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Temples are built for gods. Knowing this a farmer builds a small temple to see what kind of god turns up.

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Two identical infants lay in the cradle. “One you bore, the other is a Changeling. Choose wisely,” the Fae’s voice echoed from the shadows. “I’m taking both my children,” the mother said defiantly.

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Demons and monsters that torture people because they feed on human suffering are so dumb. People are suffering everywhere my guy go literally any place and take a deep whiff.

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Once again thinking about the “Tolkien elves are physically superior to humans in every way” thing as a disability parallel

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The Hell of Wait

Imagine this: You are the Queen of Ithaca. You gave birth at most like 5 months ago and your husband is gone to fight a war. You are now to raise this kid by yourself. The war itself takes ten years. You get the news he won, and the other kings are back in their homes, but yours is still there. He probably died. Now you have to entertain suitors who believe he and all the 600 men he took to war died and they turn out to be the a gang of assholes that pester you and your son. You wait.

You and your mother in law still believe he will come but he takes so fucking long she dies of a broken heart. You keep waiting.

You are forced to keep serving the suitors, forced to spend stupid amounts of money everyday on food and wine, throw banquets, parties, allow your home to be desecrated and is forced to house the freeloaders, no matter how much unsufferable they are, because of divine law. And you can't even complain because said divine law is the only thing that protects you from them aswell, at least for now, but you know it's only for a while. They are dangerous power hungry monsters, led by a fucking sociopath who bullies your teenage son and jokingly threatens to SA you on a daily basis, and he is so bold he does it to your son's face. Still you wait, no matter how much it hurts, you wait.

Yes, you know Zeus will punish them if they do anything, but the punishment means the crime has already been committed, so you are fucked either way. The safest thing to do would give in, but you refuse. Instead you risk your life and plot a whole scheme to fool those men and buy time for his arrival, if he's still even alive. Night after night you unthread that shroud, knowing that if any of them see you do it you are done for (ayyy). But you do it because you have faith, and you prefer to suffer the consequences that forsake the man you love. You choose to wait some more

The day you feared the most finally arrives, you have to pick and there's no running from it anymore, but you still find a way to buy more time, even if it's a few more days: The Challenge. String a bow, shoot an arrow through some axes and voilá. Perfect plan, doable enough so they can't question it but hard enough so they won't be able to do it. It works, but now the suitors are pissed and are about to raid the castle. It's over. But still, you remain waiting. if that's the last day of your life, you will spend it steadfast, unbroken, unwaivering. Waiting.

I love this part, not only because it's beatiful, but because we see that she is fucking pissed. She is very fucking angry at all she's been through these goddamn 20 years. Miraculously your husband arrives just in time, and deals with the situation, the wait has paid off, You can finally see the man you love after 20 years, you can finally RELAX and the first thing he does is fix his lips to question your love? Shit, i'd be fucking pissed too!

And i love how Ody gets angry at the bed thing but instantly recognizes her feelings when she claps back and he just pipes down and shuts up. He recognizes that he might be just a man, but she is just a woman too. She was fighting monsters and storms of her own, and she knows that if he went through half of what she's been through (and she can see he's been through A LOT) and fought as hard as she did for their love, then it doesn't matter what horrible things he has done, cause if she was in his shoes, she'd do 10x worse.

I fucking love this damn musical.

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odysseus actually saying the word rape in the song freed me of all the discomfort hold them down made me feel

idk why but it's just so. sexual assault has always been something that should have clear boundaries - and instead, you see the people in power, people who should punish and uphold the law, shift around definitions and wordplay.

as if it isn't a disgusting violation of a person, of their life, of their trust.

metaphors are beautiful, they're my favourite figure of speech. but metaphors, skirting around the topic, when it comes to rape, is what, to me, truly makes that feeling of disgust and discomfort, and yes, even panic, rise.

because the truth is? i know there are people who can excuse and disregard "taking her love and more". not consider it rape. not consider it assault. there are, unfortunately, people who can disregard a metaphor this clear. justify it, even.

but most of those people can't justify the word rape.

I dont know if this makes sense. forgive me if it doesn't. but to me, the intense nausea that hold them down brought about was erased and hell, even comforted, by the rage and protectiveness and bluntness of that one line in odysseus.

jay did a fucking fantastic job.

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I’m well and settled on the opinion that Steven Universe had to seriously stack the deck in its own favor to prevent the narrative from ending with anyone getting guillotined. I mean, Steven conveniently having a foot in the door with the diamonds because he turned out to be related, sure, but it goes into the characterization and worldbuilding, too.

Rather than cackling dictators, first off, The Diamonds had to be emotionally-arrested overgrown children; the dynamic between them and Pink was always, with context, less of a parent-child thing and more like three twelve-year-olds lecturing an eight-year-old on adult responsibility, they’re fundamentally aping a notion of the right way to be and I think it’s a mistake to view them as fully-realized people at the point where Steven finds them. Gem society, too, is less of a society, with all its messy moving parts, and more of a sanitized dollhouse representation of a society that’s only just starting to morph into the real deal via the rebellion. There’s no genuinely complicated politics to untangle; just gems meaninglessly play-acting at politics. And, crucially, nobody is getting anything out of any of it- gems are a needless society, they expand endlessly because they…. don’t not do that, there’s no material incentive to behave the way they do, no economic reality Steven has to counter in order to make the horror stop. All he has to do is convince three emotional runts to stop being awful.

