#SORRY. I JUST DISAGREE

[theriverbeyond]

I don't think they're "bashing it with their closed fist" bad

However

I do a 100% believe Dulcinea, Palamedes, and by extension Cam have their entire view of sex shaped by cheap erotica. Imagine the worst understanding of anatomy, what is sexual pleasing, and most blatantly inserted author kink, and they all thought that was just normal and how things were supposed to work

Pyrrha has sex with Pal and Cam and they're saying the most batshit terrible dialogue she's heard since Cytherea, because Pal religiously reads smut and Cam has been with Pal for years

okay I hear what you are saying but I need to raise you this: the 6th House final exams involve reciting erotic poetry. the 6th House in general are a bunch of nerdy weirdos. 2/3 of their military is specifically about going out to fuck and breed. The Nine Houses in general, culturally, are literally based on anatomy (necromancy), not even getting into the extensive education Palamedes (and Cam by extension, as his cavalier) would recieve as a necromancer.

Palamedes and Camilla and the rest of the 6th were getting age appropriate sexual education starting at age 6 and repeated every year thereafter until maticulation, with details and info etc of course updated to corespond to their respective developmental stage.

what I mean is: 6th House erotica is painstakingly, unwholesomly accurate. Even in BAD 6th House erotica they can still find the clit. Even in PURPOSEFULLY UNREALISTIC 6th House erotica everything is still very much logically supported.

So: theory is different than practice (esp. because Camilla gives acearo vibes TO ME!!!) but to ME, Palamedes is the snobbiest smut writer/reader you have ever seen. The man has standards. He reads and writes the hottest and horniest erotica you could ever imagine and 90% of it is for the in-univese equivalent of Hockey RPF. He is not inherently opposed to author insert or unrealistic anatomy, but that shit better have correct grammer, coherent characters, and a compelling emotional arc. etc

[pastabaguette]

look guys i don’t like to argue but i hate it when people portray equius and nepeta like this:

i mean, they’re both just thirteen, come on.

equius is not her parental figure, and nepeta isn’t a fussy baby that can’t eat her fruits and veggies! equius isn’t some malicious evil guy, he’s just a stupid little teenager. that goes for eridan too (and i guess like, all of the trolls, but especially those two). nepeta’s not some innocent little baby. she’s the same age as all her friends. she kills huge wild beasts on the regular for consumption.

a lot of dubs i’ve seen, too, make nepeta sound like a toddler, and equius like a whole grown adult man, and i don’t really like it because neither of them are those things. (granted, i don’t watch too many dubs, so maybe i am wrong on this)

[bixels]

tarpit site.

[luna-lovegreat]

Wars and Wild as knights in Lu

They have issues.

I have a lot of thoughts on Wild and Wars and their relationship (Order of this post is talking about saluting, Wild and Wars' different perspectives, memory issues, and fire) Rant time.

No saluting!!

So Wild took a formal- almost/awkwardly saluting pose when Wars confronted him in 'Entrance pt.2'

It's similar to the first time Wild addressed Wars as 'captain'. His left hand is up from where a salute should be, and his overall posture is awkward, with his shoulders and right hand raised, but it's clear he's trying to do a salute in the presence of a fellow knight.

In the second example his hand is behind his head, but his posture is very straight and his right arm stiff- he's again attempting a formal saluting position. Which is still awkward

It is less clear but his changes in posture clued me in. He goes from like a deer in the headlights to visibly sweating to straight backed and looking up at Wars- looking at the changes in his body language

Side note but I literally love how Jojo draws the champions tunic so much-

We can't see the action of Wild's body language in a comic, just the positions he went to. But he visibly leaned away from Wars before switching to a straight backed saluting-like posture. He's clearly freaked out, hence Twilight's face: >:(

I think that Wild taking somewhat military poses around Wars is important to their relationship issues because it comes from his struggle with memory and identity

.

So like. All of them have different perspectives

Wars

I adore Wars. He is baby and I love him. I think it is also important to acknowledge that he would not speak to any of the others this way.

