#weird metaphors

[rosy-cozy-radio]

I was trying to make a mental metaphor over why none of the crystal gems thought rose was PD and what I came across was “imagine if the president of your school’s GSA was secretly Donald trump” and I realized tumblr was the only place I could say this

[altosys]

i wish more people understood that having bpd/npd is sometimes like putting on the master crown from kirby returns to dreamland. like one moment you're that person's bestie but whoop-di-doo the crown slips on and all of a sudden you literally want nothing more than for them to die painfully but you're not even in control of it anymore.

jesus fucking christ i need to stop projecting (also bpd magolor real???)

[icanteatdeath]

microwave.

Disappearing like a cat only to be put in a microwave.

Heated on the inside but cold to the touch, on the tongue I am but disdained.

You stare at me in disgust but you smiled at me yesterday.

You shouldve never left me in the microwave. The microwaved beeped: beep-beep-beep but you never came.

When my warmth was gone, you stared at me like it's my fault, only to put me down again to set me back in that dreaded microwave. At least you came back but now I'm too hot , my crunch in your tongue though im supposed to be soft. You look at me in disdain, but you dont put me in the dreaded microwave. Instead you throw me away, in the trash, when it wasnt my fault but the microwave. I sat in the dark as you put the lid on me, rotting away all because of that dreaded microwave. I think about you everyday but you throw me away when i never had a say. It was all your fault. You should've never put me in the microwave.

[friedoats]

I kinda want to share my rough drafts bc i think they're funny as hell but i also dont want anyone to preceive my creative process

[drevnian-smol]

Sometimes I feel like I’m in an arranged marriage with school

[curiositeath]

in the au of my heart where everything’s beautiful and nothing hurts arthur pendragon would be such a Good Dad but he’d be so utterly Terrified of becoming his own father and stressing about it like fully going grey at the temples until finally fed up merlin is like “hey you wanna genocide a people?” and arthur’s like “no?!!” and merlin’s like “congrats you’re not your dad now hold this” and it’s a baby dragon

[captain-astors]

"For You." (redraw of that one manga panel from chapter 29)

[ohno-the-sun]

Some thoughts about who Eclipse is exactly

[vaguely-concerned]

the strength it must have taken for illario to not immediately go full 'lmao since when have you even had a kiss hello lucanis' sibling violence mode during the café talk. inspirational. rook and lucanis really were doing all that right in front of his salad huh

[gonnadosomethingwmylife]

do y’all remember the criminal minds episode where the team had to go to a sexual harassment seminar mostly because of how derek and penelope talk to each other? Suits could’ve done something really funny.

I just want a normal person overhearing harvey call his associate a good boy or any one of their weird as fuck conversations and being like what the FUCK dude and reporting it,,,mikes embarrassed bc he doesn’t MIND and he gives it right back in his own way but everyone sitting at this seminar clearly aimed at harvey at mike,,,i think it would be really funny

[l0ve-sicc]

crane wives go crazy

[anghraine]

It's interesting (if often frustrating) to see the renewed Orc Discourse after the last few episodes of ROP. I've seen arguments that orcs have to be personifications of evil rather than people as such or else the ethics of our heroes' approach to them becomes much more fraught. Tolkien's work, as written, seems an odd choice to me for not wrangling with difficult questions, and of course, more diehard fans are going to immediately bring up Shagrat and Gorbag.

If you haven't read LOTR recently, Shagrat and Gorbag are two orcs who briefly have a conversation about how they're being screwed over by Sauron but have no other real options, about their opinions of mistakes that have been made, that they think Sauron himself has made one, but it's not safe to discuss because Sauron has spies in their own ranks. They reminisce about better times when they had more freedom and fantasize about a future when they can go elsewhere and set up a small-scale banditry operation rather than being involved in this huge-scale war. Eventually, however, they end up turning on each other.

Basically any time that someone brings up the "humanity" of this conversation, someone else will point out that they're still bad people. They're not at all guilty about what they're part of. They just resent the dangers to themselves, the pressure from above, failures of competence, the surveillance they're under, and their lack of realistic alternative options. The dream of another life mentioned in the conversation is still one of preying on innocent people, just on a much smaller and more immediate scale, etc.

