay people to transition". Like.......

Do you need to tell yourself this story?

No.

When I was a teenager, all my doctors were trying to stop me from going down that path. They weren't fast-tracking me into it. Fuck!

I hate the way that I've seen activist groups take a few individuals' experiences, and they assume that EVERYONE ELSE IN THE WORLD has the same experience.

....or maybe, maybe... "maybe I just wasn't fast-tracked into it because I was a straight girl", but ba-dum-tss! --- I thought I was bi, at the time. Maybe I am. I don't know, I don't care.

I really needed to be able to say "I can be a proud heterosexual", cuz of this political whirlwind oppression-Olympics game I got myself into..... where some people think it's good fun to insult other people different from them, but if you insult them back then "you're a meany meaner nasty bigot bitch! Take it in silence!"

Try that in real life.

I was just so young, again.... I took it seriously when I didn't need to.

I kind of knew that I didn't need to, but I thought I would get extra-credit if I did. 🤔

I'm eating chocolate-covered roasted coffee-beans.

A voice told me not to buy them, and I've seen why, now.... A bad thing to have in the house.

I dunno, whatever. All this is my perspective.

I really understand whenever people talk about 'rapid-onset gender-dysphoria', because I experienced it, and I know firsthand how friends can have a sway in eachother's minds.

People can't always fully articulate everything in one moment, and they may not want to. They may omit information if they believe that someone else will take it "the wrong way". I know this firsthand.

I'll keep saying that over and over.

I know what it is like to feel like the world is all against you. Like you and your friends are action heroes that are evading the Matrix.

but then you realize everyone else has something you can learn. Something valuable... whether it's a skill, or a tidbit of information that sends you down a rabbithole, or a piece of the puzzle....

I respect everyone.

Even if their eyes are clouded by judgements.... they still have valuable life experiences. Even if they may not realize the value, yet.

I have hope for the world!

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a-dragons-journal · 2 years

Note

any suggestions/advice for someone who has always been anti-fictionkin, but who is now questioning being fictionkind? it's confusing and stressful and i keep getting angry at myself for even considering being fictionkin.

Alright, this one's a doozy, sorry for the delay on it - I wanted to make sure I had the time and energy to sit down and give this the depth of response it deserves.

First off: You are most definitely not alone. You'd be shocked how many fictionkin - and otherkin, for that matter! - I know who went from being antikin or anti-fictionkin to realizing they were 'kin/fictionkin. I can almost guarantee some of them will reply to this post sooner or later (and I encourage them to).

Second: The best thing you can do for yourself overall, I think, is to take it slow and be gentle with yourself. You are allowed to set it aside when you start wrapping yourself up into too tight of an emotional ball. It's going to be stressful no matter how this goes, but you're allowed to take it in as small of chunks as you need to to minimize that stress while figuring this out. Questioning a strong belief you've held for a long time is hard and it is stressful - the brain doesn't like rewiring pathways like that, and it will likely get panicky and may try to confirmation-bias you out of it. Questioning your identity itself is also extremely hard and stressful for a lot of people. It is only natural to be freaked out by all this. Pause, take three deep breaths (count 'em), and take it one step at a time.

Third: Regarding specifically questioning whether your stance on something is actually correct or not, the best tool in your toolbox is the word "why". Apply it liberally. You've been anti-fictionkin for a long time: why is that? What are your reasons for thinking fictionkin is [fake/stupid/misguided/etc.]? Write them down, it'll probably make it easier to keep track of your thoughts. Then take each of those bullet points, those arguments, and ask again: Why do I think this? What's my logic? What's my evidence?

Eventually you will hit a point where the "why do I think this" question no longer makes sense - that's called a base assumption, and it's what your current logic is based on, and thus is what really needs to be evaluated to see if that logic is sound or flawed.

For example: Let's say one of your reasons for being anti-fictionkin is "It's not possible to be something that's a creation from someone else's brain."

Well, why do you think that?

Your answer might be, "It's not real, and didn't exist even in imagination until that person wrote about it, so you can't have been that thing until that person wrote about it."

Now, you could ask "why do I think that?" again, but at that point it seems kind of to not make much sense and I would call this a base assumption, so I would re-direct the questioning in a different way. There are two ways to challenge this base assumption that I see: First, is it true that you can't have been that thing until the person wrote about it?, and second, if we prove that that is true, does that make the identity less real once it's there?

Now you go reading and researching. As someone who runs an antikin response blog, chances are that whatever arguments you have against fictionkin, they have been stated and refuted a hundred times before - which is great for you, because it means if you can find those old archived conversations, they might answer your concerns adequately and you might not have to start a new one!

In this case, for the sake of our example exercise, I'll tell you the answers I would give to these two questions that, in my opinion, pretty solidly demonstrate that the base assumption is flawed:

The short answer to the first question is that no, it's not true, my evidence being that you can find essays and other evidence of people who had the experiences linked to their fictionkinity long before they came across their source media - and in some cases, long before their source media even existed. (Example evidence here, here, and here.) (The longer answer includes some philosophizing about how really, species and character labels are often just a way of getting across "this is similar enough to what I experience that it's a convenient label to convey it to others with," especially in the case of fictionkin, and thus it makes complete sense that in the vastness of several billion people who've lived on this earth one person's experiences and another person's imagination have an awful lot of coincidental similarities even if they probably don't line up perfectly, purely through Monkeys With Typewriters theory.)

The answer to the second question is a bit more philosophical, but my argument would be this: in my opinion, even if someone didn't have a fictotype before exposure to their source media, that doesn't change that their experiences are happening and having a significant impact on them. Kintypes coming about later in life, for various reasons both spiritual and psychological, have been accepted for a long time in the otherkin community. Whether someone is otherkin has little if anything to do with how their identity came about*, and the same should logically apply to fictionkin - someone's identity is based on their experiences, and the source of those experiences is (or at least should be) secondary.

*Arguable exception for identities that were consciously, intentionally formed, ie 'links; I'm not gonna get into that here, that's a whole other discussion.

Now, once you have those arguments presented to you, either via your own internal logic or by someone else through conversation, you get to evaluate them and decide whether they make sense and are internally consistent (ie, if their arguments contradict themselves, either you've misunderstood something, or their argument is badly flawed). And, if you decide the argument is flawed, to ask yourself why that is. What logic enables you to break down their argument and refute it? What parts of their argument make sense and are solid, if any?

If this seems a bit cyclical, it's because it is. The idea is to break every argument, for and against, down to its basic building blocks, and then look at those building blocks to make sure they're actually sound. If one of your base assumptions is false or flawed, the argument/opinion based on it is inherently flawed as well.

This whole process is hard and intimidating work, especially if you haven't practiced it before. But it's necessary, and to me at least it's rewarding when you get the hang of it. There's a reason I run an antikin response blog - I genuinely enjoy this process; I enjoy ripping debates apart to examine them piece by piece and see what makes sense and what doesn't. It's mental enrichment for me, and it can be for you too. It feels good to look at your stances on things and know that you have put effort into making sure they're as logically sound, factually correct, and morally correct as possible with the information you currently have. It's also a never-ending process - you should always be ready to re-examine your opinions on things in light of new information, should new information arise. (People also don't always like it when you tell them you're not gonna open your fat mouth until you've examined all the information thoroughly and have sorted out your opinion, because the internet wants your opinion now, but oh well. They usually (usually) appreciate it after the fact, when you've come back with a well-informed opinion instead of a half-baked and reactionary one.)

That's how things are supposed to work, anyway, but confirmation bias is a powerful force. I'm proud of you for standing up to it and trying to re-examine stuff in your own brain - that takes grit. We are allergic to admitting we're wrong in today's society, and it's genuinely a massive problem - we're getting more and more reactionary and polarized because of it, because we're so used to being shamed for admitting we were wrong that instead it's often easier to double down. Props to you for not going the easy way and just doubling down.

