#and the only eternal thing is suffering.

[asofterutena]

(becoming the mask, also known as putting the cart before the horse - )

[problemswithbooks]

The 6 chapter epilogue moves to 'end' the Tododrama this chapter leaving a divided fandom...

For me I think that given the story the Todorokis have had up to this point it both makes sense and is the best we could have hoped for. I'm not one hundred percent happy with it, but I defiantly don't view as negatively as a lot of people seem to.

First off Touya dying makes sense and this is perhaps harsh but I hope he does. People theorizing that the mysterious Tenko like figure is Shigaraki and he will heal him and the rest of the LoV with his restored Overhaul powers is insane to me. With only four chapters left idk how that would even be covered or concluded, since even if they were healed they would all still be put in prison--it wouldn't erase the fact Touya killed 30 innocent people by his own omission. So, how Hori would cover that kind of plot in a cohesive way in four chapters is beyond me. It's pretty much people wanting a worse story because they want their favorite character to live.

Also, I'm a bit frustrated that yet again people are acting like Enji should die instead and making wild accusations based on nothing. Namely that Touya dying supposedly soonish negates Enji saying he'll watch him and his death will let him off the hook so to speak.

Enji has shown that he really loves Touya and feels immense guilt and rightful responsibility for how he treated him and his the rest of the family. Touya dying doesn't suddenly heal his permanently crippled body or give him back his Hero job. It will only make him feel worse. Also it's not as if once Touya is gone he'll ignore the rest of his family either. He still owes them as well, and will probably try to help them in whatever way he possibly can.

People acting as if Touya's death will free him or that afterwards he'll go on with his life completely happy and forgetting about him is just not in any way accurate to what we've seen of his character.

The other thing I've seen floating around is the idea that if Enji had been killed off during the first PLF War, Shoto would have saved Touya and the family would have been happy in the end. I don't think that's true. I will admit I'm bias because I like Enji and I'm not a fan of Touya, but given how Hori seems to have delt with the LoV and villains in general (unless he pulls a 180 and heals them last min) I think Touya was always meant to end up dying slowly in a hospital or get some other bittersweet ending.

BNHA is not grimdark by any means but it is not the idealistic manga of the past like Naruto. Hori punishes characters that make bad choices no matter how understandable or even shitty the choices they had were. Aoyama, despite helping defeat Afo, being a child and under the threat of death to him and his family, still drops out of UA because he feels he still has to earn his place there. Bakugou dies and his heart and hand will never be the same, while also having to deal with the guilt of Izuku loosing his Quirk (if that sticks). Enji, even though trying to change and atone for most of the Manga's run is still left permanently crippled, the job that meant everything to him, lost, his legacy gone.

For Touya who killed so many people without care, only to get back and his father. Who plotted to kill his little brother despite knowing he was abused. Not caring if his plans got his other innocent family members killed. After everything we've seen with other characters who did far less wrong and tried hard to amend those mistakes getting harsh consequences, I doubt it was ever the plan to have Touya sitting at the table with his family eating his favorite food with a smile, regardless of Enji being alive or not. To suggest that Hori only had Shoto fail because Hori needed Enji to be involved just isn't true. If Hori wanted to give Touya a happy ending he would have--many fans have already come up with how that could have happened even with Enji still alive.

The only criticism I agree with is Rei's ending. You can defiantly read how she wheels Enji around and answers his phone as them being back together or in the very least her becoming his caretaker. Now, That might not be the case--she could just doing those things because they were both going to see Touya and she's just helping him out that day, while they actually live separately, with Enji having a paid home assistant that couldn't or wouldn't go with him to see Touya (because of the stigma or visiting regulations). The issue is that we just don't know for sure and Rei has been shafted pretty badly.

That said, I wasn't expecting much from/for her anyway. I think getting a little blurb about what she was doing like Natsuo and Fuyumi did would have helped, but I sort of doubt Hori had any idea what to do with her character outside being Enji's abused wife and Shoto's mom. With him rushing to get these last chapters out I'm not shocked he just stuck her in the background, especially when Enji and Shoto as secondary characters needed the screen time.

