#We won't make an actual point at how the social lives of people don't seem to be solved by talking as much as duelling. no. we'll say..

[omarwolaeth]

It's such a tiny innocuous thing that really doesn't matter, but I feel like calling duel monsters a children's card game (when it's fundamentally baked into everyday life, and your social existence is judged by what you play and how you play it so very intensely, for everyone in-universe) is an absolute injustice to what it is for that universe of people.

[flanaganfilm]

Do you have any “don’t meet your heroes” stories from working in Hollywood?

Absolutely. Hollywood really is a place like no other. If you grow up loving cinema, certain people can take on mythic status in your imagination. Actors, filmmakers; they are larger than life. They become idols in the truest sense - an image that is actually worshipped. But Hollywood is actually full of very weird human beings who have been lucky enough to make their living in a world of make-believe. A huge percentage of the people who work in this industry are strange birds, unsuited for working anywhere else.

Some of our biggest stars wouldn't last ten minutes working a real job; some of our most exalted filmmakers collapse inward if they're in a crowded room. They can have unusual talents, or beauty, or unique perspectives and abilities that have propelled them to various levels of success, or even stardom, but they're just normal, neurotic people.

And success, fame, and money can really twist people. It can be like radiation. They can go full Gollum from it.

But most people who work in Hollywood are not stars at all. The vast majority of people who work here are not rich, not famous. Most are hardworking craftsmen and craftswomen who are fighting every day to make a living, scraping by the best they can in an industry that is brutal, impersonal, and impenetrable. But every single person in this business - whether they are superstars or not - are just ordinary people. They're insecure, anxious, and prone to all of the failings we mortals are prone to. Some of them are awesome; some of them are assholes. But most of the people here (even the superstars) quietly feel like they don't belong, or that they don't deserve it, or that their sheer ordinariness will be discovered any minute. In fact, it's the people who seem to feel the opposite - those rare people who feel that they DO belong here, and deserve the lifestyle this industry can afford, who are inevitably the least likable ones I've met.

As I've been lucky enough to keep working in this business, I've met a lot of the people who I idolized along the way. Filmmakers and actors who I admire so much, whose work has shaped the trajectory of my life without them knowing it. I've been starstruck every time, and I am still am - I stammer, I freeze, and I kick myself for what I say, or don't say, or how I said it. I'm not good at it. I have acute social anxiety, and when you throw me at someone I admire, I turn into a blubbering idiot. They say "don't meet your heroes" because you may (likely will) be disappointed by just how ordinary they truly are. Or worse, they may even turn out to be people you wouldn't want to interact with in normal circumstances - your heroes might be people you wouldn't want to invite to coffee. The persona you have admired is a product in itself, something you bought, something you have taken home and displayed proudly in your imagination... but the human being behind that persona is full of all the ordinary failings. That can be really hard to reconcile. So yeah, a long-winded way of saying that I've had the experience of meeting people I admired a great deal only to be disappointed, or worse. I've got some nightmare stories in there where the actual person violently shattered the idol I'd built in my imagination. I won't share those stories, there's little point in that, but instead I'll talk about the rare exceptions - the few heroes I've met who were every bit as awesome as I'd hoped they'd be. They may say "never meet your heroes," but they haven't met Mark Hamill. I worked with Mark on The Fall of the House of Usher, and he is one of my favorite people. Kind, generous, humble, and so, so funny. I was nervous and excited to meet Mark for the obvious reasons, because of the hero he was in my imagination - but I got to meet Mark the actor, the father, the husband, the humanitarian, and the friend. Guillermo Del Toro - one of my biggest heroes, his work has meant so much to me. And I was terrified to meet him. But he is one of the most joyful, honest, sweet-natured people I've met in the business, and his love for movies is infectious. For me, the man himself exceeded the myth.

I've been lucky to meet other exceptions to this rule, heroes of mine who exceeded my expectations - Ewan McGregor, Mick Garris, Brian Henson, Heather Langenkamp, Henry Thomas - and yeah, I've had the other experience too. But I try to focus on the exceptions. It can be unhealthy to idolize people - unhealthy for you, and unhealthy for them. But it's truly awesome when someone is even more amazing than you imagined.

[despazito]

could u elaborate on "parrots make bad pets"? not disagreeing (far from it) just interested to see your take! looking to learn more about this

(i've gotten this ask before so please don't mind i'm just gonna paste a writeup i did a while ago)

There’s a blog run by an animal behaviourist who specializes in parrots that i really enjoy reading, she has a very good writeup on the state of companion parrots as an industry: The Inconvenient Truth About Cockatoos

so basically the average person usually cannot meet the needs of a parrot, especially medium and ESPECIALLY large species. they are long lived, extremely social and intelligent animals who are very demanding if you are their only companion. in my mind the most 'ethical' pet parrot setup is having some pairs of budgies in a dedicated bird room filled with foraging enrichment and doing some basic command training as a bird-human bonding activity instead of cuddles.

most pet parrots are hand reared or even hatched in incubators by breeders and are never given a chance to be raised by their parents, and virtually none stay with their parents until a natural weaning age before getting sold. which is wild considering it is fucking ILLEGAL to do that to puppies or kittens.

A parrot isn't really born wired for human companionship in the same way that a dog or cat is. they imprint on their parents which sets the blueprint of their kin, and they generally want to only form extremely close bonds with others of their kin. To get a very people-oriented parrot, it has to think it’s people.

This is different from the socializing practiced in raising cats and dogs or acclimating ferals to people. socializing means exposure to things so that the animal doesn't grow up to see the target as a threat, and ultimately that the target is something that can be very rewarding to spend time around. A dog raised with its mother and socialized to people still understands that it's a dog, it can get along with other dogs, but can also form strong bonds to people. They actually read both dog and human body language and legitimately have an awareness that we are different species.

The companion parrot is raised to think it’s people, and as a result many lose the ability to form bonds with their own kind. in fact the reason many breeders remove eggs or chicks from the nest is arguing that the parent birds don’t really know how to raise their chicks- because they themselves were hand reared and never learned how to parent from their parents! it seems that, like us, parenting isn't perfectly hardwired in parrots and they need to learn the skill from their families, oftentimes even staying to help their parents raise younger siblings!

That's why it's not at all uncommon for pair bonded breeding birds to be sold as a completely separate product from companion birds in many aviary operations. there's so many ads for people selling breeding parrots that fucking hate humans or are semi tame specifically listed for sale as breeders not as pets:

then their babies are bred for the pet market so they are taken either before or right after hatching to get hand reared and imprinted onto humans, because a parrot-bonded parrot just won't be as interested in forming those close human companionships you see in viral videos. this isn't the case for all aviaries, i want to acknowledge there are smaller scale breeders who have tamer breeding birds, but big producers can have borderline feral pairs and the point i'm trying to make is when you socialize a parrot to either the human world or parrot world, it's often at the expense of the other.

most trouble starts once the parrot begins reaching the age of sexual maturity. they stop being openly cuddly to most people, and will try to pair bond with their primary caretaker. It's not uncommon for this to lead to aggression towards other family members because parrots don't share partners, they can even do this to babies they are jealous of!

But a human can't become a suitable mate substitute for a parrot, and some of their mating behaviours such as regurgitating on you can seem straight up gross so the human then shuns the parrot and shuts down their advances. this can make your bird become very sexually frustrated that can lead to more unwanted behaviours and even health emergencies such as prolapse. we lead them on by stroking their chest and backs (only something bonded pairs do, you are essentially jerking off your parrot when you do this..) then reject them with no other outlet for their natural urges, and spaying/neutering isn't an option either! so they're stuck in a psychological purgatory of being unable to fulfill their instincts. and if they're in an understimulating environment and left alone for most of the day in addition to all that, frankly i think that's just an awful life to give to an animal we allegedly love!

we essentially alienate them, and when they don’t have people around to meet their extremely high social needs because you work a 9-5, even if there are other birds around, the lonely or frustrated human-bonded parrot can become depressed and self mutilate.

parrots that were left with their parents, are raised as parrots, and weaned at their own natural pace overwhelmingly do not exhibit these destructive behaviours.

 a productive relationship with a pet parrot is one that fosters independence, not dependence, on the human companion. the most responsible parrot owners should strive to act more as a zookeeper to their parrot instead of cuddling it and creating a ‘velcro’ bird glued to the hip, and socialize with them via training sessions instead of letting their birds indulge in pair bonding behaviours like petting and preening which leads to sexual frustration and aggression or self mutilation.

Ultimately I believe any parrot hand reared and imprinted onto humans is some degree of psychologically damaged and suffers from the parrot equivalent of a developmental trauma, they have been robbed of a normal parrot life and it cannot be undone.

SO many parrot rescues are completely flooded with unwanted pets, many with tough behavioural challenges (for example it's not uncommon for parrots to be reactive to an entire gender, so that cuts the adopter pool immediately in half). and these patterns can be difficult to break especially without the aid of a behaviourist. and the thing still has another 40 years of life left in it but nobody wants to adopt because it's another "crazy bitey bird that hates everyone", has reached sexual maturity so it's no longer as friendly, and it's much easier to start from scratch so folks choose to just buy another baby and keep the cycle going.

And none of that even touches on the rampant poaching that keeps supplying the trade in many parts of the world. and that's why everyone should have domestic chickens or pigeons.

[nothorses]

I think so many TERF arguments rely on the idea that like, the only thing that could possibly justify trans people's existence is whether or not a body could be made to perfectly look one particular way after having looked another particular way. Like the argument "trans people aren't real because a man cannot physically become a woman and vice versa" is predicated entirely on the belief that what makes someone a man or a woman is their body, and nothing else.

And I get kind of tired of arguments that go after that premise alone, if I'm being honest. I think it's important to talk about how fuzzy these "male" and "female" categories really are, but the value in that conversation is in deconstructing the belief in any binary.