As one last thing, a list of resources for you regarding fictionkin and some of the common anti-fictionkin arguments I've seen and had a hand in refuting (not including the ones I linked up there):

A more in-depth explanation of fictionkinity from @/shadowfae

A more general guide on questioning a kintype, also from@/shadowfae

A thread of someone asking questions and fictionkin answering

“Isn’t being fictionkin disrespecting the creator?”, from @/anti-kin-cringe

On fictionkin and how there’s no real “line” between fantasy/mythological creatures like dragons (hi) and fictional characters/creatures, also from @/anti-kin-cringe

On the history of fictionkin, from@/liongoatsnake

houseofchimeras dot weebly dot com, which I can't link directly because Tumblr is stupid about external links, but I recommend their entire website and the websites linked in their Bookmarks page, though you'll have to do a bit of sifting to find stuff that's specifically relevant to you of course

Finally, my "fictionkin" tag on a-dragons-explanations (the aforementioned antikin response blog I run) for your perusal, which contains every discussion about fictionkin I've had on that blog.

...Phew. Hopefully that wasn't too much alphabet soup for ya ^^;

As a PS - if you want to chat with someone about all this, I'm more than happy to either simply provide answers to any questions you have, or to actively grill you and challenge your arguments for you (to your comfort level, of course) as someone who has a good deal of practice doing that. I'm available in DMs or on Discord (Discord would be preferable, since it's a bit more functional than Tumblr DMs) if you want either of those things - no judgement here.

#rani talks #otherkin #fictionkin #the directory #what do i even tag this to keep track of it. um #deconstructing arguments #i guess #rani talks A LOT today now you know why this was delayed lmao #obviously this is coming partly from the perspective of someone who's used to doing this to OTHER people's arguments #but i've applied it to my own arguments as well to test them and it works just as well either way imo #hopefully this actually helps #asked and answered #anonymous #almost forgot those lmao

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vickyvicarious · 3 years

Text

Parker: "Teach me to like stuff."

Okay, so. I have some thoughts about The French Connection Job's Parker+Eliot subplot. And I think I wanna approach it separately, scene by scene from each of their perspectives, because we have a couple different things going on here. It's still a little more of a Parker meta than an Eliot meta, but I have enough to talk about on both sides, and they're connected enough not to be in separate metas, that I am going to do it this way.

Also going to put this under a cut because it gets long.

Parker

This whole subplot comes on the heels of the last episode, in which there was a lot of banter throughout about Hardison and Parker's dates, and him wanting to branch out into other things than just bungee jumping or whatever. We have seen hints of this throughout S5 so far, even though we're only a few episodes in at this point. They went on a world tour that was pretty much just jumping off of stuff, Hardison said something about them figuring things out. We saw a cute domestic scene of the aftermath of them watching a movie together, except Parker 'fell asleep again' and missed most of it, and Hardison eventually went off to work on his laptop. Parker tried to comfort him last episode about dust mites and ended up freaking him out instead. She talked about how she liked fire and Hardison complained she was missing the point of his offer for a candlelit picnic. They did end on a very romantic note with her still making the effort to make it happen but getting rained out, and him recognizing her effort and listening to him, and projecting the stars around the dark room then having the picnic inside. They are clearly very happy together and both making the effort to meet in the middle, but there are still some disconnects. Which makes sense this early on anyway, but it's not out of place for Parker to start getting worried about her limited interests here given the context of them contrasting Hardison's more widespread interests.

Starting right off the bat - there's a picture limit so I can't show these early moments, but throughout the first part of the episode we see Parker looking visibly upset/pensive. Hardison notices and asks her what's wrong, but is immediately distracted by his package arriving, and then the team gets into the briefing and he doesn't get to talk to her again. (Sidenote that this is pretty OOC for Hardison, and I have to assume he would at the very least come back to her later, but they were clearly trying to get Parker talking with someone else this episode and apparently couldn't come up with a better way to do it. His writing outside of the kitchen stuff was kinda off this whole episode anyway, what with the whole tip thing.) She was about to open up to him, however, which is important. There's also a scene shortly afterwards where she confides in Nate, again after he notices her being upset and asks what's bothering her. She claims everyone but her has 'a thing', and names a few of them. He asks her what she thinks when she sees Michelangelo's David, and when her answer is an immediate assessment of how it's guarded and what she'd have to do to steal it, he kind of hesitates and then goes right back to running the con. He basically gives up on helping her with this once it becomes clear that a quick sentence or two isn't gonna cut it.

So after those brief, unhelpful conversations, that's when she makes a move. She was responding to others before, but this time she comes up to Eliot, clearly nervous. And she asks him to help her feel something.

(I find it very interesting that she doesn't ask Sophie. Sophie is the person who she would usually go to for something like this, after all. But, aside from this being an Eliot-centric episode and just like them sidelining Hardison's possible assistance earlier the writers want Parker to talk with Eliot not Sophie, I think there are maybe a couple reasons why she might go to him here. First, just distance. Eliot is right downstairs, meanwhile at the moment Sophie is however far across town at her theater. Certainly not saying she wouldn't go to Sophie eventually, but maybe that's why not first. Second, she and Eliot have an understanding, one that's been explicitly acknowledged since the start of S4. They are similar in a way entirely unlike the rest of the crew. So while Sophie may understand emotions best, Eliot is the one most likely to know what Parker is talking about when she says she just isn't feeling anything. Which by the way I'm gonna get more into later on. Thirdly they're in love but that's not actually relevant here since all of the team love one another.)

Eliot

On Eliot's side, she approaches him when he's busy in the kitchen. This whole job is stirring up a lot of old feelings in him right from the start. Toby was someone who 'kept him from falling all the way down', and Eliot is deeply concerned for him. At the same time, the way they are running this con is allowing Eliot to take on the role of teacher. Even though his students aren't anything like the eager students Toby has just had taken away from him, Eliot wants so badly to take advantage of this opportunity to teach them - maybe even all the more because they're resistant. He's being given a very rare opportunity to indulge his belief that food is life and to share it on a larger scale. To use the knife to create, not just destroy. Leverage often walks a line between doing both (taking down the bad guys and helping people) but Eliot doesn't often just straight up get to just do the 'creating' part. (I mean, he loves the destruction too, he genuinely loves beating people up and taking down bad guys, but this is a rarer pleasure.) So he's pretty preoccupied with that at first, and initially dismisses Parker just like the other two guys did.

But when she just looks quietly disappointed at his response, he goes still and watches her. We cut away from them here so we don't see his actual response, but it's immediately clear that he's realizing this is actually something deeply important to Parker, and well worth his time.

On to the next part of this scene below.

[Eliot sets a dish down in front of Parker]

Parker: "...It's just food."

Eliot: "It's not just food! Alright, some people could look at it and just see food, but not me. I see art. When I'm in the kitchen I'm, I'm creating something outta nothing, you know what I mean? And sometimes I crush it, sometimes it's crap, but either way - it makes me feel something."

Parker: "Feel what?"

Eliot: "Just... feel."

Parker: [murmuring] "Feel... okay." [looks down at the food and hesitates]

Eliot: "You know, I didn't feel anything for a long time. Then Toby taught me how to cook, and after he did, I started to feel stuff again. That's why I share it through my food - this is my art. This is my art, Parker." [Parker nods, looking worried] "It's like lettin' a stranger in your head, just for a second. And you allow them to feel what you're feeling." [pause] "Look again." [he pushes the plate a little closer to her. Parker takes a deep breath and slowly sets her elbows down on the counter as she stares down at the plate. Eliot watches her closely.]

