#but i feel like i'm stuck with it ^^''

[fortune-maiden]

For the Writers Truth & Dare owo: 🍓 🛼 🔪 🥐 ☁️

Thank you!! :D

🍓 ⇢ how did you get into writing fanfiction?

I'm not really sure how I got started originally with writing fanfic (probably just wanted to write new adventures of blorbos for myself), but I got into fanfic reading/posting in middle school when I discovered forums and fanfiction dot net

🛼 ⇢ describe your latest wip with five emojis

This isn't an active one sadly but I thought it could be fun to explain the boueibu alt s2 ending au of my dreams through emojis

🪓🚀🚂🎭💗☄️

6 emojis because the rocket & the train should be considered a single emoji. It's very important.

🔪 ⇢ what’s the weirdest topic you researched for a writing project?

I feel like it's been a while since I really dived into anything too weird. Should probably fix that.

A while back I was researching shipping company startups for the purposes of a modern au though. It's not that relevant to the plot (maybe), just the worldbuilding

🥐 ⇢ name one internet reference that will always make you laugh

Do songs count? I vote the Numa Numa song :D

It just always makes me smile!

☁️ ⇢ what made you choose your username?

I was a dumb middle schooler and I'd feel weird changing it now orz

the other online name I use though is the name of my favorite song from one of my favorite video games haha

[canisalbus]

✦ Convalescence ✦

[panstarry]

my final from last semester that i made into a zine. cooked this one up in a couple hours before the critique (the ink was still wet!), so it's very raw and kind of sloppy but the sentiment is there. i love you trans people of color. we are the backbone of this community 🌟

[milkamel]

The art I made for mmmilkweed's dtyis it was so fun omg- even if I struggled a bit it was a nice challenge I should experiment more it certainly makes me like my art more

Their art is such an inspiration to me and I love their shadowvanilla too it's so scrumptious,,

[stormy-nights-are-best]

FOR ANYBODY WHO WAS WAITING FOR IT sorry it looks cut short, this was an assignment and it was due today so, yk

she's on the run

Don't you hate it when your aunt is stuck as your shadow because she failed on a last-minute effort to trap you in her place?

☝️Shadow is an indication of the body. It works with the physical world and it's a vessel for the conscious. Cue body swap.

Oh yEAH THIS IS ALSO PROPAGANDA FOR MY THREE CABALLEROS AU

[cenvast]

"Toshiro Is Sexist," "Toshiro Owns Slaves": What's Really Going on With This Guy?

I've seen a lot of debate on whether or not Toshiro is problematic because he's a slave owner or because he's sexist in the context of his crush on Falin. While I do want to examine his relationship to Falin, I'd like to take a few steps back and unpack his upbringing first. We'll dive into the gender and class dynamics he was raised with and how it impacts his behavior in the main storyline.

Like all people, Toshiro is shaped by the environment he grew up in. Toshitsugu, Toshiro's father and the head of the Nakamoto clan, is the most impactful model of authority and manhood in his life. Toshiro does recognize some of his father's flaws and tries to avoid replicating them. But whether or not he emulates or subverts his father's behavior, Toshitsugu is often the starting point for Toshiro's treatment of others, particularly marginalized people.

The Nakamoto clan exists under a patriarchal hierarchy with Toshitsugu at the top. As noted by @fumifooms in their Nakamoto household post, his wife has more authority than Maizuru. She's able to ban Maizuru from parts of their residence, but despite disliking his infidelity, she can't divorce him or stop him from cheating on her. Their marriage is not an equal partnership.

On an interpersonal level, Toshitsugu and Maizuru also have a fraught relationship. While she does seem to care for him, she's often frustrated by his thoughtless behavior.

For example, he drunkenly buys Izutsumi for her — without considering how she'll have to raise this child — and invades her room in the middle of the night. When he cryptically says, "It's all my fault," she replies, "I can think of a lot of things that are your fault." She calls him an "idiot" and "believes that [Toshiro] will grow up to be a better clan leader than his father," implying that she takes issue with Toshitsugu's leadership.

Because Maizuru and Toshitsugu are described as being "in an intimate relationship" and "seem[ing] to be lovers," Maizuru appears to be a consensual participant. Still, this doesn't negate the large power imbalance between them as a male noble clan leader and his female retainer. This imbalance introduces an insidious undertone to Maizuru's frustration with