#and it's a point of insecurity for them

[waitineedaname]

my thoughts about the yunmeng bros is that they are absolutely brothers and think of each other as family, but they would have to be under threat of death to refer to each other as brother because there is way too much baggage going on there

[hematomes]

i find it rather ironic how people are reducing the adolescence mini series to "was jamie a sociopath" and "did katie bully jamie", when the whole point of the show is how the manosphere and the alt-right pipeline is so violent and omnipresent on social medias that a 13 year-old boy who loved to draw and learn about the industrial revolution ends up thinking that women are worthless pieces of meat and that he's "one of the good ones" because he didn't rape katie, he just stabbed her to death.

edit: this post is NOT terf friendly!!!! im a transsexual dyke boygirl get out get out get out

[infamousmonkey-cat]

i actually think it’s so significant that disco elysium is named after an optional side quest. because the heart of the game is in the margins. same way you don’t get the real ending if you don’t do the (let’s face it, sometimes annoying and disincentivised) cryptozoologist quest line. you have to care about the world and its people, not just grinding through the mystery, to ever really understand anything. which is exactly what the game of suzerainty tells you IF you don’t try to “win”

[peace-hunter]

For the haunted au I had an devilish little thought. Has Optimus ever had a really bad time and when the primes try to give him advice he just shouts "you guy's FAILED!" Like for all their wisdom they couldn't beat the quintisons or see Sentinels betrayal coming?

He feels bad but in his spark he wishes HE didn't have to do what THEY couldn't.

absolutely evil thought that was inflicted upon me months ago and that i finally get to inflict upon the rest of y'all OTL

i can see it happening with the caveat that he immediately regrets saying it. but it's too late. it's the kind of thing you say in the heat of the moment and then feel the ground drop under your feet because you never meant to say it out loud. but now it's out there and you can never unsay it.

it's just. a bad situation all around :(

haunted au

[platoapproved]

Wherever your miserable life takes you, whoever you find to endure time with, whatever pale proxy of me... I'll be with him. Just wanted you to know that.

[teratomatica]

you always land on all fours

[dismas-n-dismay]

I like to think Marcille is extremely in love w Falin but pre-death she’s like “Hahaha yep me and Falin, best friends, oh my fucking god she’s never gonna reciprocate my feelings” and cries herself to sleep

Like she’s THAT kind of pathetic gay meanwhile Falin is like “man kinda weird we don’t kiss considering she’s my gf but that’s okay”

[scielson]

replaying kcd2 now and at first i didn’t really understand why hans just left henry and fended for himself but after thinking it through… hans really wants to prove himself to his uncle, wants other people to see he matured and is ready for his responsibilities. and delivering a message isn’t per se that tough of a task. since he had the responsibility for his crew, he actually blames himself a lot — that’s why you get approval points if you reassure him when he feels guilty about things that happened in the game. anyway, he trusts henry even though they bicker and fight like an old couple, so hearing from someone so close to him that he’s actually at fault hurts like crazy — that genuinely offended him. he needs someone to back him up and believe in him. so when you meet him again at the wedding, he basically says “shoo. i wasn’t good enough for you, now leave me alone.” which again proves that he is in fact hurt by henry’s critique but also lowkey blames himself because let’s be real… it was lowkey his fault that they ended up the way they did.

[divortion]

close enough welcome back patrick bateman

[whetstonefires]

You know I'm realizing one reason you keep seeing mdzs modern AUs where the Jiang parents are alive mainly so they can dramatically fail and betray Wei Wuxian by cutting him off financially--defaulting on his college tuition or formally disowning him etc--isn't just that people want to translate the Burial Mounds II arc into modern terms while keeping Jiang Cheng clean of it.

(Despite the fact that the internal logic of Jiang Cheng's character is largely built around him being a person who would abandon someone he intensely cared about under these specific circumstances.)

It's because it's hard to set up a modern analogue for the way that Jiang Cheng is responsible for Wei Wuxian, as his Sect Leader.

We live in a highly individualistic society. People are trying to write Wei Wuxian Tragically Wronged, and because there's a normative expectation that people in the position of parents will provide you with resources, and certainly won't withdraw them without warning, but no such assumption that people in the position of siblings necessarily owe each other support, making this work in modern setting with Jiang Cheng in his canon role would require a lot of extra work, just to get a less readily resonant result.

