gogogoat495

[gogogoat495]

lately my kids have been playing Baby Knife, which consists of somebody acting as a baby with knife hands chasing people while going "baby knife baby knife" over and over. is this a thing or are they just insane

[gogogoat495]

being an adult and watching others succeed because they have stable relationships with their families can actually be so demoralizing, because while they were experiencing growing up you were only surviving

[gogogoat495]

Sorry we really went from free the nipple, take back the night, slut walks, and ending gender/sex segregation in sports being fucking milquetoast feminism 101 concepts to fucking girl dinner and "I just worry about fairness if we let trans girls play against cis ones" and "it was right of that woman to call the cops on a black man for existing near here in public during the day time because men are all violent monsters" and "radical feminism isn't transphobic we just need to kill all men including trans ones those oppressive traitors" and I will legit never be able to be normal about it. What the FUCK happened. I'd say I wonder what the feminists of my youth would say about this but I'm one and lemme tell ya I want to throw up. Go fucking read bell hooks or do something else useful please because all of this learned helplessness, gender essentialism, and transphobia dressed up as feminism is actively holding us back.

[gogogoat495]

(Note: OP, if it isn't too much trouble, could you please go back and add all of these as alt text for the original images? Usually my IDs are perfectly fine as is but this is one of the cases where having them all as a block at the end isn't as useful.)

[ID: Some visual aids for the essay.

1 - A picture of Asriel standing in a field of flowers set against a loveless flag.

Next images are all dialogue used in the "negatives" portion of the analysis.

2 - Flowey equating love with care. "Hurts, doesn't it? If you had just gone through without caring about anyone… You wouldn't have to feel bad now."

3 - Flowey asserting he can't make friends. "Oh, I get it. You wanna be friends, huh…? You're /pathetic/. You /really/ think I want to be friends with /you/? Heh… You really /don't/ get it, do you?" "There's only one person I could care about anymore. And even then, I couldn't /truly/ care about them. I just like to think there's someone out there… Someone that I won't get tired of. Someone like /me/."

4 - The narration on souls, equating lovelessness with cruelty. "Love, hope, compassion… This is what people say monster Souls are made of. But the absolute nature of 'Soul' is unknown. After all, humans have proven their Souls don't need these things to exist."

5 - Asriel on his identity and capacity for care. "I haven't felt like this for a long time. As a flower, I was soulless. I lacked the power to love other people. However, with everyone's souls inside me… I not only have my own compassion back… But I can feel every other monster's as well." "In a little whiile… I'll turn back into a flower. I'll stop being 'myself.' I'll stop being able to feel love again. So… Frisk. It's best if you just forget about me, OK? Just go be with the people who love you."

6 - Flowey on his discovery of his lovelessness. "He was so… Emotional. But… For some reason… I didn't feel anything at all. I soon realized I didn't feel /anything/ about /anyone/." "My compassion had disappeared! And believe me, it's not like I wasn't trying. I wasted weeks with that stupid king, vainly hoping I would feel something. But it became too much for me." "I thought of all people, /she could make me feel whole again. She failed. Ha ha… I realized those two were useless. I became despondent. I just wanted to love someone. I just wanted to care about someone."

7 - Flowey on how life seemed pointless without love. "Not in a world without love. Not in a world without you."

Last images are decorational pictures for the "positives" portion.

8 - Gif of Papyrus feeding Flowey cat food.

9 - Flowey edited onto a loveless flag.

/End ID]

I’d like to replay the game to have more cohesive thoughts but looking at some of the dialogue i’d like to give a small analysis on how undertale handles lovelessness in both a very clumsy way and very accidentally nice way. I made a whole video essay about Flowey’s lovelessness already, but I’d like to give some new thoughts now that I know I’m on the loveless spectrum myself

The negatives

While Flowey is a very important character to me and I will discuss the positives aspects of his character, there is no denying the game falls into some bad tropes and lines of dialogues.

In the pacifist run, Flowey only really talks about his lovelessness if you keep visiting him after the neutral ending or when he becomes Asriel.

In the neutral ending he seems to imply that love = care, stating he can’t really feel anything for anyone, which to him it means he doesn’t care. This is obviously false in general, but even the game itself proves him wrong over that fact, making it very clear that Flowey does care multiple times. (NOT talking about low empathy, which Flowey might have as well, I mean like… him not caring about killing people). However, this is not super well executed if there are A LOT of people that still see Flowey not feeling love as him not caring about anyone, and there are even people that think Flowey DOES feel love. While the story contradicts Flowey’s statement about love = care, it’s done in a way that the characters never really tell him that it’s okay to be the way he is. It’s never fully acknowledged that it’s okay for Flowey to be loveless, it’s mostly implied. Flowey is constantly seen as a tragic character or a cruel character, by the game and by the fans.

