raine-kai

[raine-kai]

Um.

[raine-kai]

The Matriarch Isn’t the Villain. She’s the Mirror

I often hear a discourse where Celine in K-pop Demon Hunters, Alma in Encanto and Ming in Turning Red are seen as vilains. They’re the ones who restricted the younger generation, hurt them, and are ultimately responsible for their pain, trauma and self-doubt. They’re framed as the real villains of the story. But I’d like to differ.

These are stories of intergenerational trauma. They are women who survived, repressed, and tried to protect their families the only way they knew how: through control, perfectionism, and emotional suppression.

And yet, when the next generation begins to reclaim joy, freedom, softness — they become the obstacle. Not because they’re bad people, but because they’re scarred. Their minds cling to survival strategies, unable to recognize that the environment has changed.

Alma is still stuck fleeing the colonizers.

Ming is still afraid of her true self.

Celine believes that fear and mistakes must be hidden.

It’s not about hating these characters. It’s about how unprocessed trauma twists love into control. How survival, unexamined, turns into rigidity. These women were never given space to process their own pain and they project it onto their daughters and granddaughters.

And here’s something we rarely say enough: intergenerational trauma can create toxic patterns but that doesn’t always mean there was abuse or conscious harm. Even when their love becomes suffocating or controlling, these women are not necessarily “abusive parents.” They are daughters of silence, fear, and sacrifice. And they were never taught another way. It’s important to make that distinction, especially in a world that often pushes a binary, punitive reading of family dynamics.

They’re the product of a generation that was told to endure. But endurance without healing becomes its own kind of violence.

What’s powerful in these stories is that they don’t end in vengeance. They end in confrontation and transformation. The confrontation is necessary: the younger generation refuses the silence. Refuses the shame. Refuses to carry a burden that wasn’t theirs to begin with.

The house is destroyed in Encanto.

Mei accepts her full self.

So does Rumi.

And in the best cases, this confrontation allows the elder to soften too. Alma opens up. Ming listens. And I’m hoping in the sequel, Celine will open too.

Maybe that’s also why these stories speak so deeply to POC audiences. These aren’t stories about cutting ties. They’re stories about how hard it is to transform them, to protect ancestral bonds while refusing to perpetuate inherited pain. In many racialized families, collectivity, loyalty, and intergenerational duty are sacred... even when they come at the cost of personal boundaries.

And sometimes, Western individualist frameworks read these tensions as dysfunction or villainy. But for us, they’re just the difficult truth of growing up and trying to do better.

These women aren’t villains. That would be too easy. They embody the fragile, necessary work of bringing change without breaking the thread. These stories are about refusing to inherit their pain without reflection. Because love, without accountability, is not enough.

These stories show us that each generation has something to learn from the next. And the new generation must also break free from the chains they inherited while preserving what is meaningfull.

But it’s not just their story.

One day, we’ll be the older generation.

And we’ll need to be humble enough to learn from the ones after us.

So don’t be a fool.

We may be Mei, Rumi, or Mirabel today.

But tomorrow, we could be Ming, Celine, or Alma.

And when that time comes, we’ll realize how hard it is to unlearn what once kept us safe.

So let’s have compassion for all these characters.

Because these stories show us not just how the cycle of generations works, but how it can make us better, stronger, and more connected... if we’re all willing to go through the change.

∘₊✧──────✧──────✧₊∘

If you’re curious, I’ve written more on K-pop Demon Hunters:

A post on the mental health themes woven through the songs — right here.

A breakdown of Celine-Rumi in comparaison to Gothel–Rapunzel dynamic — here.

An analysis about Rumi, Jinu, and the danger of sinking together — here.

Some book recs for each of the K-pop Demon Hunters characters — here.

[raine-kai]

Carmine by Ellegarden: Lyric Translation (One Piece OP28)

I take the future in the palm of my hand, dig my nails into it

It's blurry, boundaries between colors unclear;

Our voices are being erased beneath a coat of red,

The way the colors of summer get painted over by time.

