#and yes a lot of things i wrote simply don't make sense

[spitdrunken]

man. still have NOT managed to get my hands on the book of bill because it's sold out literally everywhere over here, but have any of you seen the new 'how not to draw' vid on the disney youtube channel that features bill? it really got me thinking.

notes: fourth wall breaking, obsessive behaviour, unhealthy relationships, implied sexual content, implied mind control

it's heavily implied that the video takes place in a world where gravity falls is supposedly fictional, like our own. bill literally says he's going to break the fourth wall! because i'm a sucker for fourth wall breaks and characters being aware of their own fandom (to an extent), i simply just HAD to run with this scenario.

i just like the idea of 'you' being just a person, some totally, in the large scheme of things, insignificant human walking the earth. you have a tendency for escapism, perhaps. you have always been drawn to stories. you like gravity falls. maybe it was something you watched while you were younger and recently rewatched, or an interest that had never waned. regardless, bill cipher, charismatic and unapologetically evil villain that he is, is one of your favourites.

you doodle him on the edges of paper when you're supposed to be doing anything else. (regardless of anyone's artistic skills, it's not difficult to draw a triangle with a top hat and an eye, is it?) and in this world, you are hardly the only one who likes him, who, perhaps, ships himself with him, who thinks about him a lot. who makes drawings and writes or reads fic. you don't think it's all that unusual.

in a stroke of luck or, depending on how you look at it, the exact opposite, the universe's idea of a cosmic joke, you are the one to catch bill's eye. (it's, after all, much easier to infiltrate the dreams of someone who already has you on their mind. makes sense, doesn't it? a tentative, wavering link had been formed already.) there, in your dreams, he tells you what to say--triangulum, entangulum. meteforis dominus ventium. meteforis venetisarium--and the next morning, you remember it clear as a memory.

you do it. for funsies. why wouldn't you? you don't expect it to actually work. he's a fictional interdimensional demon. why would it work? but much to your surprise, and horror, because surely a screw must've gotten loose for this to be happening, one of your little doodles has life blown to it. as a response to your summon, a tiny little bill cipher darts across your paper, alive but still confined.

(you've given him an in. now, he only has to take the crack you've opened for him, dig his fingers in, and tear it open.)

oh, he'll be funny! he'll be exactly what you thought of him. perhaps he even voices a line of dialogue you swore you wrote down somewhere days prior. yes, he's read whatever you wrote or read, whatever you looked at. he's keeping it himself for now. it's not easy to inflate his ego further, but you might have succeeded. rather than a meatbag, bill first looks upon you with the eye of someone presented with a puppy. fundamentally lesser, but capable of being something with the right training.

he urges you to make a deal with him and the promise he'll act out whatever fantasy you've been cooking up in that brain of yours, even if it's gross and weird and physically impossible!

he'll warp your dimension to make all of it possible!!! it's great!!! don't worry about it!!!!!!

…you don't do it. you don't touch the paper. you've seen the show, and you aren't stupid. bill nearly balks. he'd expected you to be the easiest mark of all time, but he suppose he forgot that even puppies have teeth. that's fine. he can work with this. because even though you have not let him in yet, and you refuse to shake his hand through the paper, you don't seperate yourself from him just yet.

you could oh so easily take the piece of paper he's on and throw it in the nearest shredder. or set him on fire. in you, he recognises lingering curiosity, and the excitement at having stood out, at being chosen, in one way or another. it's not hopeless yet.

he can play a bit of a longer game, then. he's been at this for a long, long time. he'll tolerate the paper he's on being folded into a little square and tucked into your breast pocket, granting him a view of your life and the world you're living in. (all the time, his hunger grows.) your decision not to throw him away ends up being your downfall. spending so much time with bill, letting him joke around with you, complaining about your problems… it takes a while for you to realise that, for a while now, he has not been speaking out loud anymore, but instead through your mind.

a connection that cannot be cut has been formed in between two of you.

on bill's part, he had thorougly expected to be bored. but perhaps it's your genuine interest in him, not the things he's offering, which he does not often see. (he's been down this road before. won't end well. but...) the sheer mundanity of your life that makes him wish he could twist and turn it all around. or just a random alignment of the stars. the heart doesn't always follow logic. in this scenario, at some point, bill realises that he has become genuinely invested in you, too. and at that point, you'll never manage to slip away. he's already dug in his heels in your mind far enough. you had no adequate protection.

he still wants to take over your world. he still wants to escape the discomforting flatness of the paper you've summoned him in. but, perhaps, you two could share that meatsack of a body of yours, before things get that far.

[dystopianam]

Tips on how to avoid and reduce the Pink Flashing - "Masterpost"

Look here for other masterposts!

⚠️ THIS IS NOT A COMPLETE ""GUIDE"". I won't be updating this post and I've explained why here. In this post I only wrote some advice, so you won't find an entire research on Pink Flashing. Please read other REAL guides if you are interested in that. Unfortunately, deleting the post wouldn't make sense since the reblogs would remain.

What is the Pink Flashing?

The Pink flashing, also called Pink Soup, is a graphical error that occurs when the game thinks it has reached the limit of its memory capacity to read the game's textures even if your PC is much more powerful and the configurations made to the game itself are very high and can hold much much more.

When this arrives, gradually an object or sim will start flashing pink and purple or even EVERYTHING will start flashing pink.

This type of error can occur both in game and on Bodyshop, and as many people mistakenly think, it is NOT a symptom of corruption. And it's not even a hardware problem of your PC. It's not your PC's fault, it's not dying, it's simply the game that's unstable.

What should I do when this occurs?

First of all, DON'T PANIC, it's nothing serious. The only thing you need to do is save the game before it crashes (because yes, it usually crashes after the pink flashing occurs), close the game and reopen it. When you reboot it, the pink flashing will be gone.

AND don't worry if some previews of your sims remain pink. They will update as you play (the fastest way to update them is to have your sim change clothes or change their appearance in the mirror)

@2fingerswhiskeysims added that another method is to minimize the game, leave the PC to rest for a few hours and then reopen the game. The pink flashing should then go away on its own (I would just recommend saving before doing so, because it's not a method that works for everyone. For example it often crashes immediately after the pink flashing appears or even just minimizing it makes it crash if it's like my game that even if you look to it by mistake it crashes)

Is there a way to increase the graphics capabilities of my game?

Yes, there is, and you should do it regardless of the pink flashing, to make your game more stable. This will NOT eliminate the risk of pink flashing, but will reduce it and make the game crash after hours and hours of play rather than after a few minutes or half an hour as happens to some.

What you need to do is make your own graphic rules that adapt the game to your video card and install the 4GB patch. This guide from Pleasantsim explains how to install both (as well as providing other tips for stability and improving graphics)

Another tip that many give is to use the Sims2RPC Launcher by LazyDuchess, as many say it has made their game more stable, while others say it has increased their Pink Flashing, so I think it's very subjective whether using this launcher is better or worse.

Is there a way to eliminate it or avoid it?

There is no fix for this problem and there is no way to eliminate it, although LazyDuchess is doing some research to see if it can be done. BUT I can give you some advice on how to avoid it for as long as possible (it will still appear after a few hours, but I can tell you what to do to be able to play safely for as long as possible)

From my personal experience, I understand that pink flashing occurs when the game needs to read a lot of thumbnails (of hairs and clothes expecially) and when you visit too many lots in the same game session or you visit a single huge lot full of objects. So, what you need to do is:

Save before changing your sims appearance (whether it's a change of hair or clothes) because the game almost always tends to crash after a long or sometimes even short makeover session. (It depens on how many ccs you have)

Avoid changing your sims hair if you don't have to. One of the causes of pink flashing is reading all the thumbnails of the hair in the game, especially if you have a lot of cc hair and getting to the last page or halfway through is very tiring for you and for your game that have to read all the thumbnails. It doesn't matter if the game already has them cached, pink flashing doesn't care.

Avoid changing your sims clothes if you don't have to change them (so avoid needlessly looking at all the clothes you have, in your wardrobe or in shop mode as if it were your closet at home). Just like with hair, pink flashing is triggered by reading too many thumbnails, especially if you have a lot of cc clothes. As with hair, it doesn't matter if the game has already cached thumbnails of all the clothes you have. Pink Flashing doesn't care. BUT unlike hair, for clothes I found a solution (which I hope is not a coincidence that only works for me). Unfortunately this took away the pleasure of going to the shops to buy clothes, but it avoided crashes and Pink Flashing. Basically, I discovered (and I don't know why) that if I use Pescado Clothing Tool, for some mystical reason the game doesn't crash and doesn't trigger pink flashing (I can even spend hours scrolling through all my many ccs and it doesn't annoys my game at all)

Last but not least, pink flashing can also be caused by reading too many thumbnails in buy mode or visiting too many lots during the same gaming session. Unfortunately there isn't much to do here, my only advice is to save very often when you edit lots, and to avoid visiting different lots too much if you don't need to (don't worry, your sims don't suffer from claustrophobia and can stay in their homes very well). If you have to edit a lot of lots, use a game session ONLY for that, because changing lots and scrolling through the buy mode there will be a lot of pink flashing very soon, at some point. At least you will have the knowledge that it will arrive any moment and you won't have to stress while you are in live mode.

To summarize, pink flashing is triggered by:

Scroll too much hair pages in "edit appearance" mode.

Scroll too much clothes pages in "change clothing" mode.

Scroll too much furnitures in "buy/build mode"

Open/go in many different lots in the same game session.

Use very big lots with a lots of objects.

Apartment lots (these ones are a hell for PF)

AND the snow. Yes, when the terrain change in "snowy" mode, this trigger the PF a lot. You can disable the snow with mods if you want or simply save the game before the terrain changes and hope that it will not happen.

@brandinotbroke added that the shaders trigger Pink Soup. But when it comes to shaders this time it also depends a lot on the hardware capacity of your PC, and it's not just a game problem. Both the game's shaders themselves, additional shaders and default replacement shaders downloaded from the internet could cause problems. If you think this is the problem, the solution is to use the "userShader off" cheat. BUT this doesn't always mean that your computer can't handle that particular shader. Often some shaders need to be downloaded in their version to be compatible with other shaders. So try to differentiate the difference between an unsupported shader and a shader that is not compatible with another, always read the description of the creator's post carefully. (For example: the "Better Night Life" shader conflicts with Voielle's water shaders and for this reason there is a BNL shader compatible with Voielle's water. IF you used the normal shader instead of the compatible one, any object that works with BNL shaders will be affected by Pink Soup.)

@goingsimcrazy added that many hood deco, high quality setting, high DOF and lot impostors can trigger pink flashing. However, this is a mix between "your PC's hardware capabilities" and basically...player luck. Sometimes players with latest generation gaming PCs cannot handle the hood decos and players who play with toasters play surrounded by hood decos, so here isn't very clear how The Sims 2... decides its capacity and compatibility criteria. But anyway, if you think that your hood deco, lot impostors, high graphics qualities and DOF (distance of field) are TOO MUCH and that your PC cannot support them, simply deactivate and lower the graphics settings from the settings!

BUT @goingsimcrazy also pointed out a detail that I wanted to add too but forgot. Basically, deleting the thumbnails cache is of no use, it doesn't solve the pink flashing problem, in fact it makes it worse. I won't give you a computer lesson but in simple terms I'll explain it to you like this: caches are used to store information so that when you open a software, the software takes information from the cache file and speeds up its reading capacity. If you delete the thumbnails cache every two days what you are doing is practically punching yourself, because not only are you slowing down the game, but by doing so you force it to regenerate the thumbnails every single time, thus causing crashes and pink flashing. Delete the thumbnails ONLY if you have changed a huge number of default replacements and need to update the previews OR press CTRL + right click of the mouse on the individual preview you want to refresh.

