i am so charmed by a lumax wedding because it’s not even something max thought would happen. like she assumed weddings were something the girl makes happen and the guy puts up with. and because she had no desire for one, so there’s no reason it would happen.
among other things weddings are an exorbitant and performative show of love, max loves lucas and she doesn’t care whether or not other people know or believe this. at it’s best marriage to her has been a representation of failed dreams and at it’s worst it’s been a tool to manipulate people who need to get away to stay. maybe they will get married for the tax benefits, she thinks.
this is until max and lucas are older and living together, they’re chilling on the couch and lucas mentions his family has been asking when he’s planning to propose and if that’s something max even wants? max doesn’t care, she doesn’t plan on going anywhere, a certificate won’t change anything and she's not crazy about parties. she doesn’t ask how he feels, he brings it up, that “actually i want a wedding.”
that is saying the least, lucas wants a wedding more than anything. he loves max and he doesn’t need to prove that to anyone, but he’s happy and he wants to share that with others! he wants to work with max to make marriage a positive thing to them, he wants to celebrate their love, everything they’ve been through. also, hell, he’s only human, he wants to show off! he wants to dress really cool and go to a really cool place and show the world know how awesome he and his girlfriend are. HIS WIFE!!!
most of all, lucas wants the moment near the end of the night, where the party’s getting loud and everybody wants his attention, but max asks if he wants to get out of there and he says yes. not out out, just outside the venue. it’s dark and the once booming music is now faint, they sit and catch up, complain about their families, laugh about their friends. max holds lucas’s hand and plays with his wedding ring, she whispers something sweet before asking him to dance. it’s the best part of the night and nobody will know about it but them.
suddenly max decides she wants a wedding.
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kiryuu sibling stasis post-32 is so interesting to me. nanami tries to leave and is (temporarily but also, crucially, violently) prevented from doing so by touga and akio. after this experience she puts distance between herself and them: she leaves touga’s phone in the car, she resigns from the student council (though she dons her old uniform still), she repeatedly dismisses and undermines the authority of the rose code, of end of the world, of akio, of touga. but she’s still in ohtori, isn’t she? uncomfortable with the idea of leaving, uncertain if it’s really possible. she tried before, and it hurt her. deeply. it’s so interesting to me, nanami’s agency and how she limits her exertion of it after 32, when she realises it for what it is. contrast that with touga, who accepts this weird stalemate between them, who is, really, uninterested in having any relationship of any kind with nanami if he can’t gain something from her. he’s very passive with her after 32, compared to the passivity he’d always feigned towards her before in order to stoke reactions from her and then exploit them. i was thinking about how touga has always been able to sever his relationship with nanami, but chosen not to; first out of a sense of obligation (‘we should live to help each other’) then a realisation of how that could be exploited. i was thinking about how nanami has never realised her ability to leave, in part because it is limited by touga and the harm he does her. i was thinking about the desperation and confusion akio calls out to anthy with as she leaves. i was thinking about how different that is to the kiryuus’ strange semi-breakdown; touga doesn’t want or need nanami, and nanami might love her brother but she cannot trust him or feel safe around him, doesn’t want to see him anymore; she’s itching to leave, and just a little scared (you know, because last time she tried that her brother assaulted her), and he’s not doing anything because ignoring her means he doesn’t have to deal with the emotions of her leaving or staying. something something gendered power dynamics something something tragic siblings
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no i dont think you understand ar is programmed to hate pm because shes a prospitian and because hes programmed to be an authority regulator on derse he should hate someone like wv who broke the law to start a revolution but he still manages to fall in love with them both anyway because its the end of the world and what does law matter anymore?
wv has lost all his army and lothes himself for being a failure and yet here come these two people who are in the same place as him who enjoy and support his dream of a new world where prospitians and dersites can get along (ar is shown helping wv with exile/can town)
pm lost her job, home, and everything she loved and lived for in one day yet here comes these two charming men who at one point were supposed to be her enemies, but they do their best to make her feel welcome and give her a dream of a better home *gripping your shoulders*
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I think there being an influx of only fem!reader fics for Yamato Endo from Wind Breaker (aka a man who has CANONICALLY said he has, and I quote, 'fallen for' another man, among SEVERAL other very notably romantic ways hes talked about Takiishi) is kinda crazy actually
I've seen people saying like 'oh he didn't mean it ROMANTICALLY' brother be fr please. Wind Breaker is no stranger to having queer characters (literally look at Tsubakino and, I don't know, their ENTIRE CHARACTER ARC. While we still don't know whether they're specifically transfem or not, they are UNDENIABLY a very explicitly queer character. Endo being gay is not too much to be realistic).