Parker

At this point I want to talk a little about what Parker means when she says "feel something" and talks about "having a thing." Because we've seen her have interests outside of straightforward thievery before. Sure, most of her hobbies revolves around stealing - casing local banks for fun, for example. But she clearly has a deep love for Christmas and for chocolate. So why doesn't she count those kinds of things as 'feeling something'?

I think it comes down to what Eliot's talking about here. It's a sense of art. Not even necessarily making it yourself, although that certainly applies. Parker likes sweet things like chocolate and donuts, but although she really really likes them they don't make her feel any truly deep emotion. It's more tactile than anything else, just a pleasant flavor. Her love of Christmas isn't the same either in her eyes because it's not uniquely hers. It's something she loves to celebrate but she can't do so all year round, and plenty of other people like Christmas too. This one comes a lot closer, because it definitely seems to be tied up more in community and family for her than something like enjoying chocolate and piñatas, but it still doesn't belong to her in the same way that cooking does to Eliot or theater does to Sophie. And while theoretically her love of base jumping and so on could maybe count, it is still so tied up in her thieving that it doesn't feel separate. She's really good at drawing but only thinks of it as a useful skill, not a creative outlet - this is similar to that.

She has been branching out into a lot of new experiences and emotions lately, and while she's struck out deep into uncharted waters with her relationship with Hardison, once there she's only seeing more and more things that she just... doesn't get. She loves spending time with him, and enjoys what they do together, but she doesn't understand all of those things. Not on a deeper level. She wants to feel that sense of connection to something, wants to feel deeply emotionally moved by something.

And honestly? I think she's way up in her head about it. I'm not trying to dismiss her struggle here at all, but I do think she is stressing herself out about having something uniquely her own. About having a huge interest that speaks so strongly to her personally. And those are amazing to have, but it's really not necessary. She doesn't need a strong secondary passion so much as she needs to let go of trying so hard to force herself into something.

And what's happening in this scene in particular is that Parker is trying so so hard to force herself to feel something. It's evident in her face throughout the whole scene, in her body language. And she is so terrified that it's not going to work that honestly, I'm not surprised at all that it doesn't.

Eliot

On Eliot's side of this scene, he feels like he recognizes where Parker is. This entire job has him remembering how it was to feel nothing. Her phrasing got to him deeply. He wants to reach out and teach her to see something more, just like Toby taught him.

He knew a bit about how to cook before Toby. But it was only seeing Toby's passion that struck something in him, that awoke a part of himself he might've never known before. For Eliot specifically, cooking being an art isn't just something he likes. It's something that brings him hope.

Eliot doesn't believe in redemption. But he believes in actions. And what Toby did, by teaching him to cook, was to teach him that his actions can be good. That he can create, not just destroy. That all is not lost - not 'for' him necessarily, so much as 'in' him. There is a deep empty place inside himself that he can enter so so easily. The difficulty is crawling back out again. Cooking was his rope out of there. He still finds it difficult to express his emotions very often, particularly verbally, but when he makes someone a meal he puts a part of himself into it. And yet doing so doesn't take anything from him, it just adds more.

This is all very vague and figurative and may make no sense, but the takeaway I want to have is that Eliot is opening up to Parker on a very deep level here. He feels like he recognizes what she's talking about, and it was a very bad place for him. (Again, I don't think she is quite that badly off at this point in canon, but I digress.) And while making food allows him to feel that he is demonstrating his love for someone, that he is sharing a part of himself with them, he recognizes that she isn't receiving that. What she's getting, is just a plate of food. Tasty food maybe, but nothing more than that. And so Eliot verbalizes everything to her in a way he rarely does.

And then he keeps trying. This scene obviously doesn't end up making her feel something, and we don't get to see the immediate aftermath of that, but we can glean a little about how they feel based on their reactions. And Eliot is deeply determined to help Parker feel something from his food. He insists that she play the food critic; even speaks directly to her and reminds her to consider what they talked about.

In the restaurant, we start out with Parker dutifully playing her role but feeling nothing much beyond just the role. Eliot checks in with Parker, she acknowledges that the food is good but doesn't make her feel anything, and he makes improvements based on her feedback. Then something abruptly changes.

Parker: "I can taste garlic, and mushrooms... and something else that makes me feel different."

Hardison: "Wait, was that for me, cause I-I don't get it."

Parker: "No, it's the food. I get it." [smiles] "I feel something."

Parker: "Mmm! These black noodles are amazing!

Eliot: "Parker, it's tagliolini nero con gamberi."

Parker: "Mmm." [eats a huge forkful] "Mmm. Mmmm. These are really good."

Parker

What just happened here? Last we saw from Parker, she'd failed to feel something from the meal Eliot made especially for her in the brewpub, and she was clearly disheartened. She felt it as a failure, very much in the sense of a disappointment. She didn't want to try again, didn't think it would work, and tried to protest when Eliot said she would be the food critic. Even once she got to the restaurant, nothing was happening for her.

The difference wasn't in the flavor of the food. The moment Parker started to feel something was right after she said she felt nothing and Eliot, instead of being disappointed or giving up, took it as a challenge. He changed his recipe, he improved it specifically to better reach out to her. He kept trying.

And yeah, maybe the bone broth helped it taste better. But that wasn't the point, not really. The point is that Parker had gotten herself stuck in a hole, trapped herself in this cycle of not understanding how things make you feel and then believing that she just couldn't. She wanted something of her own and she didn't have it and she didn't immediately get anyone else's thing either, and that was it. She just wasn't capable. She was other. This is an old old fear of Parkers, dating back to Archie or even before. Something in her just isn't capable of being like other people. She wasn't worthy of being in Archie's real family, and she's not able to feel passion for anything outside of stealing. (Setting aside the fact that she loves her team, that all she needed was the right family. That you don't have to be a creator to feel passion, and you don't need to be passionate about any particular thing in order to feel deeply and find beauty in the world.) Parker has empathized deeply with people, has felt so intensely before and is constantly trying to learn more and new ways to be. But because she is noticing her teams' passions now, she has this ideal that she wants to reach, and none of that is good enough for her. She doesn't even know exactly what her ideal involves, but she can't get to it.

But when Eliot doesn't give up, that gets to her. If he views his food as sharing himself with others, Parker finally gets what he's been trying to give all along. It's all about him trying again and again, changing his approach to match her better. That's what she feels, that's what she enjoys.

And once she starts, the floodgates open. She loves the black noodles. She is so happy, she is relieved. There was this huge resistance that she couldn't get past before, but Eliot persisting helped her to break past that and now that she is out of her head about it she can enjoy the food in a way she never has before. Because she feels his love for her in it.

Eliot

Eliot is trying so hard to connect to Parker. It's not really different from what I said in the last Eliot section, and basically the same as what I just said in that Parker section, but I want to emphasize a little more just how much this is about love on his end.

Eliot loves Parker. He loves her, and he wants so much to help her. It doesn't honestly matter that he does this with food, except for the fact that food is what matters so deeply to Eliot himself. He can't reach out to her in the same way through any other medium. And we don't get to see his reaction to Parker's moment of realization. But I think it would be such a deep sense of joy. This is as fulfilling for Eliot as it is for Parker. It's exactly what Eliot has been hoping for this whole episode, to teach someone else to see food in the same way he does. It doesn't matter if it only lasts for a moment or a single meal. That's enough. He has been the support Parker needed through this time of self-doubt. And it is all the more meaningful to him because this isn't just a random student, this is Parker.

He told her he loves her through his food, again and again, and she eventually felt it. She understood. That must mean so much to him.

I wanna end with one more brief note on Parker. Does she get her own "thing" this episode? No. No she does not, and this scene shows us that. Parker is not suddenly interested in food or cooking. The importance of that meal was purely derived from Eliot on the other end of it, focused on her and trying his best to reach out to her.

