#unexamined

[poetrythreesixfive]

Unexamined

If only we could each person as if they were a book,

curl up on a leather chair by a winter window and

delve deeply into the story of them, know the ins and

outs of every wrinkle and whether they arose from

smiles or frowns, explore the history of their school

years, the part where they got picked on, shoved to

the ground, the part where they had a crush on that

cutie but never got so much as a handshake in return,

spending nights dreaming on a pillow, feel the blows

when they were struck in the face, recoil at the sting

of skinning their knees, weep at the pain of their loss,

the funerals, the walking aways, the efforts leading

nowhere, the defeats, being asked to leave, being told

they weren’t good enough, being lied to, witnessing

the disasters, the shame, the terror, the loneliness—

only then should we offer any advice, only then can

we note their mistakes and point and judge; only then,

we would never do such things because every day,

we go crawl through our own struggles yearning that

others would read our stories and understand us too.

-GeorgeFilip

[hailmarythreetimes]

Traveling in between the city and Connecticut. The Barclays center and Hotel Chelsea. Things I can and things I can't - not spelled out explicitly.

[brionysea]

bruce's problem is he thinks jason is inherently dangerous when he's inherently good and he thinks tim is inherently good when he's inherently dangerous. all that "bruce mistaking tim for jason post-jason's death" was trying to tell us something. he's got his kids backwards

[shazzbaa]

forever ago i stumbled across a velvetlinedbox post with "COULD TRANSITIONING HAVE SAVED HER" scribbled next to a sort of baffled looking poor edward and it cracked me up but also i never stopped thinking about it. i dont think this would fix her i think she would be just as bad. but u know. support womens wrongs

[gammija]

ig another annoying thing about the 'this transcends language 😲😱' comments about the most obvious of cognates and literal english loanwords, is that it's another example of how native english speakers (and, by virtue of their population size, mostly USamericans) are the arbiters of what gets seen as 'universal' vs what's weird and foreign on the anglophone internet. cause to me as a dutch speaker, a lot of german compound words would '''transcend language''' - but the tweets that go viral about those kinds of words are about how they're silly little nonsense words to laugh at, can't be a real language, can you believe anyone speaks that!

[hamletteprinceofdenmark]

Also while we're on the subject I keep seeing the phrasing that Jumba "lost" his accent or they "removed" it.

No they didn't.

They gave him a different accent on purpose.

They gave him an American accent.

And I want to invite you to please think about why you think of an American accent as neutral or not having one at all because it is 100% relevant to this conversation

[fayvampiredom]

I would love for a foolhardy vampyre hunter to charge into my lair. Brandish her meek little toys and speak fervently about justice and hope, or something equally trite.

Bolt towards her in the middle of her speech, cutting it short as she gasps in surprise. Splinter her crossbow to shreds with my claws. Her dagger, shattered like glass against my fangs. Lace my fingers around her face and drive her into the ground, smirking as the satisfying crunch rings through my throne room.

Hunters raise their pets to be quite resilient. Once, twice, three times... We are well into the double digits, with the outline of your head firmly stamped onto the cold tiles of my floor, before her fiery eyes dull and roll back. Gloved fingers so rightly clamped around my wrists go slack and fall limply to her side. She groans, dazed, dizzy, weak...

Poor thing.

I hoist her off the ground with one hand, watching her limbs dangle uselessly by her sides. Slowly, deliberately, my tongue traces the crimson rivulets that mar her skin-- caressing her cheeks, her chin, her lips... Her shuddering moans taste almost as sweet.

I drag her body to my private quarters. Dress every wound oh so tenderly. Soft coos dripping into her ears like nectar as the eerie light of my eyes eases her pain. Brushing her hair. Dolling her up. Each measured ministration threading more and more puppet strings into her mind, molding her into the perfect plaything for me to feed from.

That's right. You are my maid. You always have been. Your purpose is to serve and adore me. And you love fulfilling your duties so, do you not?

Good girl. Now, your reward. Bare your neck, won't you?

[vaguely-concerned]

the repeating motif of digestion throughout unpleasantness at the bellona club is so fascinating. George Fentimen's suffering being not only in his mental illness symptoms but the gut problems he took home with him from the war. Opening the corpse's stomach to see when and what his last meal was. Peter's little speech at the dinner at the end about the mortifying ordeal of having to turn perfectly lovely picturesque food into disgraceful sludge and taking it into yourself as a necessary part of the human condition and being a person. the way it adds to the themes of the discomfort of the unseemly, unsightly, unpleasant creeping unavoidably in everywhere no matter how you might like to try to ignore it, as the individual people and society at large are trying to digest the war and its aftermath, and finding it a hard and graceless process.......

[annabelle--cane]

there's a way some people will talk about sex averse/repulsed asexuals where like. they won't say they think sex averse people are childish or selfish just have hang ups or are inherently conservative, and they probably don't think they think that, but when they talk about sex aversion they sound like they're talking about spoilsports who want to ruin everyone else's fun. "you don't have to have sex with anyone, but sex is really important to a lot of people, so you have to accept that lots of people will be upset or break up with you or write you off from the start. you don't have to talk about sex, but you can't ask people not to bring it up around you because that's implicitly shaming them. you don't have to watch sex scenes, but if you ever state that preference then you have to make it abundantly explicitly clear that it's just a personal thing and not an ethical objection because if you say 'I don't like sex scenes' you sound sex negative." just the constant undercurrent assumption that it is always solely the responsibility of the non-normative people to quietly stay away from the parts of the world that weren't built with them in mind with no acknowledgment or compassion for the fact that, even when that's necessary, it's still really tiring to always have to do all the legwork yourself.

