#FORGIVE ME FOR WANTING HER TO HAVE A CONCLUSION TO THAT GOSH DARN IT

[howtotrainyouragents]

I knew watching the B99 finale at 1:30 in the morning was a bad idea

[noodlenibblescribble]

My theories on Milgram: Second Trial for oncoming characters AS I AM WATCHING THE LATEST VIDS:

I understand the people that love and support Haruka and Mu's codependent friendship and that think that people are throwing Mu's new confidence put of proportion but I really think the glitched voice lines given in the Character Voice Trailer with Haruka putting himself down while apologizing and Mu demanding attention is... highlighting the unhealthiness in this combination. I'm leaning more towards Mu turning around and treating Haruka maybe not as bad as her bullies did her, but similarly by putting him down when he 'crosses a line.' She may think it's alright because she makes up for it by being nicer than her bullies were, but it's just the same cycle of abuse, and Haruka isn't able to know better. He's truly thinking this is the best attention he's gotten.

SO AFTER WATCHING HARUKA'S NEW VIDEO: I was concerned it was highlighting how far he's willing to go to keep the new attention and validation he's gotten, especially Mu's love (DREA-MU, COME ON THAT PUN LOL) even willing to kill if needed or ordered to, COME ON HARUKA. HE HASN'T LEARNED HIS LESSON. OF COURSE. We seem to have just created a yandere, and if anything happens to Mu while we're in our second nap, I wholeheartedly believe he's going to be the one beating people up and killing anything that threatens taking Mu's attention away. I was more concerned over Mu manipulating the impressionable Haruka but damn this turned the tables. Now Mu's going to be in a cage, stuck with Haruka for better or for worse. This feels like it's what they'd both want anyways. Unconditional attention for Haruka for being Mu's supporter, and Mu getting someone to boss around without repent now. ... also this boy is a masochist. He has definitely warped pain into being a form of love. Just saying (more to myself cuz holy crap I'm still reeling.)

The theory of us getting Shidou's motives wrong and that forgiving him is feeding an unseen 'killer' personality is becoming plausible to me... and it's scary. You can wave off, albeit with a raised eyebrow, his name being synonymous with the Japanese version of Jack the Ripper, but when his glitched voice says to 'Hurry up and die" well gosh darn it, sir, it looks like we fed the beast. If he ends up confessing in his next song to having enjoyed what he did to his patients before his guilt took over, we know we screwed up and are letting it take him over. But now we also know that if we don't forgive him, there can be risks to not having a doctor around to heal our prisoners. Our hands are tied!!!

IS MAHIRU BECOMING YANDERE FOR US? That's what it feels like with her upcoming song being 'I love you' and her lines in the Voice Trailer. "It's so good to see you", "I really missed you" and her glitched proclamations of love are sounding to me like she's so in love with love that it's a comfort for her. So now that shes in arguably the worst low and fearing for her life, she's clung onto that coping mechanism and attached it to us, seeing us as her savior, if only she can convince us with her love that she's worth saving.

I'm really reaching with this one, but I'm putting it out there anyways. I thought we should be on high alert as to why Kazui's had the least outwardly visible change out of everyone, and his glitched line being him claiming he loves Hinako (is that his wife? I'm running with that theory...) more than anything.... has me looking at the possibility he may be taking matters into his own hands and dispensing 'justice' onto himself since we're not condemning him. Take that as far as you'd like.

I know the Voice Trailer lines are from their past, but I believe bringing these particular lines put now is meant to highlight how they're taking our verdict and moving on. But. IN CONCLUSION.

I think I believe that everyone should have plead guilty on this first trial if we wanted them all to truly reflect on their characters and be able to grow. By pardoning some and not others we've just made it worse.

So uuh I just finished watching Yuno's video and am CONFLICTED over my prior conclusion because... yeah. She didn't do anything wrong. And despite her spite towards us, thinking we all forgave her purely because we thought of her as a 'poor little girl', I like the awareness she's gotten through her 'Innocent' verdict. I think she'd come to the same conclusion regardless if we voted her as 'Guilty' instead (and she'd call us out for that verdict) but I like that most of us agreed on her choice. Still. If we gave everyone BUT her the 'Guilty' verdict, that would've been disastrous... it would have outed her to everyone else. I guess I'm standing behind we should've given everyone the 'Guilty' verdict for the overall narrative arch that would've been us seeing them reflect and be on equal footing but I don't think Yuno is guilty at all 😔

[youknowwhatelseyouare]

The Cake That Takes The Cake Live Reaction

•Ok lowkey would never pick out a ring like that as an engagement ring but then again, I’m not a Bowie.