And I don't think this is something only Eliot could have done for her either, not really. The difference between him and the others this episode is mostly in persistence. However, it's also about her mentality. Hardison has built/done things for Parker before and she felt them just as deeply - but the context was different. She wasn't looking for a sense of beauty or art in the world at large then, and so even though she felt the love in the gift just as much, it didn't make her feel like she could find that kind of emotion in other things. She just wasn't looking for it. Also, it was made easier for Eliot to reach out because there's that connection Parker has with him, that understanding that they are on the same level somehow. She doesn't feel that with Hardison - and she loves him all the more for him being different from her, but he also I think can intimidate her with how good and open he is, with how much he can feel in so many different directions. It's part of why she got so worried about herself not being able to do so this episode.

Like, the team has scolded Nate for not having a life or interests of his own outside the job not too terribly long ago! And Parker has had her own joys before! But she isn't seeing that this episode, too caught up in this fear about not having her own 'thing', not feeling anything that way. So while anyone could have helped her through this, it was easiest for her to let Eliot do so + for him to understand what she needed from him. (Hardison in particular was rudely robbed the opportunity, but they all love and support her and could have reached her. Not to detract from Eliot doing so, but also I don't wanna sound like no other method of reaching out would've worked.)

But as soon as she feels something once with Eliot's help, that relaxes those fears. And then Parker is free to look in other places. She remembers Nate's comment about art, and maybe even tells him what she plans based on him knowing where she is at the end of the episode. And then she goes to visit this statue. In her own way which means breaking in, but without any goal of taking it. She just goes to look at the art. And she feels something again.

Parker doesn't gain some big passion at the end of this episode. She doesn't need to. She never did. She just learns how to let herself relax from that restrictive frame of mind. To simply be in the moment and enjoy things for the sake of what they are. To feel - not really in any way she was incapable of before, but intentionally now. It's a quiet victory, in the end. It doesn't mean she's going to get a new hobby or change her lifestyle at all really. But she's let go of a fear and is now intentionally seeking out new connections with the world beyond her once-limited parameters.

#leverage #leverage meta #parker #eliot spencer #my meta #ugggggh why did this get so long?! i just wanted to jot down a few thoughts!#hopefully it's coherent #i'm like half-asleep at this point which probably accounts for the length since i ramble on when i'm tired. and also hopefully for anything #that doesn't make sense

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plasticnightmaredoll · 3 years

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I stumbled across an interesting article the other day that was quite eye-opening:

Now, I am aware I have issues, and those issues stem from receiving verbal and emotional abuse from one of my parents from childhood even through my college years, and a little bit past that. Nearly 2/3rds of my life, to be honest. I am still attempting to heal but it's not easy, not in the slightest.

Reading through the article reminded me of two things:

I am not alone and LOTS of people endured emotional and verbal abuse while growing up (as well as other kinds of abuse in some cases).

I can see exactly why it's such a challenge to overcome these mental and emotional scars because I have a bunch of issues.

In case you don't want to read the whole article or just want a quick reference right here without having to go back and forth, this is a sort of summary version of the list (based on my interpretations). I bolded everything that applies to me and...well, you'll see:

Blaming yourself or taking the blame for other people's actions/behaviors.

Overthinking due to immense self-doubt.

Expecting perfection from yourself and setting unrealistic goals because of it.

Believing your problems don't matter when compared to everyone else's.

Bottling up your emotions.

Afraid to try anything new out of fear of disappointing friends and family.

Anger issues as a result of anger being directed at you as a child.

Putting on a brave face and acting like you're untouchable and unbreakable to convince others and yourself (temporarily) that you have it together (which is a lie).

Flinching when people try to touch you (in a friendly manner, like a hug or pat on the back) or when someone raises their voice (kind of like a form of PTSD from your childhood abuse).

Belittling, insulting, and/or scolding yourself for being emotional.

Fear of abandonment (including fear of people dying and leaving you).

Always/often saying, "yes," to everyone out of fear of getting into trouble (fear of conflict/confrontation due to past abuse).

Relying on others to assure you whether or not you're making the right decisions.

Shutting down emotionally when anyone raises their voice to you.

Social awkwardness: being too shy and anxious or being too friendly and giddy when it comes to meeting new people.

Whenever you find yourself in an argument or even if someone just raises their voice (maybe not even at you), you immediately feel like cowering out of fear.

Talking fast and over-explaining due to being ignored, ridiculed, and/or talked over by your parents/family.

Fear of growing close to anyone (be it as a friend or as a romantic partner) due to abuse and betrayal from parents/family while growing up. So, you're often lonely but afraid to reach out to anyone out of fear of being mistreated.

Remaining quiet in conversations and/or refusing to start conversations due to being mistreated for speaking up as a child.

Fear of authority, worrying if even a simple talk with your teacher or boss may be the result of you being in some sort of trouble. So, those with "power" remind you of your abusive parents, who had power over you and abused that power regularly.

Well, 19 out of 20. That's... a lot.

It's scary to see just how much I'm dealing with (and have dealt with most of my life) mentally and emotionally all because one of the two people I expected to love me unconditionally chose to be a terrible, overbearing, short-tempered parent.

This is one of the many reasons why I think women who want to get tubal surgery should be allowed to without hitting so many roadblocks. Don't come at me with religious beliefs of physicians, or "some women regret it, so you might, too!" or "you haven't had kids so you don't know the joy!"

I. Don't. Want. Kids.

I'm selfish, ok? I like money, like my free time, like sleeping in and napping, like being able to go where I want and when I want, want to be able to travel to goddamn Japan someday without having kids dragging me down the whole way there, I love gaming and want to keep getting the best gaming PCs I can afford...

I mean, at least I -- and other women who want to have tubal surgery -- are being responsible and realizing that parenting isn't for us and it's not fair to just put unwanted children into the adoption system time and time again. I'd rather be safe than sorry, you know?

And the same goes for other types of birth control. Women shouldn't be shamed for wanting such things, although it does still happen. I realize that parenting isn't for me and I'd be an awful parent -- not on purpose, mind you, but I'm too anxious, depressed, yet goal-oriented and self-indulgent to be a good parent. So, wanting long-term or even permanent birth control is a very responsible decision, I think. I'm avoiding a problem that doesn't need to happen if that makes sense.

But the article also made me realize something else, and it's based on what read and learned over the years:

You don't need to apologize to anyone for your existence, nor do you need to explain yourself to everyone who questions every detail about you. You are you, you have your privacy, you have your personal issues to deal with, and you don't owe nosy people anything.

You need to take care of yourself, and if anyone tries to get in the way and make you feel uncomfortable, then you need to avoid them because they aren't going to make things any easier for you. I'm much more aware now of how people are, and I now avoid interacting with those who display abusive/toxic traits like that of my one parent. I don't need more of that kind of crap in my life, certainly not from strangers who may claim to be a friend or my boyfriend or whatever.

No, I am me, I can be me, and I don't need anyone else trying to take their problems out on me. I hope others also realize this, that they don't need to be someone's punching bag (verbally or physically or both), and that it's not your fault if you were abused: the abuser is to blame, no matter what the excuses are. You are not responsible for an abuser's behavior, care, or past. Abusers need to help themselves and you need to help you.

#self healing #self help #mental health #personal rant #mental wellbeing #mental wellness #self care #moving on

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reynie-muldoons · 2 years

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I'm a bit of a newbie to the fanfiction world and I'm still getting used to/learning all of the "fanfiction specific jargon" if that's the word for it (like fluff, blurb, drabble etc.) I keep seeing a lot of people on Mysterious Benedict Society blogs referencing "pro-shippers" and "anti-antis" . By any chance could you explain what that means?