Transition hasn't always been around, and lots of trans people don't, won't, can't, or simply haven't transitioned yet. We know from the transmedicalist movement how harmful it can be to pin our beliefs on that model (even though it has helped us make progress in other ways).

And more importantly, I think it validates the core assumption TERFs have that what matters is actually the body. So many of them really do seem to believe that our entire argument is also around bodies, and that because a trans woman's body is capable of being functionally the same as a cis woman's body, that's what validates the existence of all trans women & all trans people.

I also see a lot of this idea that we really believe that trans people's experiences perfectly mirror the experiences of their cis counterparts, and I think that like, it is actually useful to acknowledge the differences in experiences and body in these conversations. I think it's important to be able to talk about how even though I as a trans man have not had the same experiences as most cis men, nor do I have the same body- and even though I am not socially/politically classed the way a cis man is- I also don't have the exact same experiences, body, and social/political classification as cis women.

I think being able to talk about trans people as a different social/political class is important in a lot of ways, and I think it also forces the conversation with TERFs and other transphobes into a new place: it's not about whether we're the same, it's about whether we exist. It's about our material realities and lived experiences, and it's about our internal thoughts and feelings, and our relationships to ourselves.

It's a lot harder to make the argument that they know how we think and feel and what we go through, and it's a lot harder to argue about the internal relationship people have with the concept of gender, than it is to argue about, like, chromosomes or whatever.

The fact of the matter is that they are just straight-up ignoring the way the rest of the world defines gender, the lived and recorded experiences of trans people, and a whole category of oppression that has been thoroughly researched and documented. They're going "nuh-uh!!" whenever someone talks about something they've felt or experienced, and they're calling that a cogent argument.

Y'all, we know trans people's bodies and experiences are different. The whole concept of transphobia relies on it. We're not trying to say otherwise, and we don't need to!

What we're saying is that people have experiences that don't fit a binary model, and there's research to back that up. TERFs etc. are still gonna argue that point, and they do, but like. Make them. Don't engage in shit that doesn't actually matter to that central point in the first place.

(Bonus: in doing so, you make the conversation one that benefits more than just TERFs and other transphobes. You can now actually help broaden people's understanding of trans identity & engage in a useful conversation with people likely to listen!)

[allsadnshit]

I think what a lot of people do not realize is that community and being able to live with others is for most of us completely necessary. I know there's lot of people who claim to be better off alone and I won't speak for them but even just in terms of survival and not even emotional existences, we do NEED a society and other humans to live. It's like a team sport where it really really sucks to work with people you don't like and you even sometimes have to cooperate with people you actually hate but it's not optional most of the time and we have to be willing to compromise and so many people really reject that idea. Being able to tolerate someone else I don't agree with isn't something we all do because we want to or out of the kindness of our hearts...it's about how we want the world to function and tolerance is often completely necessary.

Someone not having the same morals, ideals, or politics is not something we can completely ban or get rid of every time and even when there is separation for necessity and safety, people still need rights purely as humans. I remember growing up thinking that jail was a pretty black and white simple concept of only bad people go to jail and obviously they shouldn't be able to make decisions with the rest of the world because they are bad! And I don't think I really truly understood what it meant to strip someone of their basic human rights till I was already an adult and starting to understand the different complexities of incarceration and removing the ability to participate in society in any form and how slippery of a slope it actually is.

I think covid has brought so much of that out of people and you can really see how much people feel like other people are disposable, and I am not speaking for one side of politics either. I truly mean that on both sides, the consideration that someone else's life experiences and opinions on themselves and those they love should be treated with dignity is really lost on so many people who've felt under attack to the point that they treat everything as them vs us when most of the time that's not actually the case.

It makes me really really sad when i continuously see people treat their world views as holier, more compassionate, logically backed, and overall more "good human" than someone else, even though I know that anger is often out of defense and fear.

I can't bring myself to not care about other people or not see them as people in general and I think a lot of what I see in the media and on social media really tries to make it seem normal to disqualify life and opinions outside of our own and I do not think it's humane or a livable approach to the reality of being animals that need one another for survival.

[indigoraysoflight]

Hello indigoraysoflight!!

Honestly, I don't know how tptb believe that these strategies are going to work for them. As a viewer, I am hanging on by a thread.

I have come to the conclusion that I am not going to watch anything that purely retcons the mother series, so for me, more shipbait and Caryl being only friends = I leave TWDU as a whole. We even had show writers telling us Caryl is true!!

I adore Melissa and will support any other project she does, but it has been many years of being continually utilized and clowned by this franchise and enough is enough. Any ending that isn't Daryl and Carol together doesn't make sense to me, and a studio that treats me like this as a viewer doesn't deserve me to spend another minute on it, much less my money.

At this point, I will base whether I watch the spinoff or not on the reviews of some people I trust. Depending on what I gather from their reviews, I will stay or leave completely.

Which brings me to ask... Do you know if there will be reviews? With what happened with certain shippers of another spinoff leaking spoilers left and right, I have my doubts.

If there weren't any and we had no way of knowing in advance what to expect, I'm afraid I'll only follow episode spoilers weekly and won't watch anything until the end when I get to know 100% that I won't be disappointed, which for now seems almost impossible.

To think how excited I was with season 3 being filmed in my country... Now I don't think I care that much.

Thank you for everything you do for what's left of this fandom ❤️

Hello, dear anon!

Honestly? Same. I'm being very cautious now because I genuinely don't like how things are unfolding.

I respect your choice to do what's best for you. To be honest, it all feels really frustrating because Melissa deserves so much better. It's always lovely to see pictures of Melissa on set but I'm not sure why there isn't a robust marketing campaign working to promote the show. Not only is it disrespectful to the leads, but it also gives some people more incentive to bully Carylers.

Some poorly positioned social media posts — that rely on the fans to explain how the ship is romantic — are simply not good enough.

I'm not sure about the reviews. I don't know if you're aware that I run a Caryl podcast called Nine Lives Two Mics with my friend @kryptoniancape. We intend to review TBOC with or without screeners and share our honest take on it.

But it's safe to say the whole show is resting on Melissa's back, which is incredibly sad, considering she isn't getting any official promo.

To me, the future looks concerning, especially if it rests in the hands of a showrunner who has no idea how to write women and has leaned heavily on ship baiting to give a female character any value. Norman and Melissa being EPs is good. But they need a showrunner who actually cares about Caryl, and the current one has given me no reason to trust him. The future of this show needs a showrunner who can deliver not just for Caryl but for the fans who have held on for years in some cases.

It's not just about canon anymore. It's about canon being done right and a vibrant story that Caryl deserve.

I'm really sorry I don't have better news for you, dear anon. I'm not really doing anything for the fandom. I'm just hoping people's voices and concerns are heard.

I also want to thank you for your courage and vulnerability today. We need more people speaking up the way you did. I need you to know that your voice has meaning and I appreciate you for using it.

Stay safe and be well. ❤️❤️

[ramshacklefey]

As sympathetic as many of the characters in the League of Villains are, I'm frustrated by the number of people who seem to view them as a righteous group of plucky underdogs. This isn't about people who just think a character is hot and make horny art of them. It's about sincerely trying to argue that we should be rooting for them because they have some genuinely good points about flaws in their society.

Thing is, these characters do reveal serious flaws in their society. Shigaraki was able to be adopted and manipulated by AFO because everyone assumed that a lost child was someone else's problem. Touya was abused and pushed to a mental breaking point as a child because of Enji's relentless pursuit for a power that would make himself feel better. Toga was ostracized and treated as a freak because her quirk is deeply alarming to people. Jin fell into homelessness and despair because his boss fired him for something that was an accident. Spinner grew up smothered by anti-heteromorph prejudice. We don't get a lot of details about Magne's backstory, but knowing she was trans, we can guess at a lot. The members of the League are all deeply damaged, traumatized people who have, in various ways, been let down by society.

It's easy to sympathize with them because we can all see how, in that position, what they decide to do might seem like it made sense. It's easy to sympathize with them because the problems they face (neglect, abuse, and bigotry) are all things that affect our own society. There's a sense of justice in wanting to tear down a system that's caused you to suffer that much.

But however much we can sympathize with their pain, we shouldn't forget the choices they've made or the actions they've taken. And we shouldn't ignore the fact that their choices and actions are moving them further from the things they really want.

Shigaraki isn't trying to reform society. He doesn't want to tear the current system down so that he can build something better. He wants to tear things down for the sheer sake of destroying them and taking out his rage and pain on everyone else.

Jin's death hits hard because the reason he ends up dying is that he won't give up on his friends. Hawks sees Jin's loyalty and kindness to his friends and realizes that he has a good heart deep down. But Jin's final act is to brutally murder a hero for trying to apprehend Toga and Compress. Their lives weren't in danger.

Touya wants revenge on his father. Understandable, but one of the first things we learn about him is that he's responsible for several random murders. We see him kill a band of petty thieves simply because he decides they aren't powerful enough to be useful to the League. Those murders have nothing to do with his relationship with his father (well. Everything he does has to do with his relationship to his father, but you take my point). And his desire is specifically for vengeance. It isn't enough for him that Enji's crimes and cruelty be exposed. He's not just trying to say, "This man is not the person you think he is, and you shouldn't hold him up as an ideal figure." He wants Enji to suffer. He wants to inflict as much pain as he can.

Toga just murders people because she likes them. Her idea of loving someone is to literally consume them.

And their end goal isn't a better world. It's chaos and anarchy. They want to destabilize society and then provide the arms and ideology that would turn it into a libertarian dystopia. Thing is, that wouldn't actually get them what they want or need.

Take Spinner for instance. We know that in the chaotic times just after quirks appeared, heteromorphs faced intense and dangerous discrimination and hate everywhere. While it's true that heteromorphs still face discrimination and even violence, especially in rural areas, we've also seen that knocking out the social order only makes that worse (think of the woman who Deku saves. She couldn't get into any shelters because she's a heteromorph, even though she was in the middle of the city).

