#being active and excited

[argent-gale]

Oddly Nostalgic

I got a notification one of my blogs turned 7 yo today.

I haven't been on here in months but it got me reminiscing a little.

About how I'd eagerly await those reblog/like notifications.

About how I'd squee when I got a message notif.

I remember when I lived/breathed TWD and SW. Those fandoms injected a spark that made life so much more interesting.

I remember writing fics. Getting recs. BEING recd.

I remember chatting people overseas until legit 2 am my time on a worknight.

I'm not really involved in any fandom right now. My online fandom friends have drifted away. People I used to talk to multiple times a day have just...disappeared.

I get sad because I remember how it used to be. So fun. I remember thinking how boring my life was before I got so involved in my fandoms. Now that I'm not in them anymore it makes me sad because my life is once again dull.

I wish I could get excited over things again but I just can't.

I scrolled through my feed and saw some old "faces" and smiled remembering. I guess I should be grateful I had that time at all.

I packed away all my fandom merch and will probably sell/give it away. I spent so much money on that stuff, lol.

Anyway, just musing today.

[ganondoodle]

i prefer him big, thick, and a little rotten perhaps :P

(Radahn, Elden Ring)

[lilislegacy]

i’m gonna be so honest. i’m scared to post any pjo headcanons or convos or analyses of any sort right now because of the chance of it getting canonically disputed in 3 days

i’m too utterly terrified of the “well this didn’t age well” comments 🫣😂

[deathdefyinggarlic]

if merlin actually gets renewed i might genuinely die, like the reaction that my body may have will rewire me permanently,,,, i will simply be an open mouthed shape

[leafyisgreennotblue]

I was watching the time lapse and it literally broke but I thought it looked cool so I had to share. On a separate note, I wanted to thank everyone for all the nice things you all say. I read them all and it makes me very happy so thank you very much.

[slushiepizza]

if it's not obvious already, i headcanon that there's something severely wrong with guy that's masked with his upbeat personality

[basketobread]

it's right behind me, isn't it? 😂 (tomorrow is my birthday and idk how to feel about it)

[spacedace]

Fuck whatever DC is doing with the al Ghul's characterizations and story lines, I've decided that from now on the al Ghul's are gonna be DC's version of the Addams Family instead.

Now I don't mean just give the various al Ghul's the exact personalities of the various Addams and call it a day. That's boring, that erases all the interesting parts of the al Ghuls, that's just using "find & replace" and not actually adding anything. I mean give them the vibes of the Addams Family.

Keep the al Ghul's as the al Ghul's with all their scheming and machinations and world domination attempts but give them all the unhinged energy, the casually insane view of the world, the deranged levels of love and devotion for family. Make them that group where objectively they are batshit insane but also you cannot argue with the fact that they are indisputably the most stable and functional family in the entire universe.

They're creepy, they're kooky, they're mysterious and spooky. Ra's many opulent homes and impenetrable fortresses are a museum and the al Ghul's really are a screa-um whenever people come to see-um (or when they lay waste upon their enemies in a surprise attack that has been planned for months and is just the first domino in a series that will ultimately lead to achieving a far greater goal).

They all love each other and want each other to be happy, they express this primarily with stabbing and murder attempts (its fine, death is a thing that happens to other people).

And forget the League of Assassins being a cult. Just make the whole vast globe spanning organization a collection of cousins/aunts/uncles/dear old friends ect. No one (not even the al Ghuls, if they cared to keep track of such things) is sure who is actually related to them and who just got absorbed into the ever expanding family tree based on their vibes being right.

(Is Sensei Ra's father you ask? Well he's certainly someone's father - probably.

Anyway have you heard about Cousin Cheshire? Despicable poisoner of a young woman, capable of the most horrific things imaginable - yes she is the sweetest dear. Like I was saying though, she just had a baby!

Everyone in the family is just so excited to throw a baby shower to celebrate! Ubu has really gone all out with the spike traps, he does so love getting to welcome a new addition to the family.

Talia of course has cultivated a brand new strain of the most toxic plants imaginable to make a brand new kind of necrotizing poison. You know, as a nice little romantic gift for Cousin Cheshire and that young man of hers. It really is so important to make sure you take time for you and your partner to go on dates and have a few pitched battles to the death on dark rooftops in the pounding rain when you have children.

