#anyway that is a tangent unrelated to the post but

[dammitradar]

Literally had a dream about internet censorship and about how in a world where sex, cursing and death are censored, you've got to memento motherfucking mori

[ljesaw]

can’t stop thinking about somebody saying that zuko is constantly going against his very nature in order to be evil and i will be crying about it forever frankly

[tarmac-rat]

Hey hey I need to uuh hum fight you at the back of a Denny's or something over those tags on my cyberpunk post lile wtf? That's such a good analysis of his character I love your work a lot in general but this is doing me in I'm gonna cry, you're so fucking right about this dumb broken man 🥺😠

I will not fight you I will bake you a cake and give you a kiss because you're very sweet I appreciate your kindness 😘

I really love your perspective on Johnny's disabilities and addictions impacting how he sees and interacts with the world-- as someone who herself isn't disabled I tend to overlook the way people view the world through that lens and as a result have realized that I haven't touched upon it much in my own analysis of Cyberpunk, and your insight really was spot-on and spoke to me in a way I hadn't considered before.

I talk a lot about the themes and meta of the game but Pondsmith himself came out and said, like, before the game came out that Johnny is not the hero of the story. He THINKS he's the hero of the story but the way people and even himself idolize him and his actions are in many ways his biggest shortcoming. Johnny is addicted to the image of himself, much like he's addicted to his vices and addicted to his cause. He needs his anchors no matter how detrimental they are to him, but in many respects those anchors were never his choice. Now he's stuck in his place, dug in and unable to move, and that's the way he dies. Alone, unmoored, and stuck in his ways.

He's a very tragic and even empathetic character-- I do understand why he does the things he does and feel for him when he suffers tragedies-- but treating him as a hero of this story is wrong, in my opinion. He's a disabled, traumatized war veteran who was set up in life to fail at a very early age. His flaws are of his own making. They are not of his own design.

[shopcat]

i do honestly think that like. the reason steve's torture scene is so undercut is because it is a torture scene. like they didn't WANT it to be hit heavily they didn't want to have to cut between relatively normal for the show scenarios back to steve and robin locked in an unreachable facility getting beaten and drugged and about to get their fingernails ripped off with the knowledge that in the end unless they're saved they're going to die. Because that is deeply tragic. so they have to make the jokes and make it lighter than it seems not only because the plot needs it but like the AUDIENCE needs it and the CHARACTERS need it... like yes the show does not take so many character's real life suffering seriously because for some reason lasting effects and trauma only exist to be taken advantage of by the plot or if you're the billed star or something but steve also in canon is the one who didn't let himself BE A Guy Who Was Just Tortured. he was a guy who was just beat up a little. and like they're scared but they're not too scared because they have to have hope because they are two people who have never had to rely on hope before in order to survive...

but also!! tbh i can't. help but think how much of a critical hit gut wrench it would've been if they had decided to commit to the darker theme of it and how it juxtaposes against the whole Bright Neon Light Palm Fronds And 80s Pop and how 30 minutes later they're standing among a group of children and no one even realises anything is out of the ordinary i think it would've accessed an actual emotional impact and depth the duffers seem to stumble upon by accident and never of their own volition </3 to cut from the concurrently running scenes to an 18 year old boy we know is completely innocent and completely telling the truth that he was just in the wrong place and didn't realise how serious it all was who was getting tortured and it be something serious. and his 17 year old coworker who just had to listen to it all to the point where she thought they dragged his dead body in to lay next to her. and in a way it's somehow MORE tragic which was not their intention at all that it was so lightly handled even though we the audience know it's somethings deeply upsetting it all just gets washed away in the face of Life goes on even on tv... sigh.

[anarchonist]

I think a big problem in our culture is equating intent and effect, and this works both when predicting the effect and when determining the cause. It is important to remember that just as having good intentions does not excuse the harm one causes, so does someone having caused harm not always mean they intended to cause harm all along.