I've deadass blocked pretty much everyone who has posted x reader content for him because it's ALL FEM!READER. It makes zero sense to me honestly. I get some people could just say it's because he's bi or pan or something like that, but like. Idk man. We've ONLY seen him talk about Takiishi like this, not just in the present arc but also in his backstory. He literally did not care about ANYONE outside of Takiishi, and it was literally shown that any relations he had with other people were NOT genuine on his end. This includes romantic attraction (or lack thereof) for anyone else.
This is different than me just headcanoning a character as queer - Endo is queer canonically even if we weren't told outright 'THIS IS A GAY MAN', and ignoring that just to make fem!reader fics isn'ttttt that great. The only times I've seen his attraction for Takiishi be acknowledged in these fics are for threesome smut fics that I obviously haven't read, but it doesn't take a genius to realize that those fics probably don't treat Endo as someone who is actually attracted to Takiishi and instead prioritize his relationship with the reader (and furthermore just threw Takiishi in because they thought it was hot)
This is what I mean when I say we cannot have people actually RECOGNIZE queer characters unless they're explicit stereotypes, because otherwise their queerness is literally ignored entirely
All around not really that fun to see I think!
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hey. i'm turning my chair around and sitting in it backwards now because i want to speak specifically to people with ocd. this is a targeted post and is not meant to apply to the userbase of this website at large or to serve as a policy decision.
hi. do you know what scrupulosity means? it is a strong, intense, often painful concern about morality or religion. it's very common for religious people with ocd, actually—the fear that you've sinned, that you will sin, that your thoughts themselves are sinful. you're afraid of being an evil person. every thought and feeling you have is scrutinized to exhaustion in case it's proof that you're evil. this also happens for non-religious people with ocd, it's just that ours will look different; it's often a preoccupation with social justice issues. you care a lot about being a good person, right! most people do. you want to be a good person, you want to be kind to others and to dismantle oppressive systems where you can. i'm making some assumptions here, but they're based on my specific audience base.
so, there's this thing that happens online, especially on tumblr and twitter—not because bluh bluh platforms bad, but because of the ways in which information is propagated on here. people used to tag for these posts sporadically but don't do so as much anymore. you know posts that exhort you, the reader, specifically, to take action? they tell you not to look away, not to bury your head in the sand. they tell you to give and to agitate and to donate time, money, resources.
those posts used to make me intensely, deeply anxious. i don't mean mild agitation, i mean life-ruining, day-occupying panic that seizes your entire body, and thoughts that don't leave your brain. guilt that paralzyes you because you, personally, cannot go kill the politicians responsible. you don't have enough money to do more than donate a few dollars, and sometimes you don't even have that. but because of where you live, because of the fact that you have internet access and you're literate enough to read these posts, you know that you have a level of privilege that most people never will. you're aware of that privilege because you're reasonably in-tune with social justice movements and you've probably spent some time dissecting your own privilege to examine your biases. (that's not a bad thing; i'm not here to condemn that. stay with me, if you can.)
there's a thing that can happen if you've lived with ocd like this for a long time where you become kind of incapable of telling what's addressed to you personally and what isn't. everything feels like a personal exhortation. you have trouble saying no, or knowing when you're overextended, because other people have it worse. how dare you enjoy relative comfort when people are being bombed or drowning in a climate change -induced flood or being crushed to death in a crowd panic. how dare you not be aware of it at all times, always, constantly. how dare you look away. don't look away.
