#I'm not optimistic about the future whatsoever

[elaineas-elysian]

╰►┆𝑪𝒖𝒑𝒊𝒅 〚 𝒀𝒖𝒊 𝑲𝒐𝒎𝒐𝒓𝒊 〛 𝑯𝒆𝒂𝒅𝒄𝒂𝒏𝒐𝒏𝒔 ┆

⪼ «﹤┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈﹥» ⪻

Yui genuinely enjoys the thought of being a Cupid. Although she may be shy about grasping the full concept of Love, she admires how a Cupid's love is heavenly and has always thought that a Strong and Loyal desire of passion was a beautiful thing.

Yui has studied the true potential a Cupid really has, she studied the classical mythology of a Cupid, until one day she woke and, and from there, she knew that it was her destiny to help couples that we’re meant to be in the future eventually fall in love. How exactly did she become a Cupid herself? That, she was unsure of, but she didn't mind it one bit.

Yui has always been an attractive Young Female, she carries with her a soft and pure luminescence that guided her all throughout her lifetime. Wherever she went, she would always have a faint smell of roses, a significant scent that matches her doll like appearance and her gorgeous natural rosy cheeks.

Yui although being a Cupid, she has smaller wings than the average sized Cupid. To match her adorable and shy personality, she was gifted with smaller wings, but without any realization, she didn't realize that the smaller her wings we're, the more power she will be able to withstand and obtain. She's as fragile as porcelain, and others may say that she represents a goddess. She has always displayed a kind and nurturing nature towards other individuals, and for that reason, she earned that title.

At first, Yui had absolutely no clue of whatsoever when it came to using or controlling her powers, but all she had to do was take her first shot with an arrow, and she was actually a natural learner. Her ability to navigate around unseen and flutter her wings we're magnificent in this Alternative. Surprisingly, she was awfully socially awkward when it came to socializing with other Cupid's, her first response to an introduction conversation was similarly to this: “Uhm... I'm Yui Komori.. please to meet you as well!” As soon as you get to know her, she's a very outgoing and optimistic person, but from first glance, she's a respectful, shy, and bright female who expresses her qualities wonderfully.

Yui would always follow this pathway that was lit with candles that smelled like Lavender, leading to a small garden. She will always have picnics in that specific area, reading her favorite books and drinking a cup of tea as the Moonlight reflected on her hair and onto the nearby river's waters. Sometimes, she will speak to the small plants that we're there, doodling them on the small corners of her Diary as she quickly jotted down notes of her environment, anything that she found unique, intriguing, or glamorous that caught her attention.

Being a Cupid to Yui is certainly fun, and definitely has it's positive aspects, she most definitely loves seeing the sunlight through the darkness even if it took form in a different way, which of course, it didn't technically matter to her at all, because she's a Cupid remember? Like a destined goddess and figure of Amor.

[completeoveranalysis]

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Warning! This post contains spoilers up to chapter 170 of Tsubasa (and Chapter 71 of xxxHolic). Please skip this if you have not read that far.

Please also make no comments about what happens after that point in either manga.

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OK SO HERE IS SPOOKY KUROFAI MARRIAGE PORTRAIT

The splash text reads: Shed blood and tears, without forgetting them, turn them into an existence.

Here is a link to my original post if you need the full context.

But here is the thing I said that just made me want to scream here in 2021, specifically in regards to that splash text:

"Incredibly motivating. It’s like the optimistic view of how things are when things are tough. The tough times are unavoidable a lot of the time, but you can and will get through them. You just have to make the choice to pick up the pieces and use them to construct a new future - which is never easy, but it’s the only way forward. For the dads, it’s both their past and their future. Kurogane has already gone through this; his life shattered and he used the pieces to forge a new identity and found new things to live for. For Fai, this is something he still needs to work on. He’s so used to running from his tragedy that he hasn’t yet figured out who he is beyond it. The “without forgetting them” is sort of a call out for him in that respect. You can’t grow by pretending they didn’t happen, or by pretending you’re a different person. Once he’s faced the pain and accepted that he’s alive and can continue living in a way that can make himself and others happy, then he’ll finally be moving forward."

IN WHICH.

LIKE.

I have no idea how anyone even reads this liveblog armed with knowledge of what happens next because APPARENTLY I JUST SAY THINGS that are VASTLY UNJUST and now I wilt away with the memory of what I thought of Fai back then.

I don't mean to give myself any undue credit here - I predicted none of Fai’s backstory. I had something completely different in mind when writing this, entirely based around the knowledge of Fai fleeing from Ashura with no context whatsoever about who Fai really was.

