#but the opposition is very valid

[comfymoth]

as someone who is trans and came out in middle school, leon choosing his name as a path of least resistance kind of thing is very relatable and was acctually how i chose my original name i went by after my dead name until i realized that my name wasnt going to make a difference in how people treated me and eventually chose the name i use now.

i’m really glad that’s something relatable!! as complicated as coming out was for me, and as many times as i had to do it/take it back/repeat, that was also one of the things i really considered when picking my first name at 13, along with the knowledge of what my mom would have wanted to name me if i had been a boy. like you said, though, trying to choose what you think other people will approve of… really doesn’t make any difference. i’m really happy you have a name you like now, that’s really wonderful to hear :]

[cxtangerina]

k2 is such a funny ship to me, like it's just plausible enough to be kinda sorta realistic if you squint and pray and look at it sideways, not quite a crackship but not able to get off the ground as more than a particularly popular rarepair either. they had, like, one big episode together back in season 3, a handful of major moments over the years that people hold onto with an iron grip, and basically nothing else outside of a plethora of fantastic fancontent and dreams.

i think i like it for the exact opposite reasons that i like kyman, actually, they sorta stand as complementary ships in my mind. where k2 barely has any actual basis in canon & comes heavily from fanworks and speculation about how well the characters would match each other, kyman is practically canonical, at least when it comes to cartman's feelings, and is at least regularly joked about and referenced in-show. personally, i also tend to see k2 as a ship that is kinda miraculously requited, whereas kyman is usually stuck in unrequited hell, which...

...well, this gets into more specific character analysis, but a big part of this is that i tend to see cartman as having very fucked up views of both romance & sexuality that have especially interesting implications when you consider him to have a crush on kyle, specifically.

on the one hand, i think his cupid self is evidence enough that he has a very fairytale, idealized view of romance, based more out of the hollywood movie image of what love is supposed to be rather than anything in reality. south park adults being utter fucking idiots 99% of the time means that most, if not all, of the kids don't have a lot of good role models to base their actions off of. i'm not gonna talk out of my ass about childhood development more than i understand it, but i don't think it's too controversial (?) of a take to claim that kids understand & learn about the world through watching it just as much as interacting with it, particularly when it comes to their own parents.

cartman is a piece of shit, and while a lot of that comes from him and his own bigotry, he's still ultimately a kid in show and you can trace where some of his worst traits originate from in the people around him, even if he makes the personal decision to push it as much as humanly possible. i think the trend in recent seasons for many adults to try and at least appear more pc only makes this more obvious, actually (coughcoughrandy), though talking about that is maybe biting off a little more south park politics than i'm willing to chew for this particular post.

point is, cartman as a character in particular does not have a lot, if anything, to base his idea of what a healthy, happy romantic relationship looks like, which isn't only because liane is single though that may be a major contributing factor. love isn't work to cartman, it isn't about the maintenance of a relationship or communication or all the more realistic and slightly less pleasant parts of loving someone that hollywood doesn't find dramatic or interesting enough to show. rather it's a fantasy, something that happens to people that they have no real control over. i wouldn't be surprised if he believes in soulmates or love at first sight, even if the likelihood of him admitting that out loud isn't especially high.

on the other hand, i think his view of sexuality is greatly influenced by not just liane's sex work, but the way she is slut-shamed and treated like garbage by the rest of the town for it. i tend to view cartman as having a very transactional, cynical view of sex and sexuality, where sex is only used for personal gain (whether that be money or power, likely at the expense of someone else/the submissive party), and sexuality is an inherent character flaw, a weakness that must be overcome unless you are able to twist it and use it for your own (material?) benefit- see the streaming wars & cartman wanting his mom to seduce a rich man for money as a recent example of this.

it's a running gag in TFBW that cartman uses douchebag catching their dad fucking their mom as a tragic backstory, and doesn't seem to understand how reproduction actually works even when kyle basically says it straight to his fucking face. even as a joke, there's still a lot of underlying truth behind why he would believe this. cartman is aware of his mom's sex work, even if he may not want to fully admit/believe it, largely because of situations where he's specifically getting shit for it. he knows he has a father, and that he is (in)directly responsible for said father's horrible death & consumption, but he only really cares about that insofar as it means he's half ginger. sex has only ever been presented through its most vicious power dynamics to him- why would he see it as a good thing, as something that could ever be loving, especially when contrasted against such an idealized, purified view of romance?