Touya is certainly getting his vengeance on his father, but it isn't getting him what he actually wanted which is acknowledgement from Enji that he is good enough. Having Shoto fight him instead of Enji is one of the worst outcomes he could have gotten, because it is still a refusal to acknowledge him in Touya's eyes (Strictly speaking, it was actually an acknowledgement of the fact that he is probably stronger than Enji, but Touya clearly doesn't see it that way).

Toga, I think, really wants acceptance for who she really is. Her quirk frightens people, and it seems inherently villainous. But the actions she's taking only make her more terrifying to others, and I think she's also mistaken to think that her violent and murderous actions are an expression of her "true self."

And Shigaraki... well he's probably the most difficult case. All he wanted at the beginning of the story was destruction. But it's hard to get a read on him in any accurate way because of the extent to which he's been molded and manipulated by AFO into his current state. I think we can get more insight into him by looking at what desires and motivations AFO played on. As a small child, Shigaraki was angry (and rightly so) about the way his family treated him, and then at the way the rest of the world ignored him. AFO fanned his anger and resentment and actively twisted his experiences until now he can't escape the idea that there's nothing good in the world at all. But we also know that he's wrong about that. The only hope for him at this point is that Deku can show him that he's wrong.

The hurt and anger that the members of the League live with are real and valid. They've each experienced things that would turn most people bitter and angry. Those things make them deeply human and sympathetic. But it's possible to sympathize or even empathize with someone's pain without giving them a free pass to become violent murderers and terrorists.

One of the most important themes in the story is that people aren't defined by the things that happened to them in the past, but by the choices they've made in response. The League serves as a vital foil to the main characters because they've made opposite choices at nearly every turn. Trying to wave those choices away and make these characters out to be basically good people whose actions are justified by their situations (as opposed to being explained by their situations) destroys that theme.

[viviennelamb]

Hi Vivienne. There is something I do not understand. You said that sex and lust cause suffering and pain, which is totally true. But since we know that is the case, why can't people stop partaking in these sorts of stuff ? I get that sex is an addition but I do not understand the fact that when you fall into Satan consciousness / a lower consciousness, the majority of people seem unable to leave that state when we all know that they have low self esteem deep inside. Do you have an answer to that ? Like if something makes you suffer, you acknowledge it and stop doing that very thing... How is it possible that people do not become chaste after experiencing pain because of lust and sex ?? It does not make any sense to me.

Most people would admit that sex is killing them on the right day, but since most people participate in it, and they say it's necessary for procreation, even when they're on every contraceptive that exists, they keep doing it.

It's a mixture of narcissism where they need validation to exist, a split mind and sex worship.

When somebody has designated materialism as their God, they won't be able to leave.

When somebody reaches Satan Consciousness, they're demons who get off on pain. Somebody at this point would take billions of life times to become human again.

Satanism is a cult. People don't know what the word cult means, but a cult requires sexual abuse to keep their members weak and docile. If somebody can just "leave" a cult, then it's not a cult, it's just a regular club. With an actual cult, you'd likely get killed when you try to leave, and if you don't, you'd have to live in hiding or move to a remote country, or you'd get endlessly stalked and harassed.

Most people prioritize the opinions of others rather than what is happening in real time. They'd rather contract venereal diseases than become an outcast.

To summarize:

Sex worship.

In a cult (a cult can consist of two people in a romantic relationship).

Not intelligent to know that they are self-harming as lower consciousness means the mind is darker, which is ignorance.

Egotism where that Ego needs social validation to survive.

[om3ga-but-sfw]

Idk if your still taking for undertale but can I request general yandere for sans the skeleton ? If not please ignore :3

Ofc I'm still taking Undertale! Thanks so much for the ask :D!

Though I don't know if you want headcanons or a oneshot or something so I'll just do hcs if that's okay!

[Warnings: General obsessive behavior, implications of stalking, and possessive behavior.]

Yandere Undertale Sans Headcanons

Sans, at least from an outside perspective, is relatively chill, laid-back, and is still the lazy charmer we all know him to be

He can be a little protective, sure but that's normal, right? Yeah, sure, it's nothing to worry about! After all, just how much can a lazy skeleton really do?

Well, that's nothing for you to worry about, at least not early on.

At the beginning, Sans is... well, Sans!

He's funny, he'll pull a few pranks here and there along with dropping a bad pun every now and again. He's sleeping all the time and loves to scare you whenever you think you're alone and just does his thing. He's a funny lil' guy!

It's so normal that it's almost scary in this case.

Until it isn't.

Sans isn't one to form deep connections easily, and though he can be social it does take more effort for him to actually have friends or just other people in his life that he can be close with like how he is with Papyrus or even close to that point.

So when he does it isn't just a big deal, but it seems that when it especially comes to you (no matter the relationship you two have), it changes the whole game

Almost completely out of the blue, how Sans acts completely shifts over entirely, but if you don't know where to look or don't have a careful eye then it will be tough to even notice the tiniest change. Though sometimes it can be easier to see it, if Sans catches on that you may have noticed something then he'll try to be extra careful.

Which means that some of the little details that were fueling your paranioa now seem to either completely gone, or are much harder to find. Though, don't be so easily fooled.

For you see, now some of those habits of his don't seem so normal or healthy anymore.

Everytime Sans sleeps, he not only uses it as an opportunity to be unreasonably close to you, but he also uses it to take little things you probably won't notice but have some value to you.

If by chance he takes something that you're trying to find, he'll just give it right back after a few moments of watching you freak out, and claim that he found it in a place or location where you'd normally find it... but you could've sworn you checked there already- but that doesn't matter, right?

Maybe not the first few times, but after a little while it gets weird.

As for all the stuff he gets to keep? Well, he has a special place for that in his room, and it's like keeping small parts of yourself with him. He loves it, but you'll never find it.

His little 'scares' seem to be worse too, but only in the sense where they seem to happen when you not only least expect them, but when you really are all alone. It's almost strange, like he's always there, but you know he isn't. Right?

Yeah, sure, sure.

Moving on, Sans still is a guy full of jokes, and yet his little pranks seem to be a tiny bit more targeted now.

People you hate now live their lives just a little more inconveniently, and though it seems small it's the little things that can make your day all the more worse or better.

People who hate you now have to be a little more careful as they might 'risk' making an embarrassment out of themselves in front of their colleagues should they run into one of Sans' pranks. For, if they aren't careful then they'll get a bucket of water spilled on them once they enter a room, or sit on a whoopee cushion during an important meeting.

You're friends and loved ones, however, have it worse.

Tar being spilt on them, being tased for a short while, getting their fingers stuck in mousetraps, stepping on legos or thumbtacks- its bad. It's so bad that some even begin to draw away, why?

Well, that's because it gets worse with each and every 'prank'. So much so that Sans just so happens to create an opening for himself, and solve every little problem he's been overthinking and worrying about ever since you both began talking.

Sans is lazy, but lazy people who procrastinate tend to find the most innovative ways to do things as a means to make their lives easier in the most convenient way possible, especially if their smart.

Sans is a charmer, a listener, so he knows every little thing about you and everything you know about someone. He uses his little charm to get more information out of other people in the most natural way possible as he butters with up with jokes and barely even has to lift a finger before everything he wants comes tumbling out. His popularity helps immensely in that aspect, and so does his way of coming up with believable excuse and reasons on the fly.

He uses what he knows to his advantage, and that begins to show when all your loved ones begin to pull away, and even those close to your loved ones are keeping their distance and supporting your loved ones' decision.

It isn't too long after that you're cut off entirely.

Sans is a patient guy, he can wait for the results for as long as it takes (until a certain point of course), and wouldn’t you know it- his patience is handsomely rewarded.

And the funniest part of it all is that you still don't even know it until it happens.

When it all crumbles down on you and smacks you straight in the face, it hurts so badly and breaks you apart so terribly that all you can do is turn to the one person who never left you. Who you knew would listen and would hear you out as you sobbed out your worries and woes.

Sure, Sans might have acted a little weird on the outside, but like his brother he isn't that bad of an actor. People are easy to read, so it's easy to see what topics to avoid and what to change to not spark something

You are no different

And Sans is content with that, and others may be wondering why he didn't kidnap you or anything, but that's the thing isn't it?

Why would he need to do that and go through all of that trouble when you're right here in his arms, and right where you're supposed to be? You may not know it, and Sans might not say it, but this is all he's ever needed and wanted.

You, here with him, in the comfort of his home. Away from anything and everything else as it almost seems like it's just you and him in the entire world.

Why would he lock you away when you came to him all by yourself?

That's because he doesn't have to, so he didn't. Either way he got what he wanted, what he needed, so it's not like he cares anyway.

I just hope you like cuddles, because you're getting a ton of them.

Sans will make you second guess all the people around you until all you can be sure of and depend on is him.

He'll shape your world in a way where he's your only sense of comfort, he's your own safe space. Where his home is the only home you know.

Sans isn't trying to make the world seem like a bad place, and sure there are decent people out there, but who can be better than him? No one will ever make you feel as safe, seen, heard, or comforted as Sans, so it doesn't that there are others out there who are decent? None of them can give anything that Sans hasn't already given you.

That's what Sans wants to show you and help you understand.

The world isn't all the cruel, but isn't it better with him around?

-----------

Kind of rushed, but I hope they're okay! Sorry it took so long! I've been scavenging for motivation-

[edoro]

what do you think about the claims that the possession scene was unnescessary and harmful to the narrative?

well, i haven't directly seen anyone saying this, although i've seen a couple of posts like, addressing those claims, so i can't directly speak to the actual reasons people are saying it for in any meaningful way

from what i've seen from those posts + what i've heard from people who i've asked who've seen those posts, it seems like the objections tend to be that it's in some way disrespectful to abuse survivors to have Hunter suffer additional trauma/have his recovery interrupted in this way, or that it's gratuitous

which... i do not agree with.