When you know where Fai came from? Oh my god.

Oh my god.

The words just toss my intended meaning out the window and dance around with the actual truth right in your face. Especially the “pretending you’re a different person” bit - I could never have predicted that Fai was using his brother’s namesake both as a way to eliminate himself from the world and to devote his life towards resurrecting his brother in his place. But HOT DAMN do these words ice skate in all the correct patterns without any knowledge of what the heck they could possibly mean in the end.

Also I'm in physical pain from the phrase: “without forgetting them” is sort of a call out for him in that respect." I know that past!me was thinking purely about Fai running away from confrontation with Ashura and pretending that he was fine and that everything was fine and that he could stay away from it all as long as possible. Things I did not know: That Fai's memories had been deliberately changed by two separate people to control the direction of his life. "Without forgetting them" is NOT a callout for Fai - Fai had no choice in that whatsoever (but they could still be a callout for ME for forgetting any of this plotline had ever happened oh my god). Fai was only ever running from Ashura with good intentions (ie, to NOT murder someone), and there was no way he could have known that his past had been rewritten to such a massive degree that it shaped the core of his personality for his entire life. And just as the splash text implies, it's only when he gets the CORRECT memories back that he can use them to forge a healthier and more accurate life moving forward.

A call out for Fai. Imagine. Past!me has so much to answer for.

I also want to revisit the bit where I said “once he’s faced the pain and accepted that he’s alive he can continue living in a way that can make himself and others happy, then he’ll finally be moving forward”, because this comes off entirely flippant now that I’m looking back on it.

My expectation for Fai’s potential trauma was somehow barely a tenth of what it really was in the end. And like, the idea I was getting at? Technically correct! But also only correct on the surface level. Fai didn’t need to just “confront his problems”. He needed to be completely stripped of the version of himself he had constructed from his false memories, worn down to the very core through reliving the worst parts of his life - and then shown how he was wrong about them. He was lied to his entire life, and so the goals he based his life around were aimed toward an abstracted version of reality. He was never going to be able to resurrect his brother, but he never could have known that without knowing that Ashura and Evil Wolverine had manipulated him and his memories every step of the way.

It's only when he can decipher this for himself that he can course correct - and it was only in taking the Original Fai completely out of the equation that Our Fai could finally begin to comprehend the idea of living for himself, and others, instead for fixing a mistake he never actually made in the first place.

So, yeah. “Once he’s faced the pain (of his past) and accepted that HE’S alive (and he’s allowed to be, because he never killed his brother) he can continue living in a way that can make himself and others happy” IS ACTUALLY ACCIDENTALLY CORRECT IN THE END.

I also want to point out that in the initial liveblog I never really discussed how Fai’s expression was relevant to this image, because I didn’t know exactly.

He’s smiling.

It's a small, gentle smile, but CLAMP really draw attention to it with the way he's looking off centre. Kurogane looks directly at the camera, but he's off centre - Fai is in the middle of the frame and he's vaguely looking elsewhere, head tilted in the wrong direction, as if he were looking towards Kurogane but seeing something else entirely.

The image itself was part of a series of splash pages where CLAMP were depicting the current state of the relationships between all of the main cast throughout the Infinity Arc (and it was glorious) and while I absolutely caught the fact that the relationship between Fai and Kurogane was intimate but strained, I didn’t know the context of Fai’s smile. His backstory shows us that Fai smiles as a way to make other people happy, because deep down he thinks this is the only possible value he can bring them - a smile is his only way of improving the world for the people around him, and his smile is the only thing he’s worth.

Here in the image Fai is partially draped over Kurogane but his distant look shows that he isn’t fully committed to the scenario - because before Seresu he could never be. As much as he liked Kurogane and allowed himself to get close to him, it was always always with the intention of him trading his life away for his brother’s at the end of the day. This is what caused the tension between them in the first place - when Kurogane made choices in Fai’s stead to keep him alive (in Acid Tokyo), he threatened Fai’s chance to trade his life for his brother’s, and so Fai distanced himself from Kurogane. Even if they fixed what they had between them, anything he had going with Kurogane could only ever be temporary until Fai could trade places with the real Fai.

And so Fai smiles - because any happiness he can give Kurogane and the others is all he’ll ever be worth. It's a temporary happiness that was never supposed to last or even exist in the first place.

And it’s not until we get OUT of Seresu that Fai finally has the opportunity to build himself from the ground up and start living for himself. For his own happiness and those around him.