(you could also extrapolate from this how cartman associates sexuality & romance with femininity & his brand of sexism to get some particularly delectable transfem cartman ideas, but i digress.)

ANYWAYS. this is all to say that cartman having a crush on kyle (or anyone, really, but kyle is obviously the most emotionally volatile example) instantly pits those two conflicting views against one another, like he wants something that he doesn't even think could ever exist: a happy, healthy romantic relationship, where sex is just a normal thing that they can choose to do or not. this is where a lot of kyman angst comes from for me, with cartman either trying to stuff that round desire back into the square hole of how he views the world, or having his ideals fall ever further apart when the feelings are unrequited. and, on top of that, none of this being actually said out loud because communication is impossible.

this is why i always see kyman as making each other worse, especially if they actually manage to make it into a romantic relationship. i simply Do Not see kyle being a patient enough person to help cartman work through the intricacies of all of his expectations and idealized fantasies and internalized fears surrounding such mutually screwed views of romance & sexuality- on the rare occasions that kyle does show some interest in romantic relationships it's usually pretty centered around himself, and to be frank i only see his interest in romance going down as he gets older.

i've heard some people talk about kyle before like he's the "moral compass" of south park or whatever and while that may be true by the end of the episode, one of the things i like most about him is the fact that he struggles so much to get to the best conclusions. this is kind of getting back into the k2 side of this analysis, but where kenny manages a much more effortless selflessness, even pushing it to the point of being both a strength and a flaw when kenny stops caring about himself for the sake of others, kyle is a lot more self-centered than he cares to admit and it influences a lot of his attempts at being a good person.

this is both my favorite aspect of kyle, that he really has to put in the work to be the good person that he wants to be, and also the primary bad trait that i think cartman brings out of kyle. by being such a notoriously horrible shithead, he gives kyle the perfect target to unleash his annoyance on, getting him so caught up in arguing and proving himself to be the better person that kyle forgets to actually listen to the people that he's supposed to be standing up for. cartman is a fantastic troll and, at least in show, kyle definitely has not learned to stop feeding him argument fodder yet.

sidenote: about kyman entering a romantic relationship... wasn't sure where to add this, but it's for this exact reason that i also see kyman (or this version of kyman where cartman gets worse with age, rather than better) only actually happening in the universes where kyle has lost all other meaningful connections, to the point that feeding a troll to get off on an argument is the best possible option, even if he's old enough to know better. especially if he's old enough to know better.

again, k2 is the opposite of this for me in that i see kyle & kenny as having a lot of potential to bring out the best in each other.

if kyle's worst trait is that he gets too caught up in his own feelings & desires to truly be the good, selfless, thoughtful person that he wants to be to actually do genuine good for the sake of others, kenny's problem is that he skews too far in the opposite direction. i kinda already said this, but to state it outright: kenny's biggest strength and his biggest flaw are the exact same, that he is selfless to a fault, to the point of consistently putting other people's safety and happiness above his own when he thinks it would be of help the majority/the people he loves. this was the key kenny trait that was established by the end of BL&U, and it has only gotten more prominent in the years since with his mysterion persona.

it is in this way that kenny both stands as someone that kyle can look up to & admire for how effortlessly he dedicates himself to the people he cares about the most, but also, simultaneously, as someone that kyle can take care of himself and offer the same help back to. and i don't even think kenny needs to say very much out loud to push kyle towards a lot of these conclusions, he kinda just has to exist and be noticed and kyle has the intelligence to figure it out himself, to recognize the shit that kenny puts himself through and his (usually) quite noble reasons for doing so, and want to offer him the same love and care and dedication that kenny never allows himself to have.

really, the difficult part of this is being noticed at all in the first place. again, i said earlier that k2 is kinda "miraculously requited," in my mind, specifically because the aspect that's missing in the show and almost always must be provided by fan content for k2 is that spark/push forward that gets them close enough to start talking and for kyle to notice kenny in the first place. it's just lucky that's one of my favorite things to figure out and write for those two, hehehe.