@fireflowersims also added this, that it's very important, please read!

Small clarification to finish:

Sometimes pink flashing is also caused by very long gaming sessions (so even if you don't do any of the things listed, at some point it will still happen, but I'm talking about more than 4/5 hours of gaming).

Many of the things listed may be stupid and already known, many of you will be reading and thinking "the genius has arrived", but I have seen many people suffer from pink flashing, not understanding what trigghed it and doing A LOT of the things that trigghed it the most. (I watched a lot of gameplay on YouTube where this happened).

So...I hope I helped someone and if someone know other things that trigger PF let me know, I'll add it to this post!

[thatbookgirl1118]

I cannot for the life of me find the original post (tumblr is a hellsite) but this was sent in an atla gc:

@the-badger-mole

and tbh i always kinda felt like kataang was weird exactly because of that one-sidedness??? like there's one episode of katara maybe sort-of seeing aang as a love interest (when the fortune teller tells her she'll marry a powerful bender), but then the rest of the show is her being passive in the relationship or actively pushing aang away (like their second kiss). and then at the end she just randomly decided "okay i like you i guess."

whereas aang got a bunch of pining moments and you actually believed he was in love with katara.

and most of their relationship was about how she helped aang - he did contribute to her character development over the course of the series especially as a bender of course but it didn't feel as emotionally/spiritually deep as katara's literal one episode sidequest with zuko.

but then someone else wrote "I would argue the opposite? Kataang is where Katara choose the peaceful nomad which subverts the trope presented where zutara is where she chooses the strong protector/combatant. Aang as a character is a subversion of the typical hero while zutara is like,,, coloniser romance idk"

and honestly... i kinda get that. aang was problematic in a lot of ways, but he was definitely a subversive protagonist, and i can see the power of allowing the woman to choose the pacifist vegetarian over the extremely obviously hot jock badboy. this is an incredible oversimplification of their characters of course, but the point stands.

Basically, Kataang is the ship we all logically want - the sweet, friendship-based, seemingly subversive one. But Zutara is the one that actually makes sense in the story, with these characters, not their tropes. Aang is subversive, but he and Katara are also kind of terrible for each other - he isn't mature or selfless enough for Katara, who needs someone to force her to take care of herself because she's always the one taking care of everyone else (wonder what that's like). That's why she and Zuko are so perfect, because he not only takes care of her, he makes HER prioritize herself. Aang... does not. He's pretty selfish, which yes is partially due to his immaturity (I personally don't count Korra as canon because it treated ALL the og characters terribly so I'm speaking purely from his 12 yo self), but it's also just a basic incompatibility thing. And Katara is actually equally bad for Aang - she enables him waaay too much, and he needs someone who doesn't. Who forces him to stand up on his own two feet and take responsibility. She's too much of a mother, and her relationship with Aang is too mother/older sister-ish.

With Zuko, on the other hand? Katara started out HATING him, forcing him to prove himself to her instead of handing him everything she had like she tended to do with Aang and Sokka. He had to earn her care, and as a result he appreciates it way more and demands way less of it. He's a far less selfish character generally for the same reasons, and is much more mature/has a better understanding of life and gray areas. Southern Raiders is a great example of this - he's down for whatever Katara decides because he understands that there's no one right answer, unlike Aang who simply preaches forgiveness. I'm not necessarily attacking Aang about that either - I do believe that grudges eat away at a person, and taking a life does haunt you, so forgiveness isn't necessarily bad advice. But it's not what Katara needed. Aang is great as a friend, but I don't think he's what Katara needs from a romantic partner. Zuko just... is.

[llilyrose]

llilyrose spends her time analyzing aroace stuff. yay.

isat spoilers afoot

what i especially like about the way adrienne wrote mira's orientation is the lack of room for interpretation. yes they snuck aroace talk into fantasy france, but just stop and think for a minute. what would happen if mira just said "i'm aroace" or "i don't feel love the same way" instead of all the nuance we got to her character in the friend quest convo?

we know she's sex repulsed, we know she's romance repulsed. we know she loves fiction that has those things in it, loves interpreting fictional characters that way, but can't bare to see herself in that situation. it makes a lot of sense with regards to her location (vaugarde, a very sex-positive and romance-adamant country) and also with regards to herself (the way she feels about her environment). Of course she wouldn't blame other folk around her for engaging with their religion the "correct" way, of course she'd internalize all her feelings of being outcast and turn it back on herself.

The fandom respects this! Nobody ships her romantically, or sexually, because we know she's not into that. We know she would never and i know a bunch of people who would punch you for even thinking it!

Now what if Adrienne hadn't put this in the game? What if they had just said on their tumblr one day, "mira's aroace," or something. where would we be now? aspec shipping discourse would definitely take the reins. we'd have people shipping her in all kinds of different ways, bending the aroace character to the best of their ability because they could still be into sex, or romance, or whatever. this is TRUE, it's POSSIBLE, but there's no nuance. We wouldn't know the way Mira really feels about these things unless Adrienne told us, so a lot of people would either ignore/"work around" her identity or just wouldn't even know about it to begin with!

Introducing mira's orientation in the way adrienne did leaves no room for discourse. we know if she's sex-positive, sex-negative, how she reacted to finding out she was, etc. It provides so much more representation than a simple "I'm aroace" ever could. It's such a wide label, so finally having CONCRETE information about a canonical aroace's experiences with their orientation is so, so freeing and honestly quite refreshing. and it's worked into the story seamlessly!!!

She's not an emotionless carcass with no capacity for love, she's not outwardly detesting sex or romance at every possible moment, she's simply a well-rounded character who happens to be aroace. You have time to warm up to her before ever even finding out about her orientation! Or having any clue at all (barring maybe the suspicious sketches)!!!!! Aroace people are real!!! We're so real!!!!

Speaking of the suspicious sketches! We know siffrin's alloace (from, like, one line of dialogue), but we don't know if he's sex-repulsed. Adrienne's gone on record to say "aces can still have sex" in reference to siffrin, so I'm inclined to believe he has at least some sort of libido.

When looking at the sketches, both him and mira have a repulsed reaction. I think there are three possible reasons for Siffrin here!

Siffrin is sex-repulsed and has a visceral reaction to them because he thinks it's gross.

Siffrin has no libido because the stress overrides everything in his system. That combined with his ace identity would probably lead to a distaste for the papers.

Some people would NOT GET THE MEMO from the act 3 friendquest. Sometimes when you're writing you have to account for the gamers being really really dense. Some people didn't even understand the Isa friendquest was him coming out as trans basically. Since Ace characters are hard to "prove" unless they explicitly state they dislike sex, this line of dialogue might've just been there to drill it in that Siffrin is ace because the only other place we see that implication is one line in the friendquest. It could even have no tie to his relationship with sex, who knows?

one of these options is not like the others! /silly

I couldn't tell you which one of those it is, but i think at least one of them had to have hit the mark. It's a lot harder to decode siffrin's sexuality when we only get like 5 lines of dialogue total that vaguely even reference it

With this we come back to the issue from earlier: He could be demi, he could be ace, he could be sex-repulsed, he could not! Most people write them sex-repulsed and I'm personally on that bandwagon, but interpreting them a different way isn't any less correct unless you completely ignore the fact they're ace in the first place.

Even sex-positive aces have complicated relationships with sex. Some do it for the gratification, some simply have higher libido and can't think of a different way to get it out, and others only do it to please their partner.

I think writing an ace character as sex-positive should be seen as a character study instead of an excuse to ship two characters together. Is this character the type to even enjoy it in the first place? How often? How do they interact with it? Etc. Which I think is what Adrienne was talking about when she said "aces can still have sex." We don't know about siffrin's identity, we don't have a grasp on the nuance, but we do know he's ace and that he experiences love differently from the way mirabelle does, and the way isabeau does, and the way odile does, and what have you.

I love love love the representation we get in isat. An aroace, an alloace, and someone that a lot of fans headcanon as aroallo though it's unconfirmed. Even if Odile's not aro, we still get that line of dialogue about not finding romance suitable for her at the moment, which speaks true to a different experience altogether. No two characters experience love, experience life the same in isat. That's why i get to make a tumblr text post that's a bit too long exploring the different avenues adrienne took when writing the characters lol :')

[felicjana050896]

Maximus - the main antagonist in the series?

I finally watched Fallout and I want to comment on one thing, apart from the whole Cooper and Lucy relationship, because there are a lot of analyzes on Tumblr and Twitter (after watching the series, I will immediately rewatch it to find some additional hints, and if not, it's just for fun, because the series for me... was a masterpiece, it's been a long time since I couldn't break away from the series like I did from Fallout, especially since I was playing games, so it was wonderful to feel this atmosphere again, to sum up the sentiment completely took me far away...), so I'll just link some of these analyzes and hints here, in case someone hasn't read it:

It's 100% CGI, you can see how at the end that thread moves completely unnaturally, there's no way it's real, it had to be CGI and it had to be for something, it makes no sense to add such a little, tiny detail with CGI after nothing..., after all, money is spent on it, it's one thing to write "I love you" in the background, and another thing is to make a heart out of thread using CGI... (at least that's what I think, I don't know anything about CGI, but even such a small thing must cost a bit... :D )

Apart from the fact that Max and Lucy have practically no foreshadowings and no chemistry, and they DON'T KNOW each other at all, because their whole relationship is based on "I met a nice girl/boy and I think I like her/him", because let's be honest, there is no talk about love here, they liked each other because Max helped Lucy with the radiation and Lucy helped Max get out of the armor, they helped each other and were nice to each other, that's all... but it's not enough to talk about love, liking each other yes, but not about love (I'm surprised when people, for example on Twitter, write that Max and Lucy love each other, where...???) and as I mentioned above, they don't know each other, they know practically nothing about themselves, about their plans, dreams, tastes, perception of the world, etc., they know nothing about each other, they have barely met, and their entire relationship is based on the fact that in this world it is simply difficult to have any other person, so they instinctively grab whatever comes first. Lucy dreamed of getting married and having children, she was taught to focus on the ,,survival of the species", her whole wedding was pure ,,politics", and in the end it turned out that she married a bandit who then tried to kill her, while Maximus probably never didn't think about these matters, surrounded by practically only guys and focused on military life..., so their entire relationship is based on: ,,he's/she's nice, ok, I'll take it", that's why their relationship seems rushed and has zero chemistry , so in my opinion it is not a bad writing (like with Chaggie from Hazbin Hotel in my opinion), it is supposed to be like that and it makes logical sense, as I have already presented above, this relationship is supposed to be quick and without chemistry, because it is supposed to show their standards, how low they are, in this world... and Cooper, on the other hand, comes from a completely different world...

By the way, unlike Max and Lucy, who nevertheless spend some time together while traveling sensibly, we don't see any specific conversations between them that could bring them closer to each other, as I wrote above, they don't know each other and in fact they don't even try to get to know themselves, while in the case of Cooper and Lucy, Lucy constantly asks Cooper questions, and sometimes he answers (in fact, not directly, but he answers), they have a conversation about torture, Lucy asks Cooper why he is like this, why he continues this ( scene with cannibalism), Lucy asks what he is (water scene), etc., Lucy asks Cooper questions, wants to get to know him, wants to learn more about him, and he also learns more about her through her talkativeness (e.g. the initial scene when Cooper and Lucy meet for the first time and Lucy tries to diplomatically calm him down, or the scene when Lucy gives Cooper the vials), Cooper and Lucy have already gotten to know each other more than Max and Lucy, and now Lucy has gone with Cooper....