But I keep thinking about it. Because something that's getting lost here is, not just the nuances of character and relationship, but like...it's sort of key to the story that cutting Wei Wuxian off was, in fact, Completely Socially Appropriate.

The level on which it was a betrayal is subtle, and deeply cutting. And intensely tied up in the very different opinions each of Jiang Cheng's parents had about what obligations existed in their family wrt Wei Wuxian, and what these meant.

The level on which it was the obvious, normal course of action is blatant. That is to a huge extent why it happens: because Jiang Cheng's instinct to conform is a survival instinct, reinforced by trauma, and Wei Wuxian's choices meant he had no coherently compelling reason not to obey it, and enormous peer pressure to do so.

The fact is that Jiang Cheng was making a reasonable choice, the actual thing 'anyone would do in that situation,' unlike Wei Wuxian and Jin Guangyao's respective wildly warped ideas about what that is.

Wei Wuxian wasn't betrayed by Jiang Sect like your foster parents cutting you off because you're disobedient. Wei Wuxian was betrayed by Jiang Sect like your brother refusing to drop fifty grand to bail you out of jail.

Of course Wei Wuxian tells him not to. And of course the fact that Jiang Cheng already chose in the moment not to pay a cent because Fuck You Wei Ying still stands there glaring, a precedent that can never be taken back.

And then later he's betrayed by Jiang Cheng like your brother cooperating with a police investigation into a manslaughter you really did commit, that's being handled like domestic terrorism. And then like your brother calling the cops on you. And then like your brother helping the cops find where you're hiding.

I'm personally fascinated by the way Jiang Cheng's lifelong resentment for the way Jiang Fengmian reliably bailed Wei Wuxian out of everything informed those decisions to do the normal thing, the way he's reacting against his dead father as well as against Wei Wuxian and the actual situation.

But even without that daddy issues angle, the fact that the person who made that choice was Jiang Cheng, and that it was simultaneously the reasonable appropriate normal upstanding citizen rational thing to do and so shitty Wei Wuxian would be entitled never to forgive it is sort of. The Point.

Of the scenario, and also to a considerable degree of the entire finely tuned narrative construct that is Jiang Cheng.

[advisortotheadvisor]

The living squad is mystery incorporated coded with the parallels being simon/fred, claire/daphne, nicole/velma, and xavier/shaggy. The ghost squad is more vaguely breakfast club aligned, but please don't ask me who's who

[qoldenskies]

ive been thinkin about it today and ngl i am not personally interested in envy being a point of contention in leo and donnie's relationship unless it goes equally extreme on both sides, both of them yearning for the each other's particular confidence in their strengths while failing to understand completely that its just one big coping mechanism and not something that should be envied at all. not twins in the way that they complete each other and need the other to feel whole, but in the way that they always feel incomplete no matter what they do, always secretly undervaluing what they have already, and the other has everything they want to feel worthy as a person. i ESPECIALLY enjoy this dynamic if this is contrasted with them being extremely caring and supportive of each other even as they feel stuck in each other's shadows..... so much drama can be derived from the idea

[weekdaysend]

My SentOpLita 1AM relationship chart I did not think I'd be psycho-analyzing this dynamic as much as I thought I would..

[brodyfoxxsmassivetits]

laur and their strange creature thing

[charleemoon]

anyways speaking of changes from book to musical i find it fucking hilarious that the musical writers were like "so jeremy likes this super popular girl who is totally out of his league and he's convinced there is no way in hell she would ever like him let alone notice him which spurns on his decision to change to be loved. i know exactly how to write her" and then they make the most fucking autistic girl ever who is also an outcast and has strange interests and seemingly no friends and very blatantly likes and gets along with jeremy famously. like boy why are you fumbling she is you but a girl

[dimonds456]

Gonna say something controversial.

Ford Pines is a nuanced character who is neither good nor bad. Absolving him of his crimes is actively a detriment to his character and does a disservice to the storytelling of Gravity Falls, but defining him exclusively by his mistakes without taking the time to understand him is a purposefully bad faith take that actively makes your enjoyment of the show worse.

He is neither a good or bad person, because "good" people and "bad" people aren't real. There's just people. And people fuck up sometimes.

If no one fucked up and if no one held onto those fuckups sometimes out of sheer desperation, the world of fiction would be way more boring, unengaging, and dull.

Ford Pines is a mess and I don't want him to be sanitized or demonized. I just want him to be a mess.

Thank you