We are able to know our own thoughts, so when we cause harm we may easily downplay it because "that's not what I intended", as if that would make the harm go away. And when we judge others who cause harm, we similarly try to work backwards from the assumption that harm requires intent - and since we see the harm but not the intent, we assign intent somewhere where it may not even exist.

None of this is to excuse people who cause harm, but maybe to clarify that what we call evil is not some nefarious satanic mindset of ill intent, but rather a stubborn unwillingness to critically examine whether you might be causing harm even if you don't actively intend to, and even whether or not you truly care.

And the more power you have, the easier it is to distance yourself from the harm you cause and keep causing it.

[hexational]

i once drew a humanised mark design and as much as i love it because he just looks like a confused old man i am never going to share it because the sheer thought of the design being percieved by the public makes me oh so very nervous

but um

just so you know

he exists

[twilightarcade]

FREED. Anyways thanks to our sponsor @lemo-nadde. Everyone say thank you Claire. ily.

[knghtlock]

[ drifter vc ] alright alright alright ! i'm gonna try to work on the spider-verse headcanon post tonight but i am still kinda torn on whether to still incorporate the cyborg powers or not - the way i'm handling the nanites in that au FEELS kinda hamfisted so i might just .keep it simple with the funky spider powers lmao. we shall see! in the meantime, hit the heart to come plot with me!

[0dotexe]

Why is it always at 2AM that I get the burst of inspiration to work on my colour theory website/blog?

Guess that's something I need to work on this year, I kinda abandoned the project inadvertently.

[lesbiansforboromir]

Alright, I saw too many posts about DA4 and the pressure valve on dragon age opinions burst so I'm breaking my silence about mage discourse.

One day someone at bioware, can't remember who, made the worst possible PR decision and openly declared mages as an allegory for mental illness. It has all been downhill from there. Quite literally I could not be less interested in treating mages and mental illness as even tangentally related. Within the canon of DA, mages are people who literally have demons speaking to them, can literally become possessed by demons, and who are literally dangerous in extremely real and unavoidable ways even without the demon stuff. Lobotomies not only exist, but also work, the 'tranquil' are no longer plagued by the demons, nor do they have the powers of fireball anymore. It's like they called the 1300's and asked a witch hunter to write this.

And I am absolutely certain this framing is extremely cathartic for some people to relate too. Themactically speaking, turning all the dials up on a social issue for a fantasy world will always resonate with many of the victims of that issue. There is something impactful about taking all the insane stereotypes society has created around your lived experience, deciding they're real in an imaginary world and then playing out scenarios where you deal with them. God only knows gay people love vampires and werewolves.

But in that case it also has to be understood that others will not like it, or find it cathartic at all. The sticking point for me is probably the fact that mages are immensely powerful, something I find so egregiously unrelatable that any possible power fantasy it might be tempting me into just evaporates. And then of course there is Tevinter, which if we're following the allegorical logic is a state ruled by the mentally ill whom have 'embraced their demons' and so are now ruling an empire built on the enslavement of the 'pure' and 'untainted undemonic' population. Which I feel like, if we're weighing the mage narrative on the merit of it's being a cathartic themactic framing, is stretching the concept quite thin.

So I've always experienced mage based narratives as entirely seperate from their irl allegories at least emotionally, even if cognitively I do understand the parallels. And when you look at it like that, so sorry, it actually is a grey moral issue. If there were people in real life who could, without any additional equipment or technology, just create a fire/lightning storm from thin air, that on it's own would be a problem society would have to grapple with solving. You could not just let people with such power live under the same rules as everyone else. Like Wynne as a child nearly burned a barn down and scarred another child. These are not hypothetical issues within the canon.

And somewhat unrelated side tangent but I've seen people say, without an ounce of irony, 'magic doesn't kill people, people kill people' as an argument against the need for magic control. Which is just a fascinating framing all by itself, given the only difference between guns and DA magic is that one is an external tool and the other is built into select people. AND given that witholding gun licenses from the so called 'mentally disturbed' is an often advocated for policy... it's just kind of ironic is all!