(under the cut because it got long)

so, like, first of all, let me tackle 'unnecessary' here - the argument that, i guess, it doesn't really add anything to the narrative.

i don't agree, i think it's an extremely logical and emotionally/thematically resonant culmination in both of these narratives

like... Hunter's entire arc is about developing autonomy and breaking away from his abusive guardian, who has controlled and constrained his life to a terrifying degree. (even in this episode, we get yet another tidbit of how restricted and lonely Hunter's life was, how deliberately and artificially isolated he was - forced to train and study his entire life, not even allowed to socialize with the other soldiers, and only allowed to leave the castle on weekends - like, it Just Keeps Getting Worse!)

meanwhile, Philip sees Hunter as an object. Hunter has never, at any point, been an individual person to him. none of the grimwalkers have. they have all simply been Caleb-shaped dolls for Philip to play house with and use and abuse as he pleases; raise them to worship and obey him, manipulate them into comforting and caring for him, hurt them so they fear him, take out his anger and resentment and whatever other emotion he's feeling on them, try again and again to mold them into the perfect version of Caleb who won't - who can't - leave him.

so it's completely in keeping with Philip's character and with the way he views Hunter. it demonstrates very clearly the level of entitlement he has towards Hunter's body and the degree to which he dehumanizes and objectifies Hunter.

the way he vacillates between referring to Hunter as a literal replaceable object ("this one") vs as Literally Caleb is also just another way of showing how abusive he is and in what specific ways - Philip is a person for whom his emotional state creates reality. Hunter is who and what Philip wants him to be at any given time. it's not contradictory because each thing is true at that time, and stops being true the moment Philip has a different feeling.

so just from a character development pov, it makes perfect sense that it would end up here. it extremely logically follows from how Philip views Hunter, and it's a logical challenge for Hunter to face as well - which leads neatly into "this is somehow disrespectful to abuse survivors."

if somebody finds it uncomfortable, distressing, sad, etc to see this happen then that's their prerogative. they get to feel however. trying to lay a blanket claim that there's only one way abuse can be depicted and that anything bad happening to an abuse survivor, or an abuse survivor struggling/having their recovery interrupted, is always bad and disrespectful... is imo a lot more actually disrespectful.

like... this is just something that happens in real life. it's hard to get away from your abuser, especially when they're very controlling and feel entitled to your body, especially when they're your guardian/caretaker.

of course Philip doesn't want to just let Hunter go. he created Hunter - the entire reason Hunter exists is for Philip to play house with. if Hunter won't cooperate with him and be who he wants, then he wants Hunter gone so he can start over. he doesn't want Hunter to live a life he doesn't control and isn't part of.

this is just a very common experience among abuse survivors. it's hard to escape. abusers will often try to drag you back into their zone of control because they want you around to keep abusing - especially in Hunter's case, where his abuse was very much a product of Philip using him for his own emotional needs. he needs to have his little Caleb copy around to try and 'save.' it's very important to him.

so, i mean, yeah. Hunter thought he was free, because he thought Philip was dead, which meant that he could relax and start processing stuff and figuring out who he is without worrying about Philip finding him.

then he found out that wasn't the case, and it was terrifying. he started to regress, being more afraid, getting snappy, and even turning to old dissociative coping mechanisms like putting on the persona of the Golden Guard to make himself feel braver about confronting his abuser. he thought he was safe and found out he wasn't, which yeah, sucks and is sad, but it's also a thing that actually happens to many people fleeing abuse, and i just do not understand how you can say that "accurately depicting a real experience many abuse survivors go through" is in any way disrespectful.

Sometimes People Make Art That Depicts Things Which Actually Happen In Real Life, Including Things Which Are Sad, Scary, Unpleasant, Etc.

personally, i find the acknowledgement of how difficult it is to leave one's abuser and how insidiously they can try to drag you back in even after you've gotten away, just because they can't stand the idea of not being allowed to hurt and control you anymore, a lot more satisfying than pretending it's as easy as just Deciding To Not Be Abused Anymore just like that.

FURTHERMORE, we get into the whole 'this is just gratuitously making him suffer for no reason'/'why would this happen after he had all that development and got to be happy', and i think the answer there also neatly demonstrates why this is necessary to the narrative -

that being that his development is the whole point and is what enables this entire possession scene to go the way that it goes and end the way that it ends.

like... ever since Hunter first showed up, we've had a steady progression of development for him, from his very first appearance as the Emperor's willing lackey to the glimpses of doubt and dissatisfaction behind the facade in s2e6 to the revelation of just how severely emotionally affected he is by his treatment at Philip's hands in s2e9 to his first experience of friendship and peer bonding and his first intentional rebellion in s2e13...

so that by the time we get to Hollow Mind, where everything he thought he knew is revealed to be a lie and the foundation of his life is ripped away and he has to run to keep himself alive, he's in a position where he's had those thoughts and doubts, voiced those dissatisfactions, been told that it doesn't have to be this way, and he has this nascent support group ready for him to reach out to it.

and then between Hollow Mind and the s2 finale, he becomes closer friends with Willow and especially Gus, and then we see there's a whole montage of him in the human realm developing hobbies, getting closer to everyone in this group, and just learning how to be his own person and be a kid instead of a soldier and an emotional support brother-clone.

so when the possession does happen, it happens in the context of him having had that development, made those connections, learned those things about himself and his own desires.

like... Hunter pre-Hollow Mind would probably have just let Philip take his body! Hunter post-Hollow Mind but pre-finale might have fought out of pure self-preservation, the urge to stay alive, but he didn't have a whole lot to stay alive for at the time, so i doubt it would have gone as well for him.

but here we have Hunter who's spent the last few months feeling safe and secure enough to start developing his own identity. who has hobbies, who has friends. who has people who care about him and come after him when he disappears suddenly, who tell him they know he's in there and encourage him to fight, who give him something worth protecting and fighting for. who has things he wants to do with his life other than just whatever Philip wants.

without all of that development, Hunter couldn't have given Philip that little "you know what i'd like?" speech. and that was a HUGE moment for him in his arc. that was Hunter finally stating, out loud, that he not only wants to choose his own future but he has actual concrete things that he wants his future to hold.

he doesn't want to be chosen, he doesn't want to be special, he doesn't want to be the Golden Guard or the Emperor's right-hand man or the prince. he wants to be Hunter. he wants to be a kid, he wants to learn things, he wants to spend time with his friends, and he wants to protect them and himself from his abuser.

in many ways, this is the worst-case scenario for Hunter (and for many other abuse victims.) his abuser found him after he left, took control over him in a very violating and difficult to escape way, and used that control and access to him and his life to not only hurt him but to hurt his friends as well. this is a very real fear that many people who have escaped abuse face.

and... it fucking sucked! it was a horrible, deeply traumatic event! it left him physically and emotionally scarred! he was profoundly violated and his sense of safety ripped away, and he ended up losing one of his friends - his very first friend, in fact, someone who was there for him before he was even willing to admit he needed help.

but... he still has other friends. he was able, because of the love and support he's been given, because of the development that he's done, to resist the possession. he was able to make Philip let Flapjack go before he could inhale his essence (which allowed Flapjack to save him a bit later.) he was able to give that speech and throw the blood into the water.

he didn't, ultimately, stop Philip from doing anything. but he fought back and asserted himself, his identity and his desires, and he came out the other side of it. he survived. the worst possible thing happened to him, and he's still alive, and his friends are still here and still love and care for him, and they're going to support him in the wake of the loss he experienced.

he's not alone. he doesn't belong to Philip. he's his own person and in the face of such total, horrific violation, he was able to assert his personhood and deny Philip's control over him. he was very badly hurt and suffered a terrible loss, but he's surrounded by a support network of people who love him and will be able to help and care for him while he recovers from that loss.

so, i mean, to me, that's very powerful. yes, it's really sad. what happened to him was traumatic, no question, and Flapjack's loss is going to be a huge source of grief for him.

but it's also a testament to the resilience of the psyche, and how much of a different having support can make. he suffered trauma and a loss, but all of his friends are there to help him through it and help him feel safe again, and this time he knows that there's more to life than being Philip's plaything. there are things to look forward to, things to survive for, things to remain free for.

honestly, it's hard for me to imagine a better message to send to survivors of abuse? like...

-"even if your abuser catches you and hurts you and hurts the people you care about, you can still deny them, get free of them, and be supported and cared for by your loved ones in the aftermath of that trauma"

-"even if you relapse or your recovery is interrupted, that doesn't mean it's over for you or there's no hope, you can still move forward from that point and the progress you made beforehand isn't suddenly wiped out and doesn't suddenly Not Matter, and in fact it's a vital part of your ability TO move on"

-"struggling to escape your abuser doesn't mean you're weak or undeserving, and even if it takes several tries, it's worth it to do"

-"cultivating a network of people who love you and exploring your own interests will make you more resilient and allow you to better withstand and recover from future traumas and to resist being pulled back into a relationship with your abuser when they try their usual tricks"

-"losing people hurts very badly, but grief and loss are parts of life and can be dealt with; your life doesn't end because you suffer trauma or a loss, and having a support network and hobbies makes it much easier to deal with grief, pain, and loss"

not only are those all extremely powerful and hopeful messages to give to abuse survivors, they're also all main themes of the entire show? stuff like discovering yourself, facing grief, processing trauma, and doing it with the aid of friends and family rather than on your own are all very much themes that have been present from the very first episode, and they're all imo well-represented in this aspect of Hunter's arc.

so, yeah. i think it was perfectly narratively coherent and very satisfying, with ultimately a very hopeful and uplifting message inside the tragedy of it all, and also a much better, more nuanced, and more realistic take on trauma and abuse than i usually see in media like this.

[cyndaquillt]

Ok I feel like writing a long essay on Indian elections so I'm gonna do just that. Full disclaimer though, I'm just airing my thoughts out and I'm just as much of the general public as anyone else. In other words, I'm not a social scientist. While I welcome healthy discussion, if I don't find the strength in me to answer to a certain reply, I simply won't and I hope you understand and forgive me.

