#And it sucks to be in that unequal position with a sibling or a not-sibling.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Bros before Ho(oh my god is that Hanguang-Jun?)

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[angel-derangement]

how would you talk CS lewis into trans acceptance? just wondering because this is theoretically the coolest concept i can think of

ok buckle up.

In my experience it is not actually all that difficult to convince someone who is christian but holds the character of god to be of higher importance than a strict historical literalism view of the Bible that sex and gender are different. This is because it’s blatantly true and people who are of that persuasion are more likely to be able to comprehend blatantly true things, and much more empathetic to the experiences of others ie. listening to a trans person’s life story.

We know that cs Lewis did not hold a strict fundamentalist view of the historical literalism of the Bible, as he was open to the idea of evolution as a process guided by God (this forces you to interpret the creation story as somewhat allegorical, which yknow. It is. because it’s made up.) in fact historically it’s very rare for people to actually hold this view strictly in the way that we see today from conservative evangelicals. Even Martin Luther, their main guy, thought the epistle of James kinda sucked and wasn’t really right.

from sex & gender are different it’s a short hop to gender as a social construct - something these people usually understand due to renegotiating biblical views of women wearing head coverings or not wearing any jewellery. from there it’s sometimes possible - not always, but sometimes - to get them to understand that a person may experience incongruous sex and gender, and that this is resolved by living as a different gender to the one they were originally assigned based on sex.

The important thing to note to them at this point is that this does not erase their previous experience of living socially as their assigned gender, nor are they so deluded as to believe it magically makes them cisgender. At this point the analogy of biological father vs adoptive father is very useful, both being real fathers and indeed reflections of God the Father.

You can also raise to them “why is God depicted as male if he’s not a human?” and put to them the idea that people choosing their gender presentation is a reflection of God’s image in them - existing in a created state while still creating their mode of identity using the soul and spirit he gave them. Didn’t Paul change his name from Saul when he gave his life to Christ? In some ways, a gender transition can be seen as a transformation gifted to that person by God, the same way God gifts all of us with transitions throughout our lives, from child to adult, mother to grandmother, condemned to redeemed, hopeless to hopeful.

Then you can say that this is just another choice God puts before all of us: whether to marry, what job to get, what church to attend, what gender will you live as. And in all choices, as in all things, a person may glorify God. Thus if a person is trans, their identity is no different to any other chosen or re-formed identity, and we can love them by understanding that, respecting it, and protecting them as a sibling in Christ.

Idk maybe it’s crazy, and there are points along this that many Christians would fight against for many reasons. Most of those reasons though are sheer conservatism and an unwillingness to allow minor scriptures to be understood as culturally rooted. If that’s someone’s position then they are always being unequal with how they choose to renegotiate scriptural relevance ie. they are choosing to be transphobic because they just want to be, and you are going to get nowhere with them.

But cs Lewis was a kind man, who valued camaraderie and joviality and rebirth and love. I know he’s dead so it’s irrelevant. But I like to believe he could’ve been a hashtag ally.

[missmentelle]

Hey, I'm going through a difficult time with my sister right now, and I was wondering if I could get some advice, as you seem to be good at that.

I feel like I've messed things up with my sister. She barely ever talks to me anymore, and when she does, she criticizes something I'm doing, usually raising her voice, but when I tell her to shut up and leave me alone, I always feel horrible, and I'm worried that I may be driving her away because of that.

The other day, she found out about my boyfriend, and she criticized me for being with him. I tried to ignore her, because I didn't want to hurt her, but it just hurt her more, and she told me off for my behavior.

She's always jealous of me because I get more attention from our parents, even to the point she'd accuse me of being selfish and not caring for her.

I feel like I can't do anything to mend our relationship, as anything I try to do just makes her yell at me and give me the cold shoulder. Is there any advice you could give me for this? I care about her a lot, and I don't want her to hate me.

My first question would be, how old is your sister?

I know it's cliche, but if your sister is in her teens (and it sounds like she is) that could be a potential source of your problem. Sometimes teenage siblings just.... don't get along. Being a teenager is a generally overwhelming experience - you're old enough to want independence, but you're not old enough to actually have it. There are a million pressures on you, but you have very little freedom or power over your circumstances. It's a lot to deal with. Taking out your frustrations on friends, classmates or authority figures isn't really an option, which usually just leaves siblings - as weird as it sounds, the fact that teens often feel safest and most secure with their siblings is the reason that teens often take out their frustrations and insecurities on their siblings. To be clear, though, that definitely doesn’t make it okay. It’s an explanation for her behaviour, but it’s not an excuse. 