Now, where I differ in my thinking, I think, is that in contorting the worldbuilding to make sure that the diamond redemption wasn’t something patently insane, they really hit upon an incredibly compelling science-fiction set-up. Three Elder Gods playing “It’s A Good Life” with a tea-party sham of a civilization full of individuals who nonetheless feel real pain, Three Elder Gods who cause harm, and lots of it, but mainly through their lack of moral context and lack of understanding of what even constitutes harm, Three Elder Gods whom you, a puny human, actually have some pretty potent emotional leverage over but no way to overpower if it comes to a fight? A set-up where part of the horror is how easy it would be to pinpoint the source of the horror and make it stop? That’s fucking dynamite! I’d watch five whole seasons of just that! Hell, even in canon it doesn’t even stop- two years later and Steven is still kinda trying to deal with the fact that the Diamond’s good behavior is kinda-sorta dependent on his willingness to keep dealing with them and he has no real way to be sure any of it is sticking! There’s no actual end in sight! There’s no clean resolution! It’s messy and it’s harrowing and it’s specifically because culpability and morality and ethics and all of that is so goddamn sticky when you’re a consequentialist trying to play ball with super-advanced childlike Von Neuman Machines!

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 On occasion you’ll see a Who-would-win matchup where people try to get Steven Universe to Talk-no-jitsu a host of “irredeemable” villains, and it really highlights something that I think gets lost in the weeds in discussions of, and perceptions of, Steven’s character. I’d argue that he’s not actually uniquely good at talking people down, he was just uniquely well suited to talking down the handful of people he did talk down.

He had an in with the Diamonds to start, and honestly coasted a lot on the outcome of actions taken before he was born in order to survive the endgame. He never talked Jasper down. He never talked Aquamarine down. Lapis came around but she wasn’t exactly a decisive victory and the show makes a point of how she has to carry herself over the finish line. He never really convinced Bismuth so much as the material circumstances changed and put the two of them in the same camp on their second meeting. Peridot decisively feels like a feather in his cap- he made a lot of right calls in quick succession with her, and they paid off fairly straightforwardly with no backsliding - but the sucess was still super contextual in that they only worked together at all because of the mutual danger posed by the cluster. He talked down Spinel but lost her almost immediately because she (correctly!) perceived him as only having reached out to her because he needed to in order to stop everyone from dying; he didn’t think far enough ahead to realize this was probably going to happen, and honestly he kinda got lucky the Diamonds showed up when they did because they might have been in that cycle for a while otherwise.

The kid’s not a rhetorical genius- his successes in redeeming his enemies are contextual, dependent on immediate circumstances, a lot of luck, and oftentimes on the person being “redeemed” making a personal decision that has nothing immediately to do with any argument Steven made. What Steven is actually consistently good at is providing support to his friends and family, convincing them to do stuff, managing their neurosis, and this is part of why Future hits him so hard- they don’t really need him to do that anymore. Indeed, one thing I really liked about Future is that it highlighted the ways in which Steven can be genuinely emotionally incompetent in ways that don’t pop as much when he’s a kid. I’m thinking of Guidance, Volleyball, and Together Forever in particular. The show actually has a very reasonable grasp of how far rhetoric and fuzzy feelings alone will get you! 

All of this to say that if you’re treating it as a given in your battleboarding that proximity to Steven is going to result in a character being redeemed, you’re doing it wrong. Being on the television show Steven Universe is what results in a character being redeemed. If you want Steven to be why, you’re gonna have to write an actual story. With context for how they met and got stuck together for the long haul. Maybe a plot, too.

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I'm not the first to mention this, but one bit that I thought was really clever in Steven Universe is the ways in which the show subtly justifies the cartoonism of the principle cast always wearing the same outfit for ease-of-animation purposes. The gems are a gimme in that they're all hardlight-projections, and even before that's solidified as a plot point they're otherworldly and superheroic enough that you don't really think to question it. But Steven canonically just owns hundreds and hundreds of those star shirts, which are leftover merchandise from his father's fizzled-out career as a rock star. Into which you can read a whole bunch of other stuff if you really want to, right? And I do want to. It's reflective of Greg's misplaced optimism that he got hundreds of those made in the first place, and it's a benign but visible example of how Steven's life is shaped by the knock-on effects of decisions his parents made before he was even alive. He's got his mother's superpowers and he's wearing his father's shirts.

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I feel like enough time has passed since Steven Universe ending to say this: inventing your own alter ego and then launching a war against yourself is an iconic move actually. It's like if Batman and Bruce Wayne had public beef except if entire armies were involved. She really Did That. She said "go big or go home" and then went so big that no-one could ever go home, and then changed the fate of the entire galaxy by faking her own death. She slutted it up bisexually and broke countless hearts along the way. Iconic move after iconic move. Non-stop slaying. A queen an icon a legend. No-one does it like her.

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"we need more traumatized characters/characters with ptsd and/or who are abuse victims portrayed realistically with symptoms that Arent cute and soft and pretty!" you guys couldnt even handle lapis lazuli

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"i want morally grey female characters" you fuckers could barely handle rose quartz

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If baby boy evil, I get to keep in bottle

But I don't care if he's "evil", he's still my baby

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Guys I’m going to make a hot take

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Badly need good luck, hope it works

so I got into grad school today with my shitty 2.8 gpa and the moral of the story is reblog those good luck posts for the love of god

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"aRe YoU oFfEnDeD?" Yes. Rightfully so, I might add. Yes I am also a sensitive person and that has always actually served me well. I have a lot of friends who would fight for me because they know I don't hesitate to be sensitive to their needs and to be offended well enough to help and fight for them when they're being treated poorly. Does your emotional unavailability do that for you?

Just because I don't tolerate sht you said doesn't mean I'm wrong, it means I'm smart for knowing what should and shouldn't be said, and brave for voicing my thoughts. It's silly that people think they can ridicule me for feeling my feelings

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