i want to tell you about something i went through, if that's okay. a lot of people who follow me will already know this, but i haven't talked about this aspect of it very much publicly. in 2020, while visiting my partner in southern oregon, we had to evacuate from wildfires twice in under 24 hours. that was a really, really bad fire season, caused and perpetuated by a combination of global climate change and colonialization practices that destroyed traditional indigenous fire management strategies across the west coast of north america. fires stretched from bc to california. we wound up fleeing south, and then had to flee back north again, hemmed in on three sides. i flew back home to bc shortly afterwards, and i have this vivid, awful memory of seeing my home mountain range, the cascades, choked out with smoke from the window of an airplane. the woman in front of me sobbed the entire time until we touched down.
i remember thinking at that time that it was insane the entire world wasn't stopping. what i was experiencing was apocalyptic in scale—the fire we ran from the first time was part of a complex that chewed up entire towns. it wasn't the first fire season, nor the worst for the continent, nor the world. but all i could think in the moment was why aren't we doing anything, this is going to be all of us in a decade, why are people looking away.
if i had gone online and posted that, it would not have been morally wrong of me. there's no ascribing morality to a reaction like that. i mean, if i'd gone to someone who suffered in the years prior in australia or california and told them that ours was So Much Worse, that would have made me an asshole, but i didn't do that. i made some upset facebook posts targeted at the trump voters in my family, but i had no way to express at the time the sort of clawing panic of WHY AREN'T PEOPLE DOING ANYTHING??
the answer to that, which you probably know, is: what would they have done? we were sheltered by friends we evacuated with, but what power did a mutual in new york or wales or singapore have to affect a wildfire in oregon?
so, come back to the present day with me again, if you will. i said above that posts worded like this used to make me really, really anxious. in the span of time after the fire, i developed ptsd, and my ocd ruined my life. i took an extra year to graduate after i'd finished all my coursework because i could not send in the forms required. i was too busy spending 10-16 hours a day rearranging furniture in my room, or lying in bed, full-body tense, until it felt like my teeth would crack from the pressure. i'm medicated now. i'm grateful for it. i have more tolerance for these posts because i've been there. i know the op isn't doing anything wrong, because they're not wrong. why isn't the world stopping to look at a natural disaster, or a genocide? the world should not be like this.
you are not the world. you are someone with a brain that will torture you to death given the chance. you know how learning to reckon with your privileges, whatever they may be, requires you to not try and escape them? you need to be able to hold in your head that yes, you benefit from something that isn't fair; yes, other people should have that benefit, and that they don't is unjust. but you need to, for example, not try and weasel your way out of being white because you're uncomfortable with the guilt that it produces. you need to not go online and say well not ALL americans because you can't sit with the idea of being complicit in american imperialism. if you have ocd, you need to apply that to your own brain, too. you need to apply it to every post that you see. you need to know that people are not speaking directly to you, they are crying out in pain and fear. they are not doing anything wrong. they are scared and hurting.
they do not benefit from you taking on all the guilt of that fear and pain. i am not saying this to absolve you of the guilt. i am saying that you need to be able to exist with that level of guilt without allowing it to paralyze and destroy you. if you can't do that right now, i'm not here to cast judgement on you. blacklist phrases. i had "wildfire" blacklisted for a long time. i'm sure i missed aid posts because of it. the alternative was me being nonfunctional. for a long time, i had donation posts blacklisted across the board, because the way my ocd worked meant that i was neurologically incapable of knowing where my own limits were, and i would give money i did not have. if you need to do that, this is me giving you permission. doing this does not make you evil. it does not make you morally bankrupt. it makes you someone whose brain is trying to fucking kill them, and the world needs you to not let that happen.
this is not a post about how you're exempt from caring about the world if you're mentally ill, it's about how you cannot apply that care to anything useful if you're having massive panic spirals every other day about the guilt that you feel. your guilt should not rule your life. if it does, i say this kindly, but you very likely need medication. i'm sorry if you don't have access to that right now. you cannot think your way out of ocd. you cannot think your way into stopping neural activity. you cannot guilt your way into being a good person; you have to be able to exist with the guilt and not let it rule you in order to do that. nobody benefits from your brain trying to martyr you in the name of solving the world's suffering.
you need to be able to function, free of crushing and paralyzing guilt, before you can help anyone. you are not an effective ally like this just because your brain tells you that it's necessary.
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