carlsdraws

[carlsdraws]

the fates already fucked me sideways / swinging by my neck from the family tree

Dean & Mary Winchester / Family Tree Intro - Ethel Cain

in association with @amvs4palestine for @daalcuntynatural | youtube link

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heaven is not fit to house a love like you and I

thank you mr. hozier for blessing us with francesca it is truly thee most destiel-coded song ever produced

watch it on youtube

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ive been thinking about this a bit and i feel like i have some very different feelings towards certain things and strongly disagree with the implications present in the ways i see them discussed. i do not like to simplify these themes to “vengeance/punishment bad wahh”, because it does not at all feel complete enough to convey my true feelings, or the themes of the text itself for that matter imo, but like… ofc i personally cant read things like cersei’s walk of shame, where she is punished, humiliated, and dehumanized through the one thing she was unfairly condemned for her entire life— jaime’s brutal maiming and torture where he is humiliated, fed things like horse piss which he forces down because he is so thirsty before vomiting it back up, gets repeatedly beaten unconscious, and is nearly driven to passive suicide— theon’s excessive physical and mental torment that would take too long to list that breaks him entirely— and even a man as deeply evil as vargo hoat (who is not at all three dimensional) having his hands and feet and arms and legs cut off, be cannibalized, and even be forced to eat parts of himself, causing the pov character that swore to enact brutal vengeance on him to feel ill and repulsed once he finds out— and experience much, if any, catharsis, personal feelings about these characters aside. asoiaf is a series where the author pretty often deliberately places us inside the heads of bad people that have done terrible things, who some readers may feel a certain hatred for, as they are put through torment. not to make the reader feel good and satisfied about it, but to present it as something that should not really be a thing that we revel in, and encourage us to be critical about what is even gained through what they are going through. even a morally dark antagonist without a pov like joffrey and his death was meant to have elements of tragedy. during, tyrion notes that he is a young boy with fear in his eyes that he had never seen in the eyes of his father. whether you feel a certain way about it (and i am not arguing that you are morally flawed for not sympathizing with a fictional character, this isn’t real life, i am just discussing themes that i am identifying), the goal was not really to provide us with a feel-good “justice at last!” emotion through the brutally violent death of a 13 year old boy. it makes me genuinely wonder how some ppl come away with the idea that this series is intended to be a celebration and glorification of punitive justice. i am not saying justice in general is not a huge theme, and some catharsis, especially for victims, over the death/defeat of their abusers & tormenters is present in the text as well, understandably so, because it can mean safety. take pia smiling through broken teeth when jaime has her rapist executed and presents his head to her while setting a precedent with gregor’s men. some people need to die, and deserve it, but what does that look like? who decides it? why? by contrast, the instance of jaime actually feeling good when he hangs a bunch of random outlaws reads as something more tied to his current relationship to the self and certain selfish desires at this point in his story than real justice, and it is further elaborated upon and taken apart in the book. anyway, all these questions are present and the answers are not near as simple as i often see them made out to be.

it doesn’t feel like to me that most things that can be interpreted as enactments of punitive justice or moments of karma are these epic events that should just make the reader blindly cheer and applaud, or even feel good about. there is a reason that some things go awry (like with oberyn), and it isn’t cynicism. there is nuance, and not in a way where victims are condemned for fighting back, or a pacifist ideology is idealized. there just really isn’t a glorification of brutal punishment, ‘eye for an eye’ vengeance, and the needless causing of suffering. same with a blind upholding of duty and law based around flawed feudalistic constructs. and all these things should not even be conflated. not to mention that punitive justice exists also in a way where it is connected to institutions. take the faith and organized religion for example. the whole process is interrogated: what is sin? what sins are being punished? how? why? and what are the actual effects? be it jaime’s and brienne’s conversations/interactions with a bunch of different tertiary characters in affc, or cersei’s punishment in adwd. at the end of the day, she is punished for her body, for being a woman. she does not suffer “consequences” for her actual wrongs and the suffering she causes. she doesn’t really learn anything, and it will all just make her spiral more. the whole concept of punitive justice gets focused on especially with theon’s entire identity being withered away through torture. he experiences so much torment that there comes a point where he is robbed of his mind and agency. what does the “criminal” learn? how can a person change in these circumstances? what is the point, and why should we feel good about this? he is not even really “punished” for his crimes, and certainly not by people with any moral high ground over him, he is just being brutalized. same is the case with jaime in asos: it is a bad person being brutalized by men even more vile than he is, and they are not doing it because they want to deliver any justice to his victims. also, though the maiming does kickstart crisis with him specifically, it is not the determining factor when it comes to his reformation. this story is not actually saying that people can be, and should be, tortured into becoming better people, and if they can’t the solution is to just axe them. there is nuance, sure, mercy is not something everyone is entitled to in all circumstances. sometimes “mercy” towards certain evil people will lead to the enablement of the suffering of others, even entire populations. there are certainly circumstances where compromise isn’t an option. but, again, i dont think george is ever holding back on actually interrogating the moral quandaries when it comes to identifying cycles and ending them, and he is for sure not treating every single aspect of these conflicts as black and white. even tyrion murdering his father, who purposefully does have a very ironic and humiliating death scene, which is important thematically, doesn’t end in easy and feel-good catharsis, especially for tyrion, which doesn’t equal “oh, tywin should be forgiven and spared”.