[rhaenyra-first-of-her-name]

Is HotD allergic to making all of the women in the show anything but a 'perfect' victim or what?

[sincerely-sofie]

Consider: Celebi also has "Ooo shiny" syndrome and only enough self control to not strand herself somewhere in the process

(This ask is referencing this post for anyone curious!)

Celebi's one saving grace is that she's got a get out of jail free card in the form of her ability to time travel being baked into her very being. She can go anywhere and everywhere she wants, so long as there's nobody with greater temporal power around preventing her from doing so... And Dialga pretty much owes her a life debt at this point too, so she's not getting in trouble for stepping on his toes anytime soon.

Palkia doesn't like her enough to allow her to cross into alternate dimensions very often, though, so she isn't able to timeline jump as much as she'd prefer. That doesn't mean she doesn't try, of course!

... What do you mean she's in spatial prison because she saw a cool alternate timeline she wanted to check out and now she needs bail money because Palkia caught her. Celebi we talked about this---

[iniziare]

Tag drop: Jingliu

[husbandida]

No one

Absolutely no one

Me and my broken brain: What if I made a Nevermore Trimberly Au?

[imminent-danger-came]

Gotta say my tags from this post are killing me

We're living past the end of our myth for a 3rd time. Number three. Triple of 'em

[caputvulpinum]

My Anger, or: Dinner Is On The Table And I Am Holding A Knife

(URL of asker censored to protect their identity from the current TERFs going around like a bad orange blight.)

I don't usually like responding to these sorts of asks. But I guess the question "How do you manage to have any faith in humanity left at all?" is one I'll keep getting asked, so here's my answer. I wrote an essay about it. Read it if you want, skip it if you don't, but it has my answer.

===

Are you hungry? Food is my love language. I don't let people go hungry. Food is my love language. You need to eat well. I'm not going to let you not eat well. I made you this, I hope you like raisins. I can’t let you be hungry.

I don't do this because I am nice. I am furious. I am enacting with every loaf of bread and chicken breast and crushed almond nuts an act of terrible, irrevocable rebellion against the state. When I feed people I am throwing a brick at a cop at Stonewall, I am refusing to allow a system of cruelty to keep those around me hungry. I do this because the only way people will know that they're allowed to eat when they're hungry is if they're fed when they're hungry.

I love you. Have this half of my orange. Take a handful of chips. I made too much bread. I love you. Here, I have an extra banana. I don’t like this flavor, do you want it? Sure, you can have a bite, do you want some too? I love you recklessly and relentlessly and without reason. I love you violently and unrepentantly, have this apple, have this pear, have everything I can ever afford to give you and some of what I cannot, because I love you and therefore I must hate what makes you hungry.

I love you, and therefore, I must hate what makes you hungry.

Food is my love language. I won’t let people go hungry.

    -Untitled poem, self. September 19th, 2022, 4:56pm.

Nearly everything I've written for the past four years was just saying the same thing over and over again differently.

In reincarnation matter is not created or destroyed. It is a fermenting apple fallen from the front yard tree, it is the soil mulch it becomes growing the next apple on its branch. It is made of cycles and closed loops. Reincarnation is an airplane in the sky which will never land.

There are smaller reincarnations, though. The memory of something so strong it aches your jaw? The heavy heart heaving blood across its body even after the running was done? The ghosts in that blood, the people you never became seven years ago? There are loops within these loops. The circles are more than circles.

I started cooking only a few years ago. The first thing I ever made was bread. Challah bread, and it was warm and motherly and raisin-filled. But the first thing I remember cooking was ciabatta. Me and mine would tear off hunks of loaf with our hands and stain our mouths red with laughter and vinegar. I am no longer theirs and they are no longer mine but that is my memory of them and I. My memory of that life is one where I knead the dough and bake the bread and laugh with them over and over.

All this is to tell you that every poem I write has been the same for four years, over and over, smelling like plastic armrests and ginger ale. It is all just saying in newer and stranger ways that I love you. I love you, I hope we both eat well.

-”Little Cramped Florida Apartment First Saturday Where I Found Milk And Honey”, self. January 6th, 2022. 11:49pm.