And the scarf man cmon it's so pretty they are so cute-

Why is Wars talking to Wild like this? He's called him out and reprimanded him multiple times in front of the others. Wild has taken it well but tbh if it was Legend I think he would be on fire.

To some extent I think he is in captain mode. I think that he has trouble seeing Wild as not a knight. Wars gives Wild respect as a knight who sacrificed for his kingdom, but now it seems he's taking it away as a knight who's not doing well enough since he 'disregarded the plan'

At least I think that's the outside (or Wild's) view of it. But Wars internally really cares about Wild and he saw him run up to a giant and lose it. Different ways of showing concern perhaps?

Who wouldn't want to keep Wild from getting more scars?

I just. Don't doubt for a second Wars really cares about Wild- even if the way he's acting still isn't cool. He has no right to treat him like a soldier any more than the rest of the chain, and right now I think Wild is acting as the more mature person.

Wild

I adore Wild. He is baby and I love him. I think it is also important to acknowledge that although he is clearly making efforts after Twilight's injury, Wild has ignored Wars for the majority of Lu, by not speaking to him much, and not thanking or acknowledging Wars when he directly helped him. (Small example being walking with Hyrule not Wars when injured and not directly responding to Wars)

Wars cares about and respects Wild, but it seems Wild wants nothing to do with him, and he's been cold towards Wars for the majority of Lu. To Wild, Wars reminds him of his perceived failure. Which is valid feelings, but still not fair. And I think that ask is talking about these two.

The thing I love about this is each of them are right and wrong in some ways, leading to the tension between them. So fully blaming either of them is not logical

The rest of the chain is just vibing. Except twilight who's mad and wants them to just grow up, but. Heros of courage not wisdom @uniquevoidflowers ;)

And that ask- '''Are any of the Links ever jealous of another Link for adventures that were less difficult/life threatening?'' ''When you hear Wild say he 'hates' someone you'll have your answer.''' somewhat leads to my next point-

Wild's identity and memory issues exacerbate all of this

In Entrance, Twilight is being stressed and defensive, that's ok. What concerns me most is that Twilight has talked with Wild through stuff like this in his rough moments

Wild has tried to be formal several times- he is not very good at it

Four's face I can't didnwidkekfjej

Wild isn't and can't be 'him'- the same 'perfect' (<actually has crippling anxiety) knight he was before, and Twilight knows this. And I agree with him a bit, I think, that Wars is making things worse in Wild's mind by being that perfect soldier, and seemingly holding Wild to a standard he isn't

Wild's attempts at saluting is symbolic of that- Wars makes him feel like a failure trying to be the person he should be. But Wild shouldn't be anyone but himself.

Anyways. Fire.

Wars and Wild have issues, and I want them to work through all their relationship drama so they can reach their PEAK dynamic, which is obviously this

I mean like. We need these two to be friends

Anyways. Wild is in this constant state of identity crisis, and being around Wars has not been beneficial- neither of them is or has been showing the other the respect they deserve. Not as knights, but as people and brothers. They need a get along shirt.

All this Art is by Jojo @linkeduniverse au!

:)

[flysafepapi]

idk if this has been done but you can't tell me im wrong

[spacerelativity]

me and my best/boyfriend who is also me but not

[theminecraftbee]

it's fun because the things that appeal to me most about the three canonical evil clones/twins of hermitcraft are similar, but they're all different.

evil x appeals to me because he is very much Just Some Guy, for all that he's an evil force of nature; when he's sympathetic, it's because he's Just Some Guy who's been shackled to the terrible fate of being "evil", but when he's a villain (like in season eight!), the things that make him villainous also aren't the supernatural aesthetics, but the ways he is also the evil of being just some guy. for all the lightning and thunder and echo of xisuma's appearance, he isn't anyone special. (xisuma is.)

helsknight appeals to me for almost the opposite reason: this isn't just some guy, this is you, explicitly, a demon that possessed your clone and possesses all the things that are bad about you, magnified. he's a mirror, inherently, in his very creation. in the stories where he's a threat, he's menacing because he's a mirror of someone we should like; in the stories where he's sympathetic, we must confront how much of ourselves are also mirrors. (what happens if you don't like what you see in those mirrors, anyway?)

empires!false is somewhere in-between; she's not a mirror but she is the result. she's learning something you'd rather have forgotten about your past, and at her most sympathetic, we feel for the way she's been cast aside so false can 'fix her', the things done to her memory. at her least sympathetic, though, she's reflecting these pains onto others; violence begets violence, and even with it missing, the past begets her. there's no looking at empires!false without seeing the echoes of what false did to her. (there's no looking at false without it either.)