[gentle-hero-blog]

something i love about dread is that the more i play it the more it becomes apparent that Raven Beak NEEDS her validation. he pulls out all the stops (calls her "daughter", tells her it's her destiny to pave the way for his rule) but in the end samus is literally just doing her thing while RB's entire plan precariously hinges on her. really highlights how much of an egomaniac he is as well to be so 100% convinced that This is her purpose

[pengillys]

speaking of sabrina's album cover.. all i'm going to say is that it 100% elicited the response she wanted it to

[releasing-my-insanity]

Emergency! episode Quicker Than The Eye: We need someone to play the couple where the husband stores a loaded gun in a drawer and accidentally shoots his pregnant wife. I know! Let's get famous Olympic champion Mark Spitz and his wife, even though she has no screen acting credits and he's only played himself!

And it WORKED.

[longlivetv]

In the age of families that don’t speak I chuckle every time I am reminded that joining my extended family is like joining a fictional crime family - once you’re in, you can’t escape (but *mostly* without the crime)

[jemandrr]

Unironically, Ben Shapiro's greatest win against the left was turning left/centerleft laypeople off from the idea of a 'debate with facts and logic' because of his bad faith arguments. Like it's almost...triggering to people, and that leaves a lot of people with unsharpened ideas and an unwillingness to explain them in a rigorous manner.

One example phenomenon that this has fed into is a continuing degradation in the lines of thought people use to reach certain conclusions - so person A expresses opinion X that person B agrees with, but because person B never really sees the entire line of thought laid out by anyone else, their formulation of opinion X based on their own intuition might randomly lean on some idea Y which person A doesn't care about. As a result, if Idea Y lacks actual backing, person B might wrongly defend opinion X and give an impression that the entire thing is flimsy, or person B might lose their own footing and assuredness and change sides.

I also think that he so badly mangled the concept of debate in the casual public consciousness that it's a contributing factor to the vague anti-academic sentiment in recent years. (Which, while academia as an institution has problems, there's certainly an undercurrent of less directed discontent that is contributing to low public opinion of education as a whole - and a greater feeling expressed on social media that 'casual reference of marquee media' is in a way insulting to people who have not consumed it, rather than an invitation to partake or something you can pass by without caring. Not on tumblr though, where we see Dracula and then we read Dracula.)

tl;dr his pseudo-intellectualism meaningfully contributed to certain common sentiments of anti-intellectualism because of how badly and annoyingly he and the people who emulate(d) him did/do it.

[ethersierra]

i wish people were more open to saying "its not for me" rather than being like "this is objectively bad and here's why"

[hylianane]

i really dont like using my blog to vent or complain cause idk thats not what social media is about to me its just a space to be silly about the things i like. that being said. im just gonna do a mini vent in the tags abt smth that isnt even half as serious as im making it sound

[britneyshakespeare]

Man is saying weird things to me again

[nothing-an-iratze-cant-fix]

You know, funnily enough, I would never want to be severed. The moral issue of creating a new consciousness without agency aside, unless Lumon have also worked out immortality, I have one limited life and I’m not giving a second of it away. Sure work can be dull and no-one wants to go to the dentist but in all of those moments I am still alive and I’m still me. I’m pissed I have to be unconscious for a third of my life, no way in hell I’m handing over 8 hours of my life just so I don’t have to be bored at work. Absolute insanity.

and obviously you find yourself thinking oh i do wish i could get severed to do this one thing. would you actually maybe not. but you do wish you didn't have to undergo medical procedures you do wish you didn't have to do the things that give you anxiety you do wish you didn't have to do tedious tasks that barely even require you to be present for them. it's tempting. that's why the premise works. but the premise is also that somebody has to do it. somebody has to go to the dentist and somebody has to get on that plane and somebody has to write those thank you notes. just like somebody has to clean the house and somebody has to harvest the food you eat and somebody has to make the clothes you wear. you can't eliminate inconvenience you can only delegate it. you can't eliminate suffering you can only delegate it. and always the easiest way to live with this is to see that somebody as less than. less than you less than people. and if that somebody has to wear your body to do it well maybe it's not all that different. they're not a person. you are. it's capitalism all the way down baby

[maryibgarry102]

i just replied to a comment on youtube for the first time in..maybe actually over a decade.