With that out of the way, I'm coming out of my optimism bubble to take a stock of things. At this point (6:19 am IST), the counting has been done. It's apparent that BJP did not win the clear majority they were hoping for. In fact, they could only get about ~36% of the total votes, which means majority of seats in the Lok Sabha belong to parties that are not in the BJP. This is a huge deal, despite it being apparent that NDA WILL make the government and by extension, Modi may get elected for PM for a third term.

However, there's the matter of how tightly knit the NDA itself is. At this point NDA holds 292 seats. If JD(U) and TDP (i.e. Nitish and Chandrababu Naidu) flip, NDA loses 16+12 seats leaving them at 264 seats, i.e. below the 272 mark. If only JD(U) flips, they are at 280 and a majority and if only TDP flips, they are at 276, still a majority (See ECI's website for seat tally by party). While all hinges on what Nitish gets offered today and what conversations Chandrababu Naidu has in Delhi today, neither have given conclusive statements towards their intent, and on the contrary, TDP seems to be leaning towards staying in the NDA. For the current government to truly fall, BOTH TDP and JD(U) will have to fall out of the NDA, which is a very optimistic outcome and seems unlikely.

Let's consider both outcomes actually, I wanna do a thought experiment for myself to see how things would turn out if NDA forms the govt vs if INDIA forms the govt.

Option 1 : NDA holds the majority and forms the govt

Very likely Modi will come back for a third term but now there's a sizeable opposition majority in the Lok Sabha. And if systems work the way they should, this should at the very least provide some friction to motions BJP has had ease with passing in the past decade.

Certain ministries will probably be given to non-BJP members. As someone from Bihar I know for a FACT that Nitish is going to push for Something Big. I'm not going to make any conclusive statements about Nitish or Chandrababu Naidu or idk, Chirag Paswan taking up a ministry, but that is a possibility, for better or worse.

Depending on whoever takes up whatever ministry, if the core of the polities remain what the current BJP govt has executed, not much may change. Privatization of telecom services leading to death of BSNL and MTNL to death of Doordarshan/rise of sold out and censored media to increasing gas subsidy to tanking the value of the Indian Rupee, or literally any aspect of daily life that the current government made us used to like slow boiling frogs, may just remain the same or change veeery slowly. Since BJP is at the core of the NDA and still has a sizeable presence, this remains the most apparent possibility.

I do think the divisive, supremacist politics might deescalate. Not because BJP or NDA are going to be soooo nice all of a sudden, but because this election has shown that it clearly doesn't work. Eg: Manipur used to be a BJP stronghold. From 2007 to 2015, I have been in close contact with Manipuri friends who really believed BJP had potential to do great things for Manipur. And yet here we are. They instigated communities that were coexisting for ages to fight, left a trail of blood, ruined people's lives, and even lost the state. Also bringing Manipur in as an example because what happened in Ayodhya is already a national joke at this point. Modi almost lost Varanasi. If there's any lesson to take away from these experiences, it's to cut back on divisive politics.

Option 2 : INDIA forms the govt

I'm actually not sure who the PM would be. Rahul? Akhilesh? I actually don't like the alternative of Akhilesh being a PM tbh. His failure to understand the needs of the people in 2010s is what paved the way for Yogi Adityanath to win UP. Not that Yogi did a great job and solved everything, but BJP's whole pitch in 2014 was that they were coming in as 'underdogs' to throw out dynastic politics like the kind SP or INC play. Which of course, is a fucking joke seeing that Chirag Paswan or Pradyot Manikya Deb Barma (a literal prince!) are in the NDA this time, but I digress. I was in Varanasi at the time when Akhilesh was the CM of UP and he was pandering at best! I vaguely remember the biggest news was him giving laptops for free to girls who graduate from the state board but that was all! He was passive and BJP+Yogi took advantage of that! Rahul poses a similar issue, but I am overall just worried about whoever ends up as the PM, would perhaps be more of a figurehead than holding together a strong opposition, and that would mean an NDA/BJP opposition would eat them up for breakfast.

When you speak with people who are in denial of media being sold, their counterargument is almost always 'there were so many scams on the news before 2014! Now there are none!' Well, yeah, cause news media is a literal joke now. But they aren't wrong about the scams either! The thing is, there is next to no politician in the current political landscape who isn't a slave to power. Corruption won't go away. Scams won't go away. But will the media actually report them when people in power are involved in it? I'm actually not sure anymore......

Which also makes me think of how much will things actually change? And who will change them? Listen, I grew up in 90s and 2000s Bihar under the Lalu regime as a minority middle class with two state govt office workers for parents. 'Don't trust anyone in power' is in my DNA. I have also seen Nitish flip the landscape of Bihar and bring in resources we'd never even imagined. But core problems still stay. From casteism to corruption to infrastructure issues to brain drain, all issues remain. Simply using Bihar as a toy model, I lose hope of any rapid progress even under a drastic change of leadership. While it would be certain that this government would be Left-Center, I would be highly skeptical of whether or not they'll scrape all right wing policies. Not to mention Amrit Pal won?? Shiv Sena is in power??? Yeah it's a much more complicated and treacherous path up ahead, even if this option may be the most optimistic alternative.

This election was an important one. Preceeding this were whole movements (eg : farmers protests, CAA/NRC protests, etc), a pandemic that brought forth gaping holes in the health infrastructure, agitations that shook entire regions, and that's only scraping the top of the public outcry against the current government. In a democracy, riots, protests, movements are as much a voice of the people as votes and clearly these manifested as votes in this election. While this election day was extremely entertaining and the memes are fun, I do want to remind myself and others that communalism, casteism, regionalism, religious bigotry, corruption, and partisanship aren't simply going away. It will take work to undo things and even more work to right the wrongs that have been around since wayyy before 2014. But I do hope this is the beginning of something positive 🤞🤞

[chaos-and-recover]

#you guys don't know how software development works and it Pains Me

Could you expand on that?

I think the post sums it up well, that there are physical servers that need to host the platform and that costs money so there's truly no way to have a totally free website (that's why AO3 has fundraising drives, because the alternative is ads and nobody wants that on the Fandom Porn Site).

But also in the recent announcements about restructuring and large parts of the Tumblr team being reassigned to other teams within Automattic and Tumblr essentially being left with a skeleton crew is... not great? Like everyone is celebrating the fact that Tumblr Live is probably going to die soon and ignoring the part that they also won't be shipping many if any new features but instead focusing on the ones they have. And when that part is acknowledged the reaction seems to be that they're gonna fix a bunch of shit and like... they probably aren't.

Development is slow and it requires people and direction. I don't know the details of what staff currently looks like or who's going where but in my experience, "we're focusing on improving the features we have" means "whoever is left will be focused on keeping the lights on." Like, maintaining vital infrastructure and maybe fixing bugs here and there if they have the capacity for it.

Plus not having shiny new features as often if at all makes it really hard to drive new users to the platform, and that makes it less enticing for investors and/or advertisers.

I work for a SaaS company with a significantly smaller userbase than a typical social media site would have, even a relatively underused one like Tumblr (bc we're B2B so our customers are other businesses in a niche-ish field) and just one of our platforms has two distinct product teams, with each team consisting of a product manager, a designer, a handful of developers and a QA team, and that doesn't include the site reliability team who keep the whole thing running and solve database and server issues.

And it'll be hard to attract or retain top talent in any of these roles if your company just isn't putting the resources into the platform.

It takes a lot of people to keep a website functional, and I don't want to be doom and gloom because it might all be fine, at least for the foreseeable future, but it takes a lot of people to keep a software platform running.

I'm just glad it seems like no one at Tumblr is actually losing their jobs at this point.

And lbr I'm still gonna be here til the wheels fall off.

[intothecocoverse]

I finished The Mandalorian season 3. So many strong female characters, I LOVED IT AND I LOVE WOMEN AND ELIA KANE I AM READY TO FIGHT YOU IN DUAL I'M TINY BUT MIGHTY KATY O'BRIAN PLAYS HER SO WELL I WANNA FIGHT I HATE ELIA SO MUCH JDKDFNKDKD

When it came out, people had mix reactions; some were very happy that Grogu and Djarin have now their little house but others, if I remember well, were like "but why did he abandon the darksaber?" And so on. It didn't shock me. Djarin was right when he said that the robot weird general grievous thingy took it from him and that Bo-Katan was the one who retrieved it from the creature. I see Mando like this; he lived only by the Creed before he met Grogu. He didn't seem to be that social guy with a lot of friends. He just wants a calm life. After Grogu and everything that happened, he has now a son who is also his apprentice. He helps a lot of people and makes friends along the way. For me it would have been weird to see him on the throne of Mandalore at the end of the season. He is a leader but he doesn't want the power that goes with it or any type of power for that matter. So him not fighting for the Darksaber and going on adventures with Grogu is on point. And honestly, if they wanna do 10 seasons of the Din family going on adventures, saving people, discovering Jedi's secrets or just living a normal life, I'll watch it. The people being Animatronic Grogu, puppet Grogu and CGI grogu made an amazing job and Pedro Pascal plays so well that we can't but believe that Grogu is actually a living being. So thank you to them.

I can't wait for season 4 because yes, new Mando and Grogu adventures but also the Mythosaur!!! How will Mandalore prosper? And unfortunately, the creation of the new order....

The only thing that bothered me a bit during this season is the level-up of the imps. Everytime, we are seeing new droids that are almost impossible to kill but then, they are destroyed and we won't see them again DESPITE they're killing machines. It was the same in The Clone Wars or SW Rebels. I don't know how to explain it.

As a fan, I hope that, as long as good stories are written, we will see Din Djarin on our screens for a long time.

So yeah, The Mandalorian is done, waiting for season 4 impatiently and tomorrow I will start Ahsoka! Just like Star Wars Rebels, I know that The Mandalorian is a Star Wars series I will watch again and again. I have spoken.