............then they also all appeal to me by being ridiculous failguys but like if you want to be DRAMATIC ABOUT IT, the ways they appeal to me are like the above,

[the-elusive-soleil]

My new favorite Halenthir idea:

Haleth does battle, meets Caranthir, feels some feelings, heads west per canon and eventually reaches Brethil...and becomes acquainted with Finrod Nom Felagund as he tries to talk his kinsman into letting the Haladin settle in the area.

At some point, Haleth and Finrod are talking and he compliments her on her mastery of elvish languages, and she's like "oh yeah, the lord of Thargelion and his people taught us". (Note: this is not the AU where Caranthir only teaches them Quenya.) And Finrod's like, "hey, that's my annoying grumpy cousin!"

And they chat about Caranthir a bit, because Haleth also thinks Caranthir is annoying and grumpy and is willing to joke back and forth with Finrod on the subject, but she's not willing to go along with it once she feels that Caranthir is being insulted/mocked. And somewhere along the line Finrod clocks that "oh, there's something going on here".

Which is confirmed when, at one point, she mentions that Caranthir wanted her to stay and as good as proposed marriage.

She's about to reel off her usual list of rationalizations for why she couldn't possibly have, but Finrod gets there first with "oh, but of course it was for the best in the end that you left him, elves and Men are just too [dramatic gesture] metaphysically different to ever be together, it's always destined to end in tragedy", and basically tries to Athrabeth her.

Except that Haleth doesn't particularly care to be Athrabethed. Like, yes, she made the choice to do what needed to be done for her people instead of what she maybekindasorta wanted, but that was her choice. She's not really into this smarmy know-it-all elf patiently explaining to her like she's a child that she can't have Caranthir because ~*Fate*~ said so.

And, well, her people have a safe home now. Her sister-in-law will make a good enough peacetime leader until her nephew is grown up.

So she gathers the Haladin, explains what she's going to do. Most of them, naturally, opt to stay in Brethil, but a few adventurous or Thingol-averse sorts join her on the trip she ends up making back to Thargelion.

Where she marches up to Caranthir and essentially says, "I'm going to marry you to spite your irritating blond cousin."

Which is the best reason Caranthir has ever heard of for doing anything.

(They're married for like seventy years and ridiculously happy and in this one, Caranthir's brothers find out fairly early on because he won't stop sending smug letters to Finrod every year with updates on his marriage to his amazing adaneth wife and sketched peredhel baby pictures and so forth.)

[qiu-yan]

as a jc stan it's now time for my shot at the obligatory shipping poll

[tsukasalover]

it’s kinda stupid to call rui “sassy” or say he was acting “mean” for simply doing what any person would do realistically after tsukasa humiliated nene in the main story. i swear this fandom has gone over this a thousand times and yet for some reason it’s still so hard for people to accept that tsukasa was being a self centered asshole. that’s not even exaggerating anything that’s just the truth.

btw (if im wrong correct me) but rui has never gotten angry at someone unreasonably he’s actually quite mature and doesn’t just?? explode over things so i dont know why him refusing to work with tsukasa even after nene forgave him is seen as a “mean” thing… let’s not forget he still believed tsukasa hadnt changed at all and only wanted to be in shows for selfish purposes. it’s not bad to admit that tsukasa is egotistical and has acted much more mean in unacceptable ways than rui + has had to own up to this and work hard to grow as a person over time

[turtleblogatlast]

One of the biggest things that makes me see Leo as trans is absolutely the size of his carapace in comparison to his brothers’.