But leaving Cooper and Lucy, because this post is not about them, let's move on to Max..., Max, who in my opinion has a great predisposition to become the main or at least one of the main (because the most main may be those from Vault-Tec) antagonists in series, why....

At the beginning, I was positive towards Max, unlike Lucy, who seemed naive and stupid to me at the beginning, and I don't like such characters (of course, I liked Cooper from the very beginning, after all, Hancock was my Fallout husband in Fallout 4 ;) ), and then she surprised me in the scene with her husband, when she ,,killed" him (almost, but still), I didn't expect such a change in the character at all..., later she surprised me by the fact that she is not as stupid as she seemed in the in the beginning, yes she is naive but not stupid, she just had to get out of the bubble called the Vault and I can't wait to see how her character will evolve in season 2 after all this and being together with Cooper..., I want to see her show her claws..., I want to see even more how, under this guise of a naive girl, there is actually a strong and dangerous woman who can cope on her own and is still fair and honorable..., I love such characters :) , but I had a different experience with Max, whom I liked at the beginning, but the further into the forest, the more I felt like ,,guy, you make more and more stupid decisions, what's wrong with you...", at the beginning Max seemed to me as reasonable, honorable, fair and a real soldier, and at the end I only saw him as an unreasonable 15-year-old boy making stupid, irresponsible and evil decisions with his own ego problem... sorry, but this character gave me the vibe at the end that he would go towards darkness, and when he finds out that Lucy is allied with Cooper..., a guy he fought and who completely defeated and humiliated him..., a guy who, by the way, he hasn't seen since that fight..., Cooper and Max haven't had any interaction in the show apart from this fight, so Max has absolutely no knowledge that Cooper is ,,in the game", and that Lucy could have gone with him at all, he's probably already forgotten about him, and when he remembers..., I'm really curious about his reaction....

The first and most important thing about Maximus in the series... in season one, when asked why he joined the brotherhood, he replies that to ,,hurt the people who hurt me"... that's not a praiseworthy answer..., this is not a good answer..., sure, I understand the issue of revenge etc., but as good and golden rules teach (speaking of Lucy's golden rules, because she sticks to them and this is what distinguishes her from, above all, Maximus) revenge brings no good..., Lucy, despite everything, didn't want to take revenge on Moldaver, even though many people she knew died because of her, her father was kidnapped, and she almost died, she didn't want to take revenge on her, of course, she was out of her own turf and surrounded by enemies, but still, her goal was to free her father, not revenge, while Max's goal is simply revenge, he doesn't want to, for example, rebuild Shady Sands or be a good knight who helps people, bring peace to this world, NO, he just wants revenge..., he wants to become a knight for his own selfish purposes, not for other people, while Lucy does things for other people, wants to free her father, helps Wilzig, worries about dog while Cooper is dragging her, helping Cooper with the vials, helping the ghouls (of course she didn't know and probably wouldn't understand that they were wild, her intentions were good, and that something bad came out of it is something she couldn't have known at that moment), she also helps in vault 4 when she first thinks something bad is happening there, and then she tells Max to return the core and kills his mother out of mercy, just like Cooper killed Roger (I think at this point, after the incident with wild ghouls, Lucy understood what Cooper did then and that it was good after all), Lucy does everything to help people and live according to the golden rules, while Max is selfish and thinks only about himself, leaving aside the issue of revenge, he also says that he wanted something bad to happen to Dane, of course he didn't really do anything to them, but he wanted something bad to happen to them... what kind of person do you have to be to want them to become your best friend harm, just because they got what you wanted..., from the very beginning the series shows us not to have any illusions about Maximus and that he is not really and will not be a good guy...., he let Titus die and sure, the guy was a dick and I would probably get angry too and want to kill him, but kill him anyway... quickly... while from what we see, Max just lets Titus die slowly, I don't know about you, but for me there is a difference between killing someone quickly because he deserved it, and letting it happen and WAITING AROUND him until he slowly dies... that was cruel... I would understand if Max killed him, but he KILLED, he showed some humanity despite everything, even though the guy deserved to die, and he didn't wait next to him and listen to him slowly die... it was evil....

Then, when he has armor, he enters a situation with a guy who raped a chicken (Cooper would be really angry :D ) and instead of learning the whole situation, calming them down and finding out what's going on, who is right, he immediately takes the side of the one who is oppressed, thus oppressing the one who is actually right, takes him brutally by the hair and is happy about it..., seriously..., you are happy about this situation..., even if he were helping a good person, I don't think so that there is something to be happy about here..., although what I really think he enjoys is the power, the power that the armor gives him..., this is bad again... if someone likes the feeling of power so much, power and control, it always reflects badly on him..., then (after painfully holding the innocent man all the time) he throws the guy to the ground and when the other explains the situation that took place, Maximus doesn't even apologize..., he is only distracted and then says, ,,Okay. On your way, citizen." what..., as if you hadn't hurt this ,,citizen" a moment ago and didn't judge him badly..., not at all, there's nothing to apologize for here..., it's better to go on your way..., God..., this was the scene from which my opinion about Maximus slowly started to go down, because even with Titus I still made excuses for him (even if it was cruel), but from that moment Maximus with starting with my grade of his character as ,,4+", at the end of the series he dropped to a grade of ,,2-" and it's not that this is a poorly written character, NO, in my opinion it is a very well-written character, just a bad character man and I mean assessing his humanity, not the creators' writing, because in my opinion it is very good :)

In addition, of course, we have the issue that he lies to everyone that he is Titus because he wants to be a knight and clearly wants people to admire him (again, the issue of his ego), at the beginning he clearly wants to kill Thaddeus in cold blood, but then he changes his mind (apart from what killing Thaddeus would give you..., even if you came back with the head, you would be responsible for two deaths..., come on...), then of course he tries to kill him again after he tells him the truth..., then we have the Vault 4 arc in episode 6 and halfway through the episode when Max goes to the armor that is in the room, he looks at him through the glass with a stupid smile, he turns around and with that smile and behavior, with his body movements, he looks to me like he told them ,,See, this is my armor, this is me, I'm a knight"... it looks as if he wanted someone to come up to him and ask him about it, and he could brag about how cool he is, because I really don't know how else to read this short scene...:

Sorry for the poor quality, I did it on my phone.

then he turns back to the armor and his facial expression changes, he frowns:

and we have a close-up of the entrance to the core, and Maximus sees the guy next to him screwing in a light bulb and asking where it came from they take electricity, he goes to that place and wants to take their fusion core..., literally at that moment he wants to brazenly steal their fusion core, the people who helped them and cured him, he wants to take away their only source of energy..., or Maximum is so stupid that he doesn't know that this is literally their source of survival and thinks that they can cope without him, although it's still vile and I don't believe it, or Maximus is just a vile, evil and selfish man who doesn't matter with no one else but himself and what would make him feel good..., just look at his face at this moment...:

he knows that he is doing something he shouldn't and he is clearly doing it with full premeditation...

later in the plot, in episode 7, when Maximus sees the inhabitants of Vault 4 doing something to Lucy, which Maximus does..., of course he doesn't find out about the whole situation first, he doesn't try to eavesdrop on what they're talking about or anything, he just rushes in in armor and starts attacking everyone around, seriously... how stupid and irresponsible it was of him, I won't even mention... and when they finally release them, which Maximus does..., he takes the armor with the core with him, without thinking that it is their only source of energy and, what's most funny, he doesn't want to give it back..., NO, he wants to keep it so he can walk around in his big armor and show everyone "look how great I am!", says that he needs a core for his armor, and without the armor he won't be a knight, Lucy tells him that a knight shouldn't steal, and Max replies ,,with this armor, I can help people", how have you helped people so far..., you let escape a chicken rapist..., besides, what kind of help is it if, in order to provide this help to people, you steal something that will put other innocent people at risk of death..., you can't build something good on something bad, poisonous roots, will give poisonous fruit, no other way..., then the best thing is..., because be careful... he is trying to MANIPULATE HER! Yes..., this guy who supposed wants to be good, noble, fair..., no wait..., he wants to be a knight to take revenge..., nevermind..., it's up to him anyway fits..., he manipulates her, playing on her feelings, telling her that he wants to help her find her father and asks her if she would give up the core if it meant she wouldn't get her dad back, if it was up to the core to get her father back..., only then Lucy convinces him to give up the core when she says that if his father found out about it, it would break his heart and that she can't do that, only then Maximus gives up on convincing her and decides to give up the core. Lucy is his moral compass here, and it's possible that she would put him back on the right path if she were with him, but in the end, Lucy chooses Cooper and leaves with him.

To sum up... where do people who ship Lucy and Max have this good and beloved Max... where... where is Max a better person and a better match for Lucy than Cooper... (because I saw some comments under some episodes of the series that ,,Ghoul is evil and Max is good and honorable"), so far Max makes more bad decisions and does it with full premeditation and/or out of his own stupidity..., when Cooper, when he does something, it has a purpose..., he never does anything without a reason, yes, he shot Roger, but he did it out of mercy, first he made Roger remember the good times, so that in those last moments he died happily (this is one of my favorite scenes, if not my favorite, it was sweet and touching despite the situation...), he shoots Wilzig, but in the foot, probably so that he won't just run away, it's not to kill him, since he probably at that moment he thinks that he has to deliver him alive, because it is only from Wilzig that Lucy learns that only his head is enough, not himself, he kills people in the town, but only those who attacked him, he doesn't go around houses and doesn't kill random people..., kills "guards" who were bad for him, and one obviously wanted to kill him, but he doesn't kill their boss, interestingly..., he kills, of course, three guys at the beginning who are also ready to kill him and they want to force him to work for them, after practically lying in a coffin underground for 30 years, he kills the farmer's son, when the son reaches for a gun, you can see here how Cooper is poking this son to see if he is capable of doing it, but he himself doesn't reach for the gun until this son reaches for it, Cooper always wants to know, to be sure whether the man he is killing really deserves it, whether there is really a point in killing him, unlike Maximus, who never finds out who he is really guilty, he prefers to just ,,go with the wave" and he orders the one he finds guilty at first glance, he even wants to kill Thaddeus at the beginning (of course he doesn't do it in the end, but he wants to) even though the guy hasn't done any harm to him yet (and bullying ,,at school" is not a good reason to kill, it's not a reason at all), and he's not torturing Lucy like some still claim, even though Cooper himself and the entire scene says he's using her as bait, not torturing her, and yet there are still people who say he's torturing her here..., really I know that some people sometimes have trouble reading the situation on the screen, but when the entire situation on the screen screams "BAIT!" and the character who uses the bait says directly that he thinks torture doesn't work and uses her as bait, like one can still claim that there is some torture in this scene..., are there really people who cannot hear and see things that are said directly..., how..., Cooper used to be a good guy and he still is, deep down, he's still that good guy. When there is a scene from the past when Cooper has to play a slightly worse guy on camera to show that his character also makes mistakes, he doesn't want to do it, he doesn't like it, because in his opinion a good person should be good and not make such mistakes, Lucy will direct him back to the right path, and he will teach her a little about life, this is the perfect dynamic of two different, yet very similar characters who can and do influence each other's development.

