#but also? vindicated

[sarcastic-clapping]

so no one was going to tell me some adhd stimulants make novacaine NOT FUCKING WORK??? OH MY GOD

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Laios's three Boy Best Friends. And yes, they hate him.

[cream-and-tea]

what she says: yea i’m fine

what she’s thinking: the story brought both carpenter and faulkner to their inevitable end points that have been foreshadowed from the v first episode of the show ambiguity of carpenters death aside she stood on the banks of the river singing like her nana glass and was gunned down by the military and faulkner was drowned dragged delivered by the god and story he had let devour him but. but. before those things happened right before the narrative reached its end both of them stood up and said no! i want to go forward! i want to find something past this whatever it might be i don’t want it to take me yet im going to keep on walking! and it was too late! the thing is it was too fucking late!!!!!!! the aquifer was already flooding the soldiers were closing in she was to hurt to run he can’t swim. the chance had come and gone at the beginning of the episode for any hope of them reaching each other ever again but even though it was too little too late never ever going to be enough they both looked the site of their doom in the eyes and said i do not accept this. not here. not now. i am staring at you– the thing that will eat me — and resolving to pry open the jaws and choose to use the last moments of my life (whether i know it or not) to run and stumble and crawl and cry and sing in the hopes of reaching the people who matter to me more than being made your meal. and of course they got fucking eaten anyways. of course they did bc they were walking towards it from the beginning. but there is a way out, there is a way forward, there is a land beyond the storm that is possible to reach if you choose to step out of the story that has been built for you to find it. we walk on, with a rough and tarnished hope, and a tangled, ruined love. it can end with love, and it can end with kindness. even as the jaws are closing. ours is a world of miracles.

[seance]

EDWIN and CHARLES in THE CASE OF THE VERY LONG STAIRWAY

[ivegoneawayinsidemyhead]

9-1-1 : Realizations

(A.K.A. Notes on a Metaphor)

AO3

[narikill]

aughdhshfjjsjcjdjfjsbgsknfjs <- leshy in this art probably

[maharellasa]

the way this man is a ruthless trickster hellbent on achieving his goals but also cares enough to beg a total stranger to "take his hand" so that he might save her

[bidonicart]

I made an illustration (well several in one) for my current favorite prestige drama, @jilldrawblog's MGS fic House On Fire. Go read it! It's about Kaz's divorce from the point of view of his wife :)

[hydroelectricjaya]

You don’t understand how satisfied this exchange makes me.

[anjian]

i can't even get far enough to submit it in person smh

[kacievvbbbb]

I mean this with the utmost respect; but I truly believe that Mob Psycho 100 could only have been written by someone that “can’t draw” but truly loves to draw.

And as someone who is the opposite of that I truly appreciate it.

It’s about doing the things you love to do even if you aren’t good at them and not doing the things you’re great at “gifted” even simply because they don’t make you happy or fufill you.

Reigen really looked Mob, the quintessential gifted child, in the face and told him “you don’t have to do something just because you’re good at it, your powers aren’t who you are” and the body improvement club tells him “why give up just because your bad at it? You’re having fun aren’t you?”

Mob Psycho looked the world in the eyes and said you are more than your talents. Being something isn’t who you are it’s a choice you make and you’re allowed to make a different one everyday.

[animanga-bonanza]

every episode of x men 97 be like

[inrainprose]

Pit Babe has everything. Racing. Omegaverse. Evil billionaires trafficking powered children. Breeding scheme. Kinky shit. High melodrama. BETRAYALS. Spice and fluff. Man tears. Inane plot logic and priorities. Not one not two not three but FOUR (and counting?) secretly adopted siblings. I love it here.

[whetstonefires]

Hey you said something about the my hero academia creator being unhinged about sexism, do you mind explaining?

I tried to write like, a thorough explanation of this and it just got longer and longer and longer and I have not touched this series in actual years and yet I've still got all these receipts a;lkjk;lfasd.

So rather than trying to build the whole massive case, here's a pared-down version. It's normal to have sexism in media, and shounen manga especially. Everyone does it. The level and mode and intentionality and so forth all vary, but of course it's there.