And I’m not talking about height! I’m specifically looking at his shell here, because when you compare him to the others, particularly Donnie who is nearly the same height as Leo, it’s very clear that Leo’s carapace is much longer in proportion to the rest of his body.

Like - standing side by side, even though Donnie is shorter his carapace ends noticeably higher up than Leo’s does. And I like this not only because it really helps push the idea that Leo could very likely be trans (or intersex!), but it’s also just a fun design difference between them.

(It also lends way to future scenarios of Donnie eventually getting taller than Leo, but sitting down still has Leo being the taller one haha.)

[natjennie]

what's weird about the fantasy high drama is that like. it seems to me like people forget d&d is primarily a) a game you play with your friends and also b) luck based.

I mean it's fine to say that "nothing felt like a challenge" and "they just dominated everything and there weren't any stakes" but like. it's not as if they weren't up against huge threats. they lost the mall fight. the last stand was an onslaught of enemies. they fought a dozen dragons from an airship. the fights were hard. they're just really good. they've had very good dice luck in general this season and are all very high level and highly specialized. fig is gonna beat deception and performance checks. adaine's gonna figure out the arcana. riz is gonna succeed investigations. like. for some reason their strategical competence and wisely picked abilities are. a downside? a disappointment?

the thing about d&d that you need to remember is it's first and foremost a game. it's mostly random and it takes you down weird paths and you're playing to have fun with your friends. the dice are literally telling the story that it's their time, it's their year. they've struggled enough. they've trained enough. they're good at what they do. and in my post about the academic/domestic/personal stressors being the focus, d&d doesn't have any other system to work them out than rolling different skills. that's what d&d is. brennan set specific challenge levels for different tasks and the players strategized to prioritize which abilities they were strongest in. the challenges were there. and the players rose to them. they were both smart in their delegation of responsibilities and lucky with their dice rolls. of which, both are foundations of d&d.

don't mistake them being good players and getting lucky with there being no hardship. just because they smashed through the wall, that doesn't mean the wall wasn't strong. they were just stronger.

[curseofdelos]

I finished re-reading TLH recently, and I want to talk about the common fan interpretation of Piper as a pick me girl for a sec (let me preface this whole post by clarifying that while this is ultimately a defense of Piper as a character, it is also a critique of how Rick wrote her, Drew, and the rest of cabin 10)

The way cabin 10 is written in the books has never been great. Very early on in TLT, Rick makes a point to establish that Aphrodite had both sons and daughters:

Take note of how Rick explicitly genders Aphrodite kids in this paragraph, but uses the gender neutral "kids" to refer to the children of every other god. This is a very deliberate writing choice, and I can't think of any reason why he would have done this other than to (initially anyway) avoid associating womanhood with vanity/interest in personal appearances.

...And then in every book after this, cabin 10 heavily skews female, and traditional femininity becomes the butt of almost every joke about them.

Cabin 10 doesn't get any real focus until TLH with the introduction of Piper, Drew, and the rest of Cabin 10, in which Rick spends a lot of time establishing how different Piper is from the rest of her cabin because she rejects traditional femininity. Piper cuts her own hair, she doesn't wear makeup or care about fashion, she hates dresses etc. This is in direct contrast with Drew who's often described as wearing heavy makeup, having perfectly done hair, manicured nails etc.

Note that Piper's description of Drew's appearance is fairly neutral. Her problem with Drew is not in how she chooses to dress, but in her behaviour.

This would be fine if it weren't for the fact that every time Drew's appearance is described, it is directly preceded and/or followed by her doing something heinous. She insults and degrades Piper's appearance within seconds of meeting her, and we see this again in the Cabin 10 scene where she bullies and manipulates their siblings - kicking them out of the bathroom mid-shower, dumping a bin filled with used tampons on the floor and making them clean it up, etc.