You mentioned that your parents give you more attention than they give to your sister - I’m curious about that. Is there a particular reason for it? Have your parents ever shown you direct favoritism or directly compared you and your sister? Have they ever told your sister to be more like you, or presented you as a role model? Do you and your sister get unequal amounts of praise? It sort of sounds like your sister has been put in a position where she has to compete with you for your parents’ love - from her perspective, you are sort of an obstacle standing between her and your parents’ attention. If you weren’t around, she’d get more attention, and it sounds like she might resent you for it. Again, it’s not okay for her to take it out on you, and it’s not your fault that your parents aren’t giving their children equal attention, but it sort of shows where she’s coming from. Feeling invisible, feeling like you have to “earn” your parents’ affection, and feeling like the “least favourite child” are all really shitty feelings, and it’s easier for her to take them out on you than to confront your parents directly. 

As far as mending the relationship goes, I think it would be a good idea to have a direct conversation with your sister. Pick a time where she seems calm, and isn’t obviously upset about something. This doesn’t have to be a big formal speech - just tell your sister that you’ve noticed things aren’t good lately, that you care about her a lot and that you want to be close again. “Hey, I’ve noticed we’ve been fighting a lot lately and I’m sad about it, I really love you and I don’t want us to fight” is a decent way to start. If face-to-face conversations are tough, you can try talking to her over text or messaging if it’ll make it easier for you both to be emotionally open. If you think the parental favoritism thing is an issue, don’t be afraid to address it directly - “hey, I know mom and dad sometimes pay more attention to me and I know it’s not fair to you”. Be honest about how you’re feeling, and give her space to share her feelings. This doesn’t have to happen all in one conversation - ideally you want to start an ongoing dialogue to get all your issues out in the open and mend the relationship over time. 

I think it would also be a good idea to take a genuine interest in her life. It sounds like she’s feeling kind of ignored or second-best, and that sucks. Show her that you are interested in her life - ask her about her day. Remember details of the things she tells you. Ask her opinions on things, and take her opinions seriously. Send her articles or videos or memes that you think she might enjoy. Try to make her feel seen, and like she matters to you. Don’t be overly syrupy or condescending - you don’t want to make her feel like she’s being talked down to or pitied. Just try to be genuine. You don’t have to take everything she says seriously - if she’s being cranky and mean, you don’t have to stand there and agree with her, you can and should just walk away - but try to find time in each day to seek her out and just have a regular conversation with her about something. 

I think it’s also important to be patient here. Sometimes these things take time. My younger brother and I hated each other for a few years when we were teenagers, but we’re very close as adults. It seems like we had a lot of the same issues that you and your sister do - I got much better grades than he did in school, with much more involvement in extracurriculars, and he understandably got tired of having parents and teachers constantly compare him to me. Friends, dating and hobbies came a lot easier to me, and it left him frustrated and looking for someone to take it out on - he got in trouble for lashing out at school peers, which basically left him to lash out at me. But things got better for us. We both grew up. He found things that he excelled at, he found healthier ways to get attention, and he developed an identity beyond “MissMentelle’s screw-up brother”. When our relationship was at its lowest point, it seemed like it would never recover, but it did - we grew out of our teenage insecurities, we moved beyond fighting for our parents attention, and we found things to bond over. 

Relationships with siblings can be complicated - they are the longest relationships we have in our lives, and they move through many phases. Sibling relationships aren’t like friendships - they are permanent relationships, which means they are the place we end up testing boundaries. If you lash out at your friend, they will stop being your friend. Your sibling can’t stop being your sibling. Sometimes that means we can be much harsher with our siblings than we should be - they’re not going anywhere. Keep working on your relationship with your sister. Don’t let her be mean to you - set boundaries, disengage, walk away - but try to remember that this is something a lot of siblings go through, and remember that your sister’s anger probably isn’t really about you. It sounds like she’s dealing with some stuff right now, and needs an outlet for her feelings - unfortunately, you are the best outlet available, especially during a global pandemic that has limited her contact with her friends. Take care of yourself, try not to let it get you down, and keep trying to have normal conversations with your sister - in all likelihood, this rough patch will pass.  Best of luck to you! MM

[achorusofcleris]

how about 'C - A ship you have never liked and probably never will.' ?

Hoo boy. I'm probably going to have to put this under a read more since I’m sure I’ll get some hate for this one, and also because this ended up being long af.