(and if you wanna express your opinion about it, please do! I would love to talk about the series haha)

Here is my Grogu because why not

[angel-is-not-creative]

Hetalia

I cannot rate this with a good conscience ❤

I have autism and Hetalia is my special interest so this is literally 3k words long and I have absolutely no regrets. I could have gone on longer but I wanted to remain relevant to the class. If you don't reply to me I will cry.

I'm gonna break this into a few sections so you can skip around. I'm going to try and stick to just season 1 with this discussion, which won't be too hard cause it's the most insane one. Also, I just want to say that I wrote this all before I read the attached article and I'm now seeing that I literally could have written that article because I know everything about Hetalia.

When do we cross the line between stereotyping and just straight-up racism?

Hey, why are we idolizing WWII Germany?

Oh, we are portraying war as silly and funny, okay cool.

Is this Japanese Nationalism? (a surprisingly controversial argument)

The Sub and the Dub are 2 totally different shows

The Fandom (and linking back to other class-related terms)

Okay I'll name one good thing

Alright, let's get started.

1.

A lot of people will argue that Hetalia is not racist at all because they are making fun of everyone. If you are portraying all of the countries as their most common stereotypes then it evens out in the end. I would argue that this is in fact, not the case. Especially when you set your show during WWII. I will give Himaruya credit in that he mostly focuses on European countries to make fun of, making a lot of the stereotypes less so targeted at minorities. However, a lot of these jokes are still highly insensitive and frame some countries in a worse light than others

Just look at the difference between how Northern Italy is portrayed as opposed to Germany or Japan. Or how France is a predator, Belarus is into her literal brother, and Spain is seen as a creep. It is often times mocking an entire country's intelligence, appearance, or personality. While it is not always that serious, it does lead me to the second point.

When you personify a country and mock it, you aren't just mocking a piece of land, you are mocking an entire population of people. These jokes may seem harmless but they can still be hurtful. While I don't believe that liking Hetalia translates to your actual views on world events, it can unconsciously impact your real-life thoughts and behaviors.

(also why does Britain see imaginary magical creatures, what is that referencing? According to the wiki, it is some popular folklore story of a rabbit who lives on the moon but like.. what? If Himaruya was doing this much research into these countries' cultural backgrounds why is he portraying them like this?)

2.

This show portrays WWII Germany in too positive of a light for my liking. I've noticed a trend in anime where they seem to love Germany (or Germanic aesthetics) a lot (AOT I'm looking at you). Now I'm not well-versed in the interpersonal relationships between Japan and Germany, but the idolization is not it. The way that Japan in this show is portrayed as being literally obsessed with Germany is the biggest example (Italy is also shown having an immense appreciation for Germany and is often gushing about his positive qualities, even writing him a song while he was being kept prisoner). But I mean look at how Germany is portrayed, even his stereotypes are mostly positive, he is hardworking but helps out his fellow allies, makes great food, and is super strong. His only negative trait is that he sometimes doesn't understand social scenarios and that makes him very awkward. However, he will always go out of his way to try and better understand his friends (like Italy) by purchasing books to try and help him learn the appropriate way to act in scenarios).

This is 10x worse in the dub but we will get there. When one of your main characters, the one you are portraying in the best light, is a literal war criminal hot anime boy, you can understand why I would be concerned. I mean they gave him the whole blonde hair blue eyed appearance like come on. Now I'm not going to go into depth on fandom or anything here but Hetalia knows that its demographic is young tweens (primarily girls) so how can you be surprised when this portrayal of Germany leads to WWII fanfics sympathizing with Germany and 14 y/o girls in German military uniforms doing questionable things. (also Germany becomes a canonically gay character in Hetalia in like season 4 or something and that just makes me so mad, like yeah, of course, the gay character is WWII Germany that so cool) (okay, I would like to clarify that technically Sweden is the only confirmed gay character. Sweden is bad representation though because he has one-sided feelings for Finland and makes him uncomfortable by constantly referring to him as his wife)

3.

I mean yeah, obviously this isn't going to be an accurate portrayal of history but some of this is just totally misinformation.

Austria invading Germany is literally just Austria annoying him in his house for a really long time. But also there's like actual wars... and like all of the events of WWI are canon... and like there are some really serious episodes

Also, we literally see a bunch of countries going to war personally, like fighting on the frontlines. Which to me confirms that these people are all literal murderers, like mass murderers lowkey.

Do you know how many weird USSR jokes there are throughout this? So many. Lithuania is pretty much just in a running gag where he keeps getting manipulated by Russia into coming back to live with him. (Yeah, there are so many USSR fics as well).

ALSO! why is the American revolution portrayed as the saddest thing to happen thus far, the storyline is stretched out from episodes 16-20 and it is all drastically different from the tone of the rest of the show. Britain is literally on his knees crying saying that he can't shoot America (which also implies these countries can physically harm/kill each other). Like that is the war you wanted to make all sad and sentimental? Why? Is this how Japanese people think that we view the Revolutionary war? Because that is a pretty inaccurate view.

Anyways back to the original point. Some historical events should not be played for laughs sometimes. It is incredibly disrespectful for actual victims of these tragedies to portray these events as funny or goofy.

Though I will give credit because Himaruya does make all sides of the war look like idiots who have no clue what they are doing, which is a sentiment I can get behind.

4.

As a both non-Japanese and non-Korean person I can not really give my opinion on this however I can share with you both sides of the argument. This is mostly in relation to the original comic strip, but has some relevance to the anime as well. I just wanted to bring it up because it is interesting to me. (This is briefly mentioned in the article but I wanted to expand on the argument).

You may or may not have noticed that there is no South Korea character in this show, however, there was in the original comic. In the comics, South Korea is a pervert who is constantly touching Japan and he also takes credit for the inventions of other countries. Now I'm obviously not going to go into the past history of these 2 countries because that would be incredibly long but the South Korean National Assembly reviewed Hetalia and determined that it was a "crime against South Koreans, akin to slander". So yeah, South Korean people were not happy with this portrayal and the character was inevitably removed from the anime before release. (This is a real picture of the South Korean National Assembly reviewed Hetalia, the corner shows South Korea groping Japan inappropriately)

There are two opposing views to the Japanese Nationalism take and I'll link them both (Belittling Japanese Nationalism Hetalia: Axis Powers is the title of the first one)

The first one pretty much argues that Hetalis is not Japanese nationalism because it paints Japan in just as negative of a light as all of the other countries, no one is left out of being made fun of. Japan is seen as socially awkward, emotionally repressed, and obsequious.

The second argues that Japan is often shown to be more intelligent than other characters as well as often being of the voice of reason (especially compared to China) and most of his negative attributes are not nearly as harmful as some others in Japan’s case, even his “negative” stereotypes are inoffensive, as they pose no threat of meiwaku.

I think we see in the dub that Americans are a little more willing to make fun of themselves. Though there are a few good Japan self digs, like the capitalism joke in one of the first episodes.

5.

Oh boy I've been waiting for this.

The dub is 10x more offensive than the sub. Most people consider it a crack dub.

So many of the jokes are rewritten that it is practically a different show. The sub is from a Japanese perspective and the dub is from an American perspective.

First of all the accents in the dub are so bad like it is actually atrocious. Japan is really annoying because not only is his voice stereotypical but he always says 'nani?' instead of 'what?' as if that is a normal thing that people do. The narrator is the best part of the dub and she is hilarious.

So I don't really feel comfortable even typing out the jokes here so if you want to hear them I included the time stamps for the three nazi jokes I remember in season 1 (the last two being worse).

Episode 1 (1:35:1:38)

Episode 7 (2:13-2:19)

Episode 48 (1:28-1:31)

Those are just a few examples and it gets worse. The dub literally had no reason to include these jokes because there is not even an insinuation of them in the sub and it makes literally everything a million times worse.

I will give the dub some credit for being so utterly ridiculous that it's funny. I will provide a few timestamps for the funniest jokes that only appear in the dub from the first 19 episodes (but I really recommend looking up Hetalia dub funny moments on youtube because some of them are really priceless):

Episode 13: (1:45-2:05)

Episode 14: (1:12-1:22)

Episode 17: (0:59-1:15) (2:06-2:11)

6.

Now I've had this post typed up for a bit and originally I wasn't going to talk about the fandom but after reading the article that he assigned (and going through the fandom unit), I see that there is a lot of reference to fandom in particular so I want to at least mention it.

Not the 2 biggest problems with the Hetalia fandom are racism and the fetishization of gay men.

As mentioned in the article, there have actually been multiple fan incidents of them dressing up in WWII German military uniforms Germany/Prussia cosplay, and standing in front of temples with fake guns or doing nazi salutes in convention photos (If we want to bring racism and fetishization of gay men together there were two people who kissed in a holocaust memorial museum in Italy and Germany cosplay... there is no picture of this so it might be a rumor but it was well-known so it is worth mentioning). There were also a lot of people using imperialist Japan flags in cosplay/fanart and writing incredibly inappropriate fanfiction about real-life events.

If you would like to see any of these incidents feel free to look up "Hetalia the Boston Incident" I don't really wanna include the photos here.

The fetishization is not unique to the Hetalia fandom, but it is amplified to the max. Obviously, within Hetalia, there are almost no female characters, so this leaves only male characters to be shipped with one another. Now suddenly Germany is an uwu gay bean and not an actual war criminal. At the moment of writing this Hetalia has 32105 M/M fics on ao3 which is only one of the three fanfiction sites, with ao3 not even becoming popularized until after the peak of the Hetalia fandom. (the most popular ship being America/England who refer to each other as brothers in the show as England raised America, showing another problematic part of the fandom). I would argue that Hetalia has one of the gayest fandoms (My Hero Academia is giving it a run for its money though) and I agree with the article that it is inaccurate to say that this is only done by straight cis women. The fact of the matter is a lot of queer teens used Hetalia as an outlet to express their own sexuality through these characters. The straight women that do fetishize BL are likely only doing so because anime creators suck at writing good female characters.