Now there is some to-do about it all of course, you know how family get together can be. Everyone is arguing over who should get to give little Lian her first weapon and what it should be. Nyssa is pushing for grenades but Ra's is insisting on a sword - he's traditional like that you know - but Dusan has the vote so far on throwing knives. You know the kind that have the little divots along the edges of the blades them to make it easier to get the poison you dip them in to stick.)

I'm just saying that the al Ghuls should be a delightful cross between the Bond Villains they were originally conceived as and the lovingly unhinged Addams Family. It just feels correct in my heart.

(Again keep the interesting aspects of the characters and the nuances of who each of them are like their drive to save the world through destroying humanity and their strong environmentalist leanings and their constantly playing 5D chess and everything, but like, take away the racism and the cartoonishly evil for no reason bullshit and give them some fun feral energy to go along with it).

[olasketches]

me and like two other sukuna stans making posts about how miserable he is

[acesstark]

“It’s his job” “It’s his drug”

“We’ve been together 77 years”

“We do horror shows so we can eat people”

“Lestat Lestat Lestat Lestat Lestat”

“There was no scripting Lestat. You cannot script a hurricane”

“Picked another one over me”

“You fear Armand. You should fear the other one”

“But you’ve gotta give up something to get something.”

“It’s you and me. Me and you. You and me. Me and you. You and me.”

“I failed Louis once in my life, it wasn’t in San Francisco”

“I knew who I was without those pieces”

“Memory is the monster”

[gloriousmonsters]

picturing Velvette huddled up on a Hell doorstep 2 hours after she arrived making a list of possible ways to get some power as quickly as possible on a bloodstained cellphone she took off a corpse and it's like

create startup, get aqui-hired

become first hellfluencer

sugar daddy?

startup + collab with a celebrity for more attention

celebrity boyfriend?

become already powerful couple's third, profit

actually find people to work with who respect and value my skills and me as a person <- this one is a joke

and then a year later she's in bed, awake after vox and val have nodded off for once, looking at mockups of the Vee tower design on her phone, and brings up the old list for just a minute to cross everything else out and write in 'all of the above???'

[nyaskitten]

I feel like one of the only people... not scared about Wyldfyre getting a potential boyfriend? Like I dunno sure Ninjago doesn't have the Best history with romantic relationships but also none of the OG writers nor Tommy are working on DR, and we already know Doc can make GREAT friendships (Cole and Vania, he wrote them as just friends, and also obviously Sora and Arin) so who's to say him, Kevin, and all the other writers can't do good romance as well?

[srapsodia]

woah!! hi!! that's a lot of you in a very short time!! thank you all for liking my drawings enough to stick around! :>

[batsplat]

do you know why vale seems to have a soft spot for pedrosa?

there's not any single one reason, I don't think, but here's are a few contributing factors that come to mind:

history! in large part because of the honda link, dani's the alien he's known the longest... valentino was the number one honda rider at a time at which dani was honda's rising star. photo on the right is from the 2001 honda celebrations at the last race of the season (when dani was sixteen); from oxley's valentino rossi: all his races: "that night vale celebrated in style at a raucous honda victory party, where he taught honda youngsters daijiro kato and dani pedrosa how to drink". they've known each other forever! valentino was getting teenage dani drunk! quite natural to be fond of someone you've seen grow up like that, even if they are being moulded to be your next big rival

circumstance! the way it basically works with valentino is that if you want to have a feud with him, you generally need to have a title fight with him when you’re already ‘established’ rivals (ignore marc, that’s its own thing, 2015 is a freaky season). biaggi and valentino were enemies headed into 2001 and then were worse enemies, he was cool with sete in year one but not year two, mostly *wiggles hand* the same with casey and jorge… feuds aren't build overnight. valentino and dani weren’t ever really direct title rivals - closest they got was 2006 and 2008, but in both cases valentino probably didn’t see dani as his main problem that year. there wasn't really any competitive necessity for valentino to get nasty... also with one or two notable exceptions, valentino did kinda have dani handled in their actual wheel-to-wheel fights, which let’s face it probably didn’t hurt