The game doesn’t really challenge the way that love is glorified. Love is seen as an inherently good thing in the story (LOVE is not the same thing, that’s obvious), the thing that ultimately makes you care about others, one of the main things that saves Asriel, it’s even stated to be the one of the things mosnters claim their souls are made out of. Quite literally a ‘love is what makes us human’ but with monsters. They even add a bit of a cruel line stating that humans don’t need love in their souls to remain alive, and this is not said in a positive way, it’s implying that humans can be cruel and still be alive.

In the pacifist ending, Asriel states he doesn’t feel love, which (in pacifist) he hasn’t really done before. Flowey is established early on to be a villain that doesn’t care about people and is willing to kill people over and over, but it’s only here where he states he didn’t really feel love when he was Flowey. Maybe you can predict so, but it’s never stated until this moment. Asriel speaks of Flowey as this sort of horrible monster and while this can be interpreted as self-deprecation and Asriel’s lack of understanding of lovelessness… again, the game doesn’t really make an effort to prove him wrong. It’s all reading between lines, it’s all things you can interpret and imply, but the game itself doesn’t go out of its way to tell Asriel he’s wrong for thinking this way. This scene is meant to make you really sad that Asriel is not going to feel love again, because that is something ‘very very sad and very very tragic’. And I feel like a lot of people don’t understand that while you can show the struggle of an identity, you can’t JUST show the struggle. Specially if you aren’t loveless yourself. If you do that, you’re just being insensitive, framing lovelessness as a horrible tragedy.

In a violent run, Flowey speaks more about his lovelessness. How he suddenly couldn’t feel anything for anyone, not even for his parents. This segment is worded a bit strangely too, again implying love = care. The obvious thing is: Flowey does not feel love anymore. He’s scared, he tries to feel the way he did before and is unable to, he doesn’t seem to really talk about it to his parents, he runs away and isolates himself. The events that lead him to find out about his reset powers happen as well. Needless to say, Flowey is very miserable. This in it of itself is not a problem, again it’s okay to show a loveless character that struggles with their lovelessness, you can make a good story and a good commentary with it. But AGAIN, the game doesn’t really challenge this, it doesn’t really do anything with it. This is just seen as Flowey’s tragic backstory that leads him to start his evil path. It’s NOT the reason why he’s evil, Flowey’s evil actions are more a reflection’s to the player’s. Unfortunately, the game also does not make this super clear because a lot of people still attribute Flowey’s evil actions to his lovelessness. Maybe it’s lack of media literacy, or maybe the game also did not try very hard to make you understand lovelessness was not the problem.

Finding out more about his lovelessness just makes the pacifist ending more cruel to me. Asriel really invalidates Flowey’s lovelessness, and it’s framed as a way that the game itself is ALSO invalidating Flowey.

The neutral?

From what I remember and from some dialogue I’ve read, while Undertale has a very obvious theme about love all throughout the game, love isn’t really mentioned as much as you’d think. The characters don’t really say ‘I love you’ to you or to each other, they have their own ways of expressing that they care about you and each other. Aside from that one Sans’ scene, they don’t have big speeches about love either. These are things you really expect in stories very centered around love but Undertale doesn’t actually talk about love as much as you’d think. They talk more about being kind to others, which is what we should be really talking about. Really, Flowey/Asriel seems to be the biggest emphasis in the game when it comes to love, but it’s all related to his lovelessness. This is both a good thing and not a great thing, neutral it is.

The positives

Undertale does something not many stories do and that is for the loveless character to actually remain loveless at the end of the game and for the extra content of the game to state over and over that Flowey cares about others and seems to have a pretty happy life. It IS a problem that this does NOT show up in the actual game, but it is good that canonically this is the character’s fate. Flowey still talks to Frisk and Papyrus and took care of Toriel when she needed it. He seems to be doing okay and he is not framed as an evil person just because he’s back to being loveless. He is okay! He is happy! Even if the game frames his ending as a tragedy, it seems they are rectifying that and stating that actually, it isn’t a tragedy and he will be okay.

Aside from that, while the game has issues in how it handles lovelessness, I can’t deny that a lot of it works really well for interesting and positive loveless metaphors and interpretations. Like I said, the problem is that the game doesn’t really explore them, but the themes ARE there. The glorification of love, the fact that because of that Flowey feels like there is something wrong with him and decides to isolate himself, the fact that he even thinks life is not worth it without love… the commentary is all there. Asriel not liking Flowey is a bit of a metaphor for how Flowey doesn’t accept himself, and that he needs to learn he doesn’t have to be Asriel to be happy again, he doesn’t need to feel love to be happy again.

It’s also super nice that Asriel says that Frisk should ‘go back with the people who love them’ and yet Frisk keeps visiting Flowey, implying that Flowey doesn’t need to love Frisk for Frisk to want to spend time together.

