#post-the final problem

[gibbearish]

love when ppl defend the aggressive monetization of the internet with "what, do you just expect it to be free and them not make a profit???" like. yeah that would be really nice actually i would love that:)! thanks for asking

[forgettable-au]

FORGETTABLE-AU (page 82-85)

THAT LAZYBONES!!

[BEGINNING] [PREVIOUS] [CONTINUE]

[buttercupshands]

another little purefount thing connected to this

also a small bonus of a very oblivious to other's feelings Fount

also!

[cairafea]

they're matching costumes.

[ragepups]

do you think of me cloud

[lgbtlunaverse]

I feel like too often people frame Nie Mingjue's issues as ignorance borne from safety. Like, they think that because of his privilege as a sect leader he doesn't know what it's like to be in danger and forced to make hard choices to survive. And I disagree. Strongly.

First of all, Nie Mingjue is very familiar with death not only from war but from. You know. Actively dying since the age of fourteen. Let us not forget Nie Mingjue is dead! Super dead! And maybe he didn't die the exact way he expected to but he did, absolutely, know he was going to die. To act like Nie Mingjue is unfamiliar with the scenario of "do something you find morally reprehensible or die" is to ignore that he has been living that exact scenario and chose death.

Nie Mingjue knows death is a risk for someone like Jin guangyao, in fact he explicitly acknowledges it even in his worst moments like the stairs in chapter 49. Had his issue been ignorance, then he would've responded to Jin Guangyao saying that he's in danger and has to sacrifice others for his own safety with "No you aren't you'll be fine." But he doesn't. He accepts the fact that jgy is in danger with no qualms and says: then you should die.

That's not him betraying his values, those are his values. He is, essentially, pro-suicide. Jgy is like hey I have a moral dilemma what should I do and nmj straight up goes "Kill yourself" and earlier that same chapter when he was faced with a moral dilemma he went "I'm gonna kill myself." He believes the solution to moral dilemmas is suicide! He is extremely consistent about this! When it's pointed out to him that it would have been dangerous for Wen Qing to oppose Wen Ruohan it doesn't phase him because he thinks putting yourself at risk to do the right thing is the only moral choice. The idea that he can only hold this belief because he is himself somehow not in danger, again, requires you to ignore that he is dying the whole time. And it doesn't deter him. He is the idea of self-sacrifice as a moral good taken to its absolute logical extreme. Someone who is ready to die and demands the same from everyone else.

It makes him a very fun case study for fandom, because a lot of fandom spaces also tend to revere self-sacrifice as the ultimate good, and yet we get very uncomfortable when someone starts demanding it of characters we love. Like woah, hold on, that's a bit too far isn't it? Only we the audience get to do that!

[starry-bi-sky]

do yall ever think about bruce/batman!clone danny standing in front of his bathroom mirror after finding out he was a clone and silently tracing his face. The slope of his jaw and point of his chin. The high angle of his cheekbones and the shape of his eyes, the curve of his brow bones and the shape of his nose. The volume of his hair and the way it curls and gets fluffy when it gets too long.

His hair is black the same way a crow's wing is black. His dad's hair is black the same way a black bear's fur is black. His dad's eyes are blue like the ocean is blue. Danny's eyes are blue the same way a glacier is blue.

His dad has a square jaw and straight flat hair, and he tans and gets a face full of freckles when he's out in the sun for too long. Danny burns like a lobster and his face remains untouched. Danny has a sharp jaw and tall cheekbones, and Sam says when he's not smiling there's almost something regal about him. You would never call Jack Fenton "regal" when he's not smiling.

Sam says when he's not smiling he looks scary the same way a stone statue is. Jack Fenton when he's not smiling looks scary the same way that german shepherd staring at you across the street is.

Do you ever think he grew up wondering if he was adopted. Because of course, he has black hair and blue eyes like his dad. But having the same color doesn't make you someone's child.

Or, worse, things he's heard from the other kids and the other parents and even some of his teachers growing up; that he was the product of an affair. And that his dad was just too stupid to notice. And Danny would defend his parents until the day he died, because Jack Fenton wasn't an idiot and Maddie Fenton wasn't a cheater.

But doubt comes in with fickle tongue. his parents swear up and down that he is their child when he asks about either. That Danny just had his grandparents' features, but he was their son and they loved him.

But Danny doesn't look like either of his parents. His mom's eyes are blue like an aquamarine and Jazz's too. And they burn like lobsters in the sun too, but Jazz gets freckles on her face and so does Maddie. And as Danny grows up he doesn't bulk up or get stocky like his dad did, and when he hits puberty he doesn't shoot up like a tree like Jack Fenton did.

He stays small, and they say he's a late bloomer (and he is), or that he just has his mom's height. But he's fast and has good stamina, and some days it feels like he's built entirely different from his family. That the things they went through growing up just didn't apply to him. Jack and Maddie Fenton both had acne and breakouts when they hit puberty, and Jazz inherits it and he's seen the amount of skincare products she keeps on her side of the bathroom.