Anyway the POINT is this is kind of frustrating to me because technically the mages COULD be a fun little play pretend thought morality experiment. This IS a difficult problem to solve, DA rightly engages with the fact that any institution created to control a subsection of people will create an environment of horrific abuse and dehumanisation. And that is only doubled with the introduction of religious control. When presented neutrally this is a 'do you sacrifice the few for the sake of the many' quandary with a lot of interesting caviates. IS it for the sake of the many? Would the actual number of people harmed by mages really exceed the number of mages themselves? Are we not just sacrificing the peace and freedom of many people for a hypothetical? But IS it a hypothetical since the slaver empire ruled by mages exists? But the hypothetical in the other direction isn't a hypothetical either, since the mage rebellion also exists and arguably did greater harm than free mages might have otherwise! But is that true? What about all the years worth of people in history hypothetically saved from harm by the strict control over mages? Isn't pushing for a more ethical circle a better plan than total abolishion? But is an ethical circle even possible given the cultural position mages hold? But in that case are free mages really going to be able to lead peaceful lives anyway? Doesn't the circle also protect them? But that is a situation the circle created and enforced right? Or is it? Since, once again, Demons definitely exist and mages have become possessed by them for centuries, and other mages have used their powers to dominate and abuse others in the past!

Theoretically, two people with exactly the same humanitarian purposes could argue the opposite ends of this debate in good faith, which is a fantasy. Because in the real world no one is born with a body inherrently able to cause more harm than the majority of other bodies. In fact, the opposite is true, people are born with more vulnerable bodies than the majority and are oppressed for it, their vulnerability taken advantage of by the dominant states in order to further those state's agendas in some way or other. Oppression does not have a 'good reason' to exist that originates from the oppressed class, those supposed reasons are fabricated after the fact to justify oppression in the minds of the general populace whom hold themselves to moral standards that a State does not. So, inherrently, the mages in DA are a fantasy idea and should be thought of as such.

But, amongst many DA fans, this is not the case. We've all seen people argue without irony that NOT taking a moral stance on the side of the mages and against the circles reflects badly upon your actual IRL moral compass. And it's not just that you cannot be pro-templar, even being neutral about it or finding the pro-mage characters or the mage narrative uninteresting is treated as an immoral action. People will ask things like 'who would even side with Meredith?' or 'does anyone even save the templars in DAI?' as if the choices you make narratively in a game have to be a moral judgement! Which we all know is nothing new in terms of fandom discourse, but within the mage/templar discussion it is so pervasive and so volatile that it makes it worth noting.

And like, obviously 'people get too serious about fiction on the internet' is such a non-issue that it's barely worth talking about. But I do find it interesting nonetheless as it's been a major part of my experience of being in the DA fandom, which now spans longer than a decade of my life (screams).

People have told me that I shouldn't treat this narrative theme as debatable because they relate to mage struggles as an autistic. And at the time I was pretty young and didn't really have a response to that other than a vague but powerful sense of discomfort. Nowadays, when I'm pretty sure I'm also autistic, I realise I was made deeply uncomfortable by the idea that there was anything relatable for me within the mage narrative. I do not have magic powers and I can't blow people up with my mind, I can't even get out of bed most days. Most people feel like mages to me just for being able to work a job or take care of themselves without help. And narratives of oppression that surround people with inherrent powers that far exceed anyone else just do not resonate! Which ultimately is just a reinforcement of the concept that the way people engage with fiction is not equivalent to actual real social issues, and really should not be treated as such.

[trans-axolotl]

anyway im really not as interested about getting as involved as intersex discourse on here as i used to be because i think like. okay i just think so many intersex people are coming into these discussions with so much trauma. like. i certainly am. theres so much community trauma. and we have almost zero like. political resources. resources for understanding ourselves. our identities. moreso these days, but still so few resources. and i think that means that a lot of this is messy, because we haven't had the time and space to figure this out and a lot of people are using different terms to try to mean different things and like, actually agree with each other on more than we disagree we just can't figure it out off posts alone. just. these are conversations i prefer to have in a more personal setting. in person if possible but like in personal text threads or discord servers and also actually building relationships with other intersex people and understanding where they're coming from instead of just geting into arguements online when like.