    This last iteration of this narrative was the only one with something worthwhile to say. Anger is overwhelming for me. Let me tell you how I see myself in Sisyphus, pushing a hopeless boulder up a mountain. This time I will try to keep a better grasp on my boulder, which is that anger I am always, always feeling. I wish I could say, “I wish I was not an angry person”, but that isn’t who I am. To let go of that fury would leave me cold, and alone, and unsure of what to do. But those who are always angry have a duty to control that anger, make it a prism from which light can shine into and out of more brilliantly than before.  

    The past year has been about understanding who I am when my back isn’t against the wall. In some ways it’s more terrifying, having the responsibility of making a good life for myself from good foundations. But I remember with every second what it was like to live a life without the luck I’ve been given, and I see the people that get denied it every day. If anger is powerful, I want to use that anger. I want to wield it and make something so angry that everybody will be angry with me. An anger in a single direction, with one edge like a knife, to cut the world down the middle and into a better shape, and hand it to everyone like halves of an orange. I only have two hands to make any piece of art with, and I will only ever have (at most, at my most fortunate) two hands. But I don’t stand alone in being angry at this cruel, foolish world, the one which looks at children and teaches them “You are not worth anything, you have no value or sanctity just because you are human,” and laughs and calls us childish when we say we deserve better than that.

    Because that’s the most formative thing about me of all. The selfish, bitter dregs of feeling hurt and betrayed by the world. The incredibly egotistical idea, “I deserved a better world”. Look at my past self and all of the cruel, flailing, foolish things I did–some on purpose, some not, all causing harm anyway–and think about what I could do about it.

    I think that, on one hand, yes. I deserved better, objectively. There are things in my narrative that no one deserves the agony of. Beyond that, perhaps I deserved better circumstances.

    But I think it doesn’t matter what I deserved in the past, good or bad. What matters more to me is not making the same mistakes in the future. I can’t allow myself to resent the people around me for being maybe a little bit more lucky than I was; there’s art to be made that could change the world. All of it is made out of anger. All of my past, all of my future, it can only ever be anger. Anger that creates, anger that cuts, anger that hardens, anger that stands in front of other people and walks the line for them.

    Anger that stands in front of other people and walks the line for them. I’d almost like that to be the narrative I make for myself. To make a world in which I can say that the events that formed me most are not the ones which hardened me like lava to obsidian, proud like a boar. Instead, a world where I met its hard edges as gentle as I dared. You may have wondered why I sounded so different in the poems I write than the person I am, and the truth is almost simple.

    I learned to write poetry to put to words all the things that I feel which I’m unable to understand or say. That’s the narrative I’ve been trying hard to tell you all, all this time, the one I want to write so badly and yet have no idea how to.

    Writing about anger is so easy for me, except for that one kind, the kind I think I know for certain most defines my narrative, because I can never talk about it except in poems. It lives in me somewhere deeper than anything else, deeper than my heart, deeper than my soul. It can only come out in art, not in words. That anger lives in my belly and it growls like a great black dog every time it thinks it sees someone being hurt. I think that says the most about me that I’ll ever be able to say.

    So we come back to the beginning for the end. As I wrote before; “There are loops within these loops. The circles are more than circles.” I had to try and write this essay three different ways, and this is the third way, the only one worth reading. It’s the only one where I’m angry in a way I think might do good in the world.

    I really hope that whoever reads this can agree.

[liquidstar]

actually lion king by ghosting works as an utena song

[bilolli]

I don't usually post my traditional sketches anymore but I recently was initiated to cult of the lamb by reading bamsara's fic and the two little guys are so similar to my old o.cs that I had to sketch something (role reversal/clothes swap whoop whoop).