And I don't know about you, but for me this scene is terrifying:

this whole brotherhood is like a religious sect, and at this moment Maximus has become a kind of prophet and that look in his eyes...:

for me it is disappointment combined with the desire revenge, disappointment because he found out that the father of the girl he liked is responsible for the destruction of his house and probably the death of his relatives (we never have memories of Maximus' relatives, which is interesting, so it is not certain), and he managed to escape, and the desire I don't think I need to explain revenge... Maximus' plot in season one starts with revenge and ends with revenge, it's his plot, whether someone likes it or not... and in my opinion, as a result of everything I have described, he will change into an increasingly worse person, he was not good from the beginning and will only get worse....

This is a long post, as usual for me... unfortunately, I don't know how to write short... and besides, I like it when all the details are brought to light :) , that's the end, thank you for reading and have a nice day/evening/night :)

[mylonelydreaming]

For me, Link being "unhealthily obsessed with Zelda and finding her to the point Ganondorf is a footnote" isn't something that I think is "bad" at all, but precisely what makes this version of him remotely interesting (to me) when Nintendo is otherwise so adamant about keeping him a stoic knight most of the time.

It adds a different layer to him, turns him from this perfect, bland stoic boy into someone who only outwardly appears that way, appears like he has everything together, but is in fact flawed inside and a little broken from what has happened to him. A little off. That makes him much more interesting to me. It gives him a major character flaw that can be exploited by his enemies, and what do you know, Ganondorf and the Yiga Clan do exactly that (they even remark on what good bait she makes).

I also find it interesting to think about when he became this way. Was it the years he spent with her in-between games? Was it well before that, when he was aimlessly chasing that "beautiful voice" even before he remembered who he was? Was it some point before the Calamity? Did he become a knight in the first place not merely to follow his father's footsteps, but to one day protect her? I find this compelling to think about. Is making a specific person your life's purpose unhealthy in real life? Yes. It's also very interesting in a story.

And also on that note, isn't him becoming at least a little too obsessed with her a completely natural thing to happen?

For me, if you take away Link's (yes, I'll admit, unhealthy although I kind of like that), obsession with Zelda, then all that is left is the exact ways that people who hate not only zelink but Link himself describe him as all the time: A robot who feels nothing but duty.

And sorry, but I just find that very boring. Dull. Unexciting. I also, then, can't see why on earth Zelda would have feelings for Link if she's just a duty to him and her acts of affection, like sewing him a new tunic, are never returned. Frankly, I think she deserves a lot better than that, to have her feelings reciprocated and a happy ending after all that she's been through.

And to be honest, why would any writer make her feelings unreciprocated when she's basically the main focus of these two games? How does that make any sense? I also doubt any professional game dev working on a deadline would waste precious time writing and coding dialogue about it into the games if it supposedly wasn't meant to mean anything? I honestly rather dislike people brushing off things like Kass's song, because it ignores that it was purposefully written by the game's creators to tell the player something. It not only feels disrespectful to whoever wrote it, but ignores an extremely common convention of video games. I don't think it's really very fair to call it "bad writing" simply because it delivers the information like a video game and not like other visual mediums would have. Video games have always demanded the player to read things, investigate and read between the lines. Especially so when they are more focused on gameplay, which is exactly where Nintendo's focus lies.

And when it comes to "it should have been more obviously shown", well, look how people complain even when it's subtle? If you're someone who hates it, why complain about the romance not being overly blatant? Isn't that good? I mean, clearly an even bigger fit about it would have been thrown if they had been even more obvious, so personally, I think that the way Nintendo went about it was perfectly fine.

[blue-grama]

The Sign finale probably should have disappointed me, but... didn't?

It's been a heck of a run lately with Thai BLs that haven't quite stuck the landing, and it's got me pondering why The Sign worked for me despite sometimes feeling like a storyboard for a longer, better show.

I don't think they pulled off the emotional payoff they needed, despite that last reunion scene being so pretty and well-acted, simply because too much happened offscreen, from Khem's recovery from a gunshot wound to the entire multlifetime Tharn/Chalothon dynamic getting resolved without us seeing any of it. But somehow I wasn't that mad about it? And ultimately I think it's because this show did so many things well and so many things I'd love to see more of that I'm just like, yep, I enjoyed that ride sirs, please show me something this gorgeous again. In that sense it's joining something like Manner of Death or Kinnporsche where it's like, plot holes? Yes. Bizarre tonal shifts? Absolutely. Occasionally insane writing choices? Uh-huh. Love it anyway? You betcha. So here's what really, really worked for me:

Premise

I am always going to be onboard with QL that isn't solely coming-of-age or coming out. I'm not against those stories, of course, but give me gay romance with adult characters who know themselves and are doing adult things. I'm also a partisan for romances with high external stakes, so the mixture of crime and reincarnation was catnip to me.

Do I care that none of this training makes any sense? No.

2. Setting

Listen. Is The Sign the reason I have a document on my laptop titled "Imaginary trip to Thailand without ever seeing a beach?" Not exactly. But it's also not not the reason.

I am being willingly manipulated by the Thai Tourism Authority.

Kidding, kidding, but I do love when my Thai shows feel Thai or my Korean shows feel Korean, etc etc. I want to be driven to Wikipedia to learn more! Half the fun of watching stuff from not your own country.

3. Chemistry

I think @biochemjess covered what was underwritten about the romance in The Sign. Billy and Babe carried it on their backs and it was hard to dislike their romance, even when the series skipped over key beats.

Any time the pink lighting came out, you were gonna be in for a good time.

4. The camerawork

I don't know enough about film to speak intelligently about this, but the camerawork and aesthetics of this show were just so lovely to watch. It was really doing a lot. @chaos0pikachu wrote about it better than I ever could.

LOVED THIS. LOVED IT. So good.

We had some really lovely storytelling and visual parallels, too, like the first episode and finale both having a big action warehouse scene, or the multiple times that Phaya and Tharn ended up overlooking the Mekong river.

5. It was always kinda off the rails

I know some people felt this show started out with a strong premise and didn't live up to it, but I gotta say, I didn't have that experience. It was always kinda a bonkers watch for me. There were long training montages, random bodies in the shallows, missing genitals, extended performance art, that comedy flashback to Khem and Thongthai's college years... I never knew what I was going to get each Saturday. And I kind of loved that? I'm into unhinged. I was comparing this in my head to Last Twilight, which did disappoint me in the end, and I think it's because Last Twilight was NOT always bonkers and DID set itself up to tell a straighforward story, then dropped the ideas it had been juggling in the last episode. The Sign always felt chaotic to me, so a chaotic ending was par for the course. This is where I'd compare it to KinnPorsche, which had the weirdest fucking ending, but like, okay??? Why not!

End result? I see the flaws, but I'm giving this show tender forehead kisses anyway. Here's hoping for more like it.

[batrachised]

I got tagged by @kraytwriter to do a 20 questions challenge! I've done this one a few times, but I like it every time because it's fun to see how my answers change :D

With that, let's do this!

20 Questions for Writers

How many works do you have on AO3?

A total of 50 across my accounts now! wow!

2. What’s your total AO3 word count?

ao3 is down so I can't check :( i know its a few hundred thousand!

3. What fandoms do you write for?

Star Wars, LM Montgomery, and I made a brief foray into Bridgerton that is now dead in the water because I disliked the third season so much D;

4. What are your top 5 fics by kudos?

ao3 is down :( I know my bridgerton fics would probably take up a good chunk of these - writing for it was certainly a lesson in writing for an extremely active fandom. I wrote my fics for the main couple of season 3 in the weeks before and after season 3 came out, and compared to other fandoms it was like drinking from a firehose in terms of response

5. Do you respond to comments?

I TRY! I really love and appreciate all comments i receive (fine, most comments i receive, looking at you hate comments) but I tend to like responding to all comments on the final chapter best. there's still some i want to respond to because they point out details/make jokes that made me guffaw. i used to have the habit of responding to all the comments from the previous chapter when I posted the new chapter, which is something i might pick up doing again

6. What is the fic you wrote with the angstiest ending?

I LOVE writing surprise angsty endings, it's my form of crack. getting swarms of upset readers on the last chapter is therapeutic to me

i once wrote a fic that I based on calvin and hobbes, where Vader gets de-aged into an eight year old on the executor, the imperials assume he's a stowaway, the ghost of obi-wan has to frantically babysit him throughout various shenanakins until he realizes anakin being as destructive as possible on an imperial ship is actually a great thing, little anakin proceeds to go a merry and destructive ship tour, all is light and merry, and then the ending involves Anakin stumbling across Vader's quarters and then everything plummets into sad/mildly horrific territory - i had a ball

7. What’s the fic you wrote with the happiest ending?

probably a bridgerton fic because it comes with the territory of the fantasy romance. i had a lot of fun writing one that was pure silliness about how dumb Colin was, and I'd say that one simply because of the tone

8. Do you get hate on fics?

occasionally, yes, but it's pretty rare. i can only ever remember deleting one, and I don't even remember what it was.

I do however, get some pretty backhanded compliment ones. i tend to give the benefit of the doubt one those and just take the compliment being shoved from behind

9. Do you write smut? If so, what kind?

this is me when i get a comment slightly pg rated:

all this to say, I would never be comfortable enough to write smut 😭i wrote one - one - long form romance fanfic for anidala once, once, and it's been long hidden under the anon tag because even though i kept things fairly clean, the comments were of a sort where i was not comfortable

10. Do you write crossovers?

nope, and i doubt i ever will unless the stories happen to fit very well together (merlin and harry potter was the only crossover that really ever made sense to me)

11. Have you ever had a fic stolen?

yes, but i was credited although not asked, so i'm not sure if it really counts

12. Have you ever had a fic translated?

yup, i've had a couple translated (one without permission lol, see above)

13. Have you ever co-written a fic before?

YES, i wrote a fic with @cheesenames that is very dear to me, they are a favorite writing partner of mine because doing "and then they" star wars with them feels like this

14. What’s your all time favorite ship?

vader and parenting

15. What’s a WIP you want to finish but doubt you ever will?

all of my bridgerton fics. every other WIP i'm stubbornly hanging onto, even if it's been years, but my bridgerton fics suffered from my catastrophic loss of interest in the storyline due to such a badly written season

16. What are your writing strengths?

i find it very easy to be very silly, so crack comes easily to me [sentences that only make sense in fandom context]

17. What are your writing weaknesses?

consistency - i read of terry pratchett and LM Montgomery and flannery o'connor and Chuck Close, who has this amazing quote:

Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightening to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself.

basically, i wish i wrote on a regular schedule because so far literally every good author i've read whose talked about writing has said consistency is necessary

18. Thoughts on writing dialogue in another language in fic?

i don't know another langauge, and when it comes to fictional languages i'm not a huge fan because my lack of linguistic skills results in sentences that sound like "Gleeble glork glork, glook?"

19. First fandom you wrote for?

star wars! shout out to clifford roommate for telling me I should, I would have literally never written fanfiction in my life if not for her

20. Favorite fic you’ve written?

ao3 is down, which makes this an interesting challenge, because i have to remember what i've written. today i'm gonna say a ticklish business

tagging: @healerqueen; @cheesenames; @sparrowsarus; @mollywog

[gawrkin]

Why did gawain not become king of orkney after Lot died?

That's a simple question with a very complicated answer.

To be really, really, really short and concise**, it boils down to two things:

One: Lot originally didn't die fighting Arthur.