God, i may not necessarily believe in you (agnostic), please shield me from unnecessarily mean/toxic replies to my replyyyyyy

[shrimpothy]

does anybody else get icked out by those “women scare me” kind of dudes???

[13thpythagoras]

[solxamber]

Want You Back with: Housewardens

Where they're still in love with you.

Other parts: Vice-housewardens + Ruggie

Riddle Rosehearts

After the breakup, Riddle acted like he'd read somewhere that repressing emotion was a perfectly valid coping mechanism. Which, to be fair, he probably had. And so he embarked on what could only be described as a grief management routine so structured and detail-oriented that you almost had to respect it.

First came the part where he behaved like nothing had happened.

He went about his day with all the usual pomp—collaring students, citing arcane dorm rules, and drinking his tea as usual.

If anyone brought you up (on purpose or by accident), he would simply blink, nod, and go back to arranging sugar cubes in a perfect geometric formation. "We are no longer together," he would say, as if it were an administrative change and not, say, a soul-crushing emotional catastrophe.

Then came the coincidences.

He began showing up in places he absolutely did not frequent before. The café you liked? Suddenly, he was a regular. The library on Thursday evenings? There. The very hallway outside your class despite Heartslabyul being on the opposite side of campus? Oh yes. There too. And every time you spotted him lurking (because that was the only word for it), he would give a startled little blink, like you were the surprise.

"Oh. I didn't see you there," he said, the fourth time in a week.

You stared at him from behind your drink. "I've been sitting here for thirty minutes."

"Well," he muttered, "public seating is for everyone."

By week two, he began inventing reasons to talk to you. Weird ones.

He approached you one day, armed with a rulebook and what looked like three sticky notes marking battle locations.

"According to Queen of Hearts rule 42," he said, clearly having practiced this in front of a mirror, "ex-partners must return borrowed items within twelve days."

You blinked. "You lent me a pencil."

"It was part of a set," he snapped, scandalized.

You told him you'll give it back and he looked like someone slapped him.

You thought that might be the end of it. But then, course, it escalated.

He showed up at your door one evening with a paper in his hand. A list. A physical list. Titled, in absolutely unnecessary cursive, "A Non-Exhaustive Record of My Missteps."

"It's not meant to change anything," he said stiffly, not quite looking at you. "Only to… acknowledge."

There were bullet points. Short, awkward, and occasionally baffling.

Should not have critiqued your sock choice in front of your friends.

I apologize for saying 'emotional outbursts are not strategic.' That was, in hindsight, a poor choice of words.

You are allowed to eat dessert before dinner. Even if it is cherry pie.

I realize now that asking if we could schedule arguments during free periods was not romantic.

I should have asked you to stay.

You didn't know what to do with it—him. He was so Riddle about everything. Polite. Procedural. Very slightly insane. But under all the awkward attempts at regulation and paperwork, it was clear he missed you. Badly.

And the truth was, you still hadn't returned the matching pencil.

You kept it. Not because you believed in fate or romance or even well-meaning tyrants who quoted rulebooks like love poems—but because part of you thought, maybe, if he was willing to be just a little more flexible, there might be a version of this that could work.

And you hoped it could.

Leona Kingscholar

After the breakup, Leona made it his personal mission to convince the entire world—Ruggie, his dorm, the mirror in his room, the literal wildlife outside—that he did not care.

He went around saying things like, "Tch. Good riddance," and "Like I got time to babysit someone who cries over movies," even though no one had brought you up. He slept more. Talked less. Got moodier, which no one thought was possible until he started growling at actual potted plants for existing near his nap spots.

Whenever Ruggie so much as hinted at your name—usually while dancing around some scheduling conflict or trying to explain why Leona's mood had tanked again—he'd get cut off mid-word.

"I wasn't even talking about them!" Ruggie would complain.

"Then stop thinking about them so loud," Leona snapped, face buried in the crook of his arm like the concept of you physically hurt his eyes.

But of course, the moment your name stopped being brought up, that became a problem too.