And finally commit to the idea of being able to (and being WORTHY OF) making Kurogane happy in the long term.

Which is where we then get the punching scene in Nihon. And it’s perfect.

But OH BOY did past!me say some things that sounded correct but were utterly and completely wrong at every level.

[mbti-notes]

I'm an INFP living what I could probably define as the worst period of my life. I'm not able to get interested in anything anymore. I spend my mornings doing the things I must do, then lay on a bed and do nothing for the rest of the day. I tried to force myself to act, but it doesn't really change anything - I'm just a robot following a task, with no passion or curiosity whatsoever. I feel nothing but pain and everything around me looks empty. I see all of these enthusiastic people around me and

[con’t: wonder where do they take that interest from. I remember when I used to be like them, but it’s like remembering about someone else’s life. I have no idea how to get back there. I look in the mirror and all I see is a stupid, flawed individual, unable to change, to learn, to socialize, to get better - just useless, really - and the more I force myself to do interesting things, to get inspired, to go out, to enjoy life, the more I feel detached from everything. I don’t know what else to do. My…]

Was there another part to your question because I didn’t receive it? Have you considered the possibility of depression and talking to a therapist? I discuss type and cognitive dysfunction but if your problem is more serious than that, then professional help might be necessary. You describe common symptoms of Si loop disconnection and Te grip judgmentalness, and both have been discussed many times before, search the relevant tags. Si loop and Te grip involve two cognitive mistakes: 1) You’re looking in the wrong direction. You look to a prior version of you and your life and want to go backward, which disconnects you from the present and the future. This produces irrational pessimism because all you can see is how nothing will ever measure up to the glorified and mythologized past. 2) You mistake your subjective Feeling judgments as objective factual judgments. You nitpick and judge everything negatively as though your evaluations are purely objective when they are merely an outcrop of your unhappy feelings. This produces a hypercritical mindset because you’re desperately looking to “correct” everything you perceive as being “wrong” (inferior Te) as opposed to getting back in touch with yourself, who you are, and what you care about (dominant Fi)

Let’s say that I believe your general claim that you can’t care about anything. Then why are you even here asking me about it? Why even bother to lift your fingers to type? Because there is obviously a part of you that not only cares, but cares deeply. Instead of listening to and nurturing the caring part of you (i.e. Fi+Ne), you repeat the “I can’t care” story to yourself over and over and over again. Why? People unconsciously repeat a dysfunctional thought pattern because they get something from it, people unconsciously hold on to pain because it serves their ego. The purpose of Si loop is usually to shield oneself from feeling the pain of hurt or disappointment.

INFPs need auxiliary Ne development in order to look forward to the future and maintain an optimistic outlook on life. It’s no coincidence that irrational pessimism is the consequence of poor auxiliary Ne development. Here’s my guess: You care about life, you care about yourself, you care about the world. You need things, you want things, you dream about things, you hope for things. But, at some point, you came to believe that it’s impossible to get any of the things that you need, want, dream of, or hope for. Thus, you shut yourself down, you told yourself over and over again that you have no desires, no cares, no motivation… and then you are spared the deep pain of disappointment. What you haven’t understood is that, by cutting out the negative emotions, you can’t feel the positive ones either, you can’t feel anything after awhile when you go into denial and shut down your feeling life for the sake of ego defense.

NFs need to live a life that gives them a sense of higher calling or purpose. By confining yourself only to the activities you “must” routinely do (Te), your spirit slowly withers and dies (Fi). By being too afraid to hope and dream (Ne), you disconnect from everything positive in the world (Si loop). Life contains progress and success just as it contains setbacks and failures. The REALISTIC way to live life is to learn from the negative in order to achieve the positive. When you can’t be realistic, then Ne is unhealthily extreme and you believe that nothing is positive as long as there is any hint of the negative, then of course it seems not worth it to ever try, because there will always be something negative to disappoint you or “taint” the purity of your dreams.

People always have a choice in every moment of the day about what kind of attitude to adopt toward the world, and it seems you keep making the wrong choice: Choice #1: Live your life realistically, face up to the negative and learn how to transform it into something positive through proper Ne development. The negative tells you where improvement is necessary. Yes, you feel the pains of failure and disappointment, but you also get to feel the optimism of hope and the joy of your successes. You grow and make progress incrementally. Choice #2: Live your life never allowing yourself to hope and dream because the prospect of pain and disappointment is too scary and you want to distance from it. Convince yourself that you are terrible, the world is terrible, and numb yourself to everything.

