#but who are you to judge

[leftballoonbluebird]

World Heritage Post

[framblebee]

INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE 1x1 In Throes of Increasing Wonder

—However misshapen they may be, your brother has no shame in sharing [his thoughts]. —You sayin' I got shame? —The lie you told about leaving the opera house early.

[wormsical]

uh yeah I sure hope it does

[winterswake]

DOCTOR WHO — The Zygon Inversion

[ciderjacks]

dad issues

+

(I think they were all fundamentally affected by what they saw and just collectively decided not to share the upsetting details)

[biggest-gaudiest-patronuses]

don't know much about furry fiction but surely there is an established trope wherein some furries are allergic to other characters' dander? like say a gecko scalie falls in love with a cat furry but is allergic to cat hair. trials & tribulations & claritin ensure

[bobcatblahs]

Ya know- the more ridiculous a plot is in Doctor Who… the more unserious…. The more I’m gonna love it.

(Aliens of London, Unicorn and the Wasp, A Christmas Carol, Robots of Sherwood)

So when people complain about this new season with Space Babies

I’m just like… are you new here?! We’re all about camp and silly and fun! It can’t be all bad all the time!

[loriache]

"I've been waiting for ages for somebody to unmask them."

This moment tends to elicit negative reactions in a first read through, and I've got some opinions about why where Kabru is coming from here actually makes a lot of logical sense. So I thought I'd elaborate on that.

I think people hear this and go, "He thinks they must be hiding something because they gave money to someone? What a cynic." Or "he dislikes them because they did charity?? What's wrong with this guy!". And obviously, a lot, a lot is wrong with him. But I think this makes more sense than it seems at first glance! What people evaluating this judgement miss is why Kabru is paying attention to Laios and co to begin with.

Kabru knows of the Touden siblings because (he's a little bit of a stalker-) he is keeping an eye on all the relevant parties in events developing on the island, in order to be able to guide them to his preferred outcome. This includes adventurers because they are the ones actually exploring the dungeon! He's well aware that something as minor as internal tensions between party members could be key to the historical events that are developing. (He would love the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.)

His desired outcome is that whatever the rewards are of breaking the dungeon's curse, whether that's kingship or the ancient elven secrets of dungeons, are claimed by:

A) a short lived person

B) Someone who will be a good, effective leader and/or use those secrets and the power they carry wisely, with foresight, and to establish a political bloc for short lived people.

The person he can best trust to do this is, of course, himself. But due to his PTSD regarding dungeons and monsters, he's not able to develop the necessary skills to conquer the dungeon. Once he realises this, he starts looking for someone else who he can support to that end.

But most of the adventurers don't have any intentions of conquering the dungeon, don't have the skills, or are unsuitable in other ways. In fact, it seems like some potentially suitable people are the Toudens. There are a lot of good rumours about them going around - they actually seem to have a very positive reputation! That's what Kabru means when he says "unmask".

So when Kabru is observing something like them giving money to an old comrade from their gold-peeling days, he doesn't consider it a problem because "they're giving money to this person who doesn't actually need it" or because they must have some dark secret if they act superficially nice. I think he actually understands this situation and what it implies about Laios (in particular) perfectly well.

Laios and Falin gave money to an old comrade who got injured and couldn't work. That person then healed up but kept taking their money. Then he used the money to start smuggling illicit goods to the island.

The key is that for Kabru, the problem here is the same as with the corpse retrievers - people using the dungeon's resources to fuel dangerous, selfish, or violent pursuits cause problems for the island, attract more criminals and people with motives other than breaking the curse, and increase the chances of the whole situation ending in tragedy.

Kabru is willing to work with the Shadow Lord of the island if it gets him to his goal - he isn't scrupulous - but the criminal element of the island increasing is something he sees as a major issue.

Also, when you're evaluating someone as a candidate for power, riches, secrets, potentially kingship - then being curious about how the money you give to people is going to be used is kind of a relevant trait!

Interpersonally, Kabru's actually very easygoing - I mean, Mickbell isn't exactly an upstanding guy, is he! But Kabru likes him and they get along well. These traits wouldn't be a problem at all in a friend, or a comrade, or someone Kabru was confident he could use. But he can't get a handle on Laios, and Laios is someone who has the potential to be a major player!

On Laios' end, this is the same as with the marriage seeker who joined their party. She kept asking for things and he gave them to her, because he tries to be nice to others. He even gives her money! It's the exact same thing.

That's fine, but it became a problem because he basically wasn't interested in her motives, didn't notice she was trying to manipulate him, and it also didn't occur to him that the other party members would notice or be affected. We can assume the situation with the gold peeler is the same. When Kabru says that "It's not that they're bad people, they just aren't interested in humans," he isn't wrong.

The extent to which this is true of Laios is linked to his autism imo, (because it isn't just disinterest - he genuinely isn't able to notice nonverbal cues that people are lying to him or have ulterior motives) but to a greater or lesser extent I think it's a very common trait. Most people aren't actually that interested in other people who aren't close to them. Kabru is the weird one here. It isn't an issue except as a leader - which is why we see an immediate comparison to the Island's Lord, because that's how Kabru is evaluating them.