I think that the "level of gayness" turns straight fans away from watching the show (again MHA is the same way today) as it is hard to interact with the fandom without seeing some yaoi content. However, many people view this as something wrong or cringy, when in reality it is a normal part of fandom culture. When gay people have such little content that is actually gay, you cannot blame us for creating our own through characters that we like/relate to. Again, I think the only issues that arise here are the problematic ships that give young people a bad impression of relationships (abusive, incest, pedophilia, etc) or the arguable problematic ones like China/Russia or Lithuania/Russia as again these are real countries with real political relations. (However, I will never forget the time that there was Russia/China fanart on the news, maybe they approve and I shouldn't be complaining)

The thing is, Hetalia only seems so bad because the fandom is so large and so young. A lot of shows have fandoms that sexualize the characters and have kinda problematic fans, but the sheer volume makes things seem worse. This is something that we covered when we watched Genshiken, but there is a lot of negative stigma behind this fandom in particular, but it is just a loud minority that gets a lot of news coverage between fandoms.

It also raises the question "Is a show responsible for the response of its fans?"

Because while Himaruya has no control over what people do with his characters or how they interpret a plot, if a majority of people are leaving your show spouting vaguely racist rhetoric and interpreting your show one way, isn't there some validity in that interpretation? I think a creator has to be aware of their audience, which in this case is a very young and impressionable audience who might not understand how offensive some of the things they are doing really are. They don't hold the same ability to separate fiction from reality.

That being said Hetalia had a large impact on fandom culture as a whole, largely starting things like 'ask a character' panels (along with like homestuck but we don't talk about her). If you go to any convention you will probably find a Hetalia cosplayer, and if you watch any dub there is probably a voice actor from Hetalia there.

I also want to mention Hetalia is also a fandom full of cultural capital, If you don't know every niche fact, you're not a real fan, If you haven't read Auf Wiedersehen Sweetheart you haven't even met the entry-level requirements to be a fan. There are also no characters that are too sacred to be altered within the fandom. If you want to put Germany in a maid dress have at it, if you want to see all the characters as girls you're in luck cause Himaruya literally drew them. Fanfictions can take place anywhere from WWI to the present day and you can put any characters in any scenario and make it believable. There are thousands of pieces of fanwork, fan art, fangames, and fan AUs. These characters are malleable to fit your personal preference and there is really no way you could be mad at this as Himaruya does this himself, with no real established canon.

a Hetalia fan once said, "No one cares if Hetalia was written by a Japenese Imperialism apologist when you're 31 chapters deep into a human Au soulmate fic about Austria inviting Prussia to see his boyband perform in Berlin"

Himaruya is also the king of moe characteristics because he turned these Hetalia men into any cute thing he could think of, Chibi versions (Chibitalia), female versions (Nyotalia), and cat versions (Nekotalia). He has no reservations about drawing the characters in a dress or in cat ears. He gave the characters human names to allow for more standardized human AU's and made a DS dating game. He encourages fans to take his characters and use them in their fanworks as they see fit, canon is up to interpretation itself. I think Himaruya himself was a huge part of fandom culture (not that I could tell you cause no one knows anything about the guy) and saw how the female characters were often treated by fans and turned it on its head, allowing for females to sexualize the males this time.

Also, none of the male characters in this show resembles a Hegemonic form of masculinity. Even the most masculine character in the show (Germany) can be seen doing more "feminine things" like wearing a dress or proposing to a man. Which, you know, I guess is a good diversion from things you would typically see in an anime of this nature (but again there are a lot of instances of characters being feminine being played for laughs, like a man being girly is something inherently funny). Feat. Germany proposing to Italy with a tomato ring.

7.

I am Hetalia's biggest hater, however, I cannot deny the impact that it has had on my life and how much I love to talk about it. Hetalia is what introduced me to anime and fandom (and tumblr) for the first time. I met a lot of people I still talk to today because of this show. It encouraged me and a lot of other people to actually get interested in history. Thanks to this show I can identify every country in Europe, and it was a lot easier to remember historical facts if I just imagined the Hetalia characters. Also, Auf Wiedersehen Sweetheart is a literary masterpiece and there is a reason it almost has a five-star rating on goodnotes (https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/22064556) I love you George DeValier I hope you're doing good wherever you are.

I would like to make it abundantly clear that despite everything I've said that might make me sound like a woke blue-haired liberal, I don't really think this show is some horribly racist show or that the people who enjoy it are racist. I just wanted to provide a deeper outlook on the impact a seemingly dumb show can have on real people. I can't really blame the show for the terrible response of the fandom and it did honestly get better in later seasons that are not focused on WWII.

Despite all the bad stuff, it is a relatively funny little 5-minute watch, and you can really just jump in at any point you want to. If you don't take it as seriously as I do you might even enjoy it a little.

If you actually read this far I have major respect for you, I'm really excited to see what the general consensus on this show is.

Prussia and South Italy were my favorites in case anyone cared

If you're wondering why I didn't do my presentation on Hetalia despite my extensive knowledge, it is because I would be incredibly biased and I would go off the rails I think.

Also, my biggest fear is current Hetalia fans finding this and killing me, that might seem irrational but the Gundam fans found me last time so I wouldn't put it past them.

[finitefall]

Heya! I have a feeling we’ll get Winds of Winter either this year or next year. Probably next year. But… can I confess something? GRRM isn’t like D&D from everything I have seen. Unlike them he cares about his story and his characters very very much. And I know Dany is one of his favorites and he fully supports her ending slavery. With Fire and Blood if she must. Unlike the two hacks who think Dany is evil for killing slave masters (“good and innocent” slave masters they tried to portray). But… I never thought we would get that disgusting awful ending that we got in the shitty season. That’s why part of me is really really afraid that what if GRRM is gonna give Dany an awful ending? I suppose I could accept Dany dying if she dies as a hero and to protect her people and her loved ones. But I much rather she lived even if she doesn’t become Queen. But… I have seen a lot of comments on YouTube and social media and on Discord and they said that it’s obvious in the books Dany will go mad. I really just want our girl to get a good ending but it seems these idiots are determined to make people like me scared that she will end the same way in the books. And some of these guys even claim to like Dany but that it’s obvious she’ll go mad.

I feel you. While waiting for season 8, I still had hope, even though by then I knew D&D and it shouldn't have come as a surprise that they would give us this awful, out of character, misogynistic ending. And yet, it hit me hard. So I understand that when people say the books are different and she's obviously not gonna have this awful ending, we can think: "well, I didn't expect the show would do this either even after all the crap they had done in the previous seasons, so better be prepared this time". But as you say, GRRM isn't D&D. Their social and political opinions aren't the same at all. Martin isn't talking about "innocent slavers" and isn't against revolution.

There are already plenty of differences between her characterization in the books and in the show. It still didn't make sense in the show, but it would make even less sense in the books. Now, we can criticize GRRM for some things, but throwing away everything from the previous novels and doing fan service for those who loved season 8? I don't think so. We already know Tyrion isn't gonna be reading her the Geneva convention in the books (he was whitewashed to the point of being stupid when he joined Dany in the show), we know Varys isn't gonna join her, so we won't have those two telling the emotionally fragile woman to "fight her darkest impulses".

We know Martin wrote a heroine's arc for Dany, and that he likes to subvert tropes. Everyone looked for a boy, but it's Daenerys who's Azor Ahai returned/TPTWP. It's not a sword that's Lightbringer, it's the dragons. Now, there's a fear that she will die saving the world, which would be very disappointing (I agree with those posts here and here), although not as awful as the show's ending.

Those who claim to love Daenerys because she's "such an interesting villain" are just antis Dany. Their Dark!Dany foreshadowing doesn't make any sense. Those are the same people who claim they're not against her fighting slavery, but she should do it peacefully, meaning they don't want her to actually fight slavery at all and are totally on the same page as D&D, even though they won't admit it and tell us it's all right to like her as a villain. They’re going on and on about how it’s more interesting and more subversive if Dany doesn’t end being a hero, but there’s literally nothing interesting or subversive about Dark!Dany. Her ending in the show fell into the oldest sexist tropes.

Who are those people who claim to love Dark!Dany, anyway? Take a look around tumblr: almost all of them are Sansa stans who also loved their fave ending up QITN. Like that makes sense when you've read the books. Dany isn't gonna become mad or a tyrant, Arya isn't gonna leave to travel the world (nonsense ending for Arya too, it was really for every main female character besides Sansa to be gone) or become a psychopath, Sansa isn't gonna become QITN. We're delusional? No lovely, they are. If you want reassurance, just play along next time you see someone who claims to love Dany and says it’s obvious she’ll go mad. Tell them that you could see this happening, that she would indeed be a better and more interesting antagonist than the others, that the only thing you wouldn’t like if this happened is that no main female character would end up without power corrupting them which would be sexist, and wait for their answer. It’s not gonna be “there’s Arya, don’t worry!”, because Dany and Arya stans actually get along in the fandom and most of us love both of them (Dany stan first, but Arya is my second favorite). No, it’s gonna be "there’s Sansa”.

[cringecompanionapologist]

Cradle of the Snake Part 3: Things Are Starting to Not Make Sense

The first half of The Cradle of the Snake is stronger than the second half. A lot of stuff regarding the Mara in the finale doesn't make sense and some odd things happen to the companions when their all together, their characterizations shifting from when they were separated. I still love this story, but this is the point where picking it apart might not be very good for it.

The first half of part 3 continues on from part 2 pretty well. Baala finds Turlough and lets him out, deciding that he has to be a good guy because he's scared.