•TJ would LOVE Cyrus’s patter, is all I’m saying 🤷‍♀️

•ashjdjdkdj ik why everyone is talking about the cute line but when Cyrus said TJ is a completely different person I swear the heart eyes jumped out.

•Ok lemme just take a second to appreciate how much Andi has grown from season one. From an insecure lovestruck girl to a confident self possessed woman. Now I know none of us want her and Jonah to be together with the way things have played out, but I’m still proud of Andi for how far she’s come.

•Every episode confirms how much of a Disaster Bi(TM) that Bex is. If Bowie doesn’t marry her I will.

•”I just gotta grab something out of my locker” OKAY CYRUS

•TJ isn’t dumb okay he’s just bad at math like a certain someone I know who may or may not be me (side note ever since the show brought it up I’ve been wondering if I have dyscalculia to thank for my abysmal understanding of math. But at this point it doesn’t matter, bc I now don’t have to take a math class in college!)

•CYRUS AND TJ MAKING SNEAKY PLANS TOGETHER IS MY KRYPTONITE I LOVE THEM SO MUCH MY HEART HURTS

•THEYRE SO CUTE I WANT TO DIE

•TREAT YOSELF CECE

•Again, if Bowie won’t wife Bex up I will gosh darn it.

•Look basketball is not a sport I particularly like but do I live for these kind of montages on the show? Yes. Yes I do.

•Ngl for a second I thought Cyrus was gonna go hug TJ rip

•Go Buffy for starting a girls’ team! Can’t wait to see how that’ll play out in season 3.

•Ok was not expecting Bowie’s band to show up...

•THE WAY CYRUS LOOKS AT TJ UGH I CANT

•TJ’s rap was straight fire, and that’s all I have to say on the subject.

•Ok Buffy said that even if she could forgive him she didn’t think that they could be friends. No rap, no matter how fire, would make her turn those kinds of feelings into a crush.

•I was convinced before that TJ had a crush on Cyrus. Now I’m convinced that Cyrus has a crush on TJ.

•Bowie’s yikes is me 24/7

•THE WAY BEX LOOKED AT ANDI WHEN BOWIE SAID PROPOSE SHSJSJJSKSK

•Ok is it just me or is the fact that the band’s proposal to Bowie is happening right before BeX’s outlandishly funny?

•CECE TOOK OUT THE TOOTHPICK IM SCREAMING I LOVE MY PRICKLY GRANDMA

•HWYD YOU HAVE TO END LIKE THAT I CANT WAIT THREE MONTHS I WANT SEASON THREE NOW

In conclusion? That...actually wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. If anything my faith in Tyrus becoming canon is stronger than ever now. Take heart you guys. Yeah, three months is a long time to wait (probably four months if we count how long we’ll have to wait to see TJ) but this episode gave off such strong Tyrus vibes in spite of the ambiguity of the lookback.

[chrisbransdon]

There is a sense of urgency which accompanies my belief that Jesus Christ is Lord. It undergirds everything I think, say and do. But it often gets me into trouble. My brand of urgency makes me volatile; I overreach. The bible warns against the passions of youth and I don’t think it’s just talking about sex. It’s talking about the youthful need to tear through everything like a hurricane. I wonder if and when I will outgrow this temperament. I’m nearly 30 and I don’t feel any less naïve, strong-willed, or convicted than I did when I was 20. So much for my flaws. But if I can salvage anything from this unfortunate personality profile it would be that, somehow, I find that I am able to make people believe in the things that I believe in. The only thing that saves me from being so insufferable that my friends would give up on me entirely, is the fact that I am so gosh darn earnest. I swear to you I could kill a man with my earnestness.

These days I don’t know how to best channel that earnestness. While the middle aged blogosphere continues to reel from the transition into exile, I feel that I have been preparing myself for it for years. I am afraid, but I am also oddly energised. I feel that I have a good read on the times, but I also feel that I could make a fool of myself. Whatever it is, I feel the need to write about it. If it all goes up in flames, so be it. But maybe it won’t even spark. I don’t know which would be worse.

I don’t write for the usual blogging suspects because I’m not sure we yet understand each other. You have the memory of a time before social media. You got to form as a person before post-modernism had infiltrated the school curriculum and convinced us all that truth was an elastic concept. I’m still trying to establish what I believe, while navigating the ideological whiplash facilitated by the constancy of my feeds. It’s exhausting, it’s chaotic. Certain leaders are required for times like these.

Jim Elliot once said that he wished men would turn one way or another on facing Christ in him. Such single-mindedness is a rarity online, because, well, that’s not really the purpose of blogging. I tend to think that anyone who blogs ought to have some degree of self-loathing for indulging in it. I say this because I am very self-conscious about the fact that the online world is not so much given to the work of evangelism or conversion as it is to endless discourse. I do hope and expect that what is happening offline is markedly different to what is happening online.