He started acting restless. Less asleep all the time and more awake and clearly trying to look like he's not looking around for someone. He'd frown when someone laughed in the hallway, then look annoyed when it wasn't you. He started showing up to classes he normally skipped, sitting in the back with his legs stretched out and arms crossed like he was doing the entire school a favor just by existing in the room.

And then the things started appearing.

First, it was his jacket—left casually across the back of your desk chair, like maybe gravity had just pulled it there on accident. Then his spellbook, shoved between your textbooks in a way that definitely required premeditated effort. Then a sandwich. An entire sandwich, wrapped up and labeled "Not Yours."

He denied all of it, obviously.

"Must've been Ruggie," he said, regarding the jacket that literally smelled like him.

When confronted about the book: "I don't even read, what're you talking about."

As for the sandwich? "You're imagining things. I didn't make that for you."

By that point, no one believed him—not even himself.

The final blow came in the form of a confrontation you hadn't expected. Late evening, when you were walking back to your dorm from the library. You were alone, or you thought you were, until you turned the corner and found him there—half in shadow, arms crossed, gaze trained somewhere just over your shoulder.

He didn't say hello.

Didn't say anything actually.

Just let the silence stretch until it started fraying at the edges, and then muttered, voice low and rough:

"You still want this, don't you?"

You stared at him. He didn't flinch, but you could tell he wanted to. He held himself like someone who didn't expect the answer to be yes, but still desperately needed to hear it before he gave up entirely.

And you realized somewhere between the jacket, the sandwich, and the way his voice cracked at the end of the sentence—that for all his snarling and attitude, he never stopped loving you.

He just didn't know how to ask you to stay without sounding like he might actually need you.

Which, of course, he did. Not that he'd ever say it out loud.

Not yet, anyway.

But the next time he leaves something behind, you think you might return it in person. Maybe even stay awhile.

Azul Ashengrotto

Azul handled the breakup the only way he knew how: with spreadsheets, surveillance footage, and a truly unhealthy amount of denial.

He claimed to be fine, of course. Said it with a straight face while color-coding inventory spreadsheets and inputting customer satisfaction data at four in the morning like a man unburdened by heartbreak. But when the tweels found the Lounge security footage paused—again—on a scene of you laughing near the bar, they stopped asking.

He'd memorized the timestamp.

And no, he didn't want to talk about it.

Azul had always been prone to spiraling in a unique way. After the breakup, that tendency mutated into something truly concerning. He didn't cry. He didn't wallow. Instead, he opened a blank document and began calculating. How many hours you'd spent together. How often you laughed in his presence. What the average rate of eye contact was in happy couples versus yours. There were charts. Graphs. Some kind of weighted affection index.

Unfortunately, Jade opened the file looking for the March sales report and instead found a document titled:

"Projected Probability of Them Still Loving Me (v6)."

He would not let him live it down.

"Idea," Floyd said. "You wanna run those numbers again but include the variable where you're super pathetic lately?"

Even Jade raised an eyebrow. "The correlation between desperation and appeal might not be as linear as you'd hope."

Azul tried to brush them off. He even lied (very badly) about what the spreadsheet was for ("Just… tax optimization. Personal hobby. Totally normal."), but the damage was done. The eels were smug. He was mortified. And worst of all, he still couldn't stop thinking about you.

So he pivoted.

If direct emotional vulnerability had failed him, perhaps passive-aggressive marketing would do the trick.

You started receiving coupons. Neatly folded, hand-delivered, no return address—but you recognized the ink. And the handwriting. And the aggressively formal tone that somehow still managed to sound like begging.

"One (1) free drink of your choice at the Mostro Lounge. Offer valid for exes statistically proven to be an optimal match."

Another read:

"Your preferred drink has been discontinued. Kidding. Please come back."

And your personal favorite:

"A reminder that our pairing was 94.3% ideal. Come back. For research."

You didn't respond. He didn't expect you to. But every week, a new coupon showed up—some increasingly ridiculous, some borderline romantic, all of them signed with that same flourish he used when pretending he wasn't panicking.

You weren't sure if it was pathetic or endearing. Probably both. The coupons had piled up in a drawer now, next to a coaster you never returned and a little napkin with a sketch he once made of you during a slow night.

