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shielddrake · 5 years ago

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Final Fantasy XII: A Retrospective Review

So, I received Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age for Christmas last year.

Anyone who knows me knows that I am a huge fan of the Final Fantasy franchise. I have played almost every game with that title that has been released…at least the ones released in America, since I sadly do not speak Japanese. So it’s not unreasonable to assume I would want a remake of one of its games. I have quite a few, in fact, including V and VI on my iPhone, III and IV on my DS, and I and II on my PSP. Final Fantasy IX was the first game I put on my PS4 when I got it (yeah, I admit I put a PS1 game on my PS4 before anything else) and I thoroughly enjoyed replaying VIII when its remaster came out last September.

Final Fantasy XII, however, is a bit of an exception because, my Internet friends, I have a confession to make: Final Fantasy XII is my least favorite in the franchise.

Now I wouldn’t say that FFXII is a bad game. Far from it. It’s a very good game. For the most part, I completely understand why so many people love it. I just don’t feel the same way.

When I first played the game when it was released, I was not too thrilled with a lot of the gameplay decisions and where it ended up going story-wise. At the time, I concluded that while it was a good game, it was a poor Final Fantasy title. And this is taking into account the fact that I had played and beaten both Final Fantasy Tactics and Tactics Advance several times before playing FFXII. Both of these games are quite different from the main FF series, but are great in their own right. I basically consider the Ivalice Alliance as a separate spin-off series, sort of like the Crystal Chronicles games or the Dissidia series.

But FFXII was not that great, in my opinion. I didn’t feel invested in the characters, I was not a fan of the combat or license board system at all, and I felt the story was incomplete at best and annoyingly vague at worst. There were a lot of missed opportunities for the use of the characters. I was neutral about the graphics, which, although beautiful, I felt did not really improve on what was presented in Final Fantasy X, and I didn’t like that a lot of the regular trends known in the previous installments (the summons being the main example that comes to mind) were thrown out for something completely disconnected. I finished the game just feeling a mix of boredom and irritation, to be perfectly honest. The only thing I can recall even remotely liking was the music, despite it not being composed by Nobuo Uematsu, my favorite composer of all time even to this day.

Needless to say, playing The Zodiac Age was not on my list of priorities, and I’m not sure I ever would have played it had it not been gifted to me.

All that said, I received the game and felt that, well, maybe since I have it anyway I would give it another shot. Let’s see if FFXII is as bad as I remember. Maybe a retrospective review would be a good thing to post on the twelfth anniversary of the game’s original release, so why not?

* Looks at the dates and realizes Final Fantasy XII was originally released 14 years ago, not 12. *

Uh, never mind. Clearly I’m way too late for that party.

Anyway, as I started playing, I decided that there were two big questions that I wanted to answer with this retrospective review:

1.) Is Final Fantasy XII as bad of a game as I remember it being when it was first released?

2.) Would I change my claim about Final Fantasy XII being my least favorite game in the franchise?

Obviously the game has been out for a long time, remake or not, but I want to warn against spoilers here just in case. I don’t want to ruin anyone’s experience after all. With that, let’s get started.

Statistics

I just wanted to start this review with a few facts about my playthroughs (yes, the plural is intentional).

I played through The Zodiac Age twice, once for about 42 hours in length and the second for about 47. I used each of the jobs in the zodiac job system in each playthrough, but in different combinations and on different characters. Of course, I couldn’t account for every possible combination. That would take a very long time…

The party was at level 46 on my shorter playthrough and 51 on my longer one. I did not complete all of the hunts, although I fought more of them the second time through. I did not try to get any of the special gear like the Zodiac Spear, mostly because I don’t know how. I also did not get all of the espers, because other than the required time you have to summon Belias to get into Giruvegan, I never used summoning.

I avoided any guides or other playthroughs for the game, relying on the game’s directions and my memory from my previous plays…fourteen years ago…to guide me through the main part of the story. Yeah, I haven’t played FFXII since it was released in 2006, maybe 2007, give or take a few months. So, if I got confused or lost during the course of the game, it was because I either missed directions or the game was not clear on where I needed to go.

At the time of this review, I have not experimented at all with Trial Mode or played through New Game Plus.

Graphics

This section will be short, since I don’t have a lot to say about it.

The graphics are very good. As I stated above, in the original I did not feel the graphics were all that different than Final Fantasy X released four years prior, and my opinion of The Zodiac Age hasn’t really changed. According to the Final Fantasy Wiki, the game was given “high resolution upgrades to backgrounds, character models, 2d parts, and movie scenes.” To be honest, I didn’t notice much of a difference, although that might be because I didn’t play the game often enough to have the original graphics etched in my memory.

However, that does not mean the game looks bad. On the contrary, it is still a beautiful game, despite a few small glitches such as Balthier’s dialogue not syncing up to his lip movements or Basch’s hair not moving, Those are minor nitpicks. The game is still lovely to look at.

Sound and Music

Again, the music for this game is excellent. As I mentioned before, the music was probably the one thing I would praise about the game when it was originally released. The Zodiac Age somehow manages to make it better by providing a rerecorded soundtrack that makes a lot of the notes sound less harsh. There is the option of switching it back to the original version, but I preferred the new one. Basically they took the one thing I liked about the original game and made it better.

The voice acting I am pretty neutral about. For the most part, I don’t think anyone’s voice work was either bad or good. ��Other than the overuse of sighs, of which I get most annoyed by Ashe’s because she sighs all the time, I don’t mind the voice acting very much.

The only one I have a problem with, and this was also the case when I first played FFXII, is with Fran’s voice. I always feel bad criticizing a voice actor because they put a lot of training and passion into their work, but I just can’t help but be really annoyed at the choices SquareEnix made when casting Fran. She sounds so different in the English version compared to the Japanese one, and I don’t think it fits the character at all. Viera, all viera, are supposed to be these rather ethereal beings akin to the elves in The Lord of the Rings. So why, then, would the translation team have Fran be given a voice that makes her sound like a nasally four-year-old? According to the Wiki, the translators wanted to “sell the new take on the viera,” but it just falls flat.

Miscellaneous Gameplay

Okay, I only made this section so I can briefly go over some of the extra gameplay components the game has, both old and new. First, the good.

The high-speed mode is great. I always thought the characters moved so annoyingly slow! This fixes that problem and honestly saves a lot of time. I feel like it sheared off a couple of hours off the game that are just empty time needed simply to move from place to place. I used this in the FFVIII remaster as well for the same reason. I basically never turned it off. It didn’t affect cutscenes, so that wasn’t a problem. Also, the sound effect of four people running in high-speed mode is strangely hilarious to me.

There is a transparent overlay map now available. I find this to be much more useful than the minimap alone, which was constantly moving and incapable of helping me orient myself. Previously, I was frequently frustrated and getting lost in pretty much every area, dungeon and town when I played the original version. The overlay map was especially useful in places where direction was important, like the part in the Tomb of Raithwall where you need to turn the statues to face the blade. I could never tell which way to turn them and needed to bring up the main map over and over and over again. The overlay map resolves makes this and general navigation much easier.

My only complaint is that, although it is transparent, it does take up a lot of the center of the screen, but that is a small price to pay for the relief of so much frustration. There are times when the overlay map isn’t useable, namely in parts of Giruvegan and the Bahamut, and then the frustration rises again, which only emphasizes how nice the overlap map is the other times.

Autosave feature. Need I say more? Thank you, SquareEnix, for an autosave feature! Especially during some of the hunts.

And now the bad, which can be lumped into one thing: minigames. Or I guess they’re minigames. They’re small quests that are required to further the story that are not combat based. The yell at the guards to make them move game while stealing the Dusk Shard, AKA the dumbest guards ever. The have Vaan declare he’s Basch in front of people in Bhujerba to get the Resistance’s attention, which unless you had already played the game you don’t know to do in front of the guides, leading you to just listening to Vaan spout annoying nonsense while literally nobody listens. The exchanging information quest in Archadia to get chops to be allowed to ride a flying taxi, which is only slightly less annoying this time around because they reduced the number of exchanges you need to do from nine to three. I guess they realized how tedious it was. I disliked all of these when I first played the game and they were superfluous and dumb and add nothing to the experience this time around too.

Character Progression and Combat

Now we get to the parts where I feel I can really say something constructive. I was initially going to have these be separate sections, but they are so closely related to one another that it seemed silly to split them.

There is something I want to make perfectly clear, that I must admit came very much to my surprise: The combat in The Zodiac Age is nowhere near as bad as I felt it was when I played the vanilla game. Before it felt like a boring slog just to get from one quest to another, but I found that not to be the case this time around. I think the changes to the license board helps with the combat be more dynamic and require a bit more strategy since not every character ends up being the same. I’ll get to the license board in a moment.

With the job system in place, you have to think more about how you’re going to approach an enemy rather than having everyone just attack the whole time. I mean, you can still do that, but your white mage is not going to be as strong as your knight, so having the white mage do only physical attacks doesn’t work quite as well. And with the option of giving everyone different abilities, it means that every character has a different role to play in battle.

The ability to add a second job later in the game adds to the diversity you can bring, since you can make any number of combinations of jobs and really none of them are bad. You’re also not limited by which characters can have which job. Once you pick a job for a character you are stuck with it (at least on the PS4 version) but that does not lock the job away from other characters. You can have two white mages, two knights, five red battlemages, or make every character a bushi if you so desire. You can have someone balanced, someone focused on only offensive spells, someone focused on healing, someone just for physical attacks, a tank…the possibilities are huge!

The gambit system is still in place, and I still am not a huge fan. If I have to micromanage a character’s actions, I’d rather have a system that allows me to input commands individually like in previous Final Fantasy games rather than allowing an AI to do it. However, I understand that the combat in FFXII is fast-paced enough that it makes that sort of system more difficult, and I managed to deal with it fine. I wish I didn’t have to buy gambits for every single miniscule action though.

On the other hand, I did find having multiple gambits useful for the various abilities each character has, especially since the job system allows for more individualized characters. This time, I felt like having several gambit slots was actually worthwhile because I had the characters able to do more things under specific circumstances, especially for spellcasters. This made it seem like it was worth the license points to spend on gambit slots from the license board. So while I still am not fond of the gambit system, I found it overall less annoying than before.

Obviously the license board is the biggest change to The Zodiac Age. The job system is excellent this time around, compared to the complete lack of a job system in the original version. Normally a blank slate for character progression isn’t a bad thing. VI, VII and VIII all had no job system as well, but you could still customize the characters to fit with a play style that you liked. Vanilla FFXII didn’t allow that. It was far too easy to make every character identical, so it ultimately didn’t matter which character you had in your party. This time, the available variety made it much more enjoyable to play and experiment.

The board was also improved on in that it was much more logical within each job. Before, the board was literally just a board, with every license just kind of lumped together. The license for a helmet was next to a license for the fire spell. It never made much sense and it seemed hard to predict what adjacent licenses you were unlocking. This time, armor licenses are together, sword licenses are together, magic licenses are together, and so forth. Some licenses in the same category are spread apart, such as the technicks, but for the most part there is at least some sort of logic to it all, making it much easier to plan character growth instead of it feeling random.

Later on, it is possible to make the characters very similar to one another, so that everyone can cast white magic, use the same technicks, wear the same gear, etc. This is especially easy if you pick secondary jobs that are opposite the first job (for stance, adding a foebreaker job to a white mage). This doesn’t happen until late in the game though, so it doesn’t feel nearly as cheap. FFX did the same with the sphere grid, but you had to be pretty far in the game before that was possible. Same thing here.

I feel I should mention the quickenings and summons, even though I never used the latter in battle. The mist abilities now have their own gauge rather than using MP, which is a nice throwback to the limit break bars of some of the previous games. I definitely prefer it that way. I found myself using quickenings less frequently than during my first playthrough, but that might be because the game was made to be overall a little easier.

