#State Actually Writes Something

[iwritenarrativesandstuff]

I've been thinking a lot about the one-dimensional kinda fandom interpretations of Dazai and Chuuya in particular - the overemphasis on Dazai's weird brand of mischief/manipulation and Chuuya's anger and tendency to lash out and how it's not like these traits are... wrong, per se - these are their surface level/immediately notable characteristics - it's just that it misses the nuance as to why these traits likely exist.

What these interpretations don't fully capture is their very similar cores deep down - two people plagued by feelings of alienation, human inadequacy and repeated loss. Despite starting from these very similar places, they both dealt with the issue in near opposite ways. Dazai numbed himself to pain (remember: he hates pain! I cannot emphasize this enough!) and rarely gets close to anyone for fear he will lose them - his loss led to apathy, a withdrawal from humanity, a fear that he will always be empty inside - his ability: No Longer Human. Chuuya, on the other hand, refuses to numb himself and instead feels every single emotion in full and values his bonds with others over anything. He wants to belong and makes efforts to be perceived as a part of his group. Underlying this, however, is a kind of tired grief paired with resilience - remember that his ability is Upon the Tainted Sorrow. Not anger, or rage.

Sorrow is what results from this kind of heavy identity crisis and loss - for both of them. Think of Odasaku's read on Dazai as someone who looked close to tears when "acting" in front of the sniper poised to shoot him, describing him to Gide as a too-smart child left in the dark, or the way Stormbringer constantly reminds us that Chuuya is 16 and the desperation he feels in the scene where he holds his own dying clone, unable to help him.

Both characters carry a melancholy, resulting from their respective issues with their own humanity - I know I'm not the first one to comment on how their abilities could just as easily be referring to each other as well as themselves. This reads as very intentional to me - much like Atsushi's story begins as a clear parallel to the short story Rashoumon and Akutagawa sometimes being referred to in more beast-like terms than man, it makes sense that Dazai and Chuuya would reference each other in a similar vein.

And if that was the end of it, then we would expect that deep sorrow to shine through in both characters, but it rarely does except in pivotal moments. That's because the both of them have had to constantly deal with external threats - they believe they cannot afford to show vulnerability.

So, what you get instead is Dazai taking a kind of twisted ownership over his inhumanity and using it to make people afraid of him and to control everything so that he is never blindsided and hurt again, in the process, further alienating himself and making his issues worse. He inflicts fear so he doesn't have to be afraid. He can relax and be as silly as he wants - so long as everything around him is completely according to his predictions. There's a bonus to his foolish demeanour as well: hardly anyone can read him well enough to get close.

Then you get Chuuya, who feels so strongly and so much that it has no choice but to boil over, and due to never being able to or feeling comfortable with being anything but "the strongest", he hides moments when he is touched, or worried, or grieving, with anger and violence and defensiveness. As such, he is always seen as more weapon than person, a cut above the rest, forever standing out to others no matter how much he tries to integrate. The closest he came to true belonging was wrenched away from him before he could have a chance to know what that would actually feel like with the death of the Flags.

These surface traits are defense mechanisms. And the amusing thing to me is that likely means these two would love if that's all most people ever saw of them. (Of course, they clearly do want to be seen and accepted, but defense mechanisms become automatic over time because they often feel much safer. Likely another reason they clash so much - they see each other, and it is deeply uncomfortable for them both.)

So, you have Dazai defending himself with his two-faced nature, making jokes and/or manipulating everyone in the vicinity, and Chuuya defending himself with intimidation and anger, never letting any vulnerability show through because anger is easier but at the core of all of this is that loss and that grief and the sorrow and fear that pervades from it.

[danmeichael]

"shen qingqiu is a liar who is lying about his feelings so we can't ACTUALLY tell how he feels about anything"

so you admit that you can tell he is lying and by extension you can actually discern what his true feelings on the matter are and that he's just unwilling to admit to them.

[ingravinoveritas]

Noticing some very interesting parallels between Georgia's Insta caption yesterday/Michael's tweet tonight vs. both of their respective social media posts from the night of the NTAs (when Michael presented David with an award) in 2021...

Then:

Now:

...Comments? Thoughts?

[fatuismooches]

EVEN MORE CUTE DOTTORE MOMENTS TO MAKE YOU SMILE 🙏 (because I am too tired to post anything of quality)

[waystarresourceco]

Harriet Walter on how Caroline has influenced or realtes to each of the golden trio.

“She probably is a bit frightened by Siobhan because she’s quite like her dad and is very very smart about stuff that maybe Caroline isn’t. I don’t think she resents – I think she’s quite competitive for her affection because she admires her. I think it’s very possible for a mother to look up to her daughter if she’s not very like her, because I don’t think they are very alike.