And disinterest in/lack of ability with people to the extent Laios exhibits it, it does, actually, make him a worse leader... it's just that as we see in the story, people can help him out. The rest of the party tell him the marriage seeker is taking advantage of him so he tells her he can't give her special treatment anymore. They're pissed and it's a crisis point - he couldn't have recovered their trust without Marcille and Falin - but that's exactly the point. With Marcille and Falin, he was able to recover their trust.

And he has other good traits that make up for it, such as his intelligence, strategic knowledge, open-mindedness and sense of fairplay.

Kabru doesn't disqualify Laios as a candidate based on what he sees about him from afar, though - he still tries very hard to get close to him, obviously hoping that if he manages he can steer Laios to defeat the dungeon and make up for his lack of people-skills in the aftermath. (Which... he does eventually achieve that goal!) He completely fails until the events of the story, so... definitely I think "They just aren't interested in humans" could also partially be a stung reaction to Laios' complete disinterest in him.

Anyway, that's my read on what exactly Kabru's "issue" with Laios is. Obviously, once he does find out what Laios' true nature is like - about his love for monsters - he develops an entirely new set of fears about Laios' priorities. But since Laios kept that a secret until the start of the story, he has no idea of that yet.

Given all that, I think it's interesting that he says that he doesn't think that the Toudens are suitable to defeat the dungeon, and that he's hoping they'll turn out to be the thieves. As some of his few potential candidates, people who he thinks may play a big role in the island's future, you'd think he'd hope they would be good people!

I suppose it's better, in his eyes, because it means that he's involved in something "interesting". They haven't just had their stuff stolen by regular criminals (boring, puts them further away from his goal) - they've been caught up in the beginning stages of "a historic event". The desperate and dwindling group forgetting morals in their quest to retrieve their lost comrade probably appeals to his sense of melodrama. Because he also just... loves drama.

Despite it being "uglier than anything he was expecting", he still pursues Laios as the person he wants to conquer the dungeon pretty much as soon as it becomes clear that he won't be able to do it himself and they are out of time. That's because... well, to be fair, there aren't any other options. And he fits standard A: he's short-lived!

and Kabru still hopes he can fit standard B, too, and be persuaded to use the power he wins for good. No matter how many nightmares he has about Laios, or whether he thinks about killing him. He doubts him, but ultimately he puts his faith in him and seems happy after the manga's ending that he made the right decision.

[angerydome]

“We need better public transit and more passenger railways” — fuck yeah I’m all about this~

“… and we need to actively discourage people from owning and driving cars and it should be illegal actually” — FUCK NO.

I don’t know why pro-public transit people have to be so obnoxious about this and ostracize people who would otherwise support their cause. I also find it amusing that they’re more than willing to be massive dicks to me for not hating on cars, until I mention I’m disabled and immune compromised and a lot of times not being able to go DIRECTLY from point A to point B (and limit my exposure to other people’s germs) will stop me from being able to do things and go places. At which point they usually stop engaging with me because I don’t fit the stereotype of disabled and unable to drive.

Overall, a lot of causes shoot themselves in both feet by saying that in order to do X thing (which most people would agree is positive) they need to take Y away from you (for no good reason).

[choccy-milky]

people-watching and gossiping 💅

(more older seblora brainrot bc of my oneshot)

[doydoune]

hey have you heard of this brand new aa trend that totally just came out

[nerdyrevelries]

"autistic people don't pay taxes" factoid actualy just statistical error. average autistic person pays their taxes every year. Elon Musk, who uses autism to justify Nazi salutes & loopholes his way out of millions in taxes, is an outlier adn should not have been counted

[gorgonfreakman]

one of my favorite scorpy momence of all time (past and future)

[fanfic-gremlin-ft-trauma]

hiiii lovelies i didn’t die i swear so here’s a yuetara wip as proof <3

[gurggggleburgle]

personally, I think for moshang baby trapping I don't even think they had sex for the baby trapping. I think mbj just walked in and said he was pregnant and told sqh the kid was his and sqh filled in the blanks with wifeplot and weird mpreg artifacts and did not think twice on it because he's sleep deprived and at this point just rolls with this shit. We're already in this deep. Sure we stood in front of the magic mpreg mirror and ate some fruit or something and now I'm a father on top of overworked; just throw more synonyms for exhaustion at me and we'll add them in. What's more.

There's already a baby in there might as well get hot sex before i die. Really though Mobei-Jun needs like one more ingredient in his mpreg plot contrivance and it's Shang Qinghua to confess his love and manages to get that before the end of his first trimester through hard work and emotional honesty and becomes magic pregnant. So Mobei-Jun completes his ass backwards plan so he can ride that dick hard enough to get a perfect A+ in pregnancy and banks on the fact that Shang Qinghua doesn't know enough about this to notice the timeline is off