Story and Characters

While the job system was the big change for The Zodiac Age, and certainly for the better, I feel I still need to talk about the story and the characters even though nothing about these parts of the game have changed. The big reason for this is because the story was where I had the biggest problem with the original version of FFXII, and therefore will probably have the biggest impact on answering my two burning questions at the beginning of this review.

That being said, if I were to go into all the details about the story and characters and what I think of it, this review would probably be three times as long as it already is. To add to that, since the game has already been out for twelve fourteen years I’m not sure there’s a whole lot I could add to the conversation that hasn’t already been said, other than to point out how I would change the story to make it what would be, in my opinion, better.

Perhaps if people are really interested in my in-depth analysis of the story I can do that in another post, but for the purposes of this review, I’m just going to give summarized version here.

1.) Reks should have lived, or been replaced by Vaan, or have both in the party.

2.) Vaan is not as annoying as I previously thought, but he needed to have a more concrete connection to the plot.

3.) Same for Penelo. Still kind of preachy, but seemed more like a Jiminy Cricket character this time around.

4.) The Strahl needed to be stolen somehow, both to give Balthier a better reason to go with the group and to give a better excuse to not just fly somewhere.

5.) That said, knowing the whole plot of the game makes Balthier’s behavior throughout the story make more sense. Better foreshadowing, in a way.

6.) Fran’s storyline needed to have a more satisfactory conclusion. It just sort of ended.

7.) Basch and Gabranth needed to have more personal interactions throughout the story to make their final moments more satisfying.

8.) For that matter, have more personal interactions between the party and both Dr. Cid and Vayne. We meet both of them a total of two times…over the course of a 40-hour game. Too disconnected from the party’s actions to give much motivation for us to defeat them.

8.) Why did they not use Vossler’s actions as a bigger plot point, with Basch trying to stop Vossler from doing what Basch was accused of? It’s sort of there, but it ends far too quickly. Big missed opportunity.

9.) More judge fights! We fight a total of three, Ghis, Bergan and Gabranth. I wanted more judge bosses!

10.) To add to that, have more context for some of the bosses. It kind of felt like so many of the bosses were there just for the sake of being bosses, and there’s only so many times I can say to myself, “It’s probably a guardian of whatever place.”

11.) I still don’t get the love people have for Ashe. I just don’t get it.

12.) And finally, Larsa should have been the main character. End of story.

…Yeah, that’s the summarized version.

Conclusion

All things considered, I definitely had a different experience playing through The Zodiac Age compared to when I first played FFXII twelve fourteen years ago. And ultimately this is why I decided on playing this game again. I wanted to see if my opinion had changed, if I could look at it from another perspective rather than just negative memory. And although some of my feelings haven’t changed, it’s good to look back on something and see that maybe it isn’t exactly as I recall it.

Let’s go back to the big questions I proposed at the beginning of this review.

First, is Final Fantasy XII as bad of a game as I remember it being when it was first released? No, it’s certainly not. I think the changes made to the license board made the combat more enjoyable for me, and by extension it seemed less of a hassle and more of an actual game. I enjoyed running around and exploring more, and the bosses and hunts were more entertaining as well. While I’m still not fond of the gambit system, I wasn’t as irritated by it and actually found myself experimenting more with it.

Second, would I change my claim about Final Fantasy XII being my least favorite game in the franchise? Eh, probably not. Again, even with the alterations made to the game, there are still a lot of things that I personally was not a fan of, especially involving the story. I’m one of those people who love the story of a game more than anything else (which is clearly why I prefer RPGs to any other game genre). Since the story is still the weakest aspect of FFXII, in my opinion, especially compared to other Final Fantasy games, the game overall doesn’t grab me as much as some of the earlier ones. It’s still a good game, but not great. To be fair, short of completely overhauling the storyline and characters, it would the difficult change those aspects for the better in just a remaster. This makes me wonder how the FFVII remake is going to go, but the jury’s still out on that one.

With all the various opinions and thoughts about what makes a video game good, it’s hard for developers to create what might be considered a perfect game for everyone, and the Final Fantasy franchise is no exception. That doesn’t mean a game cannot be corrected to make it better than the original. That’s what is good about patches and remasters. It gives the developers another opportunity to improve on what was criticized. Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age definitely succeeds in this, even if there are still parts that are not quite as good.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a Kingdom Hearts DLC to play and then proceed to tear apart.

#final fantasy xii #ffxii #the zodiac age #retrospective #review #my opinion

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shidiand · 6 years ago

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How do you imagine Tenco's Story ending in your head?

that is a GREAT but UNEXPECTED QUESTION freshlybaked "spider" bread and i'm really happy to have the opportunity to try and answer this ageless question that has burned within all of us in the tenco's story iv waiting room community since 2013. it is an incredible coincidence (or is it? 👀) that i was just talking to Risa about tenco's this (edit: yesterday) morning so i am extra double super in the mood to talk about Tenco's Story today. so excellent of a coincidence is this that i am tempted to refer you to them in case you wanted to hear their thoughts on the matter that would probably turn out super cool, but that is neither here nor there; let us talk Tenco's Story.

i of course must mention my unadvertised and modestly detailed commentary on tenco's i-iii at https://shidiand.tumblr.com/tencos, presenting slightly interesting facts in an unwieldy and difficult-to-use format, but as it dates back to june 2017, i want to take some time to understand my feelings about the series once more.

tenco's story is a series that has a lot of meaning to me.

i took on my current name of shidiand in november of 2013. i was still in 11th grade at the time, 4th year of high school, and a very socially isolated person. i should say i was introduced to touhou in 7th grade, 2010, so i was still working through a 3 years-strong phase of trying to simultaneously both find an outlet for and bottle up an endless wellspring of awkward weeaboo-gamer nerd energy at the time.

i had my first real foray onto the internet in 2010, tried out twitter, followed some RPers and other people who had Cool Touhou Usernames. didn't really go anywhere. i had maybe 50 followers, i dont really know the count but it was definitely a) double digits and b) pretty low. didn't know what to tweet about. didn't know how to hit it off with others. i think there was basically maybe only 3 other people i ever properly interacted with. oh shit i was playing league of legends at the time. oh my god. i really did play league of .. oh my god. let's move on.

aw shit im super digressing amn't i. well.

this is just how it goes when i write essays on tumblr.com.

i'm afraid you're just along for the ride at this point so please do your best to enjoy it.

i got kind of tired of twitter at the time because i didnt know what to do with it. didnt know how to interact with people and didnt find the people i was following interesting, so i ghosted on out of there by the end of 2012. didnt deactivate it until like 2015 but at that point that was just burning away my dark history. anyways. november 2013.

--im taking a lot of time here trawling through old files on my computer, my tumblr blog, notification emails still lying around in my gmail inbox from twitter, the dropbox i didn't actually use but it had several tenco's story pictures on it but i deleted them so this was useless, ... to trace the timeline of this story and im really seeing a lot of remnants of dark history here you know? did you know i wrote a letter to a girl i had a crush on valentine's day 2014, slipped it into her locker, and anxiously hung around nearby at lunchtime to see how she reacted at lunchtime? i certainly didn't, or at least i made darn ass sure to forget about this incredible virgin incident and not remember it, ever, until i came across the records of it that i thoughtfully preserved for the me of 5 years later today. ok well now i have to read the letter to see if it was as bad as it just sounded there brb

ok so the good news is that it was actually very focused on being positive and full of admiration for the cool things she did instead of being a confession letter so i am very glad i was able to be a respectful chad 5 years ago, but the bad news is that the jokes, the actual sentences i put together. oh my god. but i mean. well. at least i got the spirit. its certainly a step up from this other person in my grade, WEEABOO ANDREW, YOU MAY RECALL THIS STORY AND HIS NAME FROM PREVIOUS STORYTIMES, THE MAN THE MYTH THE LEGEND who came to school on halloween once cosplaying kirito from sword art online and got very possessive about people asking if they could hold his black replica plastic sword, and probably worse, dropped a "will you be my girlfriend" letter into the locker of my homie and fellow trombonist samantha, who was a little bit nerdy, hung out with the anime-likers who were actually sociable and fun to be around so you can imagine why weeaboo andrew was into her, which had i) a direct quotation from SAO chapter 16.5 (origin of the famous "glopping noise" line), and ii) a condom. jesus christ. i dont want to talk about this any more. next topic.

i also put this drawing of iku nagae and her skarmory (actually an albinoss from 18 DRAGONS) on the other side of the letter because it was the coolest thing i could think of drawing at the time. and i completely agree with 2014 me because it IS super fucking cool. hell fuckin yeah

https://shidiand.tumblr.com/post/76301993387/iku-nagae-ft-that-thing-that-supposedly-is-a

alright that was a fun little trip down memory lane but lets get back on track. november 2013. i started anew as shidiand. still awkward, still learning how to express myself and looking for my place among others. i followed some touhou bloggers, hung around r/touhou a lot as well. in december i got my first tablet for christmas, a wacom bamboo splash. i still use this thing! the usb cable disconnects if you bump it so i have to find just the perfect position to sit in whenever i want to draw, but its served me well. anyways. i was just starting to play around with digital art but i remember, probably just before new years, for some reason i wanted to find out more about tenshi hinanawi (i don't remember why. tenshi wasn't even one of my favourite characters at the time) so i went googling and right there on zerochan i found this:

https://www.pixiv.net/member_illust.php?mode=medium&illust_id=23525572

this was during my dark souls phase so i just went BANANAS at the sight of this. this was literally the coolest image i had ever seen in my internet life. That image alone made me want to draw in hopes that I could make something as cool as that someday.

it wasn't immediately after but i soon discovered tenco's story, and it was love. kannnu was my very first artistic inspiration, and for a long time, my only one. i absolutely idolized them at the time. since then, ive found other artists to look up to, in a more healthy manner, but to this day i still look up to kannnu, still admire their work a lot.

i played around with drawing, followed the lives of people on tumblr, started reading touhou fanfiction, made a new twitter. i met a lot of new people along the way. some people i havent stuck with, some i cut ties with, and some people i still keep in contact with today. over those long 5 years of being shidiand, i found a name (i used to use shidian and then shid, but someone called me shidi once and i realized that was a lot better), how to reach out to others, how to express myself, places that i could feel included in. this is why i owe a blood debt to evelyn, who permitted me to kneel at her throne and was like "yea ok you can join my discord server u seem cool". evelyn, if you were confused by me ominously mentioning this blood debt/blood oath in a tumblr reply 1-2 years ago, this is the context. those 5 years were like a coming of age of sorts, that i never had when i was in high school.

and my love for tenco's story, that inspired me to draw that day, has been with me since almost the very beginning of my time as shidiand. from the beginning, i have always encouraged people to READ TENCO'S STORY, like the kin of those who cry PLAY MELTY or WATCH SYMPHOGEAR. i think my very first sidebar description was something akin to a prayer, written in very choral language, hoping for the day tenco's story iv was completed, ..., "meanwhile, furious shitposting". kannnu's work, finding delight in whatever they chose to draw, has been at my side, all along. my true mentor, my guiding moonlight...

so that's why i still to this day love tenco's story so much.

let's talk about tenco's story.

tenco's story is a story told through single pictures. the plot is vague, and details are sparse. dialogue is rare. we only know what has happened; we seldom know why. furthermore, there are many gaps between scenes that the reader is left to fill in for themselves; we see only snapshots that form an hazy outline of the events that occurred, and must imagine the rest. motivations and explanations fail me. but even with a barebones plot, tenco's story has themes, and if nothing else, those have to be carried through.

the main theme, of course, is journey and travel, but there are also other ideas, too. i actually think they start to change as the series goes on:

book i, where tenshi runs away from home, is about striking out on your own. it's a very fun and unpredictable journey, together with a friend.

book ii, where tenshi and iku are separated, forces tenshi to find and rely on companions of her own even more. but they do so, and they are able overcome hardships, and there is food and festival.