I think If anything, funnily enough I think the one who’s most like – Caroline has flowed a bit into Kendall in that I think she has more depths than we’ve seen. A bit more inside torture than we’ve seen. And I think she’s also flowed into Roman because she’s got that glib “ha ha ha” every line is a joke defense mechanism. So I think those are the people she’s influnced or influenced by – I think Shiv is very different from her and very much her own thing and I think she’s quite scared of her really. And of course Shiv probably wants big affection too but just really doesn’t beg for it in the same way that Caroline probably never begged for it from her parents. It’s a terrible kind of poisoned challice, all that welath and power if you’re born into it.”

Excerpt from Excerpt from Still Watching: Succession Season 2 "Dundee" with Dame Harriet Walter – Sept. 29, 2019

[sea-buns]

Holy fuck, man. What a trip Fearne has been on, huh?

You tell her how grateful you are to have her in your life, you flatter her, you tell her you need her, that you have to do this together. You have her make a promise that has this woman, born of chaos and fey, agreeing through shaking hands and a trembling voice.

You make her deceive your friends; you make her follow where they cannot know; you make her help you into this contraption; you make her feed this thing into you despite the fact that you both have been warned extensively of the risks. You make her watch you crumble and splinter and shatter and fracture and burst and implode. You make her watch you die, over and over and over and over, for a minute in agonizing bullet time.

You make her do all these things, because when she tries to back out, when she tries to not be the one who let you do this—how could you do this—

you tell her, "YOU PROMISED."

Because if there's one thing you know, it's that the fey do not break a promise.

[imperiuswrecked]

So I just found out that Jason Aaron (aka the worst Namor writer in the long 80+ years history of the character) is writing Namor.

I'm doing fine (lying).

[reallyhardy]

Sorry what’s up w the Ethan slater stuff? I know him only from your posts / SpongeBob stuff

HI HELLO please buckle in

yep -- the same guy from the spongebob musical, and my posts abut the spongebob musical.

he blew up completely and now the general public knows him as 'ariana grande's new boyfriend' - their relationship seems to have started off the back of co-starring in the upcoming wicked musical film adaptation.

it's just been like. a monkey's paw curling sort of a way for him to get catapulted to fame, as i had always really enjoyed him as a performer (as spongebob, yes, but also in the other roles i'd seen him in,) and my biggest hope back around 2017 was that he would continue in and be really successful in theatre, get a lot of broadway roles, maybe take on some existing parts i thought he'd really suit, like seymour in little shop or ogie in waitress.......... but instead he booked the role of boq from wicked in a massive hollywood film production instead, where he met ariana grande. THE ariana grande.

and then yeah. at some point, he and grande broke up with their respective partners, (slater leaving both his wife AND newborn son) jumped into a new relationship, and now the whole wider internet knows who he is but certainly not for the right reasons.

there's been speculation regarding whether or not grande and slater had cheated on their previous partners before their relationship began with various sources coming out of the woodwork saying "yes they did" and others saying "no they didn't" -- humans are all perfectly capable of making stuff up, the media especially, so i simply don't know who to trust and i admit it had completely shattered my whole good impression of him - PLUS it gave the wider internet an absolutely awful first impression of him, resulting in, yeah, the (frankly, unflattering, sometimes downright cruel) memes of him popping up on twitter and, as i discovered yesterday, in non-theatre youtubers' videos who would literally never have heard of him if not for the slater-grande romance 🥲

FULL COVERAGE of the situation as it was happening can all be found on the lovely @notasimpleslater's blog under the tag 'ozgate' if you want to delve deeper!

[minecraftbookshelf]

Wither Rose Alliance In The AU In Which All the Marriages are Arranged

Fwhip and Mythical Sausage are cousins who grew up together and are functionally siblings

Fwhip and GeminiTay are not biologically related but decided they were twins when they were very small and have been family ever since.

Pearl is related to no one and, in fact, is possibly not human at all. Xornoth and Gem are Suspicious. (Sometimes you spend a lot of time wondering if you’re friends with a human queen or a goddess it just be like that)

Xornoth is technically a member in the way that sometimes that one weird quiet kid gets along with one of the friend group of weird loud kids like a house on fire and so they hang out with them even if they don’t really socialize with them.

Xornoth and Pearl are best friends and Xornoth has no idea how this happened and had very little input on the situation.

Joey has become an adjacent member since he and Xornoth started dating.

The core three of the WRA, the Roseblings squad, are the only ones actively in conflict with the Ocean Alliance, which is the primary reason it has never broken out into all out war despite Sausage’s harassment of the Swamp borders. Because while Pearl enjoys a good fight Xornoth doesn’t particularly want to go to war directly after bringing their country out of isolation. And both Xornoth and Gem suspect that Lizzie Vs Pearl would be some kind of natural disaster and so they are very invested in preventing that fight.