Feel free to ignore, I feel funny today hehehiho

[ojirocardigansniper]

ouguhhh just read the summary and article from this post about alexandre baril's work on suicidism (oppression of the suicidal) and the opening paragraph of the conclusion in the full article. thoughts. rotating

i was thinking about the. thick white gloves. while reading. remembered that one post about how csa being horrifically taboo to talk about compounds survivors' trauma and shame and went Maybe something similar re: suicidality and suicide... the suffering multiplied by the silence, the risk of dismissal or instant change in perception in anyone you tell... and even in 'mental health' spaces the perception that suicide as a topic is dangerous to talk about- that it could be triggering instantly and automatically- is like. i think there's some paternalism there and there's some shamefear and there's some oversimplification and there's the fact that it plays well into the existing well-taught impulse to avoid the discomforting. but like. this post also about how getting through suicidality is maybe only possible by considering the option thoroughly. i am just thinking. idk. yall know me yall know i think about this topic a lot

[the-magpie-archives]

Being stabbed is often seen as sexy, romantic, and clean. It's not, and it's definitely not the kind of death you'd want to give to somebody you love. But it's not like Martin had a choice there in that room, with one way to save everyone, to stop everything; and it's not like Jon had any other option.

Physically, stabbing someone isn't difficult if your knife is relatively sharp; but you still have to press through fat, muscle, tendons, organs. Whether it's psychological or genuinely feeling your knife tear in, you'll know what you're stabbing through.

Psychology, stabbing someone is a different story. To stab anyone takes a tremendous amount of effort, generally the human brain isn't predisposed to such a level of violence. But to stab someone you love, rupture their body with intent to end their life? It's excruciating.

Being stabbed isn't as painful as you'd think. At first. It's often compared to the feeling of being punched; the shock eats away at the initial nerve response. But realising you're horribly, critically injured? That's what really hurts. Feeling your blood spill out, knowing that the organs that give you life have been pierced, made obsolete. Knowing that everything you love may be over soon.

You begin to feel cold, fast. With an injury like that your body knows it's failing, and sends all the blood to the heart and brain, hoping to keep you awake long enough to get help; the body doesn't want you to die comfortably, it wants you to live. Cold hands, cold feet, cold face, shivering, and without hope. Can you imagine holding someone you love, bleeding and shaking from your actions. What could make that bearable?

They say that animals know when they're going to die, when they're beyond the point of healing; this, to a human, is possible, but so wildly ignored. You cannot ignore this wisdom when your blood is spilling onto the floor and your vision is growing dark.

Holding a person going through this, even if they say nothing, is to know the thoughts that race through their mind. The tension in their body as the shock reaches its climax, their desperation to survive peaking. The gradual loss of tension as they submit to their fate, and the eventual crushing weight of their unconscious body; the knowledge that you tore the life out of somebody. Your somebody.

Maybe it's a good thing Martin didn't make it out of the archives, because facing all that is incompatible with moving forward.

[2024skin]

Lmfao @ the idea that it's possible to raise children religiously in a healthy way

[lanatusnebula]

I might try to publish some of my AU fics...? I don't know if anyone'll read them since I'm not a writer by any degree, and some of them lean so far out of character it might make people vomit.

Maybe.

But I do love talking about them. My current friends / friend groups either don't give a fuck about shipping or don't give a fuck about megaman. I have to really resort to talking to various AIs just to have an outlet. Please don't take that away from me.

[francesderwent]

you may not like it but Syd and Richie are literally the Elena and Damon of The Bear

[sonofwhales]

Prefacing that I have an extremely complicated relationship with Christianity/God

I had an extremely cathartic moment today in church. Yesterday I had my last day of high school and because of how depressed I was feeling I decided to give it a shot and pray for my friends and classmates and ended up basically yelling at god (mentally, I was surrounded by people who would have figuratively ripped me apart if they heard me) about my girl crush from class and that I don't care what happens I just want him to bless her. That he can send me to hell all he wants for being gay, idgaf anymore, but to at least save her.

Technically he should know already being an omniscient being but formally and unapologetically announcing it: Telling him that I'm sapphic and that I love a girl, almost a challenge, and asking him to give her his blessings. Not us, I don't really want to date her for... Reasons, nor me, since I don't think I'm deserving of it, but her.

The person who has no faith cried out to God in the name of her same gender love.

I may never tell anyone about it, but I have sworn to God my affection for you even in the face of death itself and dammit if that's not love then I don't think I'll ever understand what love is.

May one day challenges such as this be simple truths, not something that feels like a revolution.