I don’t think Undertale is the worst story ever when it comes to how it handles lovelessness, while there are some harmful stuff I genuinely think it has one of the best probably completely accidental portrayals of a loveless character. Flowey was a very important character for me to realize that I was loveless myself, he is the ONLY loveless character that: 1) remains loveless at the end and 2) isn’t inherently evil- that I have actually seen on media. Most ‘loveless’ characters tend to either feel love again, or seen as evil or a tragic fate. Flowey, while flawed, is a huge difference from most loveless characters. He is very complex, he is very deep, he is very important to me.

Flowey is a really great character that might fall into some bad tropes, but he’s still a cool loveless character that helped me in my journey to understand my own lovelessness. Flowey doesn’t need to be saved, he doesn’t need to be Asriel and he doesn’t need to feel love. Flowey just needs to be accepted as Flowey, a little flower that doesn’t feel love, and that’s okay.

[gogogoat495]

We live in the dumbest, lamest cyberpunk dystopia possible.

So LA has been — and continues to — protest against ICE. These protests haven’t gotten any smaller or lost any momentum, but social media wasn’t reflecting it.

TikTok users, realizing that the platform/other social media are censoring/deleting/shadowbanning these protest videos, decided to find a workaround.

They’re calling it the LA Music Festival. Ice detention centers and other protest locations are “stages.” The hottest band is Rage Against the Machine. “Here’s what gear you should be bringing to stay safe at the LA Music Festival.”

And it fucking worked.

TikTok has become a proving ground for a lot of new music, meaning lots of labels and organizations have lucrative deals with TikTok to promote their new artists and music festivals. So they absolutely cannot censor the words “music festival” or train the algorithm to ignore it, or they risk endangering that very important revenue.

So now protest videos are flooding feeds again, but it’s the LA 24/7 Music Festival. Truly an incredible timeline we’ve landed in.

[gogogoat495]

i think i tend to forget how good boredom is for creativity because we're all so addicted to numbing ourselves with screens and stimulation. but standing in the shower or going for a walk with no music or just sitting in your bedroom without being allowed to touch any screens & all of a sudden i have multiple new projects to start, a solution to a months-long plot problem & 4 new original characters

[gogogoat495]

ok google how do i propose deeper friendship and intimacy to my mutuals without feeling like a pervert predator

[gogogoat495]

ykno the thing about poetry is that 99% of it is bullshit and the other 1% will cut you like a material knife, and for every person that 1% is a different section of the whole. this is probably true about all art.

[gogogoat495]

when i take my phone case off i feel concern and fear knowing that some people just rawdog their phone like that like its so slippery girl you are carrying around a little fish

[gogogoat495]

btw there's nothing wrong with intergenerational friendships and it is in fact super important for teens to have healthy, respectful relationships with the adults in their lives because it will help them more easily identify when an adult is being toxic, manipulative, or otherwise unsavory if they have healthy relationships to go off of.

"A grown ass adult shouldn't have anything in common with a teenager" okay so you're either operating off of an assumption that either teenagers don't have anything of worth to contribute to a conversation, or that adults aren't allowed to have fun hobbies.

I talked to my teenage cousin for like an hour the other day about character motivations and the core themes of one piece and had a blast talking to her! She had some real insightful things to say!

Teenagers are fully realized and complex human beings! You can talk to them about music, books, video games, hobbies, etc. Stop being weird about it

[gogogoat495]

"If my book is not perfect then-"

Then what? People will actually discuss it? fill your plotholes with fanfiction and headcanons?

People dont care about perfection. perfection is boring. if your story is perfect people will forget about it. its how we are wired. we remember the strange, the weird and all things left open.

Perfection isnt the goal, interesting is

[gogogoat495]

I've survived my first day on Tumblr

Achievements:

Don't shoot! I'm friendly!: Prove you're not a bot

AI dismemberment: Disable algorithm settings

Friends?: Gained a mutual

I recognize you: Follow someone you know from r/Tumblr

MY EYES!: Change the site palette

Great Idea: Reblog a post

They love me: Have a post reblogged

[gogogoat495]

I truly truly believe that the most important thing you can do in fandom is be a cheerleader. comment on fics. reblog art and rave in the tags. support the people making the things you want to see. this is how you keep a fandom alive. this is how you get more of what you want. you never know: that person could have decided to make more just because you liked it.

[gogogoat495]

it’s crazy to me that Homestuck has apparently influenced every single piece of media to come out of the mid 2010s and yet I have somehow never played an indie game that attempts to lift any of this sylladex shit for its inventory. there should be 10,000 games out there by now with inventory management systems even HALF as fucked up and evil as “items can only be stored in inventory slots equivalent to their name’s Scrabble score”

[gogogoat495]

The second you start blaming transandrophobia on transfems you’re no longer trying to actually understand your own oppression you’re just being an asshole.

Transfems are not your enemy, bigots are. Fight with your sisters, not against them.

[gogogoat495]

I do the opposite of gatekeeping, I’m not going to shut up until you like this thing as much as I do

[gogogoat495]

I wish there were a way to differentiate "tired because I'm understimulated and will get energized and have fun if I go out" and "tired because I'm really just tired and I'll be boring and grumpy if I go out"