Also, I added backslashes to specific terms to keep Tumblr’s search engine free of my salt. I tend to avoid airing my grievances with things I dislike on here since I try to keep my Tumblr positive, so I’m not normally this salty or ranty.

I’m not someone who has a lot of NoTPs these days. I used to have a bunch, but as I’ve grown older, my problems with most of them went away. A lot of my former most hated ships are ones I’m now either neutral towards or ones that I’ve learned to enjoy (hell, some of them ended up being among my current faves).

That said, there are two FE/3H ships that I ended up really disliking as I played through all four routes (+ CS). I shipped one of them before the salt set in, but I was neutral towards the other one until I played my last route. As such, I’m going to be dumping on Edel/eth here (sorry).

I have four problems with this ship, though two of them aren’t exclusive to Edel/eth in particular. 

First is that the specific kind of power distance (student/teacher ships) is one that I have trouble reconciling. I worked very closely with one of my former teachers for nearly two years, and I never became comfortable calling her by her first name. It’s definitely a “me” problem, but the student characters calling By/leth by their title rather than their name seems to imply that the power distance still exists to some degree (which is probably because you can pick By/leth’s name, but it still makes it weird for me). Like I said, this isn’t unique to Edel/eth, so I can’t really hold it against the ship that much.

The second reason is that I don’t really care that much for By/leth. I won’t go into too much detail as to why here, but I’ll just say that I can’t care about a relationship if I don’t care about one of the parties involved. Like I said, this isn’t unique to Edel/eth and is how I feel about pretty much every By/leth ship (they’re not bad, they’re just not my thing). 

Unlike my discomfort with the power-distance and me not liking By/leth that much, my final two reasons are the ones that moved the ship from “eh, it’s not my thing, but not awful” to “holy shit, I just can’t anymore.”

The first reason of the two is that, unlike with Dimi/tri and Cl/aude, I don’t feel like Edel/gard’s relationship with By/leth helps her develop into a better character. Unlike in AM, where By/leth defies Dimi/tri’s wishes by killing Rand/olph, they never call Edel/gard out on any of her questionable decisions to her face. Unlike Hu/bert, they don’t have an established history with Edel/gard to explain why they won’t call her out, instead, they’re just some schmuck who happened to become her teacher. By/leth isn’t a fan of Edel/gard working with Jer/alt’s murderers, but they only bring up their grievances with Hu/bert. Then there’s the Arian/rhod lie, which would have been an amazing catalyst to help develop Edel/gard further, but she’s never called out by anyone, and By/leth just stands there and lets her do her thing.

The final reason I dislike the ship is that I feel like it reduces Edel/gard into a waifu. The rat scene is what I feel is the most egregious example of this, as it downplays Edel/gard’s trauma to make her cuter to the player. For example, she seems far more distressed about sensei spotting her doodle than she does of being reminded of her captivity and her siblings dying. As someone who has gone through my fair share of trauma, I find this decision to be pretty gross. If I was reliving a traumatic memory, the last thing I would want would be for someone to say that my distress was “cute,” and I think Edel/gard’s situation should have been handled with much more respect than she was given.

What really sucks is that Edel/eth had the potential to be an amazing ship. They have are a lot of great moments, like By/leth rescuing Edel/gard in the prologue, which could have easily made their relationship compelling. In fact, I subconsciously ended up using a lot of their best moments when coming up with Seir/helm headcanons, so I can definitely get behind the concept of their relationship.

Unfortunately, the way their relationship was executed just left a bad taste in my mouth. Given my first two grievances, I doubt I would have shipped it; but if the last two grievances weren’t a thing, then I’d probably still be neutral about it. Hell, I could probably end up feeling neutral about this one in the future, but who knows?

If you, or anyone else, likes this ship. Cool! I’m happy that it sparks joy for you, and that you can appreciate something I can’t. I also hope that if you ship it, you don’t take this as a personal attack. Everyone’s experience playing this game is going to be different, and my opinions here are the result of my own.

Also, I probably have some ships that you think are garbage (I can think of two, in particular, that people might have a problem with), so I would take the complaints I made here with a grain of salt. This could easily be one of my shit takes, but ymmv.

TL;DR: I don’t like Edel/eth because of the unequal power-dynamics, me not liking By/leth as a character, By/leth not helping Edel/gard develop the way they did with the other two lords, and for reducing Edel/gard to little more than a waifu. If you like it despite my grievances, that’s great, it’s just not my thing.