#Grit and Determination

[anaghalove]

Don't ever say it's over if I'm breathing, Racing to the moonlight and I'm speeding, I'm headed to the stars, ready to go far I'm star walkin' ✨🎶

~ Montero

[intensethought]

Learn the keys to bouncing back after adversity and see how to focus on the choices and behaviors that enable you to rebuild after loss, failure or setback.

[namisweatheria]

I feel like we don't discuss Nami's relationship with gender enough. Her entire character is so deeply informed by being a girl in a male-dominated pirate world and it's so interesting and so worth talking about.

The background creepiness of Bad pirate crews, which are most of them, how they tend to not have any female crew members at all, how they beckon any pretty young woman around to come play with them and join them. It's real bad. It's also like, a totally 2 dimensional portrayal of evil that is reserved for the most background of background characters.

However I think their ubiquity says a lot about how piracy is meant to be perceived by the public in One Piece, and is one of the strongest indicators of how prevalent misogyny is in-world.

It's very normal in One Piece for regular island inhabitants to have never met a Different class of pirate in their life. There's no reason for them to withhold judgement that maybe these pirates won't be like every crew that attacked before, and to wait and judge them by their actions. I mean frankly that would be irrationally weak self-preservation.

There are people who live peacefully under the flags of Yonkos who protect them, and feel loyalty and gratitude to them for it, but that seems to only be thing with very big name pirates. The East Blue, being the weakest and least populated, has no such plethora of powerful people and resulting turf wars.

So. Nami. Is very clearly implied to have never met any Different pirates before. I'm thinking about what that means. About how every group of pirates she stole from were creepy, dangerous men. How she started going out stealing when she was still a young child. How she didn't have a mother anymore to guide her or comfort her. How Arlong would grab her chin inappropriately, talk about her as a "human female", as property, and god knows what else.

How all the men in Arlong's crew treated her patronizingly, pretending they're all friends, teasing her and playing at respect when really not a single one of them ever stuck up for her or hesitated to accuse her of betrayal. Who were always ready to kill her if she refused to cooperate. Who grabbed her and intimidated her when they felt like it.

That's what she had to come back to after a close call with stealing from other predatory men, instead of the relief of home there was a dark, cramped room filled with endless hours of misery and isolation and blood. Where any one of her captors could barge in and demand new maps, work faster, where did you go, you took too long again this time. Endless threats and incursions.

I'm thinking about that her fight scene in Alabasta, where she tumbles and rips off her cape and uses it to catch her enemy's spikes, before leaping to her feet and running out the back door, all in one moment. How it makes her enemy reconsider her and think, "so the girl's not a total novice at fighting after all." What that implies about her experiences as a young thief. The times she wasn't fast or clever enough and had to fight and claw her way out. Why she always carried a staff and a knife. Why she was the only one before Chopper who had any medical knowledge or experience.

You know she was stitching herself up. And the weapons, how do you think she learned to use those? If any of the Arlong Pirates helped her it wasn't out of kindness and it wasn't gentle.

Then I think about Nojiko, and Bellemere's memory, and the only softness in a hard life. How easily Nami connects to every young woman experiencing hardship that she meets. How completely she dismisses the struggles of men unless they mean something to her and are going through something terrible. The way that Nami only has sympathy for women and children is easily noticeable in-text, but it's also something confirmed in those words by the author. And it's clearly because of the life she lived, the men who had all the power and only abused it, who saw her as nothing but a girl to take advantage of, without anyone aside from her sister clearly knowing and caring about any of it.

Nami clearly isn't bitter, she doesn't think the world owes her recompense, on the contrary she knows she is far from the only person in the world to suffer the things she has suffered. She is endlessly reaching out and kind, but only to those that she isn't sure would get help without her. Certainly, before Luffy, Usopp, and Zoro, no man ever reached out a hand to her without an ulterior motive.

I think when she sees a girl in trouble, a girl biting her lip to hold in a scream of grief, a girl running in the woods away from a monster, a girl captured by pirates, she sees someone who no one is coming for. Who no one will stick up for. A person without allies in a world against her. Whether it's actually true in this case or not, she runs straight for that girl anyways every single time.