Piper and Drew are in direct competition throughout the entirety of TLH. Piper strongly disapproves of the way Drew runs the cabin, they have differing opinions on Silena Beauregard (despite the fact Piper doesn't actually know her but I digress), and they're both interested in pursuing Jason romantically - Piper out of genuine attraction, and Drew out of the desire to break his heart for the Aphrodite Rite of Passage.

The narrative at every turn pits them against each other. Piper's intentions are always painted as pure and kindhearted while Drew is consistently characterised as a stereotypical mean girl who hurts others simply because she can. Drew is never given any motivation for acting the way she does, and her sole role in the story is to act as an obstacle for Piper to overcome so she could become counsellor (which is kind of pointless considering Piper never interacts with her cabin again after this). She's flat and two-dimensional, and never gets any real character development. Her sole personality trait is mean.

The result of all of this is that traditional femininity gets associated with shitty behaviour, while the rejection of traditional femininity gets associated with kindness and generosity. It should be stressed that Piper herself doesn't actually think that she's better than Drew because she doesn't wear makeup etc; Piper's issues entirely lie with Drew's behaviour. The worst Piper ever says is calling all of cabin 10 "shallow" which is no different to how the other characters talk about them (which is still a problem to be clear; it's just not a problem with Piper specifically, but how the narrative characterises cabin 10 as a whole). It's the narrative that paints femininity as lesser because of the way it positions tomboy Piper (the protagonist) as a better person than highly feminine Drew (the antagonist).

In fact, the most explicitly we ever see the book paint Piper's appearance as preferable to Drew's is in Jason's POV - not Piper's. After Piper gets claimed and Aphrodite changes her appearance, Jason spends several chapters going on and on about how much more beautiful and desirable Piper is when she's not dressed up or wearing makeup.

Because of all of this, it's not difficult to see why so many people in this fandom have interpreted Piper as a pick me 'not like other girls' type girl. The narrative constantly presents her as a better person than the more feminine Drew, and Jason (the boy they're competing over) chooses her at least partly because of how naturally beautiful she is without trying.

However, even though I do understand where this interpretation of her character came from, I do want to push back on it for a number of reasons.

Firstly, it is explicitly stated several times in TLH that the reasons Piper doesn't wear makeup and cuts her own hair is because (1) she doesn't like being the centre of attention (see the first screenshot of this post), and (2) she's rebelling against her father.

Piper's entire character arc in TLH centres around her initially being insecure at the start of the book to becoming more confident over the course of their quest. It is stated on several occasions early on that Piper doesn't like being the centre of attention, but by the end, she feels more comfortable in her own skin. She goes from being embarrassed/hurt by Drew's comments about her to laughing them off and standing up to her by the end.

The term "pick me girl" refers to girls who do things for external, mostly male validation. This is the exact opposite of why Piper doesn't wear makeup or conform to traditional femininity. She does this precisely because she does NOT want to draw attention to herself. The only male who's attention she is trying to get is her father's, and she's doing this by acting out in ways he doesn't approve of. Piper does want validation from her father, but she's not cutting her own hair to get his validation; she's so starved for affection that she wants any attention from him, even if that attention is negative.

Similarly, a major point of conflict for Piper is whether or not Jason is attracted to her, but she is not rejecting feminine things because she wants to impress him Jason does find those qualities in her attractive, but Piper held these opinions long before they even met. It was Jason/the narrative that paints those qualities in Piper attractive, not Piper herself. (Side note: there's a lot more to be said about how their relationship was written in TLH, but that isn't relevant to get into that here.)

The other reason why I want to push back on the interpretation of Piper as a pick me girl is that she's a queer woman. In a straight patriarchal society, women (women of colour especially) are often expected and pressured to perform gender in particular ways - wearing makeup, dressing femininely, being attracted to boys and exclusively boys. In much the same way that Piper's coming out now makes it possible to read her relationship with Jason as compulsory heterosexuality, it's also possible to read her discomfort with traditional femininity as discomfort with being a straight girl. It's possible to retroactively read Piper's dislike for feminine things as her feeling uncomfortable with heterosexuality but is too closeted at this point to realise it. She does, after all, cut her hair very short at the end of TBM while she is the process of exploring her sexuality.