idk i posted some fucking ridiculous stuff on here the first year after i knew i was intersex! because i was desperately trying to figure it out! because there was nowhere for me to go to figure it out! because i was trying to figure it all out publically. and people showed me a lot of grace and compassion. and that's important to me, you know?

but there are some things that i think for me it is still worth talking about on here bc i think about how like. trans intersex people. esp transfem intersex people. gender non conforming intersex people. gender diverse intersex people. intersex people who just identify as intersex. get excluded and pushed to the bottom of our communities a lot. and i think that letting that continue to happen just layers and compounds community trauma.

and there just are so few resources. so hard to find. and i think the stuff that is hardest to find is stuff about our political identity! intersex theory, and i mean theory in a very broad sense in terms of like, creating knowledge about how we understand and move in the world rather than strictly academic theory. so a lot of this stuff is going to happen publicly and messily.

also unrelated tangent but a lot of this stuff i wish was not taking place with an endosex spectator audience LMFAO like. some of this stuff i think just gets. so muddled when we are like. simultaneously trying to explain things and make it legible to an endosex audience and also try to connect and make sense of these things to each other.

idk!! idk

[am-i-the-asshole-official]

AITA for not telling someone I wasn't their bully 100% of the time

Hey so I was a shitty kid and i willbe TA for most of the story. However the ambiguous non-ending spins around my head nonstop

! In high-school I met a friend, Lacy (mtf) who had recently come out. We bonded over mutual Fandoms and shared classes and ended up pooling friends. I was already tight friends with one other girl we can call Sam. Sam went to another school but me and her had been best friends for many years and talked constantly online. After spending a lot of time with Lacy, and with L and S in a group, I started to get a little crush. Me and Lacy had this habit of passing comic notes to eachother between classes and they were just so fun. Anyways I ended up passing them one asking them out and she agreed. We talked about it casually after and I kept the note. In the background, me and Sam talk constantly about Lacy. Outside of school, online, Lacy often goes on long rants and tangents and caps it off being painfully self depreciating and insinuating self harm. I honestly don't hold that against her too much, given how young we were and how much stuff was going on. Very quickly I realize this tiny crush evaporates in the heat of her stomping rants. My gut sinks when Lacy mentions we are dating. It's been less than a day. Sam messages me immediately and I make the terrible snap decision to lie. I lie about it and I have the evidence so my version becomes correct. I tell Sam I didn't *really* ask Lacy out, blah blah. The lie doesn't end. Lacy has an explosive breakdown about it, well warranted, and I lie to adults and school administrators as well. We were friends, I guess she got too attached, we talk all the time but no. I never asked her to date. Papers signed, case closed. Lacy blocks me everywhere. The year ends. I resign to never speaking to her, as the unquestioned bully in this situation I wouldn't have the right to approach her about it. I think I send one anon ask completely unrelated to her or our lives, then block her back as is only fair.

Short hop forwards a month or two. Sam sends me a message about an update to Lacys blog. Lacy is otherkin and Sam is laughing at the kin list, sending anon messages mocking Lacy about the choices and identity. Very unfamiliar with otherkin but struggling with gender thoughts myself I don't respond much.

Fast forward a few years. Me and Sam don't talk much now. I got a boyfriend and couldn't help love how much he ignored me. Everything else fell through cracks. Working at my restaurant job one day, who else comes in but Lacy. We are very busy, I try to be quick, don't make eye contact. "Party of....for Lacy?" She nods. The lobby is full so they walk out the door and never come back. Later when my shift is over I unblock and check her blog. She's made a post saying I was her abuser and had sent her constant anon hate since bullying her in hs. Checking her ask tag I see Sam on anon sends 3-6 hate messages a year. I do nothing and leave everyone be and move on.