(This is where Scott ends up coming into the equation. RIP)

-

AU Masterpost

[distinguished-slacker]

Angy about how we have known about Mitsuba and Shinoa knowing each other before the formation of the Shinoa squad ever since chapter 8 and still… a decade, 4 months and 5 days later the manga never ever touched this subject again…ever…

[the-exiled-comic]

page 366 previous < > next

[ellies-enrichment]

oh my god my editor for this fic is the slowest editor that has ever existed

*i am the editor for this fic*

[some-pers0n]

(Voice of a person dying from executive dysfunction) Lobotomy would fix me

[elbiotipo]

I don't have the time to write about it because it will become another thesis, but in many agroeexporter countries, the great landowners and corporate movers who keep the agroexporter models often aren't foreign corporations (though they do play a role) but the local elites. In Argentina, it's the local oligarchy of a few mega-rich landowner families and business that produce most of the export crops, and oh do they claim to be more Argentine than anyone else, even as they hate 3/4 of the rest of the country ("se creen los dueños de un país que detestan") But they are the ones who keep the agroeexporter model going and repress or asphixiate any attempt at the construction of a popular alternative. And of course, they are beneficial for the First World who indeed supports them, so eventually their ideological bases end up one and the same. Much like the Larreta-Morales presidential formula: a technocratic "progressive" neoliberal from the capital with an conservative and violent provincial caudillo repressor. What both have in common is that they want the agroexporter, extractivist model going, and they both will seek the help of the capitalist system to do it. Bullrich, by her part, does not even hide her intentions; the discourse for her Order, Property and Capital. Not neeed for marines or the CIA to intervene keep us a colony, she will order the security forces herself for a share of our colonial profits, and will proclaim she's the most patriotic Argentine alive while she does so.

But again, this is all already explained by Galeano and others. Because while it is true the US and Europe has constantly intervened in Latin America, our local elites have also done the most to keep us submited as sources of raw materials and nothing more.

[my-shields-are-down]

Chenford + Emmett

REMINDER: I asked for one word prompts to trigger a fan fiction one shot. This one technically is not because there is more than a single word in the request, but I am going with it.

I’ve got 6-8 one word prompts in various stages of progress left in my queue. Keep them coming - they are busting through my writer’s block and I am having a lot of fUn writing them.

I will be posting all of these on AO3 as a collection when this batch is done.

=======================

Tim laughs every time one of his basketball buddies calls him “Jimmy.” He knows they are calling him a ringer like Jimmy from the movie “Hoosiers” - the guy who can make a shot from anywhere.

Yes, Tim is an excellent shot, be it for 3-pointers at or behind the tape, or the free throws that everyone else hates. Tim excels at those too.

Looking at Tim, you’d think with his height, wing-span and large hands, that he’d be a natural basketball player.

You’d be wrong. Horribly, horribly wrong.

While Tim is fantastic at the “glamour shots” of the game, he is not so great at running and dribbling, blocking, lay-ups, or defense. His dad had entered him in an Elk’s Club Free throw class, then competition when he was in middle school to keep Tim out of his hair while he drank excessively and fucked his way through the club waitresses out back by the dumpsters. Tim saw one poor girl pressed up against a smelly green bin one afternoon and then promptly signed up for anything and everything so he never would have to see that again. He became the reigning Elks Club “Hoop Shoot Free Throw” Champ for 5 years and “Hoop Shoot Wide Out” Champ for 4 years running. He was a master at making those far away shots, he just never learned to how to play the game to set up those shots.

Fast-forward 35 years and now he gets together with his former sergeants (Webb, Jansen, Hendricks and Gibbs) twice a week to play rec ball in the LA County First Responders League. He does a lot of running up and down the court until someone throws him the ball on the 3-point line and he scores.

————

Tim can feel his retro high-top Air Jordans (white with MJ inspired Carolina blue swooshes) loosening up on his left foot. Sure enough, with 3:36 minutes left in the second half of the game they are currently losing, his shoe lace comes untied. That plus the forward momentum from yet another run up the court shoots his wedding band skittering across the court. He always ties the ring to his left shoelace for safe keeping.

When the “object on the court” time out is called, Tim jogs over to group of guys standing around waiting to play to grab his ring from….Emmett. His wife’s one-time ex-boyfriend. The fire fighter whose “hunkiness” they once debated..

Emmett and Tim lock eyes and smile - they were pretty good friends at one point. Emmett pulls his own gold wedding band out from his Kobe jersey on a utilitarian dog tag chain to show Tim the proper way to store his ring during a game.

Tim smiles and says thank you when Emmett hands him his platinum one and is asked, “Who is the lucky girl? Anyone I know?” To which Tim kisses his ring and looks at Lucy’s heartbeat recorded when thinking about Tim (when she’s experiencing butterflies) engraved inside, before bending down and retying his laces, securing the ring with a double knot this time.

Finally, Tim stands back up and smiles his biggest, “I’m so in love” grin and says to Emmett as the referee calls him back to the court, “I never did thank you for breaking up with her. By text message no less. I’ll tell Lucy you said hi.”

———-end———-