book iii marks a climax, reasserting tenshi's goal of finding the sword of hisou. i feel like the journey shifts from a travel (visiting) to a path forwards (making your way through). perhaps this is just something i get from knowing the locations from dark souls (Anor Londo, New Londo Ruins, the Great Hollow), but the locations start to give more of a sense of verticality, like they're emphasizing tenshi's climb to the summit. the hardships and enemies are the greatest they've been yet, and right when they near the top, tenshi and iku start to bleed. the book ends on an uncertain note.

if i had to describe the type of journey and travel that tenshi and iku undertake, there's this sense of wonder at discovering new places, wandering from vista to vista in delight, but also a sense of conquering, making it through a difficult patch. the sequence from pages 2-44 to 2-51, taken together, convey this sense of overcoming the best. it's one of my favourite parts. again, although the tone definitely starts to lean towards struggle in book iii, i think tenco's sense of wonder really is the heart of the series. there's no map of the world, no predicting where tenshi and iku will end up next. and through their travels, though they come across many enemies, they also find friends -- places of refuge, places full of life, people who will look after them for a few days, companions who will stay with them for the rest of the journey. at the end of book iii, we see a long haired tenshi with purple hair being impaled by the sword of hisou (3-33, see also this extra illustration that risa pointed out to me http://sinnnkai.blog.fc2.com/blog-entry-195.html), and regular short haired tenshi continuing on her journey (3-42). if we ignore the out-of-story images where tenshi has the sword of hisou, tenshi has actually only ever used her sunlight blade (2-24, 3-26, etc), so i think that the long haired tenshi on 3-33 is a different person altogether. (if i had to guess, she might be the purple haired woman in the top left of https://www.pixiv.net/member_illust.php?mode=medium&illust_id=35443328 as we have never seen that woman appear anywhere.) she probably has something to do with the flashbacks at the end of book ii and she might somehow be short-haired tenshi at the same time, but this is just speculation.

however, in 3-43, tenshi's hair is rather blue, so i don't know if this is the purple haired woman or not. if it is, tenshi is probably still fine and closing in on the summit, but if it isn't, then it's very worrying to see a picture of tenshi without any of her companions. it's very ominous.

meanwhile, iku, while climbing the red carpeted corridor, is stabbed, and disappears for a few pages. there's a black page, a shot of a shrine that strongly resembles the hakurei shrine, and a picture of iku standing behind someone in a tux, with the line "In the past, I was saved by the lady I was serving, you see?". and then iku wakes up in a field of flowers.

i think what this scene makes clear is a theme that has continued to appear and reappear throughout every book of "being saved, being aided by someone's kindness".

i think another theme that is implied and has to be addressed by this story of running away from home is "return". something im imagining is that the reason tenshi makes finding the sword of hisou her goal is because she wants to have something to prove herself with, to vindicate her when she comes home. but i don't think she needs to prove anything, and i ultimately think that she would be happier spending the rest of her life exploring.

so i think this should be what happens in the ending.

open on iku's journey, and give her a long sequence of travel without seeing tenshi. underline her newfound resolve. she climbs to the summit with albinoss, and finds the rest of tenshi's companions fallen. and in the last room is sword of hisou tenshi, who has lost herself, and it comes down to iku to bring her back. after a difficult battle, when both of them are on their last legs, iku is unable to stand any longer. but at this moment tenshi sees her companions struggling to get back up and reach her, and that's what brings her to her senses. and iku gets to see how many friends tenshi's been able to make on her own, and they finally and properly reunite. together, tenshi and iku carry each other out of the last room.

i don't think it's necessary to return to heaven. as a conclusion, dedicate some time to tenshi and iku travelling together. they're on their way back, revisiting old friends who helped them along the way, enjoying the journey. their last stop is the house of the elderly nawis (1-42). tenshi shows off the sword of hisou; she decided to keep it not as a trophy to show her family but as proof of the bonds of her companions. surrounded by friends, tenshi and iku decide to part ways with each other, knowing that the other will be alright. iku drifts among the clouds once more, and tenshi sets off for the horizon.

that's the plot that i'd write/just wrote. i don't really expect tenco's story iv to ever come out, though. i mentioned my first sidebar description earlier in this essay, but of course, you can see that it's been changed. 2 years ago, i read my hopeful prayer once more and was struck with a terrible melancholy, so now it reads this: "having come to terms with the fact that tenco's story iv will never be released, i can still live, knowing that the spirit of the journey will live on through kannnu's original works [...] meanwhile, furious shitposting".

on one level, tenco's story is a story, but in the process of following it, i came to think of the work itself as a journey too. you can constantly see kannnu's improvement between and even within each book. they have always drawn whatever they liked; what plot matters in the face of "I wanted to draw a beautiful sky." "I wanted to draw a fantastic battle." "I wanted to draw Dark Souls and Monster Hunter and Pokemon and Brave Fencer Musashi and Bokura no Taiyou and Touhou."

its not really kannnu's style to go back and tie up old ends. they just draw whatever makes them happy. so as i watch them continue to draw beautiful places and fantastic creatures, new characters heading out on journeys of their own or just enjoying their everyday lives, it's as if tenco's story never ended. the limits and consistency of that world ignored, and a new one springs up; in a way, the world of tenco's, which had such thin boundaries, just gets bigger.

but even so, having said all that, i still see them draw that short-haired tenshi from time to time. it makes me happy to see them remember tenco's story with such fondness. often crossing over with orion or roar or elweiss, you can see tenshi on another journey.

#tenco's story #freshlybakedspiderbread

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tareyoabrumado · 3 years ago

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ive been a lot happier making art since i stopped doing character art.

i was focused on making interesting ocs and their stories and drawing them to keep up with what everyone else was doing. i had one oc i focused on most strongly, and everyone else within the story was an afterthought to fill out the backstory. i still really love the character, dont get it wrong, but i realized over the development process that my favorite parts werent designing and drawing the character; it was the worldbuilding behind it:

speculative biology for nonhuman sentient organisms

language with no basis in existing languages (i developed my first conlang solely for this one character!)

environmental influences on a society's culture

linguistic and cultural barriers upon migration to a new world

practicality and structure of clothing and tools (i feel it reasonable to believe that all the clothes i designed would be easily sewn in real life) (also hair!! many of the hairstyles i designed could theoretically be done irl, provided the wearer had horns)

music and instruments and the arts culture within a society

it got to the point where i would look at the character and there would be so much going on, and yet very little in terms of a present-day storyline. ive since realised this character was just a vessel for all my other interests: linguistics, anthropology, biology, music, and physical crafts.

and i didnt even realize those were things i was that interested in! i knew i liked music, and i was on my way to a second language, but the technical linguistics really came out of nowhere (the biology was a huge surprise, given my apathy when learning it in school).

i havent touched the character in a long time. but im happy leaving their story where its at. they live out their life until they get bored, and then move on to something else, and so on. life goes on.

i got a little bit off-topic with this post. anyway. when i joined the art side of the internet, much of it was dedicated to character design and story. everyone was making intricate universes with overarching stories and detailed characters and relationships and developments; and rather than write books, they shared concept art in the form of comics, scene drawings, and character reference pages. i very rarely saw more traditional art: paintings of just. people and things. nothing exists past the piece. its nobody specific. because of this environment, somewhere in my head it was established that this is what art is these days, and to be an artist online youre expected to do character-based pieces.

so i forced myself into it. its what all my friends were doing, after all. social psychology says that you are your friends. they were all making fanart and of course, character-based pieces with extensive stories behind them. and i just couldnt figure it out. i thought there was some kind of social disconnect--wouldnt be the first time, as i seem to be the only one in my group who really doesnt enjoy playing any videogames aside from minecraft. i tried my best, and really enjoyed the process of building up my character and their backstory and homeland and culture and anatomy and dear god ive strayed away from the character themself. it never was about the character. it was about the messages i was trying to convey. everything that overshadowed the character was everything that was more important. i dont care if the design is too busy--look at all the ways a person could wear chains as jewelry!

i see the details in everything, and especially people. human bodies. nonhuman bodies. clothes and jewelry and hair and everything else. this made drawing very difficult. i wanted to detail every part of it. it became a too-realistic cartoon. i drew the seams in the clothes and the twists in the locs. i had to stop myself from drawing lines in the face. there are lines everywhere and once you notice them its impossible to ignore them. the one time i included lines and creases in the face (not nearly as many as i wanted to, but the minimum required to convey the expression and emotion), my friends said it looked weird. unfortunately cartoons and anime and character illustration have simplified designs, and every character is either young and smooth and beautiful or theyre old and wizened and wrinkled and never beautiful and often played for laughs or when the protagonist needs a mentor figure. for a person grappling with their own identity and physical existence, seeing these sentiments expressed so prominently is. difficult. people have a lot to them and its busy and not traditionally beautiful and complex and thats what makes them interesting beings.

character art is almost always digital in its final form. so that was my medium. i got by with the lineart-colorblock-shading-background setup that much of that kind of art shares. i began using a crayon-style brush for my lineart. i was always searching for a way to do a realistic oil paint style with my coloring and shading. i never found the perfect brush, so my art never turned out exactly how i was dreaming.

i thought i hated art classes. i thought i hated art classes. i thought i hated art classes. i was so trapped in the character-art funnel that nothing was to my standards and every project was shit.

i took two art classes this year to fill credits, one focusing on 2d art and the other on ceramics. neither was digital. neither was about characters.

in my pieces, i want to explore abstract ideas. i could just make a candle lantern with a cool design carved into it; or i could explore themes of what it means to be human. there is not a single character aside from vague representations of human beings. im in love.

for my 2d class, we're expected to keep a sketchbook. any art, so long as it's art. too many times ive filled a page with a drawing of a person. nothing exists past the piece. its nobody specific. and their faces are covered in lines. everywhere. eye bags, crow's feet, lines around the mouth and nose and chin, forehead wrinkles. necks.

they are people aging and they are beautiful. they are young people with decades under their belts and they are beautiful. they are people of every age and every life and they have existed physically enough for their bodies to recognize their physical habits. a testament to their living.

they are not smiling. but they have the crow's feet and the lines around the mouth and nose and chin and you know they have laughed many times before. they have lines between their brows and you know theyve felt worried about maybe one too many things. they have wrinkles on their foreheads and you know theyve felt surprise. everything is surprising. and interesting. and awe-inspiring. and beautiful.

we age and we change. this is a story everyone knows. people are often afraid, but then years later, theyre happier than theyve ever been. and they know it will only get better with time.

