#The Mother Fault

[vaguely-concerned]

on this reread of gideon the ninth I am picking up on the frankly hilarious background thread that naberius genuinely seems to want to be buddies with colum asht, in his third house mean girl kind of way. and colum seems to count this as a genuinely painful event amidst a life defined by suffering fhdskjsha

(they're seated next to each other at magnus and abigail's party and naberius keeps trying to drag colum back into conversation (by telling him he's wrong of course) while colum mostly suffers in silence and tries to eat his dinner, and before the duel that was supposed to happen between the eight and the seventh naberius invites himself along to the walk there chattering the whole time and it makes colum, and I quote, 'look like he wished he were deaf'. how hard do you have to work at it to be insufferable to a guy who hangs around silas all day long. can colum ever catch a break. can we just see him have a chill time for like two minutes in alecto the ninth. maybe have a drink with a little umbrella in it. I realize I hope for too much but has he not suffered enough? his day job was basically to go to day trips to hell already, of all the people who could end up stuck in there he's deserved it the least let's fish him out before the series ends huh)

[ninjartistic]

Woe, incomprehensible horrors be upon ye.

[hannahvardit]

pew pew pew

[lesbiandarvey]

SUITS -> 3x16 “No Way Out”

[comradekatara]

sokka’s trademark undying loyalty is born out of a fundamental belief that he is intrinsically worthless outside of what he can provide to those he is loyal to, whereas azula's trademark undying loyalty is born out of a fundamental belief that if she were not loyal to those she is loyal to she would be intrinsically worthless. very subtle distinction, but it matters.

[wmnylander]

Feb 14, 2024

[anna-scribbles]

truest thing gabriel everrr said was that adrien had emilie's flair for the dramatics

[rapidhighway]

The fics where Knuckles has some cool powers from the master emerald or is like a very special guy who talks to the master emerald are so good but I've been thinking. What if he isn't. He's the guardian of the master emerald, not a user. Sonic is the one who can use the chaos emeralds and is basically the chosen one when it come to chaos energy, and Knuckles just guards it.

I just imagine Knuckles, who's been put on angel island and basically sacrificed his entire life to this thing and never received any form of acknowledgment, who then meets Sonic who's basically a chaos energy magnet. Chaos emeralds love him, master emerald responds to him. Sonic is there to use the energy, Knuckles is to only guard it

[michyeosseo]

I am determined to take Shen Li home.

[nthflower]

Why can't I clean the settlements. Please I want to cleans that floors. I never wanted the clean dirt this much in my life. I hate cleaning but I need to clean my pixel settlements. Please

[pizzaboat]

Raine seeing some of Eda's older scars, maybe somewhere on her torso, back or chest and they ask her about it, thinking its from an old duel or her being impulsive and doing something adventurous

And Eda is like, "Oh, uh. My mom's cures backfired more than they helped."

They never helped

And Raine has no idea about what Gwen did in the past and they're puzzled and now very concerned and they press a little more and pull the basic details

Eda gives a few examples of her "cures" while she sounds like she's trying to make it sound anecdotal, but her tone is off, and she sounds more irritated and hurt than soundly past it

Knives, poison, etc. I'm convinced her mom would always try to bring the curse out to essentially exorcise, or even kill the beast one time, and Eda has picked up scars from that. She's very lucky limbs detach

And now Raine is very angry at Gwen, and its onsight with her the next time they see her

Eda: she really messed up... but that's in the past now. She apologised for making me feel like a... you know.

Raine: Did she apologise for trying to kill you???

[whetstonefires]

The reason I keep banging the Jiang Fengmian drum so hard is not that he did nothing wrong--he's definitely in contention for best parenting in this book but that bar is in the ground--but because most of the takes I see about him are so extremely bad.

If you want to slag him off for trying to make choices that would hurt no one, and winding up properly protecting no one as a result, that's valid! That's an interesting and text-based critique, which opens into his parallels with Lan Xichen!

If you want to blame him for being weirdly over-invested in Wei Wuxian and Jiang Cheng being bffs, that's fair, that definitely contributed to the weirdness between them. If you want to say he was a poor communicator, that he fundamentally misunderstood his son, that he failed to be emotionally available in a way his kids could get much use out of, even that he should have figured out a way to stop Yu Ziyuan from creating such a hostile environment, all of that is fair game!

If you want to tackle how the worst thing he did to his kids was die I am so interested in how Wei Wuxian went on to abandon A-Yuan by going to his death, and how that might be tied to how his primary adult role model tied him to a boat and went off to a fight he knew he was going to lose.

After his parents had already left him like that once before, presumably less intentionally.

But no, instead I keep seeing that Jiang Fengmian didn't care. That he never expressed affection. That he actively participated in Yu Ziyuan's fucky game of forcing proxy conflict onto the boys instead of constantly trying (and failing) to shut it down, or that he ignored her bad behavior because it didn't affect him, or that he fought with her constantly, or that he was too much of an unmanly coward to stand up to her when she wanted something.

All of which are directly in contradiction to every scene he's in, and several of which manage to invert or erase the actual conflicts between him and his wife that were the source of all that tension.

And which are really interesting, because some of the most intractable elements are ideological--Yu Ziyuan is fundamentally a conservative and Jiang Fengmian seems to want to be an egalitarian, which ofc matched poorly with his hereditary authority as patriarch of a large sect.

The fact that the bit where we get to actually see him failing to parent Jiang Cheng consists of him gently and firmly trying to correct Jiang Cheng's ethics when what was actually needed in that moment was reassurance for the well-founded insecurities that were causing him to be a little bitch, only for Yu Ziyuan to charge in and make everything fifty times worse, is so much more interesting than literally any version of this family dynamic I have seen in fic. It's to the point I'm relieved when writers kill Jiang Fengmian off, because it means they probably won't feel the need to character-assassinate him too badly.

The number of people I've seen come right out and say some variation of 'men can't be abused' is killing me here. No, Yu Ziyuan wanting to hurt her husband does not constitute sufficient proof that he abused her first and deserved it! That's not how anything works!

[brachiocephalics]

Is this crushing loneliness I feel just for you, or is it really, underneath, the harsh metallic edge of existential longing?

David Cronenberg, Consumed × Gregory House + Lisa Cuddy

[artbyfuji]

She left me roses by the stairs,Surprises let me know she cares.

[indigayghost]

Thinking about when Guillermo goes visit his mother again and she'll be like when will you bring tu novio to meet the family and Guillermo will be like my what and she will be like yes! You are so bad mannered he needed to get here by himself! This is not how I educated you Memo

[feluka]

i hateeee jokes about arab parents only wanting sons and not wanting daughters because 1- when it's like that, that's an awful thing and not something to be joked about and 2- it spits on the face of every arab parent who consistently has to put their middle finger up to the world and say fuck you my daughter is my greatest treasure and i'd rather have her than a thousand sons and i won't hear a word against her!! because in my experience these are the most loving parents to be found in the whole wide world