Not like he'll admit it. Turlough doesn't want to be scared of the Doctor. The Doctor's presence has made him less scared before. This doesn't add up and he can't face it yet. Turlough is also probably scared for the Doctor along with being scared of the Mara. The Black Guardian possessed Turlough at least once. There's also the general idea of Evil Thing Living in Your Head Making You Do Bad Things That You Don't Want To Do. He nearly killed the Doctor because of that. The Mara seems to have more control over the Doctor than the Black Guardian had over Turlough, so this could be even worse.

So, Turlough escapes and finds Nyssa, Tegan, and the friends they've made along the way. He's panicking and just wants to gtfo NOW, but there are snakes making that a bit impossible.

Yoanna, a sort of social worker who has an American accent for some reason, kind of saw the Mara!Doctor in a sort of nightmare thing (it's complicated), so she knows to be very afraid.

Apparently Mara!Doctor has hypnotic eyes, which might've been why Turlough was almost possessed earlier, though I thought the snake tattoo is what had the hypnotic effect. The Mara is hypnotic but the Doctor just as very persuasive eyes, I guess. Especially for Turlough.

Mara!Doctor taunts the companions a bit, giving a description of each. He'll do something similar later. Both times, he addresses the three companions in the same order, which is probably a coincidence, but it's interesting.

So, I had to check a dictionary for some of this. The arrogance/large vocabulary actually resembles the Sixth Doctor a little. I wonder if it was intentional.

Anyway, big words. Tegan doesn't get a big word. Turlough is "truculent" meaning "confrontational" and Nyssa is "Interminably Reproachful" meaning "endlessly disapproving". I think some of what the Mara!Doctor says comes from the more negative traits the Doctor sees in his companions. The Mara tends to bring repressed meanness to the surface, as we saw in Part 1 with Tegan. The Doctor probably sometimes sees Tegan as always mad at him, always complaining, never happy. Meanwhile, Turlough won't listen to him. He disobeys his instructions and gets himself into trouble.

It's the Mara that has this weird obsession with Nyssa though. What about the Doctor Nyssa would morally disapprove of in a way that upset him, I have no idea. So, it's probably the Mara just bitter about being unable to get to Nyssa through Tegan.

The cops show up and arrest Mara!Doctor for causing a ruckus. They also arrest Turlough for being associated with said ruckus, even though he didn't actually do anything and disapproving of the ruckus the entire time. They also get put in the same cell, so these people apparently have no regard for Turlough's safety, despite being aware that the Doctor is the more dangerous of the two.

Kerrem, the scientist guy Mara!Doctor got possessed before, is called in as an expert on whatever's supposedly wrong here. Kerrem slips and reveals that he already knows who the Doctor is, meaning that Yoanna never answers his legitimately good question about why the Doctor and Turlough are in the same cell. From how scared he is, Kerrem can tell that Mara!Doctor hasn't possessed Turlough, so he has no idea what to do with him as a part of this jailbreak.

In the cell, Mara!Doctor waits for Kerrem to get him out while Turlough tries to find the real Doctor In There Somewhere

Turlough reveals how much the Doctor means to him, and once he gets that off his chest, he lists some continuity. Then he pauses. He has an idea. What about the TARDIS? Traveling in the TARDIS is the Doctor's main thing. Companions come and go, but the TARDIS remains. The personality of the Doctor would be more tied to that constant than his most recent companions or recent events.

The Mara decides to try some shit, pretending to be the Doctor, letting Turlough think he's won.

The Mara doesn't actually cause that much damage in this story. The story's body count is really low for a Fifth Doctor story. But, the Mara is cruel and this might be the cruelest thing it does. As much as it upset Turlough to see the Doctor possessed, seeing him so scared and weak like this is even worse. He tries to get him help, since he can't handle this on his own, but he'll try. He'll do anything he can to help, anything the Doctor asks without question if it'll be of any help.

Removing the Doctor's coat makes it easier to expose the snake mark. The Mara is tricking Turlough into getting himself possessed, not by preying on suppressed hatred or temptation, but on just how much Turlough cares about the Doctor.

The thing is, Turlough's care for the Doctor ties into a vice for the Mara to prey on. Turlough is still pretty early in his arc. He's still a coward, or he views himself as one. The Doctor is his protector, someone he can fall back on if he gets in trouble, so he's less afraid to take risks. The universe would be too terrifying to face without the Doctor.

Quiet despair...

The Mara reveals itself to still be in control only after Turlough begins to break down. If it had kept the act up, it might've been able to possess Turlough, but it can't resist the pleasure it takes from its own cruelty.

The Mara tries one last time to win Turlough over. "The Doctor" still wants his help. He can still help him. He can still be with him if they're both possessed. But, it doesn't work. Turlough panics.

Kerrem helps Mara!Doctor, who doesn't even want to be called the Doctor at this point, escape, leaving Turlough behind. Since it's not really the Doctor, Turlough doesn't seem to mind that last bit.

After everything that's happened with the Mara!Doctor, Turlough still seems shocked that the Doctor attacked him. He has to admit that he isn't safe with the Doctor anymore.

But, Turlough doesn't go into "the Doctor is dead" mode. He still wants to help him. The real Doctor has to still be in there somewhere and he won't help Yoanna if she won't help the Doctor.

Also, in the midst of whatever struggle occurred in the cell, Turlough stole the Doctor's TARDIS key to keep the Mara from having access to the TARDIS. He's not completely stunned by all this.

So, Turlough is reunited with Nyssa and Tegan and they lock the Mara!Doctor out of the TARDIS while they try to figure out what they're supposed to do to fix this mess. This causes a shift in Turlough's characterization, though it doesn't come up right away. Now that he's around companions you'd expect to be selfless and loyal, Tegan takes over the "The Doctor's still in there somewhere and we can't give up!" role. Nyssa tries to be rational, Turlough just wants to get out of this alive, Tegan is the emotional core of the team. When it's just Tegan and Turlough, the "coldly rational" role goes to Turlough. His role adapts to accommodate the other companions.

But, first, a more amusing thing: There's a certain pattern with Turlough that probably isn't a deliberate running gag, but it's consistent and funny. You can see it in The Five Doctors, where Turlough and Susan are stuck in the TARDIS and there's a bomb outside and Turlough weirdly comments that it's "Big, isn't it?".

When scared, Turlough will state the blatantly obvious or otherwise say weird, not particularly helpful things. He might have to remind himself (and/or Nyssa and Tegan) of how the alphabet works:

Meanwhile, the Mara!Doctor is confusing. It's not the Doctor anymore. It won't answer to that name. So, you'd assume that this is just the Mara speaking through the Doctor. But, the Mara!Doctor still acts like a separate entity from the Mara itself.

The Mara terrifies ??? and will be born tonight. So, Mara!Doctor isn't the Doctor and isn't the Mara. So what is he, then?

Nyssa is the biggest STEM genius out of the companions. Turlough's a STEM genius by 20th century human standards too, but it's much less pronounced. Nyssa being a scientist is a major character trait for her. It's why she stayed behind on Terminus. Because of this, the Mara wants Nyssa on its side. It's gotten bored of Tegan and it would've been fine with having Turlough around, but it seems to have given up on him. He was supposed to be the easy one to corrupt but he just wasn't. The Mara expected a troublemaker and found a young man with anxiety and a crush on the Doctor.

Mara!Doctor uses The Magic Thing That Makes Your Thoughts Real (it's complicated) to make a new TARDIS key. It goes through another round of taunting the companions.

Tegan is the one the Mara judges as still in shock. It's still mad at Turlough for stealing the key and also thinks he's stupid now. Nyssa is the good one, the brave one, the smart one, the one the Mara has chosen to possess. The Mara probably pulls from Five's suppressed mean side again. Tegan is never satisfied, too emotional, can never keep up. Turlough is always in trouble, doesn't listen to Doctor's orders, thinks he's clever because he knows more technobabble than Tegan does. But, Nyssa is level-headed. She's naturally heroic. She listens to the Doctor and generally does what she's told. The Doctor probably doesn't think he plays favorites, but he's capable of it.

Turlough is now in a more "traditional male companion" role, protecting Nyssa. Of course he cares about her, but he reacts to Nyssa being threatened before Tegan does.

He's even willing to physically attack the Mara!Doctor to protect her!

There are some promotional photos for season 20 with Nyssa and Turlough where they look like a couple, so maybe we're supposed to think that Turlough has a crush on Nyssa? I mean, Adric did, Tegan does, I guess everyone's just in love with Nyssa now. It isn't just the Doctor who plays favorites with this group...

Nothing against Nyssa btw. She's not bad, but it's easy to get annoyed with anything that's hyped up a lot. I get the same way about Ace. Great companion, I love her, but the fandom's enthusiasm can feel a bit overwhelming.

So, Nyssa's possessed and Mara!Doctor is Lord Mara now.

Also, if you didn't know that Nyssa is much older in these audios than she was on the show, that decades passed for her between Terminus and Cobwebs, you would think she was still young. I think Marc Platt completely forgot about the age up.

I like to imagine some of these Nyssa/Tegan/Turlough stories as being from an alternate timeline. Turlough could've met the Doctor without the Black Guardian's influence. Most of the stuff the Doctor was doing in Mawdryn Undead had nothing to do with the Black Guardian. It wasn't why he was there. Turlough would've jumped at the chance to leave Earth that the Doctor could provide without needed any other motive.

The Black Guardian invaded the Doctor's timeline, found a vulnerable companion right before he met the Doctor and made him an assassin. This didn't result in the Doctor being killed though. But, Turlough sabotaged the TARDIS on the Black Guardian's orders, landing them on Terminus, where Nyssa decided to stay. Nyssa wouldn't have left when she did without the Black Guardian.

So, when the Cobwebs audios don't match up with Cobwebs, that's just bits of the original timeline reasserting themselves. It's a bullshit explanation, but I had fun making it up.

So, let's wrap this up with two brief comments. Tegan believes that she could reach Mara!Nyssa easier than reaching Mara!Doctor, or otherwise automatically calls for her help before the Doctor's:

And Turlough once again states the obvious when terrified:

Yes it is, Turlough. Yes it is.