You told yourself it was nostalgia. Curiosity. Scientific inquiry, if anything.

And one slow afternoon, you found yourself digging through the drawer, smoothing out the least crumpled coupon, and thinking—just for a moment—that you might stop by.

For research. Obviously.

Kalim Al-Asim

Kalim took the breakup as well as someone who had never actually took a negative emotion in his life to heart could. Which was to say: terribly.

He cried. A lot. At first, it was appropriate—private tears, sniffles in the dorm room, a distant gaze over his drink. But then it started happening at other times. Like during an ad for laundry detergent where the happy couple folded towels together. Or during a weather report where the forecast mentioned rain, which, apparently, you once said made you sleepy. Or during absolutely nothing at all, except that the sun was setting "a little too much like that one day you held his hand, remember?"

He insisted he was fine.

"Totally fine!" he chirped, voice three octaves higher than normal, eyes red-rimmed and suspiciously glossy. "Breakups happen all the time, right? We're both growing and learning! It's healthy!"

No one believed him.

Jamil looked like he was considering reporting you to the disciplinary committee just to end Kalim's reign of emotionally unhinged sunshine. Even Grim asked if someone should "turn him off and back on again."

But Kalim doubled down. If he couldn't be fine naturally, he'd brute-force his way into happiness. Which, in his mind, meant: throwing parties. So many parties. For no reason. His calendar suddenly became a horror show of "themed celebration nights" and "spontaneous joy hours," all of which were weirdly tailored around your favorite things.

"Here!" he said brightly, handing out goodie bags. "Everyone gets this specific brand of chocolates and stickers! Because those are just objectively fun! Not because anyone used to love them or anything!"

It was transparent. Alarmingly so.

Even when he gave someone a little clay charm that looked exactly like the one you wore on your bag, Kalim waved it off with a too-wide smile. "Just spreading the joy! It's important to stay positive, right?"

Everyone knew it was a cry for help. The kind that sounded like party poppers and glitter and repressed sobbing in the school gardens.

The turning point came on a quiet afternoon when he showed up at your door holding a tiny cupcake. It had a frosting heart on it. His hands shook slightly.

"I know this is weird," he said, already teary. "I didn't wanna make you uncomfortable. I just—"

He swallowed, voice cracking like something inside him was giving up the act for good.

"Even if you don't love me again," he said, "can we still be something?"

You looked at him—his earnest eyes, his trembling lower lip—and you felt something soft and painfully familiar unfurl in your chest.

Because Kalim didn't know how to lie to the people he loved. Not well. Not really. He was all impulse and heart, the kind of boy who loved too loud and too fast and never quite knew how to stop once he started.

And maybe you weren't ready to be what you were. Not yet.

But looking at him, at the little cupcake with the slightly smudged heart and the the way he was holding it like he might shatter if you didn't take it—

How could you say no?

You took the cupcake. And maybe his hand, too. Just for a moment. Just to see if something could still bloom.

Vil Schoenheit

Vil did not mourn the breakup. Mourning was for people who couldn't maintain composure under pressure. For people who let emotion smudge their mascara. He was not one of those people.

At least, not publicly.

He was flawless. Unbothered. The exact picture of someone thriving post-relationship, thank you very much. His interviews were polished. His smiles were poised. His posture was impeccable. If anyone noticed that his usual acerbic wit had gone curiously blunt, no one said anything.

They wouldn't dare.

Privately, though, when the cameras were off and the spotlight blinked out, Vil cracked in very small ways.

He started using your favorite perfume. A subtle layer, never enough to be obvious, but just enough to make him feel like you were still somewhere in the room. Like maybe if he breathed in deep enough, he could hold onto something.

He flipped through magazines during lunch breaks, claiming it was for "market research." But every time he lingered on a movie review or a lifestyle spread, it was with the faint, ridiculous hope that you'd read it too. That your fingers might have touched the same paper. That your eyes caught the same line he was rereading for the fifth time.

He knew it was foolish. But Vil had always been prone to beautiful illusions. It was sort of his thing.

The unraveling came, ironically, in the most public of places: a toothpaste commercial.

He was halfway through filming, mid-speech about the importance of a radiant smile, when something in the script triggered a memory—something you once said about how his laugh.