What's not normal is to have lots of varied and interesting female characters with discernible inner lives, and on-page discussion of how sexism is systemic and unjust and holds them back in specific ways, and then also deliberately make consistent sexist writing decisions even where they don't arise naturally from the flow of the narrative.

Horikoshi is actively interested in gender and sexism, he's aware of them in a way you rarely see outside of the context of, you know, fighting sexism. He is hung up on the thorny issue of what women are worth and deserve and how power and respect ties into it. He genuinely wants, I think, to have Good Female Characters, and not be (seen as) A Sexist Guy!

But. He doesn't actually want to fight sexism. He displays a lot of woman-oriented anxieties, and one of the many churning paddlewheels in his head seems to be that he knows intellectually that morally sexism is bad, but emotionally he really feels like it ought to probably be at least partly correct.

There are so many things I could cite, and maybe I'll get into some of them later, but the crowning item that highlights how the pattern is 1) at least partly conscious and deliberate and 2) about Horikoshi's own weird hangups rather than simply cynical market play, is Mineta Minoru.

The writer has stated Mineta is his favorite character. Mineta is also designed to be hated--that is, he is a particularly elaborate instantiation of a character archetype normally deployed to soak up audience contempt and (by being gross and shameless and unattractive and 'unthreatening') make it possible to include a range of sexual gratification elements into the narrative that would compromise the main characters' reputations as heroic and deserving, if they were the actors.

Good Guys don't grope girls' tits and run away snickering in triumph, after all. Non-losers don't focus intense effort around successfully stealing someone's panties. Nice Girls don't let themselves be seen half-dressed. And so forth. You need an underwear gremlin for that. So, in anime and manga, longstanding though declining tradition of including such a gremlin, for authorial deniability.

Horikoshi definitely uses him straight for this purpose, looping in Kaminari as needed to make a bit work. And yet he has Feelings about the archetype itself.

The passages dedicated to the vindication of Mineta, then, and the author's statements about him, let us understand that Horikoshi identifies with the figure of the underwear gremlin. He understands the underwear gremlin as a defining exemplar of male sexuality, at least if you are not hot, and finds the attached contempt and hostility to be a dehumanizing attack on all uh.

Incels, basically.

It's not fair to write Mineta off just because he's unattractive and horny (and commits sexual harassment). Doesn't he have a mind? Doesn't he have dreams? Doesn't he have human potential?

So what's going on with Horikoshi and gender, as far as I can figure out, is that he knows damn well that women are people and are treated unjustly by sexist society, but however.

He also understands the institutions of sexism as something protecting him and people like him from life being nebulously yet definitively Worse, and therefore wants to see them upheld.

So you get this really bizarre handling of gender where obviously women's rights good and women cool, women can be Strong, and the compulsory sexualization imposed by the industry isn't them or the author, and so forth.

But also it's very important that in the world he controls, women never win anything important or Count too much, and that jokes at their expense that disrupt the internal logic of their characters are always fair game, that women asked about sexism on TV will promptly get into catfights amongst themselves, and they are understood always in terms of their sexual and romantic interests and value, and sexual assertiveness and failures to perform femininity well enough are used to code them as dangerous and irrational, and that the sexy costumes are requisite and will never be subverted or rebelled against--at most they might be circumnavigated via leaning into cute appeal.

And that Yaoyorozu Momo, who converts her body fat into physical objects, is being frivolous when she wants to use money to buy things instead (rather than as sensibly moderating her Quirk use) and is never encouraged to eat as much as possible at every opportunity to put on weight and even shown being embarrassed by hunger (even though Quirk overuse gives symptoms that suggest she's been stripping the lipids out of her cell walls or nervous system to keep fighting) and always, no matter how many Things she has made, has huge big round boobies.

[leohttbriar]

i was worried i was going to hate how worf and jadzia got together what with jadzia constantly being the object of desire, in a traditional read of the word, of so many male characters that it was reaching parody by the end of season 2, but the actual story they wrote? grade-a, rom-com, cute. screwball adorable. especially this exact moment early in the episode:

like that is literally cary grant (jadzia) and carole lombard (worf)

[drawing--dead]

Heeeeeeeey! L8sten!!!!!!!!