But, wait. You chose #2 and you still feel pain and disappointment anyway, much deeper pain than you ever imagined possible. Why? Because there is a part of you that will always wish for something better and it cannot be silenced, it won’t settle down until you actually DO something to make your life better, not just to enjoy empty pursuits but rather to find a higher purpose and calling to care about. Not allowing yourself to hope and dream for more is like cutting off a limb or gouging out your own eyes, i.e., choice #2 (the pain of self-harm) hurts much much more than choice #1 (the pain of hard work) over the long run. Wishing is different from hoping. Wishing is passive and helpless; Hoping is active and initiating. Wishing means wasting your life away criticizing and complaining about how things are impossible; Hoping means envisioning new possibilities and caring enough about yourself to bring them to life.

The trigger of Si loop is different for each individual. Some infps tried and failed too many times in life, some were raised by parents who discouraged positive Ne use, some never learned how to plan and get organized, some got hurt terribly and never got over it, some chose the wrong path under pressure and eventually felt powerless to change course, etc. Resolve whatever unresolved pain that got you stuck in this place. 

To get out of inferior grip, engage your dominant function and develop the auxiliary function as explained in the study guides. Instead of comparing yourself to the past, envision a better you for the future, then make it happen. The energy for self-improvement comes from self-love and the desire to make the most out of your potential. Reflect on who you are, envision who you want to be, what you really need and want out of life, what you hope to achieve in life, how to develop your talents and skills, and how you can contribute something positive to make the world a better place than if you hadn’t existed. 

[easilydistractedbyfanfic]

glad to know i'm not the only one that is getting sick and tired of them introducing new characters when they should be focusing on our current character's storylines not adding more for new characters that i am not going to give a crap about i find it tiring to be honest

Hi! Sorry to be a little behind on answering this but oh good grief YES you’re not the only one tired of new characters! Listen - did I like Diyoza and McCreary in S5? Yep, I totally did. Did I find Josephine, Russell, Gabriel and even Simone rather intriguing in S6? Sure. But adding them - and any new character who will have more than just a few lines - comes at a pretty big cost, especially for the last season, IMHO. And considering that Raven, Murphy, Echo, Emori, Jordan, Indra, Diyoza & Niylah (among others) were missing from various episodes in S6 in order to focus on NEW characters...well I’m just not interested in repeats of that in S7. 

I can’t speak for the entire fandom, but I do think the majority of us are still watching because of the characters we’ve connected with, and that means we want to SEE them. We want them onscreen with actual lines. We want them to have a storyline that feels full and fulfilling - not only for the character/actor that we like but also for us as viewers. I’d love to end on some measure of hope for this show (although I’m not holding my breath), but at the very least, I want plenty of screen time for the characters I enjoy most. I want to see them interact with each other and complete the arcs that have been years in the making. I don’t want to “get to know” anyone NEW when everyone OLD still feels so unfinished to me! No disrespect intended whatsoever for new actors on the show - I’m sure they’re great. But although this show tends to prioritize plot over characterization far more than I’d like (talking to you, JRoth), I’m here for the CHARACTERS. 

Of course new planets and the Eligius criminal crew is going to mean new faces, but I’m really hoping any plot lines with new actors are kept to a minimum. Why would I want side plots with random newbies when I could have interactions between Indra & Diyoza (omg perfection let me have this), or conversations with lots of subtext and longing looks between Octavia & Niylah (Niytavia should happen dang it), or how about Miller tells Jordan a story about Monty and Harper from when they first landed on Earth as Delinquents (it’s the last season, bring on the sentimental stuff). And oh, yes please with more Echo and Emori possibilities because THAT could go to some interesting places (in my head it’s already happening). And I would not be myself if I did not mention my absolute obsessive desire to see Raven & Murphy make out, even though I’d settle for them having more than six minutes of shared screentime. But that’s a whole other discussion... Anyway, you get my point! There’s so many dynamics that can be explored - and should be - with the characters we already know! And I want THAT stuff, not rando dude #5 flirting with Raven! 

UGHHHHHH. The amount of mental space this show has used up in my head over the past 6 seasons is probably staggering. I love mythology and symbolism and religious imagery and history and classism and culture and morality and thinking about what I’d do in a dystopian future (oh wait maybe I should say current events).... My past obsessive shows were LOST and Twin Peaks and X-FIles. I want to believe! And I want S7 of t100 to not let me down. I guess time will tell but it’s tougher to be optimistic with every new character announcement. Thanks for the ask - you probably got more rambling answer than you wished for, but I’m completely with you on not wanting new people now that we’re at the end! ;D