In the earlies stories of Arthuriana, like Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae, Lot never warred with Arthur. The Sword in the Stone and the Mayday Massacre never happened in these older stories, so Lot has no reason to fight Arthur.

In fact, King Lot lives all the way to the end of Arthur's reign. Here's one example:

Didot Percival

So really, Gawain doesn't succeed Lot because originally, Lot was alive the whole time and Gawain dies at Mordred's rebellion before he can succeed Lot, who dies shortly after.

Lot's early death is actually a relatively recent Plot Point that was introduced in Vulgate/Post-Vulgate.

Its a retcon that only exists as a plot device to give Gawain a motive to be evil for revenge against Pellinore and his family.

There's also a bit Stations of the Canon at play here - Traditionally, Gawain is supposed to be one of Arthur's Greatest Warriors, so inevitably, he must join the Round Table... even when later stories change things so it doesn't make sense anymore.

By Post-Vulgate, Arthur is not only responsible for the death of his father but also seemingly the death of his newborn baby brother, Mordred. Gawain, logically, has no reason to like Arthur, much less join him.

So basically, its later retcons that don't jive with Gawain's positioning as member of Arthur's household. With Lot's early death, Gawain shouldn't be running around adventuring and questing when his homeland needs him to run things.

The medieval writers took for granted that Gawain is able to be present in Arthur's court for particular reasons.

Which leads us to the second reason

Two: Because then Gawain would be unable to adventure anymore

Basically, Gawain is a traditional hero of Arthuriana, and him not being in Camelot anymore would drastically change the cast dynamics and the story. It's like if Superman and Batman retired from the Justice League and didn't show up anymore.

Gawain can't meet Lancelot and join the Grail Quest if he's stuck up in the North, doing boring Kingly duties.

Ultimately, the Medieval writers just simply didn't care about Gawain's realistic feudal duties and obligations. To them, Gawain and the other knights are adventurer-protagonists: they're heroes first, feudal lords second.

That's why you don't see Lancelot managing Joyous Gard - that's boring real life crap the Medieval audiences wouldn't be interested in seeing. So, Lancelot goes around joining tournaments and beating up knights in random directions instead.

Arthurian Literature is essentially Chivalric escapist fantasy. It's about quests and fights, action and excitement.

And YES, it doesn't make any sense that Gawain isn't called "King Gawain"

**(I wrote an entire essay as an answer, only to stop I when realized its too long and overly wordy LOL)

[perplexingluciddreams]

An exploration of gender as a nonverbal autistic

This is going to be an attempt at expressing my feelings about my own gender and queerness, as a nonverbal autistic with language difficulties, low awareness of the world around me, barely any sense of self, and so many other things that affect my ability to understand and be aware of the concept of gender and sexuality to begin with.

I tried to write this like a properly structured essay, but because my thoughts are so disorganised in general (and I have so many thoughts on this topic), I couldn’t manage that. So, I have decided to present this as if it is a collection of journal entries; that is basically what this is, in truth! You will just have to experience the disorganisation in a similar way to how I experience my own mind. The most organising I was able to do was split it up into some categories, to make it slightly easier for you, reading this. Some things that I wrote could fit into more than one category, but this is how I chose to divide it up.

I have written a lot about the words I use to describe the way I feel, how I choose those words, and how that has changed over time. My delays in certain areas of development, and the other ways my various disabilities affect me, have a significant impact on the ways I have come to understand my gender identity and the internal (and partially external) process I went through to get to where I am now.

I have no doubt that things will continue to shift and change and as a result, the way I define myself in different contexts will also change. This is just my first attempt at getting a lot of this out of my brain and into words, for other people to read.

I wrote this is many fragments, so it doesn’t flow or connect, and there may be some repetition. Each paragraph may have been written at a completely different time, and therefore doesn’t relate to the last paragraph, or the next. Some of this is just stand-alone statements, some is longer examinations of my feelings. But all of it is true to my experience of the world and of queerness.

I have never been able to express the majority of this before, so I think it is pretty good for a first attempt!

**Note: I make a reference to having speech at a point in my life. I am nonverbal due to late autism regression, and grew up semiverbal with very unreliable speech, and language issues. I had very poor communication.**

Here we go!

I am inserting a “read more” here because this is very long. Really, very long.

Part 1 - The Words

I don't really think of myself as a man or a woman, or a boy or a girl. I have called myself a transsexual man before, simply because that is the clearest way to explain to someone where I'm coming from and where I'm headed. But I don't particularly like the word "man" to describe myself. I like the word boy, just because the word is nice. But that doesn't mean I am insistent on people calling me a boy. 

I choose the words I use for myself simply from what I like the sound or feel of the most. The last thing I want is to be boxed in, though. I only use labels as descriptors, to explain to other people - they are a tool to communicate something, not a set of limits and boundaries to put on myself.

I know a lot of people might read this and think "that sounds like nonbinary", but I don't use that word. Again, simply because I don't like the way it sounds or feels when i read/write/hear it. And yes, I suppose I do exist outside the conventional binary, but that would be the case regardless of whether I was transsexual or not, because of my autism. So that is not something that needs to be labeled in my opinion (for me personally). Because the conventional binary is not something that exists in my experience of the world.

I hate that there's one set of accepted terminology to label queerness - such a fluid and complex piece of identity - and that I am even more "other" if I choose to say that I AM female, I WAS a girl. I don't like the word transgender unless it is being used as a verb - transing gender. I like the word transsexual because it describes something I will DO (top surgery, eventually). And partly because of how it sounds and the pattern of typing it on a keyboard.

My gender is what I DO, not what I AM. Gender as a verb.

Socially, changing my name and pronouns is much more connected to my barely-there sense of self, and past trauma. I needed to start again, because I felt that my life had changed completely (and it *had*). I like he/him pronouns because they sound different to how i was always referred to growing up. And they simply sound nicer. 

Even though I don't understand most of the social stuff that comes with gender stuff, I still have positive and negative connections to certain gender-related things. And relating to the way I was raised - it still affects me, even though I can't grasp the complexity of how and why.

I enjoy the fact that I am fucking with gender, fucking with expectations. I am a female that is also a boy. I love the contradiction.

I still call myself female, because if people really mean it when they say "gender and sex is separate", then "female" does not mean "girl" or "woman".

Most words I used to describe myself as a child were put on me by other people. I used to repeat them over and over in my mind, as if to explain to myself that that's what I am. Especially my own name. I felt that if I just repeated it enough then maybe those words would stick and feel real. They never did. I don't know what words I would use to describe myself now, but I don't think I need to know. I'm just me. No words are needed for that.

When I just exist as myself in the world, words are barely relevant. My world is so sensory-based and rich in sensations that there's no point even trying to put words to it.

I don't think there's anything wrong with creating new words for things that already have words to describe them, language is constantly evolving and different people will have different experiences that they want to describe in different ways. However, I don't think it is useful to argue for stopping the usage of "outdated" terms, as there are always going to be people who prefer those terms. Not all people are going to agree on a word that they find most fitting or appropriate, even in one community.

I try my best to examine my feelings about myself and what causes a good reaction in me and what causes bad reaction in me. And then I use whatever words I have to try and explain it as best as I can.

Often the words I have are not enough and either I cannot communicate something at all, or I try and it is inaccurate and/or inadequate.

It is very difficult for me to put such abstract thoughts/concepts/feelings into words, I lack the language for that and often also the awareness - there is so many steps to communicating something for me. For example, most people have the automatic urge to communicate things, and know that option is always there. For me, it takes mental work to even remember other people exist and I am capable of interaction with them. And of course after that follows so much more work to do the actual communicating.

For years I thought of the words "transgender" and "transsexual" as off limits. "Those are the things I am not allowed to be".

A lot of words have shaky definitions and that makes it hard for me to even understand what they mean, never mind use them to describe myself.

I would often rather use a phrase, or a paragraph, to describe myself, rather than a singular word. I really don't want to be misunderstood. 

I think that the way I experience gender cannot be put into words, and it certainly can't be labeled with one thing. I'm just grateful to have the opportunity to even try and communicate these things, and to explore it openly in the first place. Because of course I would still explore it inside my own head, even if I didn't have the words or couldn't tell anybody - I was already doing that, before I had access to all this new language.

I know a lot of people don't like the word "tomboy", but since I was a kid I've always really liked it. It brings to mind a mental image of young girls (in a time when clothing for men and women was much more separated) dressing up in boys clothes, boys school uniform, and the feeling of freedom from that. I always wished people would call me a tomboy when I was a kid.

I had a feeling of "oh, that's what I want to be when I grow up", when I first learnt of what butch is. Even though I am not sure at all of my sexuality, because that relates to other people and I am never sure how I relate to other people, or if that’s even possible, especially in a romantic or sexual way.

The words I use will always be slightly "out of date", or "not right", because of the time it takes my brain to catch up with everything. I will never find words to properly describe myself in a way that feels fully correct. I live in a world of my own that doesn't need words, only the acknowledgement of a feeling inside my own head. However, that is not very useful when trying to communicate things to other people.

Some words just taste and sound like defiance.

Part 2 - My Physical Existence

With puberty, I had so much discomfort with the change in my body, not only because it felt as if I was developing wrong, but also because of age and developmental stage - I felt it was too early, I was not ready for that. Big changes are bad.

I do have dysphoria, but only really around my chest, and the way people refer to me (which is also complicated and related to trauma). And other than that, I don't care a lot about how I am viewed, as long as I feel free to express myself however I want.

Aside from my chest, I am comfortable being female. I like having a vulva (as much as it intrigues me about what having a penis is like), I don't want to change that about my body. I don't mind having a uterus (apart from menstruation, which is not fun, but it's not the worst thing ever and it doesn't make me feel overly dysphoric).

I recognise that I have a physical form. I did have to develop the awareness of that, but I do not see that as ME. I am just a floating mass of thoughts and feelings and experiences.

My body was made for me, it wasn't made wrong. There are things I need to change about this body to make it more comfortable to exist in, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it was made wrong to begin with, despite feeling that way sometimes.

Disabled bodies inherently break the rules.

Many times I have wondered, perhaps, if my chest were much smaller, I wouldn’t have a problem with it. The main thing I struggle with due to my very large chest, is the physical discomfort. It aggravates my sensory issues in a massive way, it causes back and rib pain from the weight and pressure. The ways that having a large chest increases symptoms of my disabilities are the biggest reason for needing top surgery. Gender wise, I think I would be unbothered by a more “neutral” body, where I could easily forget about my birth sex. If/when I get top surgery, I will be removing my entire chest - the end result being a flat chest - however if I naturally had very small breasts I wonder whether I would pursue top surgery at all. I’m not sure of the answer to this, I can’t imagine hypothetical situations well, but it’s something I think about often.

I find relief in having physical reminders that it is different now (to when I was a child) and I won't get hurt again, I am safe now. I now have a buzzcut that I touch every time I am scared and remember it is not like when my hair was long, not anymore.

Sensory issues and physical limitations affect my physical appearance. And, my mannerisms are affected. I cannot look how I WANT to look. How I WISH I looked. As a result, my perception of myself and my external appearance, are even further divided. My generally low awareness and weak sense of self comes into play here as well. There is such a disconnect.

Part 3 - Awareness and Understanding

I can't stick labels on myself because in order to do that, I need to perceive myself as a person first. If other people want to use certain words to describe the way I am and the way I try to find joy and comfort in this confusing and scary world, that's absolutely fine by me - words are important and helpful and useful. But I don't know enough about the character that other people see and perceive, to say those things about "me".