november 15, 2022

#hoy. abrumado

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spotlightsaga · 8 years ago

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Kevin Cage of @spotlightsaga reviews... I Love Dick (S01E05) A Short History of Weird Girls Airdate: May 17, 2017 @amazonvideo Ratings: Privatized Ratings @amazon Score: 9.75/10 TVTime/FB/Twitter/Tumblr/Path/Pin: @SpotlightSaga **********SPOILERS BELOW********** The more I watch television... The more I write, review, observe, soak in, and immerse myself into what I'm watching the more I drop certain series, and cling to ones that stir up a thunderous rumble of emotions inside of me. Like Dick's art, sometimes those emotions don't have a name. Maybe they're new, maybe their not, but I feel those emotions with such a surging intensity that I know what I'm watching is beyond just a tv series and literally a piece of moving art, cinematic wonders that maybe aren't for everyone, but sure as hell should be. Amazon Studios' 'I Love Dick' is a special series, one of those rare entries that match and sometimes even surpasses its original source material. This series is literally the equivalent of females embracing their very fiber, their sexual being, and shouting out loud on the top of a mountain, echoing through a massive valley, stirring up birds and wildlife... As if to say, 'I'm here and this is who I am. I will not be shamed.' Although I'm a male, and my sexuality is of a different multi-colored variety, I connect with these women and somehow understand them on an enormously supreme level. 'A Short History of Weird Girls' is 'I Love Dick's masterpiece. As you may have noticed, and as I mentioned earlier, Ive changed the way I watch television. I've been holding onto this series, as I have with others... I actually have watched, documented, and written nearly a hundred unreleased articles. I review them, tweak them, add to them, sculpt them... Because much like this show, my writing has evolved, the way I watch tv has evolved, and the way I release these pieces I've written on these shows have evolved. This episode is somewhat in the vein of last years 'B.A.N' from Donald Glover's FX masterpiece 'Atlanta', in the sense that the core narrative takes a back seat and we are given a whole new point of view from the female characters within the series. Not everyone will see this for what this is, and some may even ridicule my interpretation & impressions, but 'A Short History of Weird Girls' is high art and should be viewed, handled, and studied as such. The more I watch 'I Love Dick' the more I see it's many different layers... It's hyper-feminine POV is Jill Soloway & Chris Kraus' alternative to HBO's hyper-masculine lens we see the show 'Ballers' through. Both shows are under appreciated, and besides that fact, the only thing that they have in common is their extreme opposite handling of how we see their worlds. Maybe 'I Love Dick' is actually less of a feminist masterpiece and more of a honest, existential, tribute to an open, bold, unchained and aggressive look at female sexuality... Sexuality in general, and where embracing it can take us. It makes me long for a truly honest look at the male take on sexuality, but 'Ballers' and it's earnest admissions that masculinity can so easily drive towards toxic levels with a snap of a finger, I know my wish is probably losing its way in the wind... At least for now. What if everyone wrote Dick letters? Chris Kraus (Kathryn Hahn) poses an interesting question at the very beginning of the episode and then suddenly that reality comes to life in one of the most vibrant, sexually charged and sensual episodes of television not only in 2017, but ever. Yes, people are throwing around the word 'Revolutionary' when it comes to 'I Love Dick' because that's exactly what it is. People as a whole never quite grasp 'revolutionary' at first do they? Chris starts off her letter at the beginning, as all characters do, and we join them on their individual journeys of sexual awakening & personal drive. She talks about her time in high school, her willingness to literally give herself to anyone, male or female, but never having any takers. Finally during her College Years, she's taken, fucked. That first encounter intoxicates her... What is it that made this man want her so badly? What was it that he found beautiful? Her mind wonders to all the things he doesn't mention, after all, we are insecure beings... Even the most confident person in the room has something in the back of their mind that they compensate for. We are imperfect... But for me, that's exactly what I find so perfect about the human form.... Imperfections, Sadness, a little bit of crazy, 'cuz, aren't we all? Chris, Devon (Roberta Colindrez), Paula (Lily Mojekwu), and Toby (India Menuez) all share their letters to Dick, chronicling his particular effects on their lives... Sexually and otherwise. They recall past lovers, current ones that they feel strong disconnect with, and that disconnect is chronicled with images of both positive and negative experiences. As the experiences head into more heartbreaking territory, or difficult memories to interpret, their sexual escapades are shown and the women are erased leaving a fading, cartoonish like presence of each woman as they are entangled with their lovers or the confusion with their burgeoning sexuality... Much like the short film 'Removed' that this very episode opens with where Tribeca Film Festival 'Jury Award' Nominee & experimental filmmaker, Naomi Uman, creates a series of clips of vintage porn and erases the women's images using fingernail polish remover. Each women's entry is captivating for separate reasons and encapsulates the Bright Eye's brainchild and this generations' Bob Dylan, Connor Oberst, idea that 'every heads a different world'. Sexuality is unique to every one person, male and female, and it's so goddamn refreshing to see, hear, and feel the lusty, powerful force of honesty in approach when it comes to sexual identity. Chris strikes up the dialogue as straight forward as it gets, "Dear Dick, I've been horny since I was six. I used to press my crotch into the belly of my stuffed rhino in the family room of our duplex in Cleveland, Ohio. I loved to hump him in front of our sitter Karen Harris. I used to say that Rhino was hungry and that I needed to feed him... And then Karen went away to college and I didn't feel like doing it anymore." As humans, we ARE sexual beings... Aren't you tired of feeling ashamed of certain impulses that occur naturally within your body? Even before I was six I had these feelings. My situation may have been unique and incredibly polarizing to the majority, and most likely this isn't the show, or should I say segment, to discuss every detail as to how I got to that point so early. It wouldn't exactly be considered a natural occurrence... But even my situation is more common than most people would like to admit, or flat out refuse to admit. All I know is that children should not be punished for acting on these impulses in an innocent manner. We should be asking more questions as to how they got there, but unfortunately people don't want to hear that answer. We are not disgusting or wrong for thinking about sex. Creating a taboo around certain subjects just catapults those very subjects into a high number of internet searches and 'behind-closed-doors' fetishes. Relationships are not as easy as everyone wants them to be. Monogamy might not exactly be obtainable the way most will it to be. Our desires for inclusiveness may just stem from a melodramatic inherited human trait of selfishness, an unwillingness to let those grow around us, because we want to own something. Whether its a relationship or a person within that relationship, the idea that it's "yours" is actually absurd. We can devote ourselves to someone, but in the end we are human. There are certain voids that exist in this life that we need to fill, as animals, as human beings. That's not to say someone can't sustain a healthy relationship with another for 50+ years, its just to say that we all have our own paths. Even if as people our paths are destined to intertwine... Like Devon and Chris... We still must continue to grow and move forward at our own rates, careful to not become codependent. Devon talks about Dick's strong masculine energy as something she embraces and emulates (unlike Chris who wants to take it in any which way she can), turning bits and pieces of it into her own. She uses that 'Dick Swag' to woo other women for sport, but when she falls in love away at college and her heart is broken she drops out of school and tosses her dreams out behind her on her way back to Texas. But it's there where Devon meets Chris and suddenly becomes inspired, tho briefly distracted by the free spirited, India. It's India who sees Dick as or through yet another color of light, Chris' is glowing red, Devon's an iridescent indigo, India's color is much more difficult... A damaged, slightly cracked, creamy shade of yellow... She had an intellectually and creatively stimulating home in New Mexico but her father, John Willis (played by People of Earth's Luka Jones) is a writer of children's books, so therefore felt like he could touch her. India doesn't seem too affected by this as she rattles it off like a cold, but natural fact of life. And here is where I once again am inspired to tell you, the reader, who may or may not know what that feels like... Suddenly the place where I talk about 'my situation' and deem Chris' experience close to mine, but an insufficient place to explore even a second of my experience becomes much more real... And much more appropriate. You see, like India, some of us are taught how to act on sexual behaviors at a young age. We all don't just experiment naturally like Paula, who talks about how seeing her mother's tampon string suddenly pushes her away from her youthful obsession of her mother or how masturbating at a young age became uninteresting once she learned there was a name for it... Hence Paula's infatuation for Dick's massive protruding, structural masculine art that has no name, no specific identity, no title... Some of us have a bit of a push, or an inappropriate 'class', if you will. India seems to be a 'victim' of non-violent sexual abuse as a young child. This is where things get very fucking confusing, because you see... As I mentioned before, India quickly rattles off this fact and sweeps on to the next. Why is that? In my own personal experience, it's extremely difficult to decipher just what sexual abuse is, especially when one isn't physically hurt or 'traditionally forced' into anything. I've written on the subject before and was met with polarizing responses. One young woman asked if she could take me home recently and drove me through the busy intersecting freeways, highways, backroad byways, and long winding ramps & roundabouts from the west end of Miami all the way to the tip of coastal Miami Beach, all the while with tears in her eyes relating to my written experiences, giving me a vivid account of her own. No one wants to see themselves as a victim, not REAL victims anyway. This idea of 'victim culture' is scoffed at by those who have been through it. Some of us may be victims, but we refuse to let that define us, or use it to try and gain sympathy or attention, applying it to causes or whatever it may be, because then suddenly we are admitting defeat or are forever trapped in those moments. The same moments we rarely tell anyone, or ever express. So when my words were recently met with disdain and accusations that I was trying to define sexual abuse in any way, I simply had to laugh. Once again, 'Every head is a different world'. The spectrum is huge, but I personally will not allow myself to be a victim, just like India it's a passing fact, it happened, it's part of my story... But you can't have it, it can't be more than what I'm giving it now... And my experience is simply one example, as is any other. Although slightly damaged, and beautiful in that fact, India captivates all in her presence... Unfortunately she leaves them a bit broken, just as she is. Trudging on, she turns porn into art at Columbia University, even centering her final undergrad thesis around the shapes of a woman's face as she sucks two cocks. For her PHD, she presented a written & visual presentation of what's known as 'gaping' in pornography. If you don't know what that is and you haven't watched the show, I'll let you explore that one at your own discretion. Her professors are a bit horrified and one even suggests she moves towards Gender Studies, much like India I would have laughed that off. I've always found such subjects to be pretentious and divisive, but hey, that's me. As a male, and according to one troll on the #BoilerRoom's comment section who took offense (and hammered down my context) to comments I made during an Oakland, CA show where one of the worst DJ Sets I've ever seen took place on a grand platform (that most people would kill to have) by some wealthy, frankly bored looking hopeful (whose passion and talents self-admittedly lie elsewhere), "I'm a 'washed up raver cis-male' who can't accept females in positions of power" (boy, he got that one comically incorrect, welcome to the 2017, age of the Internet). My comments were light and I was even trying to be supportive, saying that maybe that DJ could get better in time, my point was that she had gained that opportunity through either knowing someone or good looks. Men have created that opportunity for women to use, and I'm not saying that it isn't a legitimate way in... But my comments were taken out of context. You should be able to perform however you want, looking however you wan... But without passion, you are simply taking up an opportunity for the next person in line. A bit of research indicated she has had the opposite road of some of my strong, female musician acquaintances and friends of whom I list as fierce inspirations of my own work (however I do not and would never take away the common denominator of the grand, all-relatable human struggle). I have called upon & channeled the inspirations of women like long time Indianapolis & Midwest treasure, Techno Powerhouse, DJ Shiva, or now worldwide success and frankly G.O.A.T. House Music Legend, The Black Madonna. These women worked so hard & sacrificed so much & never rested on their laurels. I am inspired by strong females, but I don't necessarily see them as just females, I see them as human beings, who like me, have had to work a little harder to get where they're at. No one has handed me anything, and many times when I had something, I blew it. We are all working against something, someone, ourselves, time... My inspirations in life are a direct product of my environment, just like the different presentations of myself over the years. And no one will take away my freedom of speech, right to an opinion (whether it's agreed with or not), or use a term like 'cis-male' to insinuate that I don't understand what it's like to be discriminated against, to be confused about who and what I am, the complexities of human sexuality, and so on and so forth. I often tell people about my first experience in Chicago at the age of 12. I went to the Art Institute of Chicago with a large group of my fellow schoolmates, but i broke free from the pack and wondered into rooms unaccompanied. I found myself suddenly surrounded by 'Impressionist & Post-Impressionist' Paintings, peppered with Medieval & Renaissance Art. My eyes centered on this massive painting that literally popped out of the wall, surrounded by a low lying rope, to keep people away from its magnificence, but their view unobstructed... It was Georges Seurat's 1884 pointillist painting 'A Sunday Afternoon on La Grande Jatte. I felt small and insignificant, like one of the pinpoint dots that made up what seemed like a million little dots that made up the painting. I've always had trouble describing that memorable moment, but Paula knocked it out in one line while describing how Dick's art made her feel, "It evoked in me a feeling of boundlessness... It was fucking terrifying." Yes, that's exactly it. 'Dear Great Man, Genius, Loner, Cowboy', India lists off Dick's accomplishments in the most condescending tone she can possibly channel. India had previously known of Dick through the Art History books her parents had lying around the house. Dick's was her favorite, not in the normal sense. She is young. She has known pain. She has worked hard to get where she is at. India is beautiful, but she doesn't use that to her advantage to succeed. She takes the hardest route possible, because she simply doesn't want what everyone else wants and she knows that anything worth having in this life doesn't come free... And that's something I can connect to. 'Dear Dick, We are not far from your doorstep.' Yasss, Queen! Jill Soloway just directed a fn' knockout... And the all female writing staff, this one headed by Annie Baker and Heidi Schreck deserve a Spotlight Saga nomination for Achievement in Writing... And Soloway for Directing. India's final words to Dick sent a surge of electricity through my body. This is exactly how I look at the AV Club. Knock Knock.