I think this misses the reason it keeps getting brought up, though. The point is not that Shagrat and Gorbag are good people. The point is that they are people.

There's something very normal and recognizable about their resentment of their superiors, their fears of reprisal and betrayal that ultimately are realized, their dislike of this kind of industrial war machine that erases their individual work and contributions, the tinge of wistfulness in their hope of escape into a different kind of life. Their dialect is deliberately "common"—and there's a lot more to say about that and the fact that it's another commoner, Sam, who outwits them—but one of the main effects is to make them sound familiar and ordinary. And it's interesting that one of the points they specifically raise is that they're not going to get better treatment from "the good guys" so they can't defect, either.

This is self-interested, yes, but it's not the self-interest of some mystical being or spirit or whatnot, but of people.

Tolkien's later remarks tend to back this up. He said that female orcs do exist, but are rarely seen in the story because the characters only interact with the all-male warrior class of orcs. Whatever female orcs "do," it isn't going to war. Maybe they do a lot of the agricultural work that is apparently happening in distant parts of Mordor, maybe they are chiefly responsible for young orcs, maybe both and/or something else, we don't know. But we know they're out there and we know that they reproduce sexually and we know that they're not part of the orcish warrior class.

Regardless of all the problems with this, the idea that orcs have a gender-restricted warrior class at all and we're just not seeing any of their other classes because of where the story is set doesn't sound like automatons of evil. It sounds like an actual culture of people that we only see along the fringes.

And this whole matter of "but if they're people, we have to think about ethics, so they can't be people" is a weird circular argument that cannot account for what's in LOTR or for much of what Tolkien said afterwards. Yes, he struggled with The Problem of Orcs and how to reconcile it with his world building and his ethical system, but "maybe they're not people" is ultimately not a workable solution as far as LOTR goes and can't even account for much of the later evolution of his ideas, including explicit statements in his letters.

And in the end, the real response that comes to mind to that circular argument is "maybe you should think about ethics more."

[abstractfrog]

THE GLORIA SCOTT - part 2, and a follow up to my comic for the first half of this scene! thanks sm to @crashingmeteorz for allowing me to source validation for my whimsical cosmic approach to this moment <3

[smrtnik07]

shirooooooo....

[sparrowlucero]

do you actually dislike the bird abode or just the creature designs? not saying the name directly so your ass doesn't get blasted by the tag

I like a lot of the creatures in it; the showrunner is a really fantastic horror artist and it really comes through in the aesthetics of the show. I especially like this hand dragon, though there's a lot of other great designs:

As for the show on the whole, it's not bad but not really for me? Early on it really feels like it's schtick will be that it's a subversion of harry potter-esque stories, where the protagonist wants to go on an adventure similar to her favorite fantasy book but instead ends up hanging out with the "villain" (who's actually just othered)/the magic school turns out to be secretly oppressive/the world is kind of gross and spooky instead of clean and approachable... but as it goes along I think it ends up being a pretty by the books YA fantasy thing played mostly straight, and it isn't super interesting or funny or scary or anything besides that. Which admittedly was probably to its benefit, I think a lot of its popularity comes from it being this very tropeish and not-uncomfortable magic school/found family story that's actually queer, like I genuinely think this is hugely appealing to the average cartoon fan on twitter, but I'm just not personally into it in comparison to a lot of it's contemporaries

[hopelessrotting]

𝕺𝒽, 𝖍ℴ𝖜 𝕴 𝖜𝒾𝖘𝒽 𝓌𝖊 𝖈ℴ𝖚𝓁𝖉 𝖇ℯ 𝓉𝖍ℯ𝖒…

𝖂ℯ 𝒸𝖔𝓊𝖑𝒹 𝒷𝖊 𝖘ℴ 𝒽𝖆𝓅𝖕𝓎 𝓉𝖔ℊ𝖊𝓉𝖍ℯ𝖗…