#and has Issues

[musicfeedsmysoul12]

Oh I love your urban legend Izumi/Izuku but what about any European urban legends? Like the banshee!

Izumi was a quiet baby. She never made a sound. Inko was terrified, asking her husband why.

"I don't know, but it'll be fine," Hisashi assured her, even as he harassed his contacts in the Commission. That kid they got the DNA of had a perfect Quirk for heroics, and while they were sure the guy was in heroics now, they wanted someone they could control.

Izumi screamed for the first time when she was three. Her scream came out of nowhere, filling the listener with dread and horror, making them shudder in fear.

"Baby!" Inko looked at her daughter, worried. Izumi, having been taught JSL thanks to her silence, raised her hands.

"Grandpa is dead," the girl said.

Izumi was right.

It happened again for a cousin killed during a hero fight. Then, for an aunt who had a stillborn.

"It's her Quirk," the doctors said. "When someone in your family dies, she screams."

Hisashi left a week later, claiming to be going to America. Instead, he moved across Japan to try and find someone else he could have the next perfect hero with.

Izumi grew up with a solemn face and an unsettling aura. She grew up without making a sound, but she screams. Eventually, she would learn how to use her Quirk and scream without a death, which she would use to go for heroics.

She would be bullied by her class and mocked by a boy she once considered a friend. A boy who would lose the Midoriya family when Inko discovered what he was going. A refusal to put up with it, even as Inko sometimes resented her daughter. (Izumi made Hisashi leave, Inko thinks on bad nights. Guilt fills her because her daughter is a child, but the anger still burns.)

Izumi would get into UA and be put into the nurse's office after a classmate used excessive force.

There, her blood would be taken. And an old story found out.

[invinciblerodent]

For the record, I just saw a post about someone complaining how people will hate Lae'zel but love Gale, and I feel like I should say it preemptively- I don't hate Lae'zel, or any other character for that matter. They're all great. Gale just happens to be just embarrassingly my type of character.

It's my curse, in a world full of interesting and novel character concepts I'm doomed to fall for the emotionally tortured, smart-mouthed mage with facial hair over and over again.

[icewindandboringhorror]

(also feel free in the tags to clarify Why you made the choice you made!! :0c)

[earlgraytay]

So the "don't call trans women dude" discourse is back on my dash, and I just read something that might explain why it's such a frustrating argument for everyone involved.

TLDR: There's gender-cultural differences that explain why people are arguing about this- and a reason it hurts trans women more than you might think if you were raised on the other side of the cultural divide.

I'll admit, I used to be very much on team "I won't call you 'dude' if it feels like misgendering, but also I don't really grok why it feels like I'm misgendering you, especially if I'm not addressing you directly." But then I read an academic paper that really unpicked how people used the word 'dude' (it's Kiesling (2004) if you're curious) and I realized that the way I was taught to use the word was different from the way most trans women were taught.

... So the thing about the word 'dude' that's really interesting is that it's used differently a) by people of different genders and b) across gender lines. This study is, obviously, 20 years old, but a lot of the conclusions hold up. The gist is, there's ~5 different ways that people use the word "dude":

marking discourse structure- AKA separating thoughts. You can use the word 'dude' to signal that you're changing the subject or going on a different train of thought.

exclamation. You can use the word "dude" the way you'd use another interjection like "oh my god" or "god damn".

confrontational stance mitigation. When you're getting in an argument with someone, you can address them as 'dude' to de-escalate. If you're both the same gender, it's homosocial bonding. If you're different genders, it's an attempt to weaken the gender-related power dynamic.

marking affiliation and connection. Kiesling calls this 'cool solidarity'- the idea is, "I'm a dude, you're a dude. We're just guys being dudes." This is often a greeting or a form of address (aka directly calling someone dude).

signaling agreement. "Dude, you are soooo right", kind of deal.

Now, here's the important part.

When [cis] men use the word 'dude', they are overwhelmingly using it as a form of address to mark affiliation and connection- "hey, we're all bros here, dude"- to mitigate a confrontational stance, or to signal agreement.

When [cis] women use the word 'dude', they're often commiserating about something bad (and marking affiliation/connection), mitigating a confrontational stance, or giving someone a direct order. (Anecdotally, I'd guess cis women also use it as an exclamation - this is how I most often use it.)

Cis men use the word 'dude' to say 'we're all guys here'. It is a direct form of male bonding. If a cis man uses the word 'dude' in your presence, he is generally calling you one of the guys.

Cis women use the word 'dude' to say 'we're on the same level as you; we're peers'- especially to de-escalate an argument with a cis man. Between women, it's an expression of ~cool solidarity~; when a woman's addressing a man, it's a way to say 'I'm as good as you, knock it off'.

So you've got this cultural difference, depending on how you were raised and where you spent time in your formative years. If you were assigned female at birth, you're probably used to thinking of the word 'dude' as something that isn't a direct form of address- and, if you're addressing it to someone you see as a girl, you're probably thinking of it as 'cool solidarity'! You're not trying to tell the person you're talking to that they're a man- you're trying to convey that they're a cool person that you relate to as a peer.

Meanwhile, if you were assigned male at birth and spent your teens surrounded by cis guys, you're used to thinking of 'dude' as an expression of "we're all guys here", and specifically as homosocial male bonding. Someone using the word 'dude' extensively in your presence, even if they're not calling you 'dude' directly, feels like they're trying to put you in the Man Box, regardless of how they mean it.*

So what you get is this horrible, neverending argument, where everyone's lightly triggered and no one's happy.