He kept talking.

Kept improvising.

Went off-script entirely.

The crew let him go for a minute—Vil was known for his "emotional depth," after all—but when he hit the line "even the most polished smile can still ache when it remembers someone who made it feel real," the director had to call cut.

"Vil," they said gently. "It's a toothpaste commercial."

He didn't speak for the rest of the shoot. Just touched up his own makeup in silence, eyes a little glassy.

It took him another week to knock on your door.

He showed up in a soft sweater, smelling faintly of something familiar, holding his own hands like he didn't know what else to do with them.

He didn't ask for much. Didn't ask for forever. Just quietly, cautiously:

"Would you like to try again?"

And you thought—looking at him, at the person who once swore he'd never show up like this for anyone, at the vulnerability hiding under all that polish—

Maybe this time, you could make it work.

Idia Shroud

Idia handled the breakup the way he handled most things in life: with a complete and total digital meltdown, buried under forty layers of denial and an emotionally scorched Discord server.

He didn't text. Didn't call. Didn't even leave passive-aggressive emoji reactions on your old posts like a normal ex with unresolved feelings. He simply… disappeared.

Vanished like a ghost into his room, into his code, into the vast and uncaring expanse of the internet, where feelings didn't exist unless they were typed in all caps or conveyed through a crying anime girl gif.

And for a while, it was total radio silence.

Until you logged into that game.

The shared one. The one you used to play together after class, where the two of you ran a little shop in a pixelated fantasy village and spent an embarrassing amount of time farming digital potatoes.

Your shop was still there.

But now there was… a shrine.

Your character's pixel art face, recreated painstakingly in custom tiles and surrounded by in-game flowers, torches, and glowing pink mood crystals that did not exist in the vanilla version of the game.

He'd modded it.

There was a sign in the middle that just said:

"Here Lies Happiness (RIP)"

You stared at it for a long time. Then, just to confirm the ridiculous suspicion building in your chest, you checked the nearby player list.

Sure enough, his username had changed too:

"SadBoy420"

Online. Loitering.

You didn't message him immediately. Mostly because you weren't sure what to say to someone who had quite literally built a shrine to your relationship in a farming sim. But still—you lingered. Logged in more often. Left offerings of rare items near the shrine like it was some strange, silent conversation.

Idia never spoke to you directly, but you noticed the shrine changed a little every day. One day it had a sign that said "I'm Fine." The next, it was replaced with a drawing of your characters fishing together. One morning it was just a massive, pixel-art rendition of the word "SORRY" in bold letters with a sad face emoji.

Outside the game, his silence continued.

But Ortho?

Ortho was not subtle.

"Did you know my brother has been listening to the voicemails you left him on loop for the past 72 hours?" he chirped once in the cafeteria. "Not that he's, like, sad or anything! Just nostalgic. Definitely not crying."

Later: "He made your favorite NPC in our custom server the town mayor! Isn't that cute? I mean, objectively, not emotionally, haha."

Eventually, you got the call.

Your phone lit up with his name and you answered before you could talk yourself out of it.

"Uh—hey," Idia said, voice barely above a whisper. "I didn't, like, mean to call. Or—I did, but. Crap. Okay. Hi."

You waited.

He took a breath.

"I was just wondering," he said, "if you maybe wanted to talk again. Or, y'know. Game. No pressure or anything. It's fine if you're, like, over it and I'm just like a pathetic ghost haunting your social life, haha, classic tragic NPC vibes—"

"Yes," you said, before he could spiral into apologizing for existing.

He paused. Long enough that you thought the call had dropped. Then, quietly—hopeful, almost disbelieving:

"Wait. Really?"

You smiled, even if he couldn't see it.

"Yeah," you said. "Log in."

Malleus Draconia

Malleus did not understand how something so radiant could simply… end.

He didn't throw a dramatic tantrum after the breakup. He didn't disappear in a swirl of thunderclouds or curse the moon or anything out of a tragic love story.

He didn't so much as frown in public, because the full gravity of the breakup hadn't quite hit him yet. Instead, it settled in stranger places—quiet things, strange habits.