But if I only had the online world to go by, it seems pretty obvious to me why we are floundering when it comes to evangelism. My impression from the online world is not that we would force men to turn one way or another in facing Christ in us, but that we would have men think us reasonable and nuanced. I am told to offer people a coherent worldview, I am led to believe that it is time for us to revise our tactics for evangelism. At worst I watch leaders give ambiguous and open answers so that all of their bases are covered. In short, everyone is given over to a very middle-class intellectual bubble where ‘reasonableness’ is our gold standard. Ironically, ‘reasonableness’ is not necessarily defined by biblical truth, or scientific data, or you know, reason, but by how well your opinion is received. I consider this kind of intellectual climate disastrous for the continued growth of the church and especially for evangelism. It is a disaster because in prizing our ‘reasonableness’ above all things, we relinquish the very ground upon which conversion happens: the moment at which a man must deny himself and submit to the very unreasonable conclusion that Jesus Christ is his Lord and Saviour.

Oh, but why can’t we have both? The catch cry of the Christian intellectual: it’s both/and, Christine, you simple girl. I’m sure it is. I am just quesioning the insistence upon the both/and intellectualism which is popular throughout Christian media. What may be a charitable position in academia translates too easily to a lukewarm Christianity online. And because we have so thoroughly reinforced this kind of thought leadership in our blogs, articles and comments, we are dull in our voices, and we bar ourselves from ever making specific critiques.

Instead, we share Jordan Peterson clips and are careful to include apologetic captions, lest we upset the blogosphere equilbrium with too extreme a position. Am I the only one wondering why I need to look to men like Jordan Peterson (or friendlyjordies for goodness sake) to find someone who is willing to make a definite statement? I don’t even fully agree with everything that Peterson says, but the dude is saying something and in lieu of my own leaders who say nothing I fill the void where I can. And I know I’m not the only one! Tell me I’m wrong. We have all counted the cost and decided that to say what you really mean is too risky. To say what is truthful is too divisive. After all, why h8 wen u can equivocate?

You can’t be half in exile. You’re in or you’re out. That is the kind of black and white language that the rules of argument are suspicious of, but the gospel itself undermines logical fallacies and it bids me come and die. If you wanted one line on why I am not a feminist, this is it. Having died to the world, I die to its politics, to its ideologies. In this death I live, and in so doing I am able to offer life from the other side, with a conviction that I pray belies the magnitude and worth of the message I have been entrusted with. 

I am an exile for this position. I am a radical. And this is not a forgiving time for radicals.

That is where you, keeper of the blogging keys, come in. I’m not saying step aside. I’m not saying millennials don’t need you. I’m saying that it’s actually much better and much worse than you realise. It’s better than you realise because you don’t need to convince us that these are hostile times. To use a Batman related illustration: you are adjusting to the dark, but we were born into it. Our eyes have lighted and we can see the way forward but you guys are literally still asking ‘how did we get into the dark? What is the nature of the dark?’ It is almost comical to watch my leaders constantly fret over these questions. But now it is becoming more and more frustrating because what we need is for you to get on with leading us. And that’s where it gets much worse. What we need are men of character and conviction who are willing to live and die by the word of God. What we need are men who are willing to show us what it looks like to get smashed and get back up again. Part of me thinks that you spend so much time analysing the times because it means a delay on actually living in them. Once you finally come to grips with everything you are theorising over, there is nothing left but to get on with being hated.

And yes, I have deliberately addressed the men. Why? Because I have decided not to play by the rules of feminism or identity politics which would dictate to me what is the ‘right thing’ to say. And I say that with such confidence because I genuinely believe my theology. Christian men, I am looking to follow and work with you. But you are believing the lie that you ought to make yourself smaller. It is a tragedy. It is a tragedy for the women who are looking to follow you, and it is a tragedy for the young men in your churches. The complementarian women like myself are not always the most vocal online (ok maybe I’m the exception), or in your churches, or in your classrooms. But it doesn’t mean that we’re not with you. What’s the worst that could happen if you stop self-censoring? Julia Baird and her followers come for you? If Carmelina Read can survive it, you can. Stop speaking for the sake of potential critics, speak in order to give courage to your friends. Get smashed, get back up again. It’s not just in the blogosphere that we need to draw from our leaders’ courage. It’s in every sphere of life.

Billy Graham once said

Courage is contagious. When a brave man takes a stand, the spines of others are often stiffened.

He was extraordinarily courageous and yet I believe that the Christian men of our time need to display even more courage than that. I’m waiting for the first of them to stand.