And then he hits puberty and breaks out maybe once or twice, but his skin stays clear for the most part and the problems and changes his dad went through just don't happen to him.

And the truth is worse than all of the lies.

How horrifying.

[pige0ns]

i love how much the current season of severance is characterized by interpenetration. the first season was cold and isolated. severed. the innies and the outies were separate, and the leaks between them mostly only ominous hints. a tissue in mark's pocket. a dream of black goo. a blue band aid. an orange book. a recording from the break room. of course a reintegrated petey could not survive in season 1. in a severed world, it is the person trying to become whole who is the doomed, ill-suited freak. willing lobotomy should be grotesque, but when it is sanitized by corporate and scientific aesthetics, it can seem like the civilized thing, and anti-lobotomy that is grotesque. anti-lobotomy that is homeless, unshaven, and dripping blood.

this is why the we we are is so successful as a conclusion to season 1. it is a shocking violation of the boundary that existed all season. it is not just an ominous hint, but a total, almost violent obtrusion. as transgressive as the act of cutting, but in the opposite direction. and it makes the violence of the original cutting more salient in retrospect. (it's in the name, too--"we" instead of "you"; a coming together instead of a separation)

and now, in season 2, in the aftermath of that boundary violation, the boundaries start breaking down even further. helena on the severed floor. mark's reintegration visions. gemma being herself, even deep inside lumon's bowels. milchick visiting their houses. gretchen visiting dylan. mark in the birthing cabin. the innies outside at the ortbo. burt and irving being influenced by their innie connection. mark and helena meeting in the restaurant. the literal sex and romance and infidelity, involving not just innies or outies, but innies and outies. representatives of the inside and outside physically, bodily, commingling.

and it's against this backdrop that the characters in season 2 have begun to confront the boundaries within themselves. they've begun to ask how different and how separate they really are. do innies and outies have different souls? is infidelity with yourself really infidelity? it's almost cliche at this point, but really: does love transcend severance? clear narrative roles of hero and villain are decaying. former antagonists like milchick and cobel are now something murkier. meanwhile helly and helena, once seemingly so distinct, have increasingly revealed their commonalities. both trapped, both drawn to mark, repeating lines like "she's not your wife." the emphasis on helena this season is key. helly and helena embody self-division, given their initially divergent characters, goals, and narrative roles--one a hero, the other a villain. so for their differences to erode, for helena to get closer to the screentime that helly got last season, signals that this is a story in which self-division itself is growing suspect, unstable, untenable.

and then there's mark's reintegration. if of course petey couldn't survive reintegration in season 1, then of course mark can't complete his reintegration in season 2. season 2 is not a story of completion, it is a story of transition. it is messy, ambiguous, ambivalent adolescence. mark might want his innie's memories, but he has given no indication that he wants or identifies with his innie's self. as protagonist and deuteragonist, mark and helly are natural foils, and mark's forced and unsuccessful reintegration process is in contrast with helena's unexpected inching towards "natural reintegration", to use britt lower's phrase. in "attila" we see helena with her hair and manners loose, however awkwardly, playing at aspects of helly in a way that mark scout, as of "the after hours" (when this is written), would not consider doing with mark s. metaphorically, mark cannot yet reintegrate because his halves are not aligned. but they're not separate any more either. they're overlapping. they're at odds. but what will make them align? i assume that is what the finale and next season are for.

[twinkskeletons]

🐑✨💙welcome.. he’s here :3 💙✨🐑

[gossippool]

so i do think it's very interesting how, at least from what i've observed, people see/depict worst logan as kind of different from the x men logan in terms of their propensity for violence, or rather how this violence is released. i think it has to do with a couple of things:

as many have pointed out, wade is the only one who has ever been able to match him in a fight. so it makes sense that people would headcanon their relationship as involving fights on the regular. but also;

most of what we see from him in the movie is him fighting, and so we assume that he has a tendency towards it, especially since the past he's trying to escape from is exactly that: him being violent towards others, including those who don't deserve it. i think this has definitely subconsciously shaped some people's perception of him in some way.

but i think it's good to remember that what we are shown isn't proportionate to who he is, because the movie necessarily can't develop his character much outside of the plot. i don't think worst logan and x-men logan are different at all in the sense of x-men logan being "gentler", because not only have we just not had the chance to see worst logan act otherwise, but x-men logan also has this same animalistic violence in him. we can see how quickly he unleashes himself in the movies when the situation calls for it, and even when he's doing it to protect, there's still that rage underneath it all.

worst logan is violent towards wade because 1. he's projecting, and 2. wade can take it. but also it's a symptom of something else that he hasn't worked through, possibly decades of trauma he hasn't worked through. i'm working on a fic that explores this rn, but my headcanon is that his post-x-men rampage was a sort of addiction for him because of the release it gave him, which he then replaced with getting shitfaced, and finding someone who could take him in a fight (wade) could be a reversion to the former addiction if he doesn't work on it. (i think that especially with superhero movies, it's so easy to brush off violence as just another normal thing, but realistically, a failure to unpack all that baggage could escalate his problems into something way worse.)

so imo i think worst logan is practically the same, if not very similar, to x-men logan, just that he's a variant that was dealt the worst card, but we interpret his character differently because all we're shown is what he became because of it. we all know logan is gentle with his lovers, and i think that unless wade shows that he enjoys it, logan would not be violent towards him just because wade can take it. just because you can doesn't mean you should, and i think he of all people would understand that

[pleaseinsertwittyurl]

There are always 2 sides.