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mercenarypark · 8 years ago

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i was on steam earlier, looking for games involving dinosaurs [as one does], and i stumbled upon this old bastard. and it got me thinking about some things- namely, the way ppl tend 2 treat nazis as a plot device. im sure its been put more succinctly by other ppl, esp since ive been like, barely conscious most of today, but w/e: #nazism #text heavy #long post #antisemitism #murder #holocaust #shoah #concentration camps

i feel like there’s a possible connection to video games[esp classic shooters from the olden days] deciding to use nazis as their stand-in generic villain, an the disconnect a lot of ppl have today w/ nazis as an Actual Genuine Disgusting Force of Nature

and im not talking about like “uwu violence in video games is causing children 2 be more violent” stuff, i mean like, games w/ nazis as the villains doing vaguely evil stuff and being defeated by getting a bunch of lead pumped into them, easy-peasy, no mention of jewish people even existing-

instead lets have hitler have somehow resurrected dinosaurs and have a game where you can literally play as a nazi against your friends, AND have an incentive to chose the axis side since you get to be more dinosaurs uwu

honestly the fact that a game like this even made it past the drawing board, was published years ago, and has overwelmingly positive views, is. upsetting. because, and you wouldnt catch me dead playing this game, but i’d bet money that if they even once mention jewish ppl, or the Shoah, itd be offhanded and INCREDIBLY insensitive, making it so, like, the camps are patrolled by velociraptors or some bullshit-

but i digress, im not making this post to rant about a 6 year old game with a really flawed, shitty concept, im talking about how i feel like shit like this- making nazis into this ambiguously evil entity that you’re supposed to shoot and defeat- is both Obscenely insensitive to the trauma of actual jewish ppl[like me], holocaust survivors and their families, etc

by erasing over them and their/our stories, and just kinda treating nazis as a Concept instead of a genuine threat

which is smth i still see today, ppl using nazis as plot devices and with this sort of offhanded insensitivity, even NOW, when yes, nazis are still alive and well, holocaust denial is still alive and well even in the highest positions of power,

and people really dont care. and i feel like a lot of little things helped that. and one of those little things might very well have been, games like wolfenstein or this dinosaur nazi game where nazis were used for a standin generic enemy, and i think that sorta thing helped desensitize ppl to just sort of think as nazis as a vague sort of evil instead of, what they are.

i feel like there was good behind it at first- in the early ages of comic books, when most superheroes were created by jewish ppl, when punching nazis was a new concept and it was written with more than a little bit of cathartic anger- that was good. that i get.

hell, now that im invested in tf2, i have a lot of headcanons about medic murdering and slaughtering nazis, because im jewish and he’s jewish and by god, if i had the chance, i would absolutely murder a fucking nazi-

but there’s a difference between jewish creators doing that, i feel, and goyim taking nazis and removing jewish ppl entirely from the situation, and just turning nazis into a vague evil army force to be shot at. there’s a big difference there. one is personal, with a sense of fighting back, and one is more... performative, and taking the trauma of jewish ppl and twisting it so you have some meat shields for the player to shoot at

and again, like, ppl do that shit now, and make nazis a plot device- to take medic as an example again, on the OFF CHANCE i find someone who doesnt headcanon him as a goddamn nazi or nazi sympathizer, i find goyim headcanoning him, with an uncomfortable amount of focus, as being forced to work with nazis, or tortured by nazis, interned in a camp, etc, etc-

like, theres two reasons i intentionally do not hc medic as being kept in a camp. firstly, it’s too traumatic for me to even think about. secondly, it feels HORRIFICALLY disrespectful, even as a jewish person myself, to headcanon a fucking fictional character as being kept in a concentration camp and focusing on that in-depth- disrespectful to people who actually survived those conditions, and to the many, many who died, as well. they didnt suffer so that some people on the internet could use the camps as a plot device.

but goyim dont fucking care about that. and thats the real source of all this. again, goyim dont care about using jewish pain and suffering for a plot device.

and thats about all ive got to say. sorry this is, extremely long and i hope it all makes sense.

#captain's log #i am. tired fhgkhh #tf2 / mentioned towards the end #reblog if u want i guess ? i dont care #idk how well put this is though fhgkh

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asseret-sarim · 8 years ago

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The past, the present... the future. - Part 6

Summary: In SHIELD you are known for your charisma and your irrational optimism. Specially taking in count the irreversible curse HYDRA condemned you with. Because of that, Director Fury has determinate that you are the best person to take care of Bucky’s mental state.

Chapter 6: Aleksei

Pairing: Bucky x reader

Y/N: Your name

Warnings: PTSD, eating disorders, torture.

Word count: Ehhh...

A/N: Ok, Ok, I know. I’ve taken ages to upload this. I’m so sorry!!! I had a huge writer’s block, but now I’m over it. This part is a little (too) dramatic... I got carried away. Sorry, I know, I’m a monster. I promise fluff when the series end! Enjoy reading!

Previously: Part 1 - Part 5

Previously:

“I… realized something. I guess I always knew it, but I had never seen it in such a real… reality. I’ve seen… the twisted, dark, painful story HYDRA turned, not just my life, but many others, into. You could say… I’ve meet Bucky Barnes for the first time. I… Only knew The Soldier, the shadow of a monster. But… It wasn’t the shadow of Bucky, it was the shadow of HYDRA. I feared the man, when I should fear the organization. Its true, in a way, he will always be him to me, he will always be The Soldier. I will always associate my time at HYDRA with him, I will always associate him with the terrible things The Soldier did to me. But every single time, I will have to remind myself that it wasn’t him, and them I’ll keep going. Because its true. He will be the monster that haunts my nightmares, but he doesn't need to know that, because he never chose to be in that position. This is something I have to protect him about: the nightmare he was forced into.”

Daisy nods and stays quiet, looking at the park. After some time, she turns to me. “So what do we do now?”

Now, we fight.

Y/N’s POV:

I look at Daisy’s sleeping form from the sofa. It has taken me a while to convince her to take the bed, but she finally gave in, out of exhaustion.

When we came back from our walk, Coulson had called to ask why exactly was the missing mission jet in the compound. I don’t know how that went, because Tony and Daisy took care of it, but my friend got permission to stay here for the night before leaving first thing in the morning.

While they were talking, Natasha informed me of the current situation. As always, she had my back and had told the team (including Bucky) that I had gone to the training room to cool off after a fight with her and that, given that I was on edge, Barnes had scared me and that had been the straw that broke the camel’s back. It didn’t sound realistic to me, but Nat can be really convincing if she wants to. In any case, they didn't ask questions. Nearly.

When we finished supper, Tony called me aside to his lab with the excuse of wanting to run through my results with me to make sure everything was correct. When we got there, he locked the lab door and started running through some files in his computer, but it was really obvious that he had no intention of asking me anything related to my results.

“What do you want, Tony?” I leaned against one of the tables.

He switched off the computer and turned around his chair. “What happened with Barnes this morning, Y/N?”

“I had a fight with Nat and…”

“I’m not stupid. The rest of the team may be, but I’m not, OK? I want to know what happened.” He stood up, put his hands on my shoulders and looked straight into my eyes. “I want to know. Did he hurt you?”

“He didn’t.”

“But something happened.” I just looked at him, so he took a deep breath before speaking again “Look, Y/N. I… I’m sorry for everything that happened to you. I feel terrible, because I know that you are stuck in a world that has destroyed you and you can’t get out. You can’t go anywhere else than with us, the big guys that shoot each other. That’s not the place for a sixteen year old. It wasn’t forty eight years ago and it still isn't now. Some of us can just destroy a few suits, retire, take yoga lessons or fake our death if we ever decided we were sick of this life. But you can’t. You were chained to this time bomb against your will and there’s no key to your lock. I just want to help you live with it as good as you possibly can, and I want to know if Barnes did something to you so that I can take measures.”

A shiver brushes my spine and tears touch my lids. Its been a long time but still I can’t believe it when people seem to care about me so much. I’ve never been worth it, I can’t understand it. I’m just a stupid little girl that was never able to make it out on her own. People shouldn't care so much about me. I’m no one.

“Y/N…”

I realized I just said that out loud a second too late.

“You are not no one. You are not stupid. And never, absolutely never think you are weak. The three years you spend with HYDRA would have broken anyone, they broke you. But you got up again. And I don't even know how you did it, I know I wouldn't have been able…” He suddenly stopped, his look hardening and his grip on my shoulders tightening until his knuckles turned white. I would have protested if I wasn't so surprised by his behavior. He was mumbling to himself what he just told me ‘Forty eight years’ and ‘HYDRA’. When he looked up, he was horrified “Y/N… Please tell me… You didn’t… You didn't meet Barnes in HYDRA, did you?”

I didn’t even consider lying, the look on my face probably gave me away anyways.

I had managed to convince Tony not to kill Bucky in the spot. Which was lucky, because Steve had convinced him of joining the team for the rest of the evening. Clint, Nat, Daisy and Tony went out of their way to make sure Barnes didn't do anything that would freak me out, but it wouldn't have been necessary. I discovered that when there were other people around, my fear seemed to reduce considerably. It probably was because most of the time I spend with The Soldier was alone with him, because his superiors and the scientists didn't like to see him in “action”. Therefore, he hardly ever hurt me when there was people around. Having all my friends with me gave me the confidence I was lacking and I finally got to meet Bucky Barnes.

“You should have seen him!” Smiled Steve after he managed to finish his story, laughing all over his beer bottle. Why he drank it, given that he could’t even get tipsy, was a mystery to me.

“What can I say? You were a punk.” answered Bucky. At the beginning he had looked disconnected but as the evening went on he finally got more integrated to the team. I knew I should help, after all, thats why I was there, but I didn't see how. Barnes looked happy, but it wasn’t genuine. In his favor I have to say he was an amazing actor and only someone with as much training as I had would have noticed the subtle signs his body language gave off. How he sat on the edge of the chair, as if ready to run away. How he flinched every time someone got close to him. How he refused to eat or drink anything, much less alcohol, even though half of the team was drinking beer and the other half something a bit stronger. How he kept scanning the room, looking for non-existing threats. Once again, a wave of empathy washed through me. I was like that at the beginning, when I had just gotten away from their claws… and still was sometimes. It’s just not something you can leave behind, because it finds a place inside you and digs a hole and hides there. And now it's part of yourself, like it or not, taking it out would be much more painful that withstanding it every day. And so, it keeps digging deeper and deeper, and every single day its more painful to take it out.

Physically, Bucky didn’t look great either. Back in HYDRA, he was feed just enough to survive, all the other nutrients he needed were supplied intravenously. Now, he kept eating just as much as he ate at HYDRA, but lacking the IV supply, and that was taking it’s toll in his body.

“Who wants cookies?” I asked, looking around the room.

“We just ate.” Nat rolled her eyes.

“So what? I want some!” Daisy got up. “Who’s cooking?”

Vision stood up “I will take ca-”

“Y/N, didn’t you tell me you made amazing cookies?” Sam looked at me imploringly.

Of course I… didn’t. Daisy did, though. And she was nice enough to help me. In ten minutes, the cookies were in the oven and everyone (correction: nearly everyone) was impatient. The one person that actually had to eat, looked as if he was planning on disappearing. Oh, no. I hadn’t cooked for nothing.