The takeaway here: Obviously, don't call people things they don't want to be called, regardless of gender! But no one in this argument is coming to it in bad faith.

If you were raised as a cis woman and you're using the word the way a cis woman is, it is a gender-neutral term for you (with some subconscious gendered connotations you might not have realized). But if you were raised as a cis man and you're using the word the way a cis man uses it, the word dude is inherently gendered.

Don't pick this fight; it's as pointless as a French person and an American person arguing whether cheek kisses are an acceptable greeting. To one person, they might be. To another person, they aren't. Accept that your worldview is different, move on, and again, don't call people things they don't want to be called.

*(There is, of course, also the secret third thing, where someone who is trying to misgender a trans woman uses the word 'dude' to a trans woman the way they'd use it to a man. This absolutely happens. But I think the other dynamic is the reason we keep having this argument.)

[evidently-endless]

i think we should remind musicians they can absolutely make up little stories for their songs btw. it doesn’t have to be about them at all. you can invent a guy and put him in situations to music. time honoured tradition in fact.

[crumb-crumblet-s-crumbington]

my au where bee goes with megatron and the decipticons instead LOL

[catcrumb]

[wintersnails]

early seasons of House MD are so precious to me. House shifts between being prickly and doing soft little things because he hasn’t refined his persona into a suit of armor yet. Cuddy manages to be gorgeous in the most dubious pantsuits imaginable, Wilson is written like a two-dimensional female side-character who’s only there to show cleavage (aka cheekbone) and then leave. Foreman is ready to fistfight House on his very first day of work and Cameron still thinks she can change the moral trajectory of everyone around her through sheer perseverance. Chase is there to be Australian and have Catholic issues and daddy issues and malpractice issues and blackmail issues.

[chloesimaginationthings]

Why did William get FNAF springlocked? Is he stupid?

[skipppppy]

No offence but I feel like some people got a little too comfortable with telling people to touch grass and swung all the way round to just straight up shaming anyone who might have a less active social life than them to feel better about themselves. “She should be at the club” was a really funny meme until people started acting like fucking middle school bullies towards people who don’t go out with their friends a lot. All those drinking/drugs/sex milestone polls were fun to engage with until it became a wierd circlejerk making fun of people who haven’t done those things before. People on twitter are once again dogpiling someone for wanting queer social spaces that don’t revolve around alcohol or loud music and telling them it’s their own fault for not having friends.

Like I get that nightclubs and sex have strong ties to queer culture and are often the first targets in the hellscape of respectability politics. It’s important we remember our roots and protect these spaces from conservative scrutiny. I mean that. They are important. But just on a surface level it seems like people are starting to see having an inactive social life as some kind of moral failing which…it’s not. I feel like an insane person for feeling like I have to say this on the fucking queer autism website but like. You aren’t inherently a bad person if you don’t have friends. You aren’t “falling behind” if you haven’t had your first kiss in your 20s or never done drugs. The real world isn’t a movie. And if you see someone who doesn’t go out much and instinctually think “wow what a terminally online loser. I bet their social life sucks because they’re a sheltered creep and not because of systemic barriers beyond their control” you need to have a long hard look at why you feel that way.

There are very real barriers that prevent isolated people from finding community and connection. Do you think you’re superior for being able to breach them? Time, money, sobriety, accessibility, none of those factors were a problem for you, so it shouldn’t be for them, right? Right?

[kitschky]

if i got a single office music dance experience my suffering at work would all be worth it !! (everyone go watch severance now, for me, your comrade)

[pangur-and-grim]

here it is, a big print of all @l3irdl3rain's feline residents* in the style of a natural history illustration! this a 4-ink risograph print on ivory vellum, and you grab a copy at greerstothers.shop

*(circa early 2024 - by the time I finished it was already out of date)

[sunderwight]

On a moshang kick but there's just something extremely compelling about the idea of Mobei Jun spending years expecting Shang Qinghua to betray him, getting impatient waiting for the axe to drop, deliberately creating opportunities for Shang Qinghua to betray him, still no betrayal happens, until eventually it gets to the point where Shang Qinghua has like, the fantastical demon king equivalent of Mobei Jun's credit card numbers and a joint account and free access to his bedroom and food and a great big cabinet full of poison and his detailed schedule and the exact time when he'll be bathing naked with no weapons under the moonlight at the one time every five years when all ice demons temporarily lose their powers for a full night and etc etc. Mobei Jun is doing trust falls (even though he doesn't know it) but Shang Qinghua just keeps catching him.

Until the whole lack of explicit communication and cultural differences thing explodes, and even then the big betrayal that finally happens is that Shang Qinghua saves Mobei Jun's life but then LEAVES HIM, he GOES AWAY, he doesn't even push Mobei into his own metaphorical abyss he just goes "this isn't worth putting up with anymore" and forces Mobei Jun to confront the fact that in his determination to be reassured he actually failed to prove himself to Shang Qinghua in return, which reduces Mobei Jun to a shattered wreck struggling to figure out how to fix it.

[aary-soap]

Twisted dejavu

Inspired by this amazing fic “Mockingbird” and the og Ghost backstory comic

(Warning?? i guess??: Ghost comic images ahead)

Joseph based on the comic Joseph, and i noticed the little plane so had to add it ahahaha *cries* we love angst in this household 🫠

[mythicalcoolkid]

You don't wish your disability was worse or more visible, you wish your disability was taken seriously. Please stop confusing the two, I guarantee you would not get the support you need JUST by being more severe or more visible. Please listen to visibly disabled people when we tell you it isn't better on our side