So don't let your feet stop carrying you forward, let's go:

It's better to give vows in exchange for another morning,

Rather than turn a blind eye to all these skin-deep lies.

Remember the dreams we used to dream

[raine-kai]

best m/f dynamic is a flamboyant bisexual show-off desperately in love with an extremely practical girl who’s difficult to impress 🤩

[raine-kai]

Shodai-sama ni wa nakama ga inai / Master First Has No Companions by Haiji

These days I mostly read light novels: usually fantasy (though I also read contemporary romance pretty often), usually BL (though I have het and yuri content too). Depending on the length, I can usually read several a day, so I have a massive backlog of unread light novels. Lately, I've been implementing limits to the amount of unread books I'm allowed to have in my library before I buy more, which helps motivate me to get past the desire to look outwards at books I don't have before I read the ones I already have.

(Just to clarify--I do feel the need to keep a certain fairly large amount of unread books around, just in case. It's an anxiety thing.)

So this is a book that I bought several months ago because I was looking at another book that looked interesting, and saw that it was listed as #2 of a series where this was #1.

I bought this out of interest in the sequel--I'd seen this around, I remembered, but by itself, I wasn't sure what to make of the book summary.

The premise is that the main character, your typical isekai protagonist, is the hero of a fantasy game, where the demon lord he's meant to defeat is the very first hero from that series. Just as he's about to be defeated at the hands of the demon lord, his party sends him back in time to the era of the first hero, with the mission of preventing him from falling to darkness and becoming the demon lord.

When I started reading, I was pretty sure this would end up being a miss for me.

For one thing, the characters don't have names. The isekai protagonist is referred to as Dog, as he is called by the first hero, whom most people call Master Hero or Hero-sama, and whom Dog refers to as Master First or Shodai-sama. I don't know why this was off-putting for me, exactly, but I particularly didn't like the fact that the protagonist was referred to as Dog.

I set it aside and read other things.

But when I picked it up in a reading spree to work down my quota of unread books before I'm allowed to acquire more, at some point, it took me by the throat.

I love this book as I have loved few books in my life.

It's the way it's simply about the need for communication, no matter how well two people's personalities might be made to fit together like puzzle pieces.

It's about learning who you are, and what you really want out of the people around you, from the perspective of a man who describes himself as an 陰キャ (inkya, literally meaning a shadow character, which describes a person who tends to be quiet, introverted, maybe has social anxiety), but I think would probably be better described as a man with crippling social anxiety and possibly some neurodivergence.

It's probably one of the clearest D/S relationships I've read in BL, though it's not referred to as such--and the way they operate in that relationship, too, is built on their ability to communicate. (It is still a BL property, though, so don't let me raise your expectations too high in this respect.)

It made me cry at multiple points. It has everything you need to tell the story, but left me staring at the ceiling, unable to think about anything else.

I finished the book at 11pm, stared at the ceiling for several hours failing to sleep, and got up at 3am to start translating it so that at least a friend or two could read it and join me in this brainrot, if anybody's interested.

Has anyone else read this??? Would anyone be interested in a fan translation when I finish it???

It has me by the throat and I have barely been able to focus on anything else for days.

[raine-kai]

one of my favourite linguistic phenomena/in-jokes is spanish potato chips being “ham-flavored, probably”

[raine-kai]

saw your posts about revenged love, and i have to ask is china actually allowing BL content now? at first i thought it was censored like all the other BL dramas, but it looks like it's actually gay? how and when did that happen??

Ahhaahahah because it’s not being shown in China. Literally. It’s registered in Singapore I think, and every single person in China is pirating it or watching it on VPN. It is only one of the things that makes this so unhinged. The most popular show in China currently is technically not legally available in China.

[raine-kai]

A lot of people around me are having kids and every day it becomes more apparent that hitting your children to punish them is insane because literally everything can be a horrible punishment in their eyes if you frame it as such.