all of this is also why i do not really see how events like the fall of house lannister (first of all, we know it is gonna include the likely very brutal deaths of two innocent small children), red wedding 2.0, valonqar etc would be these grand and glorious moments of justice and pay-off, treated as just the good guys finally getting an epic W. they will very likely be filled with tragedy, so i am genuinely curious about where these expectations for this kind of catharsis come from

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one of my favorite #nocatharsisever re vengeance and punishment pull of gurm’s is how comically brutal hoat’s fate is

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Buffy the Vampire Slayer 2.03 "School Hard" | 5.07 "Fool for Love"

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we need to invent a way to explain how deep running and pervasive and subliminal racism and antiblackness is without immediately sounding like an insane conspiracy theorist

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Part 5! A very spiky city and an equally spiky elf

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*normie voice* surely impulse is authentic and contemplation is distortion

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I drew a deck of Dragon Age II themed playing cards! Each suit represents one of Kirkwall’s factions: the Templars, the Mages, the Law, and the Mercenaries

Now I finally hope to send them off to print, and soon you'll be able to find them in my little ko-fi shop!

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WHAT ARE YALL READING RN you must tell me

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jaime is not unemployed he sold himself to war criminal one direction for sister pussy

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I know people disagree with this for whatever reason, but building towards a classless world which is predicated on a thorough materialist grounding requires collectively graduating from many archaic and antiquated idealist social institutions. Like gender, and religion. I think this is a very basic thing.

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sorry if i'm gonna be quiet for a while. my country recently introduced laws that make it so that in order to use social media to the fullest (not being able to view ns/fw content and in a few cases, not even having access to dms), i HAVE to give the sites my id/face scan.

it goes into effect july 25th. it'll probably effect here too, since this place allows mature content (tho not full on ns/fw)

i'm very distressed about it bc i might end up not even being able to talk to my internet friends. i don't really have any irl ones

if i have to disappear on most socials by then, you know why.

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i don’t really care if an emmy nomination happened to your favorite actor it should have happened to jacob anderson instead

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There's this perception, I've noticed, that if you're going to have a cultural conception of something like "mental health" in your fictional setting it has to be like Ideal, it needs to be the ideal version of mental health awareness/conception/care or it needs to not exist at all even a little. Does that make sense.

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grand enchanter - queen of ferelden

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STAR TREK CREATOR CHALLENGE

Week 10 - Iconic Line or Moment

Far Beyond the Stars | DS9 6x13

[ID: Ten gifs from Star Trek Deep Space Nine featuring Benjamin Sisko as Benny Russell, a science fiction writer in the 1950s. He is clearly agitated as he speaks.

He says, "I am a human being, damn it. You can deny me all you want but you cannot deny Ben Sisko. He exists! That future, that space station, all those people, they exist in here. In my mind, I created it.

And every one of you know it. You read it. It's here. You hear what I'm telling you? You can pulp a story, but you cannot destroy an idea.

Don't you understand? That's ancient knowledge. You cannot destroy an idea. That future, I created it, and it's real! Don't you understand? It is real! I created it, and it's real! It's real!"

/ End ID]