yapping! so this is just a theory but it’s one I believe strongly in. you know how valentino loves to talk, right? the thing about pressers and podiums is that you're always going to have a few regular attendees, if you will, corresponding to the front runners in any given year. now, unfortunately for valentino, there were periods of time where almost every other regular attendee was someone he had pretty active beef with. that doesn’t mean he always avoided yapping at them, but relatively speaking you want a guy you can build up some good repartee with to pass the time. dani was his guy… less complicated than casey and jorge, plus dani is polite enough to go along with it and maybe even enjoy chatting to valentino (it’s been known to happen). pressers can be boring and at podiums you're still full of adrenaline, valentino wants to share a joke with someone! my completely unscientific sense is that valentino does this a lot with dani around 2008-ish to 2012, then for two years marc is the number one yap victim, then for a while it’s a bit…? oddly valentino does seem to chat quite a lot with jorge in 2015... he likes to throw in a quirky behavioural pattern sometimes to keep you guessing. anyway then in 2016 he is Actively Ignoring two of these men so vale goes!! hi there dani!! and takes it from there (though the field is more mixed up post-2015 so he becomes more of an opportunistic yapper). in general, valentino will chat to pretty much anyone with A Few Exceptions, but he does usually have a bit of an order of preference

dani’s personality! now, obviously dani is very much capable of feuds, but he’s not that naturally combative a character. valentino generally needs a competitive justification for beef, though some personal animosity can help too… but he never really hated any of that trio of young riders to come through. valentino's known dani forever, he’s been around dani a fair bit because of their respective statuses in the sport, dani isn’t going out of his way to pick fights with valentino, so no reason not to get on! he does clearly quite like chatting to dani and seems pretty fond of him even towards the start of the alien era, at a time in which it was broadly expected that dani not casey would emerge as vale's primary challenger... god knows if the relationship would have soured if dani had assumed that mantle (probably at least a little lol) but failing that, valentino does just seem to quite like him. y’know, sometimes it’s like that

They Have Also Had Their Disagreements, But There Hasn’t Been Much Cause For It To Escalate Further. these disagreements have tended to be over racing standards, where dani is generally in the ‘you people are all insane’ camp and valentino is generally in the ‘ah it’s fine’ camp (though, obviously, there is nuance here… cf vale also criticising sic over the le mans 2011 incident that left dani with the broken collarbone). generally, they don't get into direct conflict over it, more of an underlying difference in positions (hey, aragon 2013 is an example)... but there’s been dani’s suggestion that valentino’s sepang 2015 stance is inconsistent with his generally laissez faire approach, and also some other isolated little scuffles over the years like say 2017 aragon (see below). pretty small scale stuff in the grand scheme of things and if you've been on-track rivals for that long it's kinda inevitable you'll eventually disagree about some stuff, but perhaps worth bringing up

went through all of the alien combos in my head and these two slot in just behind dani/casey as probably the two most consistently beef-free inter-alien relationships? dani/casey gets extra credit for surviving The Teammate Test. but, y'know, the thing about valentino is that he's a sociable, outgoing guy... he likes talking to people... he's actually interested in them... he's a decent conversationalist, easy to get on with, all that stuff. so if you expose valentino to this nice fella who at most was like... perhaps a bit more reserved towards the start of his time in the premier class (partly due to his mentor's approach), but really was generally pretty chill... well, if valentino isn't given any reason to hate dani, then default state is that he won't. good on them etc

[black-queen-rising]

The people taking this dialogue as a legitimate “character flaw” or literally just at face value at all and not as a continuation of the blatant disrespect the writers have not just towards Rhaenyra as the heir of twenty years, but towards anything that could even vaguely be construed as “women’s work”, is the most perfect encapsulation of just how entrenched misogyny is into the very heart of our pop culture and how the popularization of fantasy has managed to worsen our societal view of soft power by painting it as not only weak, but frivolously feminine, unimportant, and a waste of time.