Like how he started speaking to the plush bat you gave him on his last birthday as though it were you. Not in a creepy way, more like someone who didn't know what to do with the empty space you left behind.

He asked it questions. Told it how his day went. Laughed, sometimes, as if it had told him a joke—low and fond, the kind of laugh only you had ever coaxed out of him. And when he sat beneath the stars, plush cradled carefully in his lap, he whispered to it with a gentleness reserved only for the lost.

The gargoyles? They weren't even sentient, but even they seemed exhausted. Every night he stood in front of them, musing out loud about the way you smiled or how you always called him weird little nicknames. One of them lost a nose—maybe unrelated.

Lilia, bless him, said nothing for a long while. He simply watched as Malleus wilted, quietly and beautifully, like a flower sealed in ice. But one evening, after Malleus asked in the softest voice, "Do humans ever come back when they leave?", Lilia did not answer. He only wrapped his arms around his ward and held him close.

At some point, he started writing letters. Not to send, just… to say things. Things he didn't know how to tell you, or hadn't said enough when he could. Some were serious. Some were barely legible thoughts written in the middle of the night. But he kept them all, folded neatly in a box that lived under his bed.

And then, of course, Silver found the box.

Silver, ever helpful and half-asleep, assumed it was mail Malleus meant to send and delivered the whole thing to your dorm like it was completely normal to get a hand-bound novel of unsent love letters dropped off on a random day.

You read them all.

You didn't say anything at first. You weren't sure what you were supposed to say. But that night, you left your window open—just a little.

And sure enough, just past midnight, Malleus appeared outside your dorm. Just… standing there. Looking up.

He didn't ask to come in. He didn't even call your name. He just waited. Like maybe you'd hear the quiet, and somehow understand.

And when you finally stepped outside, he looked at you like he'd been waiting centuries.

"May I court you again?" he asked softly. "From the beginning."

And really�� how could you say no?

Masterlist

[iceyrukia]

I honesty don't think it matters much in current times that men have influence over the beauty industry when feminists will spew repetitive commentary about 'patriarchal beauty standards' like broken records yet will perpetrate and valorize the exact same beauty standards that they critique.

Overthrowing beauty standards and getting rid of them entirely IMO is the easiest thing to "overthrow" systematically because all it takes is simply not buying beauty products and not practicing in unnecessary beauty rituals, and POOF! it can all crumble but that's not what's happening. Instead you see the most self-aware choice feminists give lip-service in support of women who don't want to be forced to wear makeup or shave or feel insecure about their looks. It's all "all women are beautiful" and "no women should be bullied for having body hair or being GNC" and they might have good intentions but at the end of the day as long as beauty is social currency for women (femininity in all forms) then that becomes a baseline for ALL women and ALL women will naturally have the incentive to try to pursue whatever is the current beauty standard. And in return those women who opt out femininity are seen as 'lesser' women who get demoted and ignored by society, and so all women, both GNC and GC who get mistreated for being women no matter what, will be inclined to at least gain something (social currency) by being 'pretty' and try to capitalize on that if they are going to be mistreated anyways.

I think it's a common misconception around choice feminists (judging by the way they tackle beauty standards) that women's insecurity are a personal self-inflicted, self-esteem problem and not one where women subconsciously know they are missing out on something (social currency) is they don't participate in it. Choice feminism somehow strangely recognized that beauty standards as systematic issue but doesn't handle it a one, in fact they go the hyper-individualistic route where every women simply needs to "be confident" (where some women's confidence comes from getting plastic surgeries to be their ideal self :/ ), and everything is solved. They focus more on individual feelings and not with the fact that beauty is more an accomplishment and experience that women are supposed to valorize in order to be successful in life, as if it's something to put on a resume.

So, as long as women participate and "gain" something from being beautiful, even if they are victims themselves of beauty standards, words and support for gender non-conforming women fall flat. When women are not valued for existing in their natural form and there is always an "improved", altered version of a women that they can be according to society (that doesn't exist for men at all), it no longer becomes a simple debate about choices and how men control women's appearances or not but one of ALWAYS feeling like your natural self as a women isn't good enough and you have to keep up with women who "choose" to do so and "gain" the most from it. Men's opinions and actions become insignificant here.