Yes, absolutely! Thank you for asking. It can be confusing entering a new community where terms like that have existed for a while, but no one seems to explain what they are. There is a lot of jargon, that's a good word for it. It'll probably get more familiar if you choose to read more :) if it doesn't get more familiar, please always feel free to ask!! In this house we make things accessible.

For form purposes, I'm going to give my definition of each word first based on my experience with them, then I will check my original thoughts with search results (aka urban dictionary bc that's what ended up being the most helpful/relevant lol)

More under the cut, since this will probably be kinda long.

From my experience, pro-shippers are people who will ship anything that breathes- a kid and their parent, siblings, a minor and an adult, a person and an animal, an abusive relationship, whatever the fuck.

According to our pals google and urban dictionary, a pro-shipper is "A term mostly used in fandoms, but can stretch outside of this to include original characters. The core belief is that shipping two fictional characters, no matter if they are family, share ages gaps considered to be unhealthy, or show blatant signs of being abusive or other generally unsavory behaviours, are valid in a fictional setting."

So yeah, pretty much what I had thought- anything goes, because it's fiction and in their opinion it doesn't matter because it's not real.

I have my own opinions about that, but since you didnt ask for them, I'll keep them to myself for now.

Anti-antis is something I havent really come across, so I'm not as certain. Since an anti is someone against something probably supported by proshippers, I would think that an anti-anti means someone or a group of people who think it's stupid that something is disliked online.

So our pals google and urban dictionary came back in clutch!! An anti-anti seems to be pretty much synonymous with a proshipper- "In contexts where "anti" is short for anti-shipping, an "anti anti" is someone who defends shipping, including shipping that may be deemed problematic, often in defense of free speech. It may also be used as an adjective to describe the position of defending problematic shipping.

This term is generally found in tumblr fandom discourse."

(With the example sentences because I was still a little confused, hope they help you too!)

"'I'm anti anti. I think people should be allowed to ship what they want. Fanfiction shouldn't be censored.'

'I can't believe you're an anti anti. That's basically defending pedophilia!'"

So in the context of mbs, this means that proshippers/anti-antis might make content for ships like mr curtain/mr benedict, kate/milligan, non-consensual things, or things like that, with the argument that because it's fiction, it's not real, so it doesn't matter if it shouldn't happen in real life.

If you or anyone else have more questions about fan culture/fanfiction jargon or terms, or really anything else, always feel free to ask! I'm more than happy to help.

#ask #the mysterious benedict society #charity's talkies

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gil-grissom-rp-blog · 2 years

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Introduction

Welcome to the blog. As you can see, this is a roleplay blog for the character Gilbert Arthur Grissom from CSI. Anyone who wishes to interact is required to read and follow the rules, which are as follows:

• Please be polite and respectful. Of me the admin and of other people who interact with this blog ❤️

• Even if you interact with this blog frequently and actively, you are not obligated to follow it. You are free to follow as you please.

• Roleplays can be done in the reblogs of asks or in pms.

• Roleplays can be started based on prompts from prompt lists or scenarios of your own.

• I am open to roleplaying AUs and/or crossovers. But if it's for a fandom I'm not in (do take a look at my main blog for reference) then please send me a long-ass explanation in pms for everything I need to know. Or send/tag me in your character bios or whatever.

• Note: if you want to handle the narration by revealing your character's/fandom's story as the roleplay progresses, that is what we shall do.

• Aside from that, I welcome OCs, whether they be from CSI, other fandoms, or are fandomless.

• There is no "time limit" for you to reply to roleplays. You can take as many days/weeks as you want. I will be waiting patiently and will always welcome you. I, too, will take a long time sometimes. I won't rush you, and I expect to be treated the same way.

• If you see me actively replying to someone else but not you, please ping me. I will never purposefully ignore you. I'm sorry if the note gets lost, or if I forget. Whatever it is, know that I am not deliberately ghosting you.

• I'm not finicky about roleplay length. If a one-worded piece of dialogue is enough to convey everything, then that's fantastic. Of course, this won't be the case most of the time, so something needs describing, do that. Don't make the roleplay bland.

• If you're someone who's vehement about your rp partner cutting roleplays, then this blog might not be for you; please understand that I am strictly a Tumblr mobile user and do not have that function.

• I do have anon on; I logged in through my browser and did it. But otherwise, I am staying on the app.

• Since canon itself is quite...suggestive, in that sense, I do allow such things to be roleplayed. However, full-blown NSFW must be kept strictly to pms, and ONLY PEOPLE 18 YEARS OLD AND OLDER CAN ROLEPLAY THIS.

• Anyone who wants to roleplay smut must first confirm that they are of 18 years of age and above, whether it be on your blog bio or by telling me. If you tell me, I will check your blog.

• That means that anons cannot roleplay smut.

• If the roleplay started out in reblogs but ventured to 18+ content, the roleplay will be shifted to pms. If you wish to pick up in reblogs after the smut scene is over, that is okay.

• In that same vein, gore is allowed, but nothing too over-the-top, unless it's being done in pms.

• Rape can be mentioned in passing when appertaining to a case, but I am not comfortable with outrightly playing it out. Please respect this.

• I also cannot roleplay suicide, self-harm or abuse, because they are triggering for me.

• Gil is autistic (ASD), and so am I (ASD also), so that will come out in a lot in interactions, whether I'm roleplaying as him or speaking as myself. This very detailed ruling list would be an example. And even now I'm still worried as to whether I've thought of everything. I will write him stimming or being pedantic like this, being socially repulsed, touch-averse and whatnot. If you wouldn't want to bear with this from either him nor me, I would advise you to not communicate with me.

• On the subject of faith/religion. Gil is a secular Catholic. And of course neither he or I will judge you or your character for your beliefs. It's all accepted here ❤️

• If you're afraid of/hate arthropods, block the tag [#bug man grissom]

• I am fine with roleplaying Gil in a platonic or romantic relationship with your character.

• I will not roleplay first encounter/first few encounters smut, because Grissom being demisexual is pretty much canon to me. I will only write Gil having sex with people he is in love with.

• As for what ships I roleplay, my main one is GSR, but I am willing to roleplay Grillows, Kessom, Grissom/Warrick, Grissom/Nick and Grissom/Greg. As for the lab techs and stuff, I personally don't see how a romantic dynamic between Gil and any of them can come about, but if you want to do that, then sure, I can try. The only ship I won't do is Grissom/Ecklie. Like, please. No.

• And I'm fine with any other non-Grissom ship. Sandle, Morganders, Morgan x Hodges, Wedges, Hedges, Warnick, Nicky and Greggo, Catherine and Warick, Catherine and Nick, Catherine and Vartann, whatever you want.