“So, Bucky. Tell us a bit about your thoughts. What do you think of this new era?” I could feel Clint’s worried look and Daisy’s puzzled stare piercing through me. I did actually surprised myself, not only for having addressed him directly, but for having been able to come up with a topic that most likely wouldn’t trigger bad memories.

He looked up surprised, but smiled. “Well, internet is definitely useful. Science and medicine have advanced so much… And so have human rights. So that’s great! Ehhh… I don't know…”

“Of course you don’t know. You can’t say you've tried the best from the XXI century if you haven't tried my cookies” Said Daisy, who was already taking them out of the oven.

“I’m gonna turn that one down. Not really hungry.”

Yeah… About that. No one says Daisy “no”. Half an hour later we had managed to get him to eat, not only cookies, but also a few slices of pizza. Success!

A while after midnight we finally called it a day (or night?) and went to bed. After Daisy fell in the arms of Morpheus, I decided to read one of my journals. I started writing journals when I escaped HYDRA, as a therapy you could say, and got into the habit of keeping one journal for every place I lived in. I still read them from time to time.

The one that is resting on my lap right now is white, wore out by time and use, and has a beautiful drawing of a flamenco dancer on the cover. I moved to Spain a few years after escaping HYDRA and in my second day I saw this notebook in a bookshop and I fell in love. I lived all around the country for five years, which was stretching the time I should have been there way too much, before I was trapped and forced to flee to Sweden.

I look at the page I’m on again, explaining my experiences with Spanish food (man, those people sure like strong flavors) and a sudden stab of nostalgia crosses my stomach. I lean over myself, breathing heavily. I’ve never been a nostalgic person, and this feeling is a complete surprise to me. I close the journal, determinate to try and sleep, but the sound of footsteps interrupts me. They are coming from one floor above, and they sound too heavy to belong to someone who is thinking with clarity. Whoever it is, they may hurt themselves if they walk around like this, so I put a sweatshirt on and head to the noise. I’ve dealt with sleepwalkers before.

The footsteps take me to the top common room. By the noise they make, I work out that they are Steve’s. When I’m about to turn the corner, an unexpected noise stops me. It’s a sob. A contained, frustrated, pained sob, the kind you don’t wan’t people to see. I’m about to turn around and go back to my room, but my damn curiosity doesn’t agree. What can the mighty Captain America be crying about? Before I know it, I’ve entered the common room.

Bad idea.

As soon as I step in, I realize my mistake. Because its not Steve who I have in front. It’s The Soldier. The more rational and smart part of my brain tells me to run and pretend I haven’t seen anything. But there’s a small, unhappy part that just doesn’t see how that is moral. I can’t just leave him here, especially not after the speech I had given Daisy just eight hours ago.

“Hey…” I start towards the sofa.

He looks at me, his expression wild. I take an involuntary step back and need to use all my willpower to continue walking forward. He looks at me carefully until I seat on the other end of the sofa.

Let’s do this.

Bucky’s POV:

I feel her when she seats next to me. I feel her when she reaches over to touch my shoulder, even though she backs away at the last second. I feel her as she looks at me in silence. I feel her. Even though I’ve buried my head on my hands again as soon as she has proven to be no threat.

Silence floats around us, but it doesn’t feel bad. Sharing silence it’s a strange experience, it’s so intimate, vulnerable… but it never lasts much. Sooner or later, something shatters it into a million irreparable pieces. But this one… This one feels right, and I want to hold on to it for a little bit more. And a little bit more. And a little bit more.

“Nightmares?” she asks softly after the silences has lost its proprieties.

“Horrible ones” I murmur. The image the man smiling down at me with a blood-driven expression, brass knuckles in his hands, is still imprinted on my eyelids.

The girl nods and hands me something over. I don’t know when she has done it, because I haven’t looked up, but there’s a steaming infusion in my hands right now. “Clint’s secret recipe. Calming” I drink and the heat travels down my chest. I don’t know why exactly why this is so comforting, but it feels good. “Do you want to talk about it?”

“No”

“Okay” she says looking out the window. I notice she’s shivering and hand her a blanket. “Thanks”

I nod and leave the mug in the table. The infusion has help me calm, but there’s still something in my stomach I can’t really identify. It’s moving, making me sick with words and, before I realize it, I vomit them all. All my nightmares. There’s something strange, familiar, floating around this girl, something I can’t identify, but I can’t control either. It’s like something around her is making me speak, but not forcing me. Why am I doing this?

“I dreamed… Of HYDRA. I can’t believe they haven’t… left my head yet. Its… Today I dreamed of a man called Aleksei. It was at the beginning, when HYDRA still hid inside the shade of the KGB. Brainwashing then was… more difficult. I still had strength to fight them back. So they decided the best way to proceed was to make sure I couldn’t fight back. That I was so damn tired and… broken, that I couldn’t even think about it anymore. This man… Aleksei. He was famous in the KGB. He was their men to torture hostages for information or… for more personal causes. He was a sadistic, but with some sort of strange pull to refinement. It’s… difficult to explain. But he was great at his job, and they decided he was the perfect person to get me “ready” for brainwashing. The routine… guess you could call it like that, was simple. At that time, I wasn’t in cryo, because they needed me for various jobs in there… They would call me and take me to a cell in one of the lowest subterranean floors. So no one could hear the screams, I figured.

The HYDRA agents pushed me against the wall and took a par of chains hanging from the ceiling. One of them looked at me, coming uncomfortably close “Take your shirt off” he said. It was a direct order, I couldn't go against it. Aleksei liked to work over exposed skin. I striped my shirt and they chained my wrists, so my arms were raised above my head and my body was nearly hanging from them. They looked at me one last time, while I was hanging there, exposed. One of them walked slowly towards me, smiling lustfully, bloodthirsty in his eyes. He leaned closer and then, with no words, punched me in the stomach. I grunted, but knew the look on this man’s eyes was nothing compared to what was coming. The agents finally exited and I was left there, waiting. Aleksei always took his time, sometimes hours had passed until he finally appeared. I think it was part of his technique… It was mind-destroying knowing what was coming but never actually started. I was just there, hanging vulnerably, surrounded by cold and silence, waiting.

He finally appeared. He closed the door carefully behind him, slowly… He then went to a table set on one side and took his leather gloves off slowly. He turned on the water of the sink and the sound filled the space, left it run for a while before washing his hands, and when he was done, he dried them on a towel. Finally, he looked at me, and there it was. I have never seen so much lust and bloodthirsty fill a man’s eyes as I saw when he looked at me, examining his ideas, deciding which one would work better, and which one he felt like doing. Finally, he walked towards the table and opened it with a key. The cover raised to reveal a secret drawer full of instruments, a lot for which I had no name for. He ran his fingers through the blades of the knifes, to finally choose a silver one. He softly pressed the edge to his finger and with that minimum contact, there was already a cut on his skin.

“I heard what you did last week.” He whispered, coming closer. “Do you think that’s nice, Soldier? Hitting poor helpless girls?”

Last week I was assigned the training of the integrants of the Black Widow program. I was ordered to fight them without holding back. I did hold back, and my handler got furious. I knew there was going to be a punishment, I just didn’t expect it to be so bad.

“But you hurt Natasha. Why did you hurt Natasha?” He asked. Natasha Romanoff was Aleksei’s favorite. He shook his head, but I didn’t open my mouth. That would just make everything worse. “And you also disobeyed orders, I’ve been told. So that’s double punishment” He had been turning around me and now laid the knife on my lower back. The contact between my skin and the cold blade immediately started to sting. He kept the knife on the same place, but slowly pushed it deeper and deeper into the open wound, making it burn worse and worse. He did the same on the other side before cleaning the blade. “I’m not happy with you, soldier” He said, while I grunted in pain. “We are doing a quick warm up, and then get started. Once we get started, don’t expect good treatment” He pressed the knife to my front left hip. This time, the knife dug in deep, reaching the bone, and he leaned against it, coming very close to me, and looked into my eyes, establishing dominance. He finally took the knife out of the wound and I growled loudly, in pain. “Don’t tell me you’re already in pain. We haven’t even gotten really started” he laughed, heading towards the table and taking some brass knuckles that reflected light. “But if you’re feeling that way, let’s get over with warm up soon, shall we?”

He walked towards me at rate that was the opposite of quickly. He took his time to adjust the brass knuckles. He then hit the back of my knees and I fell to my knees, hanging from my wrists. He got into a fight position. This was going to be bad. Aleksei was specially bloodthirsty today, and he had an excuse to inflict extra pain, no one would tell him off about it. He knew that. He damn well knew that, and he was taking his chance. The cold, hard metal collided against my chest, sending a wave of pain through me, and it didn’t stop for what felt like eternity.

When he considered the punching was over, there wasn’t a single part of my body he hadn’t hit. He had even gone below the hip, something unusual in him, I was doubled over as much as I could to relive pain, which wasn’t much given the position I was hanging on. Aleksei threw the bass knuckles over the table and smiled.

He carried on: he dug a razor blade into the twisted skin of my flesh shoulder and started pushing it down. I screamed as the blade enter the tender skin on my armpit, that had never been cut until now. He shushed me. “Stop screaming, this is nothing yet. I’m going to have to muzzle you if you keep making noises.” Blood dripped and flowed down my side, mixing with dirt. He cleaned the blade and looked at me. “Oh, look! The bruises are already forming” he said, laying a hand and pressing down on a particularly big and painful bruise on my abdomen. I grunted and he didn’t look happy “Here we go again. Don’t say I didn't warn you” He cut a piece of duct tape and sealed my lips with it. Then he came back with a dark liquid. Vinegar. I could feel it burning even before the wet fabric touched my cuts. He enjoyed the burning pain this particular procedure caused. When I felt like my back, hip and side were on fire, he finally decided to stop. His hand gripped my jaw and forced me to look at him. “Don’t you dare pass out, or I’ll make sure you come back soon enough. And you’ll regret it” I believed him. “Its so nice when you have your mouth sealed. Its much more fun to do this. But I want to hear your screams for what you did to Natasha.” He showed me a whip, enjoying the desperation in my eyes before ripping the duct tape off…

I hear a contain sob that breaks my trance. My breathing is heavy and I can feel the intensity my face showcases after the flashback. Next to me Y/N won’t meet my eyes, rubbing a hand over her face. I feel guilty, she had no reason to hear that, she did not deserve to be haunted by my experiences. But then she does something surprising and squeezes next to me, pulling the blanket around us both.

“I think it worked.” she whispers, her voice still shaky, and I realize that I’m feeling much lighter now that I don’t have to bear that weight alone. “You should sleep now” I rest my head on her shoulder and the light feeling drags me into dream land while she gently runs a hand through my hair.

Before I completely drift off, I hear her mumbling something “So Aleksei had another victim.” but I’m too far off now to understand anything.

Part 7

Thank you to @beccaanne814-blog @annadier @lilasiannerd @obsessivegeekynerd @drinkfantasy @graysonmalfoy @scoobertdoobert2 @violentlyfarts @queenllamamama13 @agentraven007 @brutalwerewolf @isaxhorror @katundeadd @chrixa @i-am-mina @musichowler @panic-at-the-camisado @chipilerendi @thesalsafic @jennymagicalheart @amrita31199 @crazyliraz @psm2303 @s-eabasstian @5secondsofonedirection222 @38leticia @acidentally-in-hell @namastay-in-bed-2002 @paulaamarieee @ipaintmelodies and all the amazing people who are with me in this adventure!!