Another 3 years goes by. Sam reaches out. She's terminally ill, and we speak stiffly for a few IMs. I don't forgive myself for leaving her and decide it's best we don't keep talking. Another few years and Sam passes. Our old friends go through Sam's papers and pc files reminiscing and find pages and pages of shared chat logs between me L and S. It really was a harsh reminder of how cruel I had been, speaking behind Lacys back and lying. I don't doubt I caused her lasting trauma with my actions.

Part of me wanted to reach out to Lacy and apologize, explaining myself and the misunderstanding and clearing the lie not because I wanted to feel absolved I just that it's finally done now. But it feels so cruel to do it when 1. As the original bully it's still not my place to seek closure 2. I can't just toss my friends corpse under this bus for no reason.

It's soon a decade since we all left school so the time seems well past. I just can't stop thinking about all the mistakes. And there seems no reason to bring it all up after all Sam can't say anything about it anymore and nobody is hurt believing i said these things. So, AITA for not telling Lacy it wasn't me bullying her most of the time?

What are these acronyms?

[alexthebordercollie]

Reposting this old piece of Fluttercord art. It is adorable and it brings me joy. I used to have an MLP next gen ask blog for a while. It got kinda popular but I eventually burnt out cause I kept getting flooded with questions about random background characters I didn't care about, like single-episode characters or even ponies with only a couple lines of dialog. The blog was supposed to be focused on the kids of the mane six and when it started getting derailed by that flood of questions by people who didn't care about the stories I wanted to tell it just kinda ruined it for me. Like I would write whole chapters of a fic or make long meaty story posts get almost no engagement on them then be flooded with questions about unrelated characters. That and being harassed any time I took too long to post, it just made me feel like no one actually cared about the quality at all as long as I was churning out generic pony art as fast as possible.

Anyway long tangent aside. I still love these boys. The yellow one is the older brother Chaos and the red one is Anarchy but everyone calls him Archie. These two were adorable and I love Fluttercord so much. Archie was effectively the Twilight of my mane six crew. The main mascot character of the blog. Both boys have Discord's powers.

Chaos is loud and rowdy and well, chaotic. He likes pulling pranks and causing general mischief. He's also typically pretty reckless and irresponsible. As a colt he once plunged Equestria into chaos during a temper tantrum and Celestia had his powers sealed inside a gem he wears around his neck. He can get them back when he's proved he can be trusted with him but as a young adult, he's still yet to have earned them back. Chaos looks like a mostly normal pegasus but with Discord's red and yellow eyes. His cutie mark is the symbol of the discordian society, the sacred chao.

Archie is quiet and reserved. Unlike most ponies Archie is almost always fully dressed. He's much more comfortable with clothes on. He works as a librarian at Twilight's castle and is a dragon scholar. Taking frequent trips to the dragon lands to study their culture and biology. He's well-liked by the dragons. Despite his polite and calm demeanor he's one of the few ponies most dragons have ever met who really seriously tried to understand them rather than writing off their culture as nothing but senseless brutality. Archie looks like a mostly normal pegasus but with dragon wings instead of pegasus wings. His cutie mark is a dragon.

[itsnothingofinterest]

So was the quirk singularity dropped entirely or was it just a reason to give shigaraki a body horror power while still having erasure stop his quirks all along and never meant to be a problem. Like it’s never come up or been used except for as a reason for afo deku and shigaraki to be stronger.

Yeah that plot point was never resolved, not even in a super contrived way like the bystander effect thing.

I guess humanity's just going extinct sometime in the next century or so.

Although as I believe I've said before, I'm reasonably sure Shigaraki's body horror hands weren't related directly to the singularity, but instead to the singularity-proofing procedure he went through. Like hey just come with the improved hardware to handle more complex software (quirks).

And as for Deku...how did he relate to the Singularity again? I mean Yoichi says OFA passed it, but it never really got uncontrollable for Deku (except that one brief time, does that count?) and it almost seems like Yoichi was just talking about the threshold where Deku could talk to the vestiges rather than anything related to Garaki's theory.

(Honestly the term/concept seemed to kind of just get thrown around haphazardly to things unrelated to what Garaki & meatball boy described to us once or twice like that, basically just attached to any quirk looking really strong or scary.)