Since the beginning of the show the writers have almost exclusively portrayed Rhaenyra as disinterested if not opposed to her role as heir, as a politician, and a woman in power broadly all against the original canon and all glaringly, not to make her look worse or better or likable or incompetent (they do all those things, almost every episode, with however they need her to affect the plot in that given moment because they’re incapable of having the characters drive it organically) because it’s not truly about her at all. It’s simply because they cannot fathom a story where a woman is politically adept and as a result either 1. evil or 2. boring, and that is fundamentally because once again they are so biased and against portraying anything that could even vaguely be construed as women’s work or at all “feminine-coded” in an even neutral-but-interesting way they do for (stereotypically) masculine-coded activities like sword fighting, horse back riding, dragon riding, hunting, archery, not to mention just the concept of the political conversations that drive these stories, let alone an actually positive way.

They have taken a story that at its core was always an indictment of structural misogyny and how it will literally cause societies to tear themselves apart over nothing. But because they decided at the outset they wouldn’t and couldn’t portray the structural part of said misogyny without scaring away their intended audience, and decided instead to base this all around ultimately meaningless ~team discourse~ (because literally everyone meeting their downfall as a result of the consequences of systemic misogyny is the point) their alternate path has been to over-exaggerate and ultimately turn to spectacle every single woman involved’s individual suffering at the expense of everything else about their characters. It doesn’t matter if that was the intent or not the principle result of this adaptation has been the continual disempowerment and degradation of women and their agency combined with an almost impressively voyeuristic portrayal of their suffering.

The women in this show are not allowed to have interests or hobbies unless it’s to serve to make them seem “bad” in someway, whether that be the discomfort around Helaena’s bugs, the total lack of any positive representation of Alicent’s religiosity, or how the women dragon riders are broadly painted as aggressive, violent, and unnatural. I don’t even have specific examples to list from the other “team” because in order to be portrayed as “likable” to the general audience the women of Team Black are barely allowed to have personalities, let alone distinguishing interests or characterizing hobbies. The agency and autonomy they have been stripped of, collectively, from both historical precedent and actual ASoIaF, is almost entirely in their refusal to allow women’s work to be portrayed positively. There are no balls, no sewing circles, no garden parties, no trappings of power and contests of will in the jewels and gowns Rhaenyra must now loathe to be (their deeply narrow and biased view of) “likable”, there are no female mentorships, and no female friendships, and at every chance they have had to portray these things at both a societal and personal level they have chosen to veer away and instead reinforce their suffering. They have removed women’s avenues and halls of power from this story, while making it very clear there are no others that exist in this world, and they cannot participate in the men’s; if they could this story wouldn’t exist. So we are left with a group of people who are supposedly driving this story, who this story is supposedly about, but they are internally and externally isolated, largely removed from the public eye, angry or distressed to be there on the rare occasions they’re present, disempowered, stripped of personal agency and will, and we’re still told they have power. But if we search for it the only logical conclusion is that any power which does not center on how much suffering they have been through, or how much more they may be dealt, is not only gone, it was never there in the first place.

I don’t enjoy Rhaenyra’s quasi domestic abuse any more than Alicent’s visceral sexual shame and I don’t enjoy the infantilization of Helaena’s character any more than the erasure of Rhaena’s and it is deeply concerning how many people look at these decisions, and nod their heads and say “yes, this is realistic, and not only is it realistic it’s, GOOD, because without horrific psychological and physical abuse and ultimately a complete reduction to every female character as peace loving victims of powerful men’s cruel machinations we could never even SEE how misogyny is so damaging.” And the mindset that drives people to claim that those of us who call out how this is, the definition of benevolent misogyny and say we’re crazy, that we can’t see the complexity, that actually we’re the ones somehow falling back into sexist tropes, or asking for a black and white story when instead the black and white has simply become an insultingly reductive view of evil men versus helpless women and when all else fails, accusing us of wanting a boring story because it’s either not focused on gratuitous individual female suffering, or is focused on the kind of political power every single featured female character on both sides of this conflict wielded in the original book instead of evil man conversations and eviler man dragon-battles, is at its heart why we have come to a place in pop culture where one of its most marquee properties displays and embodies these problems so glaringly in the fucking first place.

[chryblossomjjk]

just found out that jungkook interacts with people who aren’t me