Like, one family makes their toddler sit on the stairs for three minutes when he hits his brother or whatever. The stairs are well lit and he can see his family the whole time, he’s just not allowed to get up and leave the stairs or the timer starts over. He fucking hates it just because it’s framed as a punishment.

Another family use a baseball cap. It’s just a plain blue cap with nothing on it. When their toddler needs discipline he gets a timeout on a chair and has to put the cap on. When they’re out and about he just has to wear the cap but it gets the same reaction. Nobody around them can tell he’s being punished because it’s in no way an embarrassing cap, but HE knows and just the threat of having to wear it is enough.

And there isn’t the same contempt afterwards I’ve seen with kids whose parents hit them. One time the kid swung a stick at my dog, his mother immediately made him sit on the stairs, he screamed but stayed put, then he came over to my dog and gently said “Sorry Ellie” and went back to playing like nothing happened, but this time without swinging sticks at the nearby animals.

[raine-kai]

Also, can we just take a minute to remember that writing problematic fanfic where crimes happen is very different from endorsing or doing such actions in real life. Sure, you can make the argument that such stories trivialize and normalize traumatic experiences, but isn't this just a part of fiction? If that were really the problem, where are all the pitchforks pointing at crime and mystery authors who frequently write murder and all sorts of heinous crimes happening? (If you're going to tell me that such novels don't endorse criminal behavior, then, just based on a handful off the top of my head, may I point you at All She Was Worth by Miyuki Miyabe or The Devotion of Suspect X by Keigo Higashino or Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie?) If you don't like that kind of fiction, don't read it. Simple. Problematic elements in fiction don't speak to the nature of the author or the reader--if you have a problem with someone, take it up with things they've actually done. But if you're digging for reasons to dislike them...look at yourself. What are you doing? Go find something you actually enjoy.

roach-works was a notorious underage + incest + rape fanfic writer and all of those are still up for everyone to read on their ao3

[raine-kai]

👒Zine Preview👒

⭐️Unmother of Three⭐️

🌟By: @raine-kai

🌟Dadan’s Problematic Parenting; Canon Major Character Death

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❤️Preorders Open June 1-July 13❤️

[raine-kai]

🔥Side Zine Preview🔥

⭐️The King’s Brother-Knights⭐️

🌟By: @raine-kai

🌟King Arthur AU; Brothers-turned-knights Ace and Sabo

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🧡Preorders Open June 1-July 13🧡

[raine-kai]

[raine-kai]

oh. i just found out that the writer of the vincent van gogh doctor who episode wrote it as a tribute to his sister.

[raine-kai]

happy fourth of july to the philippines ONLY

[raine-kai]

I can’t hug Luffy but… :’3

[raine-kai]

insp.

[raine-kai]

Something that really fucks me up is this scene where Robin says she wants to die and how Luffy makes this face

And upon reading this for the first time, I felt a huge wave of emotion over his expression because it just felt to me like when he heard that, he was seeing something else. Almost like a memory that we weren't being shown.

And then later when Ace and Luffy's backstory plays out, this is revealed;

That Ace was suicidal. Feeling like it was wrong for him to have even been born and to live. Feeling hurt, angry, alone and unwanted.

And that the only reason he felt like he had the strength to keep living was because Luffy told him that he didn't want him to die.

Ace never directly told Luffy that he wanted to kill himself. But with the way he carried himself and the obvious disregard he had for his life, it was easy to see for someone as empathetic and intuitive as Luffy. And so Luffy stayed close to Ace desperately until he felt strong enough to stand on his own.

Luffy has had so many suicidal people in his life since such a young age and he always saves them in such a seemingly effortless way just by saying

"I'll be there with you. I'll stay."

But what alot of people don't understand is that in spite of Luffy's endless empathy, compassion and love that's deeper than the ocean, when somebody he loves wants to die it always hurts him so bad and it shows so much on his face at even a hint of it.

He bounces back with a smile so often and kicks so much ass that it's so easy to forget sometimes that he's just this 17-19 year old kid...

Who, at his core, is still always crying and begging the people he loves not to leave him because he doesn't want to be alone anymore, either.