[goosegoblin]

no bitch has ever gone as hard as commander wake, actually. like:

take over and unite a disorganised insurgency group to become one of the greatest threats ever presented to an immortal god

learn about, identify, locate and somehow KILL??? a monster that multiple lyctors have died trying to kill, then make said monster's body into weaponry for better god-killing abilities

identify the saint of duty and make him violate his duty, sexual-style. it's okay, because the 'duty' really refers to his cavalier, who you are also dating. succesfully two-time two people who are sharing a body. how do you even do this.

connect with even more lyctors and, rather than getting killed on sight, agree to help kill the emperor. this part contains child murder but okay!

when the relevant material dies, who cares? you've got a perfectly good womb, a syringe and seemingly immortal sperm!

inseminate yourself with god's semen ???

succesfully evade the saint of duty for the duration of your pregnancy. when cornered, succesfully a) get to the right place b) induce labour and c) deliver your child

get kicked out an airlock. this one is a bummer. reroute your oxygen to your child, which would be a sweet gesture if it wasn't specifically so your child can be killed at a more useful time

refuse all attempts by ninth house spirit-callers, other than yelling the name of the lyctor that killed you. 'sacred forgotten names' my ass

like. that's already genuinely insane behaviour! and that's only stuff that happens before book one!

because then your soul is so bitter and determined and angry that you somehow hold onto your bones for a VERY long time and you don't go insane, and then you end up in a sword for literal decades and you still don't go insane, and then some mega necromancer gets hold of The Sword With You In It and you hate her so much you can make her projectile vomit just by being near you- and, again, you are a ghost inside a sword at this stage-

also you simultaneously haunt the necromancer's brain and fuck up her attempts to rewrite history by being like 'what if i was there and also i had a gun. what if that.' and you're so hard to kill that they have to summon the ghost of the coolest bestest big boy soldier who ever lived just to try and step to you.

and also you got the necro to stab a body so you can puppet the corpse around a spaceship, which you use mostly to try and kill lyctors (and, also, to try and fuck)

also, you canonically named yourself after 'lose yourself' by eminem.

[principiumindividuationis777]

[faaun]

we sang in the aeroplane over the sea tgth ☆

[seaquestions]

i like to believe the boys are able to receive my psychic beams of love and encouragement 💗

[in-tenebris-et-in-solitudine]

[sapphire-weapon]

fucking Obsessed with the dialogue in the RE4make ending showcasing just how layered one sentence can be. when Leon turns down Ashley’s offer to put him on security detail, he’s not actually suggesting that the president’s fucking daughter doesn’t need security detail. there’s so damn much going on in that one line of dialogue alone.

what he says: “You don’t need me.” what he means: “I’m not even here under my own free will; there’s no chance in hell they’d transfer me. But even if there is the slightest possibility that you could actually help, I don’t want you to worry about it, so I won’t say anything.”

what he says: “You don’t need me.” what he means: “If I take my eyes off of bioterror for even a second, I’ll never be able to bring myself to go back. And I can’t afford to do that.”

what he says: “You don’t need me.” what he means: “Sherry needed me after we escaped together, and I’m pretty sure I fucked that up. I couldn’t bear to ruin the life of another tiny blonde girl.”

what he says: “You don’t need me.” what he means: “I’m probably fucking worthless outside of a life-and-death bioterror situation.”

what he says: “You don’t need me.” what he means: “The more you feel that you need me in order to cope with what’s happened to us here, the more you actually will need me, and I don’t want that for you.”

what he says: “You don’t need me.” what he means: “I genuinely believe you can heal from this and go on to live a normal life. I couldn’t.”

what he says: “You don’t need me.” what he means: “I wouldn’t have made it out of here without you, either.”

what he says: “You don’t need me.” what he means: “I’m so fucking proud of you.”

[ghoul-haunted]

i will now play ac odyssey and we'll see what happens in the recesses of my mind

[curiosity-killed]

@ god why does my brain specifically and exclusively hate economics

[seafearing]

love that tommy rose himself up from horsegirl to leader of the criminal underworld

trying to use this as inspiration so i get up from bed to wash all this glitter off my face

[rammbles]

my boyfriend is taking me to my very first pride event ever this month and i want to sob my fuckin eyes out 😭😭😭

[danthropologie]

thank you for being the voice of reason lol. like i get it, not ideal, disappointing and it's easy to fall into negativity habits but maybe it's b/c i've been a daniel fan since 2013 and don't just know him from mclaren but i feel like the instant catastrophizing and doom and gloom by daniel FANS is more insulting than anything his haters or pundits say, like come on dirlies. it's one tenth in the first qualifying. if WE don't have faith in him then what the hell are we doing here? wallowing for fun?

unfortunately i feel like i AM part of the problem here as a supremely delusional girlie that was spreading sandbagging propaganda and saying he would get into q3 no problem 😭 for that, i must apologize to my fellow daniel girlies 😭

no but seriously, everything you said!! it's one thing to be frustrated about it—hell, even daniel himself is!—but to immediately spiral to a place where this is an omen for how the entire season is going to go just isn't realistic. not every week is gonna go his way, that's just the way the sport is, but as long as he's backing himself, he's got a team behind him that's supporting him, and he's got a car underneath him that does what he wants and expects it to do, the results will come. we know exactly who he is and what he can do ESPECIALLY when he's got a fire under his ass, so it's just a matter of time

[in-tenebris-et-in-solitudine]

[groundhogfancy]