I don't understand the concept of gender at all really. For me being trans is just about having more of the things that make me happier and more comfortable. I don't know what it means to BE a boy, versus being a girl - just that, out of the two, I would much rather be a boy. It is complicated, having such strong feelings towards and/or against things that I barely grasp the concept of.

My (lack of) understanding of gender and awareness of the world and myself definitely impact the way I define my identity. I would like to say that I am not bothered about labels much. That, to me the human experience is too complex and varied and colourful to be fit into black and white labels, I am just somewhere on the spectrum of human, but as descriptors they can be useful. And all of that is true, however, I do have intense preferences on which words I and others use to refer to me, even if I don’t at all understand why. Those preferences have shifted over time, as well, which sparks a period of questioning and examination, every time I hear someone use a word I previously preferred and find myself physically recoiling from the discomfort.

I cannot understand social constructs such as gender and gender roles. It just add to the confusion that surrounds my brain every day of my life.

If someone views me as a woman (or a girl), nowadays I am okay with that. It definitely would have bothered younger me, because I couldn't yet wrap my head around the complexity and fluidity of identity, and how it can't always be described by words with strict definitions. But as long as people use the name I chose for myself, and refer to me in the the way I ask, I am okay with any assumptions they may make about me based on my outward appearance. Because it's me, and how I define my own identity, that matters. Not how I look to other people. And my appearance is not something I have much control over at all, anyway. The first thing people notice about me is that I’m disabled.

Part 4 - Growing Up

The stages to breaking down my identity enough to identify it as a trans experience, for me, were this. First, it was necessary to understand what gender and sex is, and that there’s a difference between the two. Then, to understand social roles assigned to male and female that create "girl" and "boy" expectations. Thirdly, to have enough awareness of myself and understand my individual experience (and be able to compare my experience to others’) enough to figure out how I feel about gender. Lastly, to finally get communication skills and the control over my life to be able to TELL anyone. This last step is a work in progress!

The way I see it, I was by default a girl when I was younger. Because I had no control then, and that's what was assigned to me. I really couldn't say what I wanted almost at all until I was about 16 years old. And one of the first complex things I finally could communicate (at a very basic level, just scraping the surface) was the gender stuff. I attempted this a lot of times before 16 but I simply didn’t have the language, the understanding, the awareness, the communication skills, etc. to get my point across. The first time I tried to tell another person about experiencing queerness, I only had the words “gay” and “lesbian” to use. I knew that these were not right, but that was all I had. The only words I could use were ones I had read or heard, from other people, and that greatly, greatly limited my ability to express my unique internal experiences. Instead of trying to find other words, I instead became very insistent upon being gay/lesbian, only because I knew it was more than that.

I have a lot of memories of scary experiences where my unreliable speech took over and blurted out scripts (delayed echolalia) about being queer (using words I wouldn’t choose), simply because I was trying to learn and understand my feelings about queerness better with watching/reading media from other people. And that lead to ridicule and more exposure than I was ready for or wanted. I didn’t want other people to know, at that stage. I wasn’t done with the processing, and I needed it to stay internal. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a choice in the matter.

I was one of those people where it was always obvious I am queer, or at least “different” in just about every respect. I have never had a choice to hide it. I mourn the fact that I was never allowed the chance to inform other people of this part of my identity in my own time, with my own words. I am grateful that I even have the privilege of writing this, but there is a reason that there’s so much to write here in one go. There is so much I haven’t had the ability to say at all, until now, and even more that I haven’t had the chance to say right.

Sometimes I have the feeling that, even in the queer community, with the accepted labels and identities, I don't fit. It makes me sad sometimes, that I couldn't fit an accepted “role” or label. I have come to an understanding that that is not what being queer is about at all, which helps. I think part of the reason this upsets me, is because I am so disabled that I will never “fit” in any real queer space with other real queer people. I am left outside, watching from the edges. I am outside of everything. 

But - It comforts me that there have always been people like me, just existing in the world. We have always been here. When I was younger and had all these thoughts and feelings about gender that I didn't understand yet, had no context for, couldn't express and didn't have proof of anyone else who had the same experience - it comforted me to think "if i am feeling this, then statistically another human at some point in time must've felt the same way".

When I was younger I used to believe - queer is what people say when they mean "dirty" and "wrong". It’s what people say when they mean something worse but don't have a word for it.

My identity of being trans is simply my identity of being me.

When I think about "passing" and wishing things to be easier for me, I don't think "I wish I passed as a boy", I find myself wishing I was just a girl, and then my life would be so much less complicated. But, of course, it will always be complicated for me, because of how others perceive my autism first, before anything else. I feel I struggle to be seen as a whole human with a complex human experience, because to so many people I am just my autism. Then also lacking of awareness of gender and only knowing my own feelings - even if I was a girl, I would still have this difficulty! - but still, in this situation, I think "I wish I didn't have these feelings to begin with". I think that shows it is more about the difficulty of coping, rather than other people's view and opinion based on my appearance and outward expression.

When using words to refer to my younger self, those experiences and the way they were labeled and explained at the time does not cease to exist just because I choose to use different words for my present-day self. I am more accepting of this now, I used to really struggle with the fact that it had changed over time and my black-and-white thinking of “one or the other is true”, made it very challenging.

When I was younger, the only way I knew how to make everything “wrong” with me (autism, physical disabilities, queerness, lack of faith in God, etc.) an understandable concept, was to come up with the overall explanation that “my brain is broken”. I just thought that must be the only answer. It was the only way I could process how many things I thought were completely and utterly wrong about me.

It feels like two facts colliding when I see my birth name, and it makes my brain hurt and my understanding of the world shatter.

Part 5 - The Choice

When people misgender me, it is more upsetting to me that people ignore my choice than that they perceive me "wrong" or make the wrong assumption. I actually don’t mind assumptions much, if someone looks at me and thinks I’m a woman that’s okay with me nowadays - I understand that I appear female, because I am, and a lot of people connect female with woman (or girl, as I am often also assumed to be quite young). But I also can easily forget that someone might not know my pronouns straight away, simply because of struggles with theory of mind - I forget that other people don't automatically know what I know, that they can't read my mind.

It is upsetting only because my choice is not being respected or understood or seen, from my brain’s point of view. Having the ability and opportunity to choose the way I am addressed, the way I identify, the way I talk about myself and want others to talk about me, is incredibly valuable to me. For so long I have only had other people’s words, both for them to freely put onto me, and to use in my laboured attempts at communication. Attempting to grab onto the closest words to my true meaning and piecing them together like jigsaw pieces from different puzzles that don’t quite fit.

Now that I can write something like this, with so many words that are mostly my own, to have someone go against that (whether it is intentional or not - it doesn’t change things because of my low theory of mind, I can’t think from another’s perspective and understand that they don’t know what I know) is spirit breaking.

A lot of the parts of my transition can be (partially) attributed to different things, different reasons. I changed my name partly because I had no connection to my birth name, and struggled to remember to respond to it. It also reminded me of bad memories that I don’t want to relive every day. Having a new name was part of a necessary process of changing every part of my life so it never feels the same way it used to - at least, not in the ways that I can control. I already wrote about how I need top surgery for reasons including but not limited to dysphoria, pain, sensory issues, and so on. I love having my hair buzzed (as much as I have the occasional urge to grow it), because it feels like me. It feel different to when I was younger, and it’s a physical reminder that I am safe now, every time I touch my head or catch a glance of myself in the mirror.

Technically, with these other reasons to attribute many parts of my transition to, I could choose not to identify the way I do. If I didn’t feel a strong connection to queerness, I don’t think I would spend so much time trying to sift through thoughts and feelings and experiences and memories and holding them up against different words to see how it fits. I have basically no awareness of gender outside of myself, I can’t figure out my sexuality because I don’t know how I can even relate to other people. I could put a mental block between me and this topic, and never call myself queer or trans or anything like that ever again.

But - I DO choose to collect these parts of me, and spend the time holding them up to the light and squinting at them from every direction, to come to align them with these words. That is my choice.

I am the same person I always have been, I just get to choose now. I have the power and control.

Thank you for reading, if you got to the end! I love to know that my words are seen by other people.

[heartnosekid]

well, friends. i’m sure a good lot of you have seen this post. i was denied today. i have to contact a lawyer and i don't even know how to begin advocating for myself outside of simply contacting the firm an ex-friend of mine used to obtain disability.

if you would rather not read the whole vent, i completely understand. but if you would still like to provide answers or support to me, here are my main issues.

i need advice from others who have been denied disability and have gone through a lawyer to obtain it. i need advice on what to do about getting started with victim advocacy. that's about it, i reckon. i love you all. my dm's are open. you will be blocked if you clown.

and yes, i realize my stim blog is not the place to talk about this. i understand, but this is my largest audience and i feel i would be a fool to not post this somewhere it may be actually received.

tw for mental health talk / long vent under the cut, particularly of the despairing kind, and also mentions of CSA / CSAM, psychosis, and my general disabilities. if this post needs more trigger tags, please let me know and i'll add them.

my whole life i have been treated as if i am not struggling because i can do the bare minimum to keep myself alive. i can survive, but never thrive, and even surviving now has become difficult. i can't feed myself regularly, my guardians do that for me. i can't stand for longer than a few minutes at a time without extreme duress and pain, which makes cleaning, showering, and going out super difficult and beyond draining. i can understand abstract concepts and certain ideas and am emotionally intelligent, but i struggle heavily with understanding money or how government works, particularly when it comes to laws and loopholes. i don't know when i'm "being had", as it were, and others have pointed this out to me throughout my adulthood. it feels as though this entire disability journey has been me "being had". they gave me something to cling on to, the possibility i may be able to receive real help, and it seems as though they basically knew the whole time they were going to deny me again. for the fourth time. i know that is unrealistic but, it does feel that way.

i wrote several full length books when i was a child / young teenager, and had two published. i won't share the titles because i have outgrown what i wrote and find them childish and frankly embarrassing, but everyone upon learning that i have written and had novels published, immediately jumps to the conclusion that i am some kind of self-sufficient, incredibly intelligent and capable person. i have never once been able to effectively take care of myself. without my guardians, i wouldn't be able to manage money, insurance, bills, cars, groceries, among other things. i don't even halfway understand how insurance on anything even works despite having been shown how it works.

i can see something, be "taught" to the best of someone's ability, and i will still not be able to learn. this has been a constant issue throughout my life, and the american public school system has continually helped these issues perpetuate. all schooling has done is teach me how to parrot back concepts and ideas, remember them for a limited amount of time before losing them to the void, and not how to fundamentally understand and learn them or utilize them in daily life. even higher education was like this, and i was not able to thrive throughout my experience with college despite making mostly okay grades (i cheated and lied a lot, okay. i'm not proud of it but i felt i had to get through or i would be severely punished). i had to a sign an agreement that i personally still do not fully understand to "obtain" my associate's degree, and i do not know why despite the fact it was explained to me, in detail. the information has not registered, and i now no longer have anyone that was involved in said agreement to explain it to me. everyone i say this to is like, "what? that doesn't make any sense." and i'm like. yeah. it doesn't, and i have zero ability to explain it to them in a way that makes sense.

i mention my associate's degree because i am sure in some form or fashion it was used against me in the disability process, since i was "able to complete higher education". also it should be noted i did an early college program. also probably has been used against me. also cheated through most of it.

people have always considered my kind of autism to be hyper competent, since it appeared that way when i was a child, despite showing several signs that i was struggling with a math-centric learning disability, called dyscalculia. i have since deteriorated to the point of barely having the knowledge a young adult should have, about how life works financially and honestly in general.