I think that's it XD Here's a link to a character bio:

#gil grissom roleplay #gil grissom rp #csi roleplay #csi rp

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lavenderek · 3 years

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So you're saying you don't think "underage" fic is gross. Is that what youre saying?

well, no. yuck. what i’m saying is, what exactly and specifically do we want to happen?

there should not be explicit fic about underage characters, got it. so what age can they not be under? 18? 16? what country’s laws regarding the age of consent do we prioritize? like, i think it’s gross that the age of consent is 16 in some places, but i’m an american, so i would, wouldn’t i? so ok, what if we hedged it a bit and put the age as like, 14? that way it’s not little kids, it’s all teenagers. but no, gross, 14-year-olds are children. fun fact: so are 16-year-olds. they are also children.

what about fic about two teenagers having a consensual encounter? should all romantic or sexual fic have to be about adults only? your answer to this may very well be “yes,” and that’s completely valid. a teenager writing fic might disagree. somebody who’s a big fan of a show that’s about a bunch of teenagers might disagree. should there be an adults-only section on the site? there’s already a “stop, you have to be 18″ box to check before you can access explicit fic, so how do we verify a user’s age? they can just lie about their age and click through anyway. you have to be 18 to make a youtube account and i’ve had one since i was 13. i remember very deliberately choosing a new birth year when it asked for my birthdate.

then you get to slightly greyer areas like large age gaps, or heavy role play between consenting adults. i have absolutely witnessed fic that’s clearly written to be CP, but it’s tagged as age play. so like, for all intents and purposes this is CP, but if you roll in like “hey, this is fucked up,” they can be like, “oh, so you read this picturing actual children, sicko?? you have a problem with two adults doing shit in the bedroom??? how dare you!!! don’t like don’t read!!!”

it’s kind of like on porn sites, how they make like nasty inc*st stuff but call it “stepmom” or whatever, like oh, they’re not actually related! sure, joseph, thanks for covering all your bases

so we can’t ban kinks. or can we? should we limit depictions of serious addictions or domestic abuse too? torture, or even body horror? these are generally accepted to be dark content.

i’m not trying to engage in whataboutism, i’m naming actual, relevant questions about shit that’s disturbing in real life (no offense to kink people who follow codes of consent and conduct) and can be incredibly upsetting to encounter online. shit that i can’t imagine wanting to read, let alone write.

these are the questions that we, you, i, people pro-a*3 and people anti-a*3, are all asking, and not a single one of us can or should answer them unilaterally.

so it’s like, oh, okay, so there should be no oversight at all? should there be no rules? no, obviously, that would be horrible, i don’t trust any of these fuckers to conduct themselves civilly. so there should be some rules, but not too many rules. that’s what we have now, and clearly the way things are now isn’t working because a lot of users are reasonably very upset.

should there be a voting system, and rules are set by a popular vote? should certain words be flagged and you can’t post the fic with that word in it? should there be a thing where when you post a fic, you have to select the ages of each character and that’s listed at the top of the fic? what if they age during the fic? should there be a flagging function, where you report someone for not using sufficient tags? users will find workarounds for all of this. you know they will. so mods will have to be very specific about the rules and introduce, like, a vetting system for it. which is a lot more manpower and a lot more chances for subjective judgments.

all of the above is why it operates on a tagging system instead. i’m gonna be real, i only go on a*3 to read comments on my own shit lmao, and even when i did go on there more often i never went in the tags searching for fic. so is there a blacklist function? is there a flagging function?

if there is a flagging function, maybe they make it so that if the flagged user has violated the rules, their account is suspended and their fic made private for the duration and until they add necessary tags.

cool, a compromise. but uh-oh, it turns out Mod A agrees that this fic is n*ncon, but Mod B thinks it’s just vague, not n*nconsensual, and doesn’t feel comfortable banning the fic. or it turns out User didn’t post anything flaggable, they were reported by somebody who is targeting them for some reason, or by someone who is more stringent about n*ncon than somebody else would be, like, it’s gotta be enthusiastic and verbal consent or else it’s skirting the edges too much.

it’s like, we’ve already witnessed censorship (please take this word usage gently, i know it’s touchy but it’s the word to use here) being a problem here on tumblr with their stupid nipple ban. there’s a double standard regarding whose nipples are explicit and whose are kosher for public consumption. people have to appeal their shit getting flagged and sometimes nothing gets fixed regardless. i’m sure other people are pleased that there’s less of a chance of them accidentally scrolling past a picture of a hard dick at work.

so you get it, this is a problem that’s more complicated than “all of x should be banned and if you post it there’s something wrong with you,” a belief you’re more than entitled to hold but can’t base, like, fanfic legislation off of. you get it you get it.

you get it, but like, what is the fucking deal with those “fandom moms” who go off on soliloquies about the days of old or whatever the fuck whenever this topic comes up? what about the weirdos who are like, “what’s next, banning gay fic????” yeah, if we allow gay marriage you can marry a tree, that’s how it works, thanks tiffany.

but no, the reason they do this is NOT that they think lgbtq content is comparable in any way to CP. the reason they do this is that this exact problem has taken place on every site that has ever hosted fic. and many previous sites did think lgbtq content was comparable to CP. it was categorized as adult content and hidden.

that’s why a*3 exists in the first place. it was to avoid godmodding and absolutism. it’s supposed to be more or less self-governed. i don’t want there to be CP on a*3 any more than you do, but i also don’t trust randos to decide what is and isn’t acceptable content. this topic is not new.

i’m in support of stronger government regulation in real life because it can be argued that certain actions and systems violate human rights. everybody deserves food and shelter, for example. the same can’t be argued in this case because some creep writing CP doesn’t violate my rights. i find it offensive and i don’t think they should be writing it, but my right to click the back button is intact. there is no institution making it impossible or even difficult for me to not read fanfiction. the creep could just as reasonably argue that their right to post what they want is being affected.

why is this response so long? is it because i can’t shut up? yes, but also because this is a complex issue and that’s why nobody has taken significant action on it.

people are also big mad.

i’ve never understood this impulse to see somebody not doing a thing you want them to do and assume it’s out of malice or incompetence, anyway. i don’t know anybody who volunteers for a*3 but it’s my assumption that given the choice to have us all pissed at them, or have us all not pissed at them, they would choose to have us not be pissed at them. it just seems like the reasonable reaction to have. and like, i’d be pretty shocked to part the kimono and find out they’re all CP-loving gargoyles and a*3 actually stands for A lot Of child abus3. that is the reason i have not been like, “fuck a*3.” because what are they supposed to do, you know?

there’s no simple or inarguably morally right solution here. the princess is in another castle. just post fic on tumblr, i guess? make another hosting site that’s exactly like a*3 but romantic characters can only be like, 21?

i actually think the legal age in the US should be raised to 21, not joking. your brain literally and biologically isn’t finished developing at 18. teenagers lack the world experience to make decisions that adults make.

somewhere there is an 18-year-old or a person who moved out and became self sufficient at 18 who hates this sentiment. there’s a teenager in an abusive home who would be intensely demoralized by the prospect of having to remain beholden to these people for three more years.

and there’s a parent who is relieved to know that their kid can’t be preyed on by army recruiters for three more years. there’s a person who got into a car crash with a teenager who misjudged whether or not they could make a turn who’s like, yeah, she could probably have benefited from a few more years.

nothing is as simple as it should be. i agree with you, but i’m not willing to pass blanket judgments with regards to actions that should be taken. and honestly, given how little i actually go on the site, i don’t even have a dog in this fight. so all my opinions on it are moot anyway.

(side note, if you are in an abusive home and you can’t make your own bank account, or if your bank account is monitored by your abusive parents, maybe try venmo? you can get a debit card that pulls directly from your venmo balance. a surprising number of places accept venmo payments, and this way you can save up money in secret.)

anyway uhhhhh seeya

#who is this even #haters #long post #please DO NOT REBLOG

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thatocdfeel · 4 years

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Just as a general statement for other people who struggle with moral stuff like I do. I've been doing some reading and there's this thing called white fragility which basically means white people can't handle facing their own racism and get really anxious when confronted by it. Combine that with the fact that literally all white people are racist and that basically means that if you've been really anxious about racism in the last week or so it's probably not your OCD and you're actually racist.

Okay, so I’ve let this sit in my inbox for some time, not sure how to approach this, because:

1. I am white 2. I am not from the US

It’s not my place to discuss what is or isn’t racism, however, I do think your ask is oversimplifying the matter, and I’ll explain my reasoning.

White fragility is a term coined by Robin DiAngelo in her essay of the same name, which you can read here.

For a TL;DR, here is a quote from an article by the Guardian:

‘’DiAngelo says she encounters a lot of “certitude from white people – they insist ‘Well, it’s not me’, or say ‘I’m doing my best, what do you want from me?’ ”. She defines this as white fragility – the inability of white people to tolerate racial stress.