I'm pretty sure the only semi-confirmed basic quirk we saw to be truly post-Singularity all by itself is Eri's Rewind.

Goodness was the Singularity a very weirdly handled plot line in the end, wasn't it? Anyway, sorry I went on a tangent there. But yeah, doomsday plot line got dropped, guess that means the world is ending. Sucks I guess.

[talyns-fanfics]

Your MHA x Gravity Falls idea sounds very cool!

Oh my god! You’re so sweet! I’m happy to announce that it’s actually happening! I’ve spent the entire day since posting that idea trying to figure out how it’ll work. I’m aiming for it to be a one shot, but if it expands then it expands.

I think Bill would have a lot of fun if he found the MHA universe. “OH MY GOD! A WHOLE UNIVERSE FULL OF FREAKS LIKE ME! I MUST MAKE THIS WORLD MY DOMINION OF WEIRDNESS!” And he gets his butt absolutely handed to by the grown up Class A kids from the MHA story.

I would like to clarify that since I’m using the MHA characters in the future, Deku and his friends are adults (ages 24/25). I’m also adding in grown up Mellissa Shield and Tanaka Midoriya (Mellissa being 26 and Tanaka being 25).

Also, I will be making The Bill Cipher Zodiac relevant to the story. I have already chosen which symbol for each character.

I’ve written a Bill centric story before, so it’s nice to revisit this character and see how different my characterization of him is from the first time I wrote him.

Anyway, sorry for that little tangent. Just letting y’all know that I’m really looking forward to see where I go with this story. This will be my first crossover storyline and I can’t wait to see it unfold.

Also, completely unrelated to the story, but UA flying in the MHA manga has always given me Shacktron vibes.

[dreameralive]

but on a tangent almost completely unrelated to that last post of mine i do find it very interesting how wildly the characterization of Slenderman changes from person to person. i don't just mean slenderverse vs creepypasta here, i mean... well, everything. but i'll mainly be focusing on slenderverse, here.

this is partially why i wish people explored the slenderverse beyond the popular video series' of it, but i think it really is worth considering each depiction of Slenderman, especially ones that drastically vary from the 'norm' that we may think of when it comes to the character. take the blog JustAnotherFool (which, while now only available via the Internet archive, is something i highly recommend giving a read!), for example. there, Slenderman is portrayed as this horrific, spiderlike creature who wears a fedora and rips people to shreds himself. it's completely the opposite of almost every proposal of Slenderman i've ever seen in the context of the slenderverse - he's not a silent observer, nor a commanding authority. he's a beast. he's angry.

even in popular slenderverse webseries', he changes a lot. for example, in Marble Hornets, he's a, like i said, silent observer. although he brings so, so much devastation to these characters lives, he doesn't seem to have all that much investment in them. it's a matter of hopping from one to the next to the next to the next. it's about spreading. now, compare this to mlandersen0 or everymanhybrid, where Slenderman actively seems to almost delight in tormenting these characters, for presumably, as long as he possibly can. he is an active force in these peoples lives. everything he does to them is so deeply, deeply personal. he goes so far as to maul someone who was abusing Vinnie in the Fairmount timeline. why? well, the text says it itself. "the man doesn't share."

there's also the humanization of Slenderman, like how i mentioned above, where he seems to have some sort of psychological capabilities to him. he is choosing to do this. he is choosing to hurt people. which is deeply, deeply sinister. a horror that wants you to suffer, specifically. a horror that knows what it's doing. a horror that does it all simply because it can. but there's also blogs and series' where he's portrayed as nothing more than a stupid animal, or some sort of infection. where he runs on instincts, a need to feed or to spread, and nothing more. which is also quite disturbing. a horror that does it all simply because it can do nothing else.

this is all, of course, only really scratching the surface. and anyway, i don't really know what point exactly i'm trying to make here. but, i guess this is a good conclusion to end on: please don't be afraid to stray too far from popular depictions with your portrayal of Slenderman! and please look into more slenderverse media that isn't simply MH/EMH/etc! it's good stuff!