#bucky barnes #bucky x reader #bucky imagine #bucky fanfic #bucky fic #avengers #avengers x reader #avengers fanfiction #marvel #angst #winter soldier #winter soldier x reader #winter soldier fanfiction

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illestfantasy · 6 years ago

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2/7/2019

Ari’s album comes out in a few hours and even though I already listened to it Im still really excited for the zach sang interview and the break up with your gf music video {THAT SONG REALLY HAS A FUCKING NSYNC SAMPLE AHHHHHHHHHH OMG}.Also Im really proud of myself. Yesterday I went to the gym, worked on my video, and practiced singing and today I started stretching again so I can be more flexible and I started meditating again and I spent way less time on twitter these last 2 days. And between all this Ive been working on loving myself and accepting myself and Im really seeing changes with the way I view myself, my emotions, my thoughts, and others. I love this I really feel like 2019 is my year. Im so grateful for all that has happened so far and all that is going to happen this year. Everything feels so beautiful. Im just realizing and appreciating so much about myself. I am so creative and talented and such an amazing person. I just feel like I am flourishing and with that I feel called to kind of disconnect. I want to spend more time here than on twitter. Stop talking to people I know I have no connection to anymore and just allow myself to be. I also want to do things that are so out of my comfort zone like sing in front of people and allow myself to be seen and heard rather than just hiding behind the scenes. I realize life is too short to not make the most of it and I so deeply want to make the most of mine. I want to let all my dreams come true and stop worrying about what other ppl say about me or what they think I should be doing. I want to allow myself to love and be loved and to give love and receive love freely. I just realized its okay to love myself and to know that I am worthy of amazing things happening to me for so long I was subconciously under the impression that thinking those things were self absorbed and tbh it does feel a bit scary to post about how much I love myself (and how we should all feel this way about ourselves) when all I see on the internet are people saying how much they dont love themselves. It feels like Im being “fake woke” and makes me feel different and like I dont fit in and that Ive changed too much but I need to accept that these are my views and just because others dont feel the same doesnt mean I need to change or that theres anything wrong with me. Tbh I used to feel that way about myself but through discovering the law of attraction and spirituality and all that I realized how important it is to put yourself first and love yourself and while this is still a proccess and Im not all the way there yet I am getting closer and closer to having unconditional love for myself with each passing day and Im so grateful and I hope everyone finds a way to have unconditional love for themselves one day too. I realize were all on our own personal journeys and I cant tell someone how to live their lives or give advice or try to change them. The only thing we can do is send love and support and allow people to figure things out for themselves on their own time. Omg its 11:11 right now lol. And I saw 11:11 in the breathin music video I watched 20 mins ago. Its 11:20 now and I just spent 10 mins rereading and listening to music (Im listening to Janet now btw) idk if any of this makes sense because its so late and im tired but it all came from the heart so <3

#personal #self love

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sarcasticlykaeon-blog · 7 years ago

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Caught Between Worlds

Stuck. Thats how it felt, every hour of every day, for as long as I could remember. Like i was some sort of freak, on the outside looking in. I can remember when i was small, barely old enough to really walk and talk, two and a half, three...and i hated dresses. I hated pink. I hated lace and frills. If i could choose or make my will known it was pants. Tshirts and sweatshirts. Childrens overalls. I hated games in preschool. The girls always wanted to play house, with husbands and babies in some sort of elaborate roleplay. The boys wouldnt let me play with them. "No girls," theyd say. "You wont know how," or "girls arent any good at this. Go play with dolls." somehow...just because i didnt have the same lower regions i wasnt good enough. So i played alone, with blocks or toys, making up elaborate adventures or stories in the process. My mother, my aunts, my grandmother...they all wanted me to be a girl. They tried to take me underwing in baking, playing with makeup, dressup, dolls...they tried to teach me about playing with hair. Me? I just wanted to test out the new computer, watch ninja turtles, and kick butt like she-ra. My one concession to female marketed programs was Jem...but honestly? I loved the story and drama, not the glamour, glitter, fashion, or fame. I was the oldest...five years between me and my brother meant i was dads son substitute until i was almost 11. I learned things like changing the oil in a car, ms-dos programming and how to kick ass in Doom, how to tackle and fight back if grabbed by a bigger opponent. Of course...the instant my middle brother was old enough to do son things....fwip! I was ignored. About the only thing i could get the old man to do was D&D. My grandfather insisted it was a phase i would grow out of, that id become a seeker of a strong man and an actual woman eventually. My mother tried to force me to conform to gender standards. My aunt was disappointed. My father only started caring about gender normativity when i hit puberty. I never told them things like "i want to grow up to be a boy" because even at three, i knew it didnt work that way, on some instinctual level. But i dod wail and growl about the unfairness. Why is x okay for boys but not girls? Why are girls expected to be like this but boys arent? And the answer...oh the answer just upset me and angered me. "Because youre expected to be a young lady." By puberty, the words "young lady" were guarenteed to trigger a huge emotional fit of rage...but i couldnt explain why. Just like the fact that i had to fight for my place amidst whatever boys lived in the neighborhood. I had to work twice as hard to prove i was worthy of being allowed to hang out...and still they sought to ditch me at every opportunity. School was even worse. I was overly tall, strong, and hyper intelligent. I was part of the "Gifted Program" (which in most school systems is naught but busy work or a careful way to set up classes in high school to fix the averages of a class.) I was, in every concievable way the outcast. And then puberty found me. Early. The first time i bled in sixth grade, i cried myself to sleep, hiding blood ruined underwear in the back of my closet until i could throw it away. I didnt tell my mother until i was sixteen--hiding this horrid, agonizingly painful thing that happened to me once a month. When i grew breasts i hated them. I hated bras. And of course, i have breasts that grew huge. I survive with super tight sports bras and tshirts because nothing else fits my fucked up frame: ive got broad shoulders, long legs, and huge feet (size 12 womens, which is impossible to find), and im like 5'8". Id be taller but my arms and torso are short, and ive got wide hips and huge breasts and butt. I hated my body and i still do. I feel like i was a crapshoot built out of the mismatched leftovers of several people. And the shit my parents tried to enforce for gender conformity to this "new identity of a young lady." first was acne management. I wasnt a pizza face, but i did and still do have a bit of an issue with blackheads (Glasses have that effect.) But my parents tried to force me to pop my zits...and when i refused because it hurt, they basically held me down and popped them for me. Then was "shaving my legs". Okay. Underarms i get because pits stink. I shave those because it feels less stanky when i do. But their issue? My legs. I refused to do it. "Boys dont, why do i? Thats not fair!" i fought. Hard. But...like the zits...theyd hold me down and buzz my legs for me from knee to foot while i thrashed and begged...all to force on me a title i never wanted, a mold i didnt fit. And i didnt understand WHY. Why was my behavior, my life and interests and hobbies and clothing all supposed to be dictated by something so unimportant? And then...when i was sixteen, i met a person i hit it off with. A sweet and funny youth my age with hair as long as mine and a goofy smile on his face. In a few months we were dating long distance and i suspect my family sighed in relief that i wasnt a lesbian. Our fathers got to be friends(which was useful, since 200miles between us put a crimp in relations.) But this had another side effect. You see, that next year i learned something id never heard before. Something id never considered until that day in 2002. His father...felt he was a woman trapped in a mans body. I was floored. This could happen? What? So i researched what i could to understand (there wasnt much, back then.) And...i began to wonder....because all I could find was for males becoming females. Even joked with my boyfriend that the universe "got us backwards" (he agreed, seeing as how he was girlier than me) And then it all crashed to a halt one night at dinner. His father, him, me, another mtf person and two other adults were at a restaurant, and the kne guy at the table with no knowledge on trans folks was asking questions. I listened, enraptured as the emotions and disconnects id always felt were described from the other side. Emboldened, 17, and perhaps seeking some form of connection or...validation for my feelings, i piped up, expressing how i felt the universe had gotten me backwards. That was the worst thing to say, as his father unloaded on me verbally for being mocking and insensitive and jumping on a bandwagon i had no business on. Treated me like i was being scum--damn near drove me to tears and made me feel small and useless. And i thought "if this is what trans ppl are like...i dont want to be like them ever." it crushed my desire to understand my gender identity and sexuality for years. It didnt help that as time went by ot seemed every trans person i encountered was one of two things: a dramawhore with the emotional stability of a 14year old girl, or someone like my bf's father who decided that i couldnt belong to his elitest club in a fashion that echoed years of "no girls allowed" from boys everywhere. The internets vast collection of professionally offended "keyboard warriors" who spew bigotry and hate and small minded idiocy while calling it "truth" or "just what X group deserves" is a steaming cesspit of shit I dont want to be part of on any level, and unfortunately many of them claim to be whatever "alternate" gender identity or sexuality is the fad this month. Its not winning me over at all, and made me shy further away from actual people i might be able to relate to...maybe who can help me. I finally did own up to something when i was 23--I was more sexually attracted to women than men. In fact...beyond a few emotion driven crushes as a teen, the only male i have ever found attractive was that same goofy, funny, smiling boy with the long hair...except these days hes my supportive, goofy, smiling mate with the softest heart of gold ive ever known inside a powerful and intimidatingly sized viking-esque exterior. But again...because on the outside, our relationship seems very "normal" im not welcomed much by the vocal minority and so im super wary of all parts of the lgbt crowd. I dont advertise or tell my relatives--my parents and their respective siblings are between 50 and 70 years old. They barely believe this stuff exists. I still dont want to be a girl. I dont want the societal expectations of it. I hate having breasts that risk knocking my teeth loose if i move too fast. And dont get me started on the fucking shit show that is my sex life. Its a complicated shit show that starts with the disconnect of parts and ends with kinks i can never actually engage in because, guess what? Im a GIRL. But at the same time, i stare at the only transmen examples and stories i can find, which seem to be rare and hidden somewhere, at places like fb and tumblr and twitter...at pride rallies and news stories...at stuff recounted by friends...and i dont want to be associated with people whose actions turn them into examples of literal human garbage. And so here i sit, caught between two worlds, never part of either one and feeling like im slowly drowning. It seems like one doesnt want me and the other i dont want... Im so tired of being stuck.

#Gender dysphoria #gender identity #emotional stress #confusion #feeling like a freak

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somedaypast-thesunset · 7 years ago

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im in this like .. cycle i guess.

i want to reach out for support because i feel a lack of support but to express a lack of support offends people around me (despite their lack of support) and i lose even the smallest amount of support i had

i’m really sad lingering on feeling depressed. and im trying hard to reprogram my brain to see it as feeling depressed and not being depressed because its like acting out the emotion of depressed as your character and i just want to feel it because im not in a movie.

i had an issue with my roommates dog while being in immense pain from a stupid cyst and literally no one would help. as i laid on the floor in pain i knew no one would actually help. it wasnt until 11pm that he returned a phone call i made at noon and when i said i was in pain he offered to bring me to his house and take me to the doctors tomorrow.

but his whole attitude had changed like i was really burdening his life now and i guess he was calling to tell me he was leaving like the next day or somethng and now ive interrupted it. of course he didnt “say” this but it felt heavily implied and i never really felt comfortable being around him. he didnt want to show any affection and seemed to avoid it, slept through the day and had us go to bed at 10pm

he had mentioned briefly that he would take me to the doctors again today but pack up and leave in the evening. this morning it was the same awkward uncomfortableness and he had like little desire to talk to me. i thought like if that was our last night and this is our last morning i guess it really says alot. like i guess if im ever severely injured he will begrudgingly help me in some way but he’ll have a really shit attitude about it and i can be nothing more than grateful i guess?

i told him i would take myself to the doctors. he said okay. i said i was leaving in 10 minutes and he said okay. i sat feeling really sick and i understand, a bit, that alot of this sickness comes from feeling really alone in other areas of my life. so theres like this giant hole and immediate panic when the person who was atleast occupyng space in the hole leaves. but if i had other people i wouldnt feel such panic - i’m thinkng like wow i’m fucked if i’m actually hurt. or if i get sick. like i cant expect any help from anyone even though they all receive some kind of help from other people. i cant even make a call to anyone and express anything at all without them having to go or do something else in their life that im not apart of. and its not just bad timing - i could wait and wait and im just waiting for someone to make the time for me and i have to be grateful that anyone would set aside even one hour of their day for me and ive not been around other people who understand the complexities of this. like, of course im grateful. im extremely grateful. thats like all i think about for that hour that thank fucking god there was a single human being willing to give me this time so i could even help myself in some way.