[innanzituttoticalmi]

i wish all "ferrari should move to the UK" a very die

[mumblesplash]

watching through some baldur's gate videos for funsies bc i'm not much of an 'actually playing games' person and after seeing a few clips of people romancing astarion i got curious what a karlach romance looked like, searched for a playthrough and was absolutely blindsided when the player character was a man. somehow completely forgot men could be attracted to women

[insomniac-arrest]

pervert behavior to get in touch with your "inner self" like, that guy's minding their own business and you want to access them? stay in your lane

[chickren]

in my voyage of self-discovery this year, i'm coming to terms with the fact that most of my jb fic ideas evolved out of some emotional torture scenario i concocted for jaime and then elaborated on to an embarrassing degree. what if jaime was jonesing for brienne but was afraid she'd think he was even more dishonorable if he made a move. what if jaime had to try to keep brienne and cersei both alive but couldn't separate them. what if jaime had to work through his emotional constipation if he wanted to be with brienne. what if jaime sincerely believed he and brienne were star-crossed. what if jaime

[miixz]

Mu Qing being chosen as the major representation for lower class struggles in the TGCF fandom (as far as I've seen it at least) is a choice that I find... interesting.

I understand where it's coming from, of course, and I see how his bitterness at the class system could be relatable, but it feels odd to me that Hua Cheng is missing from those discussions while we've seen that he was very much not living in any luxury as a child. He was in fact worse off than MQ who got to study cultivation and work for the prince.

I don't quite know how to put this into words, but I do think it says something about unconscious biases that the man who was able to ascend and enjoy being at the highest class he could possibly aspire to be while doing nothing to further criticize those systems is the one propped up, while the one who did achieve success but through unconventional means isn't.

Being the king of a city full of ghosts just isn't as glamorous of a fantasy to live vicariously through as a golden palace in the heavens, I suppose, in spite of this being something MXTX is actively criticizing in her book.

[sunlight-shunlight]

"the writer for anders in da2 based him (somewhat negatively) off an ex-boyfriend with bipolar disorder and was also a zionist" is truly one of the factoids that makes me nod solemnly at dragon age the most. ough... the canadian centrism is inescapable.

[artbyblastweave]

🔥 Textually "political" superheroes, ala Green Arrow being a leftist and Flash being a conservative, Bastion being cancelled, etc.

Rapid-firing your specific examples- half the fun of Green Arrow is the tension between his leftism and his absurdly privileged status as a billionaire superhero. I wasn't actually aware Flash is a quote-unquote conservative- I'm assuming this came up in that godawful comic that tried to map out how the League would vote in the 08 election- but honestly this is kind of a "he's a white midwestern cop" moment, I feel like the politics associated with his job are always a little bit of an elephant in the room for the Flash Fandom. Bastion is his own post I've been meaning to make for a while, but the short version is that Bastion is a really, really funny dark comedy beat, if you choose to apply that lens.

Circling back to the Flash specifically, though- I get the sense these days that big-two superheroes are rarely characterized as meaningfully politically conservative, in the quotidian manner in which many, many real life people are. I certainly get why they shy away from that, I'm not saying that I want them to pick a couple leaguers who seem like The Type and have them start flying Gadsden flags, I'm just saying it has a certain impact on the verisimilitude of the setting when nobody on these teams has the generically shitty politics of that coworker you roll your eyes at or the Uncle you dread seeing at Thanksgiving. I think it was Memecucker that had a post a couple years ago about how you probably couldn't get away with anything analogous to that thing they once did where Hal Jordan was expressly racist as a character flaw that he had to overcome- you probably aren't gonna get an A-lister who's transphobic and has to be taught the error of their ways, for example. I'm not entirely certain how true that is- pretty true in my reading experience, but then again, there are a lot of comics, so maybe someone took a swing at that hornets nest and I just missed it and I've been talking out my ass for about 800 words.

(I did hear rumblings that they tried to do like, a coming-out-to-tepidly-accepting-parents metaphor with Franklin being a mutant during the Krakoa thing? I don't recall people talking about that beat in a positve light, which makes sense. "Have you tried not being a mutant" has always been a fraught analogy no matter which group is being referenced.)

Anyway my final takeaway is that indie cape things, by virtue of not having to keep everyone in their casts sympathetic and marketable in perpetuity, generally have way more leeway to depict superhero communities with a much wider spread of (potentially horrific) personal politics. Bastion being an example of that- if he showed up in Marvel or DC, he'd be, like, a bit character who shows up in a two-shot issue to get demolished or shown-up by Actual Superheroes (tm) but in Worm? Nope. There's no decades-long protagonist like Spider-Man or Batman through whose lens we view this setting by default. Bastion's as much a superhero as anyone else we've met, he's exactly as real, weighted exactly as much as the rest of them. And he sucks.