This, she says, leads to white people “weaponising [their] hurt feelings” and being indignant and defensive when confronted with racial inequality and injustice. This creates a climate where the suggestion or accusation of racism causes more outrage among white people than the racism itself.

“And if nobody is racist,” she asks, “why is racism still America’s biggest problem? What are white people afraid they will lose by listening? What is so threatening about humility on this topic?”

Using DiAngelo’s own words, we have no ‘racial stamina’. Whether you think of yourself as a ‘morally good’ person and the idea of being racist offends you, or if you are a racist who doesn’t believe racism is even real, or you’re a proud racist and believe it to be ‘morally just’, or you simply don’t give a shit about it one way or the other -- being forced to confront racism will trigger discomfort, anger, anxiety and defensiveness.

Whether or not you consider yourself racist, white fragility enables racism, and is something white people have to consciously make an effort to unlearn.

And to your point about ‘being automatically racist’, people who don’t consider themselves racist will still have internalized racist ideas, because if you live in a white supremacist / racist society, you will grow up surrounded by these ideas.

And while consciously you are against racism, morally, ethically, politically, etc... these internalized, learned behaviours will be there, and it is a long and difficult task to find, identify and unlearn them.

This is true about sexism, homophobia, ableism, classism and so on.

I am not arguing this.

The main concern I had with your ask is that this is an OCD blog, and because OCD encourages all or nothing thinking, a follower might read that statement and think you are either racist or you aren’t, and that if you are racist, it’s game over forever.

The OCD sufferer, based on their own moral compass, cannot allow this unthinkable, horrible scenario to be true, because what if I am racist? , to the OCD sufferer, appears only to have one answer: if you are, you’re evil forever and your life is over.

When in reality, the answer to the question what if I’m racist? is: if you are, you can choose to educate yourself and work to do better, or you can choose to be complicit and do nothing.

If you’re white in a society like the US, you WILL have internalized racist beliefs and behaviours. Some of these will be so subtle you don’t even consider them, because you’ve never had to consider them. And because you never had to, suddenly making yourself consider these things will be hard, and it will take practice, time, effort and a degree of self-compassion.

These things, while true, do not make you an irredeemable, evil monster. They do not mean you are morally corrupt or that the only way to atone is through self-punishment. If you care about being anti-racist, you cannot judge yourself ‘irredeemable’ and call it a day.

You have to look inward, you have to look at your white friends and family, your society, your government -- you have to educate yourself, you have to listen to the voices of PoC, you have to speak up against other white people and you have to fight that white fragility that tells you to run away from the conversation.

TLDR; There are plenty of reasons to be anxious about racism, especially if you are someone who is plagued by OCD. So yes, if you’ve been really anxious about racism in the last week or so, it will in part be because of ‘white fragility’, but that doesn’t mean your OCD related anxiety is any less real or valid.

Intrusive thoughts about racism, fears of being racist, fears of acting racist, and so on are not uncommon and you will definitely be anxious about it because that’s how the disorder works.

While I don’t have any specific resources on this, I’d recommend reading about:

Moral Scrupulosity OCD

Responsibility OCD

And here is someone’s personal account (tw for eating disorders)

A final word on OCD enhanced anxiety about racism, as a white person:

This doesn’t mean you’re a bad person, but it also doesn’t mean you’re free of responsibility. We all have the responsibility, every single day, to fight injustice, unlearn prejudice and make the world better. We don’t do this through self-hatred, but by accepting that you are not perfect. Moral purity is impossible, being 100% good is impossible, having no flaws is impossible, never ever in your life doing, saying or thinking a single bad thing is impossible. Accepting this does NOT mean accepting the any particular moral value of that behaviour. The first step to change the parts of yourself you do not like, is to acknowledge that they are there.

Whatever your OCD makes you scared of, think of it as a stain on your carpet. If you think that having a stain on the carpet is the worst thing that could ever happen, that this is an UNTHINKABLE situation, you will ignore the stain every time you walk by it. You get angry when people point the stain out. You have a CLEAN house, damn it! The stain CANNOT be there because that means YOU have failed, and YOU are BAD.

Stop. Look at the stain. The stain is there. It happens. Stains happen all the time, to everyone. Now, when you have seen the stain, acknowledged it, accepted it is there. How did the stain happen? Once you figure that out, you can stop that stain from happening again.

Maybe you spilled your coffee because you don’t look where you walk. Start looking where you walk. Does this mean you’ll never spill anything else again? No, but next time, you’ll be even better at recognizing, cleaning and preventing stains than you were before.

Or you can leave the stain and keep spilling coffee until there’s coffee everywhere and the whole carpet is ruined.

That is a deliberate choice you can make, and that is the decision that matters.

#racism tw

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menatiera · 4 years

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*Crashes in with prompt ideas* Hi my Mena! Ok, here we go... I'll just suggest a character and a prompt and let you take it from there. Tony, Someone turning up in the nick of time to save the heroes in a car/plane/spacecraft/etc and asking "Need a ride?" Bucky, “We live together. You can’t blame this on anyone else.” Steve, "So violent. You want to mug and tase everybody these days." If you're needing more, just hit me up, honey! *Mwah*

Hey my dearest megmeg! Sorry it took me so long to actually post it while it was written since Easter... :’) But here it is! I went with the first prompt, and I hope you’ll like it!

Title: Showing up to save the day Collaborator: Menatiera Card number: 3109 Ao3 Link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24239134 Squares Filled: Natasha Romanoff Bingo - O5 - Depression Tony Stark Bingo - T1 - I'll sleep when I'm dead. Ship/Main Pairing: Gen Rating: Teen and Up Major Tags: One-Shot, Depressive Thoughts, Mission Gone Wrong, Angst with a Happy Ending Summary: Written for the prompt Someone turning up in the nick of time to save the heroes in a car/plane/spacecraft/etc and asking "Need a ride?" I got from Rebelmeg on Tumblr. :)

Showing up to save the day

Natasha had never been more grateful for Tony’s tendency to adopt children than today.

The mission had been a disaster from start to finish. The Avengers had had to react quickly, and therefore went in based on insufficient information. It was something that would probably leave any other first responder unit in a screaming match with their superiors, while it was the most common and most expected from a group of superheroes, really. And on most days, it was okay. On most days, they were quick on their feet and could handle whatever was thrown at their faces.

But there were days when the given intel wasn’t only insufficient but completely misleading. There were days when it meant going into a situation expecting a handful of ordinary goons, when in reality they went in to be pinned down by a squadron of enhanced, intelligent dinosaurs armed to the teeth under the command of the handful of not-exactly-ordinary and not-exactly-human-anymore goons.

Which was challenging, to say the least, even to superheroes, because being super and trained and hard to kill is one thing, and being this far outnumbered by competent enemies was another.

(rest under the cut)

When the reptiles had successfully managed to separate them from each other, they all kind of started to make their peace with the very likely option of not leaving the scene alive. Or at least not all of them, despite their best efforts. Natasha felt the icy feeling settle in her stomach, the ruthless truth of it run through his veins with cold certitude. She didn’t have more time than to spare a few glances to her teammates, but she had been trained to see the important details even by just that.