(To be clear: I'm not arguing that this is what Rick had always intended for her - I assume he expected Jason/Piper would be endgame at the time he was writing TLH - but I do think there's a 'death of the author' interpretation available here that her hatred of dresses etc is an early sign of her being a closeted queer woman who is beginning to explore her gender presentation and sexuality.)

I feel that sometimes, in their efforts to (rightly) criticise the way femininity gets treated in this series, some people act as if makeup is in intrinsic part of womanhood and that Piper is a misogynist for not wanting to wear it. This is not true. It is not inherently misogynistic for a woman to dislike it - especially when that woman is queer, and especially in today's society where many women are pressured into wearing makeup to be taken seriously. Piper disliking makeup is not the problem.

The problem with Piper's story in TLH is that the narrative consistently presents her as a better person than the more feminine Drew, and a more desirable option for Jason because of how beautiful she is without trying really hard like Drew and the other Aphrodite girls do. Because every highly feminine character is either a villain (Drew) or a joke (Valentina in TOA), the result of Piper and Drew's rivalry is that femininity gets demonised by the narrative. Again, it's not that Piper herself thinks she's better than Drew for hating fashion; it's the way the story puts these characters in opposition to each other that results in femininity being framed as lesser.

I think a writer with a better grasp of women's issues (and queer women's issues especially) could have written a great story here on gender as a performance, and an exploration on conforming (Drew) VS rebelling (Piper) against gender norms! How there really is no winning and women get harassed for being too feminine AND for not being feminine enough (See: the jokes about Clarisse in PJO not being a girl/being manly because she's violent and rough around the edges)! What we got instead was a story that carries the deeply unfortunate implication that girls who don't care about their appearance are kinder and more desirable than girls who do.

It's not Piper that's the problem; it's the narrative. I think a lot of people have been conflating the two, and have been unfairly pinning the blame onto Piper's characterisation when the fault lies with the plot, and with Drew's characterisation as a flat two-dimensional mean girl stereotype. I think if Drew had been given a redemption arc like Clarisse, or some amount of depth that explains why she hates Silena and acts the way she does, or even if she and Piper had learned to respect each other despite their differences, then we would be having a very different conversation.

[sabh0]

Little rant and probably a controversial opinion, please don't burn me at the stake for that If i asked you to guess how many dazai anon accounts have i blocked here till now, what number would u think of? Bc i just checked - i currently have 9 of their accounts blocked. 2 from this week alone. And it's not like i go around hunting for them. I just randomly open tumblr to check what silly things did ppl say about my art, and then i see 50 different reblogs, comments or asks from dazai anon alone, being no longer only mean to Chuuya or skk, but bashing my art or telling me to off myself!!! Yay!! And u know, it wasn't a problem in the beginning. The stuff they write is comedic with how stupid it is. I could also interact with em smh (ngl, they left me for a good while after i drew them and chuuya making out that one time). And as i said, before they didn't attack me personally. But then i started getting comments that i shouldn't interact with dazai anon bc something something they're mentally unstable? Like im sorry, but how is this my problem. They come to me and regularly tell me to hurt myself, but i can't even reply to them bc "sab, it's no use, they're sick smth smth smth, just block them"?? Like bruh aight, it's just that sitting silently actually starts to affect me. Bc no matter how many accounts i block, they come back with a new one the moment they realize they're blocked. And the whole carousel of "block, dont interact" starts again. I just think it's not really alright to tell ppl that they can't in any way stand up for themselves? Why do i have to care about personal wellbeing or a sad backstory of someone who doesn't respect mine? Why should i even know about their problems? They're a complete stranger to me and i don't really go around reading random people's biographies on the internet. Like aughhh it's seriously starting to annoy me now,,,, i'm not saying ppl ACCEPT what dazai anon does, but using the excuse that they're not okay mentally just doesn't sit right with me, idk. Mental health problems should never be an excuse for hurting others, imo.

[front-facing-pokemon]

[sorrelpaws]

no offense but i genuinely fear that their potential dynamic will go severely underutilized