and its not like i dont give this. ive given soooooooooo much of this an got nothing in return. except that i have to feel super grateful for the hour i get in return for my huge investment into their lives. and its like at nooooo point can i ask my mom for 20$. i cant ask my dad what credit card i should get. or if this person is ripping me off. like i get that i can (an will) do all these things myself but i dont even get the priviledge of receiving valid learned advice from a trusted source - i get jack offs and reddit commenters explaining how a mortgage works. or how to buy a car. or the best tips on a driving test. and when im sad and lonely? i get to turn to strangers on the internet or i guess worse, this. even though its likely no one at all will read this. when im really sick? i make chicken soup for myself. i go to the store for myself. i maybe find a ride to the doctors and mabe get lucky the pharmacy is there too so i dont have to ride the bus.when i feel like everything is chaotic? i return to cats.

but hey - i’m going to be a “stronger, smarter” person right? thats what it all boils down to. lacking soo much will somehow make me stronger and smarter than the next person who already has these things. doesnt that seem so dumb? to me, i just worked 10x as hard to get to the same place that someone else did with half the work. but im “stronger and smarter” for the effort. i think you’re wiser and more resilient. because you become wise through experience and knowledge of the experience - but you can still be dumb as hell. you arent stronger - you just learned to put up with more; that’s resilience. you couldn’t use resilience like you could use strength. it just means you didnt give up.

and thats not a negative but when you place it in this light i think it conjures a different respect for the lack of priviledges that it takes to reach “wiser and more resilient’.

right now im really.... alot of things. i feel sad and angry and frustrated and bitter and envious. im trying to respect other peoples journeys but its leaving me really fucking alone. i told him i was leaving and he said bye. that could very well be our last personal encounter and i guess i appreciate that i left it as is. instead of trying to shape it into something it wasnt going to be, i just accepted that this was the choice he was making. of course, its easier to leave when you disconnect from someone/the things around you.

i personally feel that this is the end of the relationship and my expectation is that he’ll be gone in the next 24 hours. i think i would prefer to leave our last encounter as this. although he “asked” multiple times how i was feeling or why i didnt feel good - i knew that he wasnt even the person to be talking to about it. how could i explain any of this to him? he has really not understood it and its doubtful he ever will. i expect nothing from him now - maybe i did before. maybe i wanted to have something real with him, like how we pretended to have. and i guess he showed his ‘support’ but like - youre leaving anyways. what happens when youre gone? does it matter?

i cant ask these questions because theyre already answered. nothing happens, life goes on. you got what you got for the time being, be grateful.

its not just him i feel this way with - i actually feel this way with multiple people ive been around. i cant talk about these things beacause it implies they dont care. and they do care otherwise they wouldnt have given me a ride or a sandwhich or bus change or sat wth me for an hour or smoked me some weed. BUT NONE OF IT MATTERS TO My ACTUAL LIFE. when you give a homeless man a dollar, do you think you just changed his life? like you changed 5 minutes before he had to go ask for another dollar from someone else because not a single person wants to give him actual legitimate help. just smile and nod.

ths morning his mother literally shut the garage door on me. i have no idea how she did not hear the door open or the garage door open standing 10 ft away but she literally shut the door and i sat in the dark. i said nothing because no one cares.

and he bitchs and moans about all these things and its like hes just discovering no one cares and his solution is to also stop caring for anyone but himself. and its like he doesnt even see this because hes ‘going to get better and help so many people’ but hes not. he literally is not. and its infruiating that he cant even signficiantly benefit one persons life and his solution to this is to stop any attempts and focus just on himself before i guess inviting the world in.

am i not fucking worthy or deserving? i’m not some runaway kid. i’m not a fucking drug addict. i’m not a single mom. if not me, then who deserves to benefit? i guess everyone above. you know, i didnt add to everyone being fucking dead and deserted with severe trauma and ptsd and little coping skills by taking hard drugs and fucking strange men. i didnt have unsafe sex. but i guess i should have so i could have the attention that other people seem to get for these acts. i stayed “strong” and “smart” and i’m alone and struggling. i guess i deserve to be.

when i say this its not like i want people to immediately become my family and do all this shit with me and include me an talk to me all waking moments. i want this person who has been in my life but has remained in a neutral position by their own decision to remain neutral as i express the lonliness that i feel being in this position instead of take it personal or trying to make me be optimistic about it. i am sitting with a person and still expressing this - optimism is not what i need. nor do i need to argue that this person hasnt fulfilled the needs i have when they consider themselves a ‘friend”. to be a friend now is to remain in the position youve already taken and allow me the space to now be myself - this sucks. its hard. when i speak, no one is really listening. when i need someone, i have to wait until “a good time” which could be days. and its not just one person. if this one person was doing this - fine. it’s sad but bareable. it’s so many encounters that i feel like im in highschool floating through the halls unnoticed. i have no significance or importance to anything. and its not like oh god i have to be loved and have attention but like theres litereally none. there is zero. nothing.

thats when “anything” looks better than nothing and you get stuck in even shittier situations.

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toughlikebronze · 8 years ago

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back at it again with the update that ive never felt more lost and alone in my entire life...

I know it is probably completely pathetic that I’m 25 and still whining on the internet about how I wish my life didn’t suck but it seems to be the only thing that helps. Whether anyone reads it or not, it just makes me feel a little better getting the words out of my head. And I have a lot going on in my head and no one to talk to. I originally started this blog YEARS ago as a way to go back and see how far I’ve come or how things have changed. Looking back, the past 5 years have been the hardest/worst. In that time, I struggled with my sexuality, found a girl I completely fell head over heels for, told her, and got rejected. I know I’m not the only one that’s ever had this happen but god damn does it hurt. During that entire time, and all the time since, I never felt like any of my friends really understood or cared about how difficult that entire situation was for me. All of my friends are straight. My extended family is very conservative and religious. This is such a major part of who i am as a person and i am completely alone in it. I’ve eventually learned to just deal with it because as long as these people are in my life, that’s how things are going to be. Not an ideal situation but, I digress.

Within the last year, I’ve changed my career. Initially this was something I was so excited for. I found an incredible school that would teach me more than just the technical side of things. I was finally pursuing a dream of working with video and landed myself on some local TV productions and some freelance opportunities. I quit the job that killed me to go to everyday. I didn’t think that everyone I know (my friends and family) felt so strongly about my quitting. Just because I don’t work a “9 to 5″, doesn’t mean I won’t be able to make a living for myself. But everyone seems to think that is impossible. No one believes in me. Aside from my sisters, it feels like no one really supports me in this.

My sisters are the only people I feel like I can talk to about with all this. I know it is a two way street, but I feel so disconnected from all my friends. Everyone has someone, and I don’t. It always feels like I’m bothering them when I want to see them or they’re busy or I get comments like “I know you’re not doing anything so I know you can’t be busy”. Like fuck, I’m trying my hardest to be busy so I don’t have to sit at home and wonder what I did to screw up my life so bad. Old hobbies don’t interest me. Going out somewhere is exhausting and I get the worst social anxiety. I’ve never been like that before. And it scares me a little bit.

This completely unconventional life I’m living is not meant for this city. Every day I look for jobs, internships, or anything that is going to get me out of here. It really just feels like I’m here, going through motions, putting a smile on when every night I go to sleep with a tear in my eye. I’ve never felt so down and stuck in a rut like this before. I know it’s time to make a major change and I need to do it soon.

#personal #life rant / update / whine fest #i hope i read this in a year and all this is fixed

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oddlymysteriousphoenix · 8 years ago

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#73 (#1) 2:03pm July 7

Before September Ends

*Insert Green Day lyrics of ‘’Wake Me Up When September Ends’’*

-September 30th, 2015 4:44pm

Well, my name is Kevin Olvera. Born from Miami and lived in Florida my whole life. Ive moved to multiple cities and now I currently live in Naples. It’s not as good as Miami, but at least I’m not far away from my hometown. Anyway, Ive been thinking to write about my current life and emotions to see if it helps out worth expressing myself one way or another. As of now, I'm laying in my bed feeling lonely as usual. My years since freshmen year has been getting worse, little by little, I don't like to use the term ‘’depressed’’, but I guess it accuretly describes how I constantly feel. Yet, I’m still progressing in life, for now, in detereating hope of a meaningful futire. Dealing with these emotions is a burden, making me wish sometimes I didn't have any emotioms. Ever since mid/late middle school Ive been like this. Nowadats, life in general is just difficult to enjoy, but I still have a few people in my life that adds meaning to my life. As of now, Ive known most of them for about 5 years. Ill never regret meeting them and I hope Ill have them around as the years pass by, They may not know it, but they mean a lot to me. We’ve made tons of memories together in the past and those were great times in my life. Surely, Ill name them later on in this book for they won’t be forgotten. Even though my greatest friends are from the Xbox/Internet, they’re still awesome people I could hang out online. I wish them the very best with or without me. I just want the best for all of us...

- 5:27pm

-October 3, 2015 5:56om

Well, this weekend has been pretty lonesome. I haven’ t talked to any of my friends on Xbox, hopefully they’re all okay. I'm feeling pretty depressed, but I just have to deal with it. I'm here listening to my Ps3 playing music since that’s all I use it for including videos. I have hundreds of songs on there that I have downloaded freely from YouTube using a music/video converter. It’s really nice something like that exists. I hope next weekend is an improvement from this one, I feel so alone and disconnected from everyone. I miss my girlfriend, she’s sick after many weeks of the past summer. She’s my everything, to me. Even though my life has been rough, we’re still going for 32 months. So far, we’ve never met in person but video calling on skype makes it up for it. Her name is Erin/Lilah. (Long story on having two first names) Ill have to explain about her another day, as for now I just want to rest and hope for another better day. Before that, I must finish my chores...

-6:18pm

- October 5, 2015 4:33pm

Here I am laying in bed feeling abandoned by others. I’m very tired feeling like this all the time I just want it to end for once. It’s exhausting to go through life this especially when I never ask for help. I think it’s better if only a few people would know about my struggles, the world gas other things to care about and I’ll never be included. Being sad and partially sick is not as fun as well as being cold for no reason that I know of. I'm still here wishing life could get better, at least those who I care about. They do deserve a better life I know it with what they've been through. I haven't talked to them in awhile, my sadness shouldn't be on them, I miss them all, including Erin. I’ve been listening to her past voicemails about a year ago when we used to talk so much more. Ever since last Christmas, she’s been occupied with her things. We don't talk as often even on our anniversaries of each month. That’s okay because I still love her infinitely even after death and beyond. I just want the best for her even though we’re both struggling with our own things. I love her. I need her. I miss her. She’s my everything, I just wonder if I'm truly good enough...

-4:56pm

- Oct 14 2015 4:14pm

Well, this week has been tiresome and somewhat an improvement of the past weeks. Such as my girlfriend being able to text me a bit more than usual. Things are a lot worse than I thought, I never would've assumed she’d be back at cutting. It gives me horrid memories coming from mine and others. Ive never gotten an urge to cute since I didn't see it benefitting me. Seeing those sorts of pain is something anyone could possibly feel. Even more, if they've known people who’ve done it, such as myself knowing some of my friends doing it in the past. Like always, I wish I could take the pain away and heal them. ANYWAY! I still realize that I still have a title of being a loser. I wish I could change that one day, if only it was possible, maybe it’s because of my hair? Or possibly my nature of being awkward and ugly. Yes, I do have the lowest self esteem out of anymore that will be born/made. I hate tons of things about me, but I rather not produce a list since it’d be pointless. I just want to be wanted, looked up to, adored, respected, enjoyable and plenty of more. Only times will tell. I want to be a better person. In the eyes of myself as well as people around the world. Especially to the ones I care so much about.

-4:50pm

--3:14pm

P.S. Ill do more later of my First Book journal.

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