i have extreme fear about what may happen to me without proper assistance. my guardians will be able to take care of me for some time, but after that? that feels like a black hole to me. it doesn't exist nor will it while i am under-assisted, and this black hole fills me with utter despair. i try not to let it permeate my daily life, so as to not dwell in a future that doesn't exist yet and has the possibility for change. but god. it fills me with literal existential dread, and it is becoming so much more difficult to ignore the older i get.

a lot of factors have been used against me my entire life to deny me assistance, and these reasons being yet another factor has really dredged up a lot of shit from my past.

this is besides the point, but i also learned recently that CSAM was made and distributed of me when i was a child and wow. that has hit me in ways i cannot even describe. part of me is like, why was i not allowed to know after the fact, even when i became an adult? i was directly involved. why did no one tell me my abuser was convicted for counts of spreading CSAM, and that they lied directly to the court system about their inappropriate actions with me? i was disenfranchised in more ways than one by more than one person on allowance of my abuser, and i am just now hearing about it. i don't know how to deal and i don't know how to get started with victim advocacy in my area.

but at the same time, whilst being treated as severely more competent than i am, i have also been infantilized relentlessly, by nearly everyone around me. how does this make any sense. i feel incredibly stupid and uninformed and at the same time privy to things about my disabilities others are not, while not being able to effectively communicate it. i feel i am screaming and begging for help, nearly at my wits end with a lot of things, and all of it is reading as "owie booboo" to anyone who could do anything to help. i feel i am falling through the cracks, and i fear having to crawl back up through them. i fear i won't make the trek. i fear i will lose motivation and let myself rot. it feels like no one in a position of power has taken a true effort to really help me and i cannot help or advocate for myself. i am very scared.

on top of all of that stuff, i am withdrawing pretty heavily from cymbalta, experiencing heightened panic attacks every day, PNES (psychogenic non-epileptic seizures), more episodes of psychosis and hallucinating than i'm used to, all of my mental and physical issues are out of control, and now this disability stuff. i also won't be able to see a psychiatrist for...maybe a week or so more, so no bridge meds till then.

these last couple weeks have just really kicked me down. thank you for reading if you got this far. i appreciate you more than you know and i have no idea where i would be without y'all and this blog. i love you all so very much.

-ish

[alchemicaladarna]

Just to clarify, I am obviously talking about the characters and the QSMP as a story. I am simply an avid viewer that had too much coffee and time on their hands so I basically wrote an essay. What is it about? I have no idea. So, read it if you want, but beware that nothing at the end of this should make sense.

In my opinion, morally ambigious characters are interesting, but UNPREDICTABLE morally ambigious characters are even more fun to analyze because they take more risks and play more dangerous games. If a character was labeled as a "hero" and played on the "good" side they are guaranteed a safe spot within the group. Regardless of whether they kill or hurt others, they are on the good side because they are fighting against the corporation that is keeping them and their friends trapped in a place that is a nightmarish paradise. If they had done actions that worked against the islanders' favor, by, for example nearly getting everyone killed by explosives at a party they are justifiably labelled a villian. But what if a character played in the middle? What if they were neutral? What if they simply wanted to let things play out- sticking to the sidelines and only becoming involved when the situation benifits their entertainment?

So, pardon me for the long intro, but here's the gist folks: q!Foolish arrested q!Pac e q!Mike and unknowingly put them through loads of emotional trauma that I don't think they'll be recovering from any time soon, for fun. To a person with a normal moral compass, that's obviously fucked up.

"Friends don't send friends to prison."

In q!Foolish's perspective, he REALLY didn't think the consequences of his actions through, but he wouldn't have arrested q!Pac e q!Mike for no reason. Mr. Mustard is missing and the Federation told q!Foolish that q!Pac e q!Mike were responsible for his disappearance. At this point, I think enough time has passed that we the audience know q!Foolish is being manipulated by the Federation. Even Foolish himself knows he's being manipulated by them, yet he still partakes in this precarious game because it's simply more entertaining than just sitting on the good side and letting things play out.

Q!Foolish has never actively gone out of his way to hurt people on purpose. Does he lack some emotional maturity and the appropriate response to some situations? Yes he does; but he doesn't have malicious intentions. He's there to have fun. Where others see a dire situation- at the mercy of the inescapable claws of a malevolent corporate entity, q!Foolish sees fun and exciting opportunities. The others might not want to admit it, but aside from the tragedies and kidnappings that have occured on the island, this nightmarish paradise has provided the characters with more excitement and enjoyment, than what is worth.

But, not everyone understands q!Foolish's perspective, and that's good! That's ok! But what I'm perplexed about is their constant unjust treatment of him- the exclusion, threats, torture, many many pointless accusations disguised as interrogations, etc- simply because he did one task for the Federation. One task that affected the lives of two people, but in the end both parties communicated and forgave each other anyways. One task that required q!Foolish, and by extension, q!Jaiden to harmlessly investigate around q!Pac and q!Mike's base for a considerably long time before finding nothing that would incriminate the duo. Throughout q!Foolish's endeavour, working with the Federation cost him most of his friends' trust and gave him no benifits, but he still reluctantly chooses to carry out another task because it's entertaining. But like q!Foolish said to q!Cellbit the other day, he may be stupid, but he's certainly not an idiot, and he has limits. A lot of people, specifically q!Max don't seem to understand the concept of a neutral party. If you work for the Federation, you are a villain- and honestly, that's a fair assumption considering their reputation. But what about people like q!Jaiden? Q!Jaiden, one of the kindest people on the island, who is compassionate to everyone, even Cucurucho, who is always perceived as a malicious entity?

What exactly defines a villain in this story? In my opinion, everyone on the island has a skewed sense of morality. Everyone except Elquackity knew of his first assasination and simply watched as he lost his first life, then celebrated when he lost the other with no regards to the repurcussions of their actions or how Elq felt about all this. And while we can justify their actions because Elq hurt people before, and either brainwashed or replaced q!Quackity, how do we justify their treatment of q!Foolish even after he communicated honestly to q!Pac e q!Mike and done nothing to deserve their maltreatment of him. Maybe I'm a bit impatient, but at this point, q!Foolish's arrest, has had the same value and impact as q!Bad giving people the survey for the Federation; I'm even more willing to believe that q!Cellbit's accidental "employee of the month" investigations benifitted the Federation more than whatever measly and repititive tasks they're giving out to q!Foolish.

So, what warrants all this hate and injustice towards q!Foolish then if he's not harming anyone? Why is he the punching bag? Why is he the butt if the joke Every Single Time? What warranted all the cruel jokes and malicious beatings after the Nether event? Is it because they know he won't exact revenge upon them? Is it because, in their eyes, they only value him as a court jester and nothing more? Q!Foolish even said the Nether, an obsolete dimension of fire and brimstone, offered more compassion and comfort than a world where the sun shone and the air was less polluted because the inhabitants, his "friends" treated him with more malevolence than literal souless monsters from hell itself.

Think about q!Jaiden- a person whose compassion broke through Cucurucho's souless programming and gave it a home, a sense of safety, and relaxation. Jaiden works (and apparently worked???) with the Federation, yet she has more kindness within her than an entire group of people, on the "good" side, fighting against evil.

The truth is, there is no bad side among the islanders. The admins (meta) wrote the Federation (and codes?) as entities that the collective group should be against- a common enemy. But once you "ally" yourself with the Federation and do tasks for them does that make you the common enemy as well, or do you need to commit more heinious acts to be considered a villain?

And what about the islanders? At what point do the rest of the players begin to consider a character on the wrong side of things? At what point do they begin to abandon compassion in favor of searching for the truth? How far will they go in pursuit of the truth?

In my opinion, there are no villains in the story because everyone is capable of becoming an antagonist in one way or another. Basically, EVERYONE is morally ambiqious because they have all been antagonists to each other at some point in the tale, and as the story keeps unfolding, who knows what could happen? A character might say they are a good person, but as the story changes, so do their values, their morals, their limits. How thin can someone's patience be before it inevitably snaps?

[hidden-poet]

Hello!

I just want to say that every 'version' of your Coryo is amazing, but somehow Commander Snow is the best for me.

Maybe the reader doesn't have such a strong character and may seem the least developed compared to him and others, but....

It seems to me that this version of Coryo has a more motivated desire/desire/obsession with the reader. Somehow I see his need to be with her, her warmth, and to have control over her as a 'natural thing' that could happen to him. Because that's what Coryo might have been missing. Yes, he had Tigirs (who is a wonderful angel), but I think that even in front of her, he tried to play strong; he did not let himself feel her tenderness and care so much, because it was reminding him that he was weak, that his family is poor, and he can't take care of them himself.

So when he sees a reader—so similar to his cousin—who spreads this kindness and warmth, he wants it for himself, and with her he can afford to do more than with Tigirs. He does everything to get what he wants from her, because while Tigris herself gave him this warmth, the reader is afraid of him, and as you wrote, men like the chase. At the beginning, he was also making sure that she wouldn't be starving or something—a thing he couldn't do to his family—another act of having some kind control over her.

So, I just want to say that the reader may not be the strongest character here, but if such an amazing written Coryo I think that people simply don't care/see it as a minus or anything bad or less interesting. Quite opposite it's keeping us curious about what will happen next, what he may do to make sure he will keep her around for himself.

I will just stop my mumbling here... I'm so sorry I made it that long.

Thank you for your work, and I wish you the most inspiration to keep writing and feeding us with Coryo content. Have a happy day/night!! 💙

Hello! thank you so much for this.

You are 100% correct. As i said Coriolanus was looking a lot for comfort and safety which fueled his desire for control.

When I said that I preferred Mabel to the reader, i meant in a story telling way and not as a insult.

I just meant that the dynamic was different. In commander Snow she will always have to be submissive, not only due to her nature but also because he controls her entire community.

Where's in Snow lands on top we see Mabel who isn't shy and still holds power in the relationship. She can challenge Coriolanus which i think is a fun dynamic for a man who loves control. He has to earn it rather then it just being expected.

I've tried to flesh out the reader as much as I could we can see she is a shy, friendly girl who is naturally very motherly. She is well liked within her community, and has been well protected by her mother and brother. She's not a total victim. She can think for herself and has a high endurance level.

She has often shown to be capable of manipulating Coriolanus and finding ways through his punishments.

I think it would be cannon that he would gravitate to a girl like this.

In Snow lands on top, the attraction is purely physical. Mabel is a beautiful women and Snow likes pretty things.

Where's in Commander Snow it's the softness that attracts Snow.

The linkage between her and Tigress is spot on and something i've worked very hard to get across. He is head of the Snow household and yet the women in his life are looking after him. It would make sense that he holds a lot of guilt that he failed to provide them a life that the name of Snow should carry.

And when he finally gets back to watch himself provided for his family, he is torn away and thrown back to the district. Only to come across a girl that could heal the past for him.

Not only could he make amens with Tigress in a symbolic way. But also offer the hurt boy in him comfort. re-writting history a bit.

He wanted to hurt the small school boy so she could comfort because no one came to help small boy Coriolanus.

He wanted her to be a mother because his mother was ripped from him.

He wanted her to wash his clothes and cook his food because for so long he rarely had food to cook or clothes to wash, but when he did his cousin did it for him. His cousin who is now miles from him.

I think Tigress words, "people can be good. People are good" is something that he hold on to but see's very little. So he grabs it before it can be destroyed.