The discourse around Louis and Lestat being a victim and abuser and nothing more drives me insane.

Something i don't think enough people remember is that the very same reason the fight began in 1×05 (lestat grabbing claudia by the throat when she tries to "take louis away") we see Louis himself do to her in 1×07 when she tries to get Louis to burn Lestat.

They BOTH would harm her rather than live in a world without the other. They are both guilty of abusing her and each other.

There is an implication that a good deal of time passed between Louis and Lestat meeting and the church. Louis expresses that he shares himself with Lestat in a way he only had with Paul. I would assume that goes both ways, to a degree. We know Louis knows at least enough about Nicki to discourage Claudia poking that wound. He also clearly knows that the threat of leaving is his most powerful weapon against Lestat.

Mental abuse is abuse. And Louis abused Lestat mentally for years. Shaming him, ridiculing him, shutting him out, manipulating him into making Claudia (a traumatic moment for him, whether Louis understands the depths of it or not) by promising to give him what he's being denying him, promising to never put him through what he fears the most.

Louis admits to purposely making Lestat suffer. He admits he was warned that Claudia would suffer and he wanted her anyway because he needed to feel redeemed. He is not innocent. He is not a trapped, weak victim. He made choices to hurt both Lestat and Claudia time and time again.

Does this justify Lestat's actions in 1×05? Obviously not. But we now know Louis was not willing to stop the fight. He taunted Lestat the same way he taunted the Alderman. He was unleashing years of frustrations just as Lestat was. His priority was not to protect Claudia, it was to hurt Lestat, consequences be damned.

I hate the drop scene as much as the next person and Lestat has admitted he will never earn forgiveness for what he did. But if you view Louis as some squeaky clean victim who was manipulated, trapped, and abused by Lestat you are missing so much of what this show is conveying.

We will always tend to paint ourselves as the hero of our own story. It is hard to accept your faults or that you hurt people you love. It is much easier to shift that blame on to someone else, to frame them as the villian. But life is not usually that black and white. Claudia had harsh words for them both in her diary, even before they got to Europe, for a reason. They both made hurtful mistakes with her, both treated her like a pawn in their relationship instead of a person, both harmed her, took away her choice, never prioritized her.

That is the great tragedy. That she never had a choice and was not allowed to be her own person. And in the end, they both are responsible for her misery and her death. That's what makes the reunion scene so important. They have been grieving her and carrying that guilt alone, all the while longing for the comfort of the other for 70+ years. Louis has found clarity in his memories, he has accepted his role in their suffering, he has seen Lestat's perspective more fully. Lestat is broken, totally consumed with that guilt and grief. Both know that although they cannot change what they've done, they can forgive the other, even if they can't forgive themselves. They can love each other despite everything they've done to one another because they cannot stop loving each other. But now they can try to rebuild that love from the rubble.

[milkivikk]

ralsei posting bc what a precious fluffy boi ôwô

played deltarune for the first time last month and idk why it took me that long fr

been doing more sketches but i jus wanted to spotlight ralsei's preedy eyes for now ✨

[starcurtain]

I don't have the time at the moment to write a full essay but someone should definitely remind me to write a post later on the phenomenon that is Ratio's assholery being sanded away by well-meaning fans.

In a quest to fight against the "Ratio is a condescending jerk" stereotype from Ratio haters, pro-Ratio fans have now swung too far the other way, making him into a saint who loves everyone, isn't disdainful of failure, and believes every single person can equally pull themselves up out of mediocrity.

None of those things are actually true based on the game itself, where Ratio is, in fact, a judgmental person who struggles to accept the mundanity of those around him, believes in an educational elite, and can be exceptionally condescending, whether he means it or not.

He's a flawed character. His own flaws are absolutely central to his character, in fact. And yet none of his flaws preclude him from being meaningful, nuanced, and likeable.

It's okay that he's not actually that nice.

In defending a character from one extreme ("he's a bad person"), we don't have to jump all the way to the other side ("he's an angel").

He can be a little bit of a dick and still be a great character, promise.

[a2zillustration]

Does croissant and gale get married in your story?

It's certainly something they plan to do!

But not just yet.

🥐 Croissant Adventures Masterpost 🥐

[loveridden1999]

"we need more evil woman" you guys can't even handle a woman talking about eating pussy

[alackofghosts]

vierapril days 7 (privacy) and 8 (weakness)