She saw how heavily Bucky was bleeding; the dinosaur teeth had gone through tac gear like it was cotton candy. She saw the desperation as he switched from rifle to gun to blades, as he had ran out of ammo or lost them to the enemy. (She dodged sharp fangs and shot through the jaw of the beastie.) She saw Steve, his jaw clenched and teeth gritted, partly because of determination and partly simply to not bit his tongue as he flipped, fought, punched and defended himself with the shield, growls of frustration escaping him as he got farther and farther away from the rest of his team. (A goon came close enough for her to slam her body in. Stomp on his feet. Elbow to his noise; hear the satisfactory crack of bone. Push him away, into the waiting jaw of a dinosaur.) She saw Clint, running out of arrows, refusing to move away from his spot as he defended Wanda, who had been knocked unconscious earlier. (Switch the knife from her right to her left hand and thrust into the chest of a reptile, push push push until she couldn’t further, until the warm blood of the animal coated her hand.) She saw Vision, struggling and immobilized by one of the alien devices the enemy had, his synthetic-vibranium body withstanding the dinosaurs but who knew how long would that last. (Get a moment to breath and spray the enemies in front of her with bullets, without aim, just to keep them at bay while she panted.) She saw Rhodey, out of his armor for some reason she had missed, teamed up with Sam who was forced on the ground too, but at least the pair still had their guns. (A bullet hit her chest, stopped by her gear but she still stumbled back two steps, trying to get her bearings again through the pain. A dinosaur nearly chomped her head off. She danced away, further from the others…)

So it was really looking fucking great for everyone.

Natasha wasn’t afraid of dying, hadn’t been since she had turned twelve, always accepted it as an unlikely but possible scenario. And to be completely honest, she wasn’t even displeased with this way of dying. Being eaten alive wasn’t ideal for sure, but she was practical enough to know that there were worse ones. Plus, if there were an afterlife, Clint would be able to brag about it for eternity as something pretty unique and, in his terms, badass way to go.

(She was forced on the ground, assaulted from too many directions to be able to stand up, just rolling away and away - sometimes being able to retaliate, but mostly just avoiding, rolling, dodging…)

She was a bit worried about Steve and Bucky. But hey, they’d died a few times already, they should be good for another round. As long as they went out together, because she was pretty sure they’d commit suicide to drag the other back personally anyway if one of them miraculously survived where the other didn’t.

(Finally she was on her feet and she fired, almost blindly, only paying attention to turn away from her teammates, even though she was going to run out of ammo too soon.)

The rest of the team, well. Natasha could guess, but she was pretty preoccupied with a dinosaur snarling at her face, so she didn’t. They’d figure out afterlife if they even got there.

Which, personally, Natasha doubted, but it was just her belief. Everyone was allowed to have their own delusions. (Even if they were wrong.)

The whole building started to shook around her, and through the roaring of the battle she heard thumbling, thunderous sounds of bricks collapsing, structures shattering, and she looked up, surprised and too damn deep among the enemies to feel hopeful. Even if Thor arrived just in time to save the day, there was never any insurance that all of the team would survive long enough to see him - Natasha herself was bleeding, the cuts from the dinosaur claws slashing deep into her flesh, making her slower, easier to target.

But what she saw when the roof was torn away from above them wasn't the God of Thunder.

What she saw was... a spaceship.

It was bulky, less sleek than the Guardians' ship with which she had experience. It seemed used and old, the way a thirty-years old car would look despite being loved and cared for through the decades. She didn't have time to goggle too much, having plenty enough to focus on without the appearing spaceship. The Avengers were in a bad enough situation, if the newcomer turned out to be hostile, it was all lost anyway, and she couldn't do anything against a spaceship in her condition - she ran out of ammo already, not to mention the exhaustion of the blood loss and the fight.

The spaceship, hovering above them, opened fire.

Dinosaurs and goons fell like they were skittles, the hail of bullets avoiding the Avengers carefully.

The spaceship turned in the air, almost like making a dramatic pirouette, and the head of it tipped down, revealing the pilot.

Natasha had never been more grateful to see an alien.

Nebula was holding a sippy cup in one hand, nibbling at it absent-mindedly as she piloted the ship.

Natasha sliced through the garters of a reptile and grinned up. Nebula parted the cup from her lips long enough to smile back, then continued to nibble on it.

Natasha's smile faltered, partly because a goon got close enough to nearly hit her face with his gunstock, and partly because someone joined Nebula on the cockpit, and of course Tony had to be there.

She was happy to see Tony, always. She wasn't happy to see him out of bed against doctors’ orders. But honestly, what else did she expect.

There was no music, no AC/DC filling the air like the first time Tony had shown up for the very first Avengers mission, joining the fight against Loki. Maybe Tony grew out of some of his antics; maybe he just got older and more tired to waste it without good reason. But he was still dramatic enough to switch on a loudspeaker. "Need a ride, team?" he asked.

The resulting growls, thankfully, were lost to the noise of the spaceship landing. On top of some of the dinosaurs. No one particularly minded that bit.

One by one, the Avengers fought their way to the opening hatch. Natasha helped Clint dragging Wanda, while Sam and Rhodey carried Vision and the supersoldier duo covered their hasty exit with punching or stabbing anything that came close enough to punch or stab it.

They all but collapsed on the floor once the ramp was up and they felt the ship rising to the air.

Natasha heard part of the conversation happening in the cockpit. "These are bad guys by Terran standards, right?" Nebula asked.

"Absolutely," Tony confirmed, voice audibly proud, and also audibly shaky. He probably wasn't as good to go as he tried to convince himself.

"Okay then," Nebula said.

The next moment, there was an explosion huge enough that it shook the ship in the air, throwing everyone off-balance who tried to be on their feet. Natasha was wiser than that to begin with, still sprawled out on the dirty iron lattice. Every inch of her body hurt. Adrenaline had kept the sensations at bay, but even hormones could do miracles only for so long. She was very grateful to just lay on the floor, happy to be still breathing, and getting acclimatized to the fact that she missed her meeting with death yet again.

Thanks to the amazing team. The team that included Tony Stark, Iron Man, the best defender of planet Earth, and foster dad of many deadly being. Including, but not limited to Nebula.

Half-deaf from the explosion, Natasha wondered if they should make Nebula an Avenger in the eyes of the world, too. She always showed up if Iron Man got involved, anyway - they might as well make it official.

Once the ringing of their ears dissipated, Tony sighed, loud and exasperated.

"Neb, Mean and Angsty Blue Princess, dearest of the aliens, when I say bad guys, I mean you should turn them to the authorities, not to blow them up, remember?"

"Ooops," Nebula said, tone as flat as possible. "I'll keep that in mind next time."

Natasha rolled to her back and couldn't help a smile as he listened to the team roustling and groaning and complaining around her.

Nebula didn't blow up the facility because she forgot the rules of Earth. She did it because the people in there had hurt the Avengers. She had chosen Tony as his family, and with Tony came a bunch of other superheroes, and as much as Nebula tried to keep up appearances, she had grown fond of them. All of them. Natasha knew, because she'd been there once where Nebula was now, too attached to not care but too scared to show it openly. Yet.

She'd come around, Natasha was sure of that.

And until then, here she was, saving them all.

Natasha knew there were a lot to come. They'd have to thank Neb and Tony. They'd have to ask them where did they acquire a spaceship. (Or more like, where the hell had been Tony and Nebula secretly building it, since it was clearly a shared project between the pair.) They'd have to deal with the fallout of this mission gone wrong. They'd have to justify the extreme measure of violence to authorities. They'd have to figure out how did this facility got weaponized dinosaurs, which wouldn't be easy with the evidence blown up to kingdom come. They'd have to sit down with Nebula yet again, pretending they didn't all know why had she done what she'd done. And they'd have to chew another one on Tony for not staying in bed when he had been on the brink of death only a few days ago.

But all of that could wait.

At these moments, she just wanted to sleep, preferably for a whole week, surrounded by her family.

So she did.

#marvel #natasha romanoff #avengers #avengers team #fanfic #my writing #my fanfic #tony stark #nebula #iron man #iron dad #black widow #mission gone wrong #depression #depressive thoughts #angsty #angst with a happy ending #rebelmeg

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