I also disagree that Coriolanus is loving the chase. He is very much wanting to skip that part and fall into the ten years married part.

He is ready to be looked after. He got the grades. He won the hunger games. Betrayed and killed people to get to the top. Now he is ready to be rewarded for it.

He is just a mummy's boy without a mummy, and he is taking it out on the poor reader.

So yes you are 110% right about the dynamic of the relationship and i LOVE that you got it so right. I am so sorry if I came across to be disrespectful to the Commander Snow story. I also love it.

💕💕💕💕💕💕

[nancydrewwouldnever]

My only thought is that Chris could maybe argue harder for more (developed) screen time and better (more resolved) character arcs for his iconic characters.

It seems like he’s happy to go along with what he’s given to work with, and he gives the input he’s allowed: aka insist that Johnny’s end monologue is included and doesn’t get cut (which actually does give way to how the Cassandra thing makes sense, so I agree with him on that). But Ryan wrote that for Johnny so it was already there. Chris didn’t come in and try to rework Johnny his way, he just came in and did what he was asked.

The whole endgame thing which is extremely tired discourse seemed that he was fine with letting his character sort of fade away into the background (while leaving it open so if Kevin and co want to bring Steve back…) while the RDJ/Ironman show got the spotlight. You can sort of argue that for what happens in civil war too. How is cap civil war more about Tony once again than anything else?

The Johnny part was fun but some people did say they felt he was done dirty - he didn’t get too much play outside of being kind of treated like a comic relief, though you are right that it was more than just a “throwaway cameo.”

I think it’s why when he does get more creative liberty and say you’ll see more confidence showing in his performances. It’s just too bad that some of these projects haven’t been able to take off. I think his confidence is extremely rattled by some of the lukewarm reception but it’s nice to see at least he/his team wants to continue to get him some more projects where he’d have more producer credits too (sacrifice). Ghosted could have been a lot better but the script was just not it. So maybe it was always DOA regardless. I did like how he helped get those cameos on set (which were arguably the best parts of the otherwise meh movie).

I feel he’s often overshadowed by bigger personalities who make decisions about certain characters he plays (Ryan and Shawn had ultimate say in how Johnny played out), the Russos and the screenwriters and Kevin feige had overall say in how Steve’s arc ended, and likely they all wanted it to center around RDJ:Tony because he started it all.

Sometimes, being adamant about your vision and input on a creative project may have you butting with a few heads but ultimately, sometimes it works out for the better. Look at how bong joon ho fought against Harvey Weinstein to keep his film the way it was against Harvey’s take to change it up. Yes, that cost the film visibility and the chance to be a big box office hit, but it’s considered one of bong’s best films (and a great film overall) and one of Chris’ best films too. I think Snowpiercer walked so parasite could run and that’s all due to bong’s vision and determination to keep it that way.

I hope CE develops better self esteem and trusts his own ability so it can open more doors for him in the future.

(Just my opinion)

Wow, I think you bring up several excellent points, but, in the end, we have to remember what Chris has said about himself absolutely hating confrontation. It's extremely difficult to advocate for yourself or your pov on your character if you feel unable to speak up due to whatever internal struggles you have. But, also, I don't know how much you can even do when you're just coming in for a small supporting role. I think the "system" of the movie simply expects you to do as asked and remain quiet.

[autisticempathydaemon]

Ohmygod I love matchups

What song are you fixated on at the moment? What lyric or verse, and why?

Too sweet by Hozier ofc ofcm I looove Hozier and the way he sings about relationships 😭 Im like not fixated on a specific lyric, I'm fixated on the wedding bells in the background of the chorus

What is your Enneagram type?

Okay it has been a FUCKTON of time since I looked at that stuff but iirc it was 2? Me being an infp is literally the only thing I can consistently remember bc ADHD brain

Do you love gargantuan Youtube video essays, and if so, which is your favorite and why?

YESS I listen to them whenever I'm playing Sims or working on something. Any of Jenny Nicholson or Li Speaks’ videos are common for that Nostalgic Essay Stuff. SPECIFICALLY Jenny Nicholson’s jeff the killer fanfiction book video because I OWNED THAT BOOK. I WROTE CREEPYPASTA FANFICTION AND I OWNED THAT BOOK

Tell me about your childhood imaginary friend.

I did not have one and I pretended to because everyone else did and I felt weird for not having one

What is your go-to way to fall asleep?

Imagining being loved and cared for 😭 or whumpy fanfiction scenarios no in-between. But they usually overlap

If you had to change your name, what would it be, and why? (In tandem, if you have changed your name, why did you pick that one?)

I named myself after a character cause I relate ofc but I also named myself echo because it was another birth name in consideration for me and it feels like… whimsical

What is your favorite of Redacted’s audios, and why?

ITS STILL “FLIRTY VAMPIRE LOSES CONTROL” BECAUSE IM OBSESSED WITH SCENES WHERE THE HUMAN PARTNER OF A “MONSTER” CHARACTER IS DIRECTLY CONFRONTED WITH THEIR MONSTROUS TRAITS AND LOVES THEM ANYWAY.

What Redacted boy holds no appeal to you, and why? Like, not the one you hate but the one who you don’t get the hype for. (I won’t judge, I promise.)

Gavin </3 I am simply not a sexual person and it puts me off a bit lol

Tell me about that one book/movie/tv show you know all the words to.

This spectacular show called dramaworld about a girl whos obsessed with kdramas and gets sucked into the world of them, but not in a “the events are real” way, in a “the entire world is a setup for the same characters to go through various plots, forgetting and falling in love over and over again” and it's hilarious and it's such a comfort show even though I can't watch it anywhere anymore I don't think. The main romance is top tier. It's so funny. And the stakes and plot twists are actually pretty good

Which Redacted boy are you platonically attracted to? Like- forget dating, which dude do you want to be your best friend?

Probably Sam? I want him to be my dad. I have issues.

Do you have a go-to thing you ramble about when you’re tired, and if so, what is it? (For example, my boyfriend knows I’m ready to sleep when I start talking about space.)

Apparently when I'm half asleep I start talking about horses? But when I'm still conscious, I mostly talk about like. Vampires mostly.

Tell me your go-to gas station and drink combo.

doritos dinamita and mountain dew yes I am basic

Tell me about your favorite playlist at the moment.

I don't have favorite playlists so much as I play 4-6 songs over and over on repeat until I'm sick of them. Currently, those songs are too sweet by Hozier, no more birthdays by sophie may, and Every Chappelle Roan Song.

What’s your guilty pleasure media, and why?

I love bad romance novels the more ridiculous and bad, the better. kresley cole's immortals after dark are fun to make fun of (no. Hate if you like them)

And whatever else you think tells me about who you are!

Uhhh my favorite form of interaction is parallel play. irl or digital, in a digital sense it means “we're liveblogging two separate things we're doing at the same time” lmao

- Asher-Echo/vampire-bite

Ooh, there’s a lot of good info to consider here. Initially, it was hard because I find Type Two’s easily compatible with most of the Redacted bois, but what said about “not being a sexual person” made it easy to choose Ollie for you.

Because he has never and will never get a BA, I love to headcanon Ollie as either asexual, low-libido, or both, so that’s one reason I think he’d be a good match for you. I also love that y’all would like so many of the same things like open-world games, bad/silly romance novels, and spending time with one another without the pressure to actively interact or engage with each other. (Also creepypastas. I love to headcanon Ollie as a horror, creepypasta fiend, given he grew up on the internet around when Jeff the Killer came to be.)

Every day with Ollie would be so comfortable and domestic, so sweet. Like, on a long weekend like this one if you’re American, I can see y’all spending it at home, a little staycation. He’d be in the other room or one end of the couch reading, and you’d be on the other reading one of your romance novels. Cattywumpus would be on your lap, because you’re his favorite. Your music is playing in the background, and you both stop what you’re doing to dance to “Hot to Go!”, because Ollie would totes love Chappell Roan.

Song:

Spillin' wine and homemade drinks/ We throw a cheers, the worries sink/ Damnit, it's so good to be alive/ We know that we don't got much/ But, then again, it's just enough/ To always find a way for a good time

Ollie strikes me as the type of guy who loves simple, feel-good, folk-esque music, someone being honest and emotional with a guitar. That’s one reason I like this song for y’all and can imagine it shuffled with yours as y’all hang out. The other is that this love song is sweet, catchy, simple just like Ollie~

Runner-ups:

Your love of the Sims and cheesy paranormal romance novels compels me to give you Elliott as a runner-up, because he could bring the things you read and create to life in your dreams, and that’d be so fun! In contrast, your Enneagram type and identifying yourself as nonsexual makes me want to pair you with Cam who gives me an asexual, easily affectionate vibe.

Read this post and send me an ask if you’d like a match-up of your own! 💌

[stupendousfoxthing]

https://www.tumblr.com/stupendousfoxthing/757161061837340672/httpswwwtumblrcomstupendousfoxthing757121371

It’s not your place to tell other people what should and what shouldn’t be accepted in their culture. Are there some aspects of the korean culture that need work? Definitely but what gave you the right to say what should and what shouldn’t be? You perceived the article from what is acceptable to you and the culture you are used to but to the people who wrote the article, that is acceptable in the culture they are from. Have you seen a single korean throwing a hissy fit about the article? Nope it’s just international fans who are making mountains out of molehills simply because they don’t understand things the way those things were intended.

What you need to realize is that these people have grown up in and are used to a culture that is completely different from yours. To koreans, how they look is extremely important to them. Do I agree with their strict beauty standards and all of that? Absolutely not and again, this article isn’t supposed to make sense to you. People are popping veins even though I am sure the members involved wouldn’t find a single thing to be upset about from the article that was written. Yes the world is evolving and people are trying to be more open minded about certain things but not everyone would go at your pace or at the pace you want them to and you need to understand that. If in the korean culture, referring to someone as “rough” is considered a compliment who are to get mad about it just because in your culture it isn’t? How is this any different from people from the west hating on Asians because of the food they like to eat? You don’t go hating on something just because you don’t understand it or because it isn’t what you are used to. It might not make sense to you but as long as it make sense to them, let it go and stop taking medication for other people’s headaches. Y’all are the ones who say listen to the members but that is only applicable when the members say things you want to hear. How many times has Jungkook spoken about wanting to have sharper more sculpted looks? How many times has he mentioned that he doesn’t like being called cute? I personally don’t think there is anything wrong with him being round or with him being called cute but if he doesn’t like it, it’s not your place to force it on him, is it? So who told you he wasn’t being serious when he said he doesn’t like being called cute?

Anyways, I didn’t come to argue about what is right and what isn’t about the article. Just wanted you to know that it was taken completely out of context and there wasn’t anything shippy about it. The fact that y’all saw it as shippy speaks more about you than the people who wrote the article.

You're right. Criticizing sexist stereotypes is like hating on the food someone eats. You're so right.

Anyways, I didn’t come to argue about what is right and what isn’t about the article.

You're just here to double down on defending things that are problematic and gaslighting people who see them for what they are. The harmful stereotypes people saw being thrust on Jungkook and Jimin in that article may be prevalent in shipping culture, but that doesn't mean the issue was about whether it was "shippy" or not. I don't give a fuck about the "bromance" angle, my problem is harmful stereotypes which were not at all subtle there. That's it. You're trying to twist it into just a ship thing, and that speaks a lot about you. The only people I saw defending it were shippers, but shippers were not the only ones I saw criticizing it. People who actually have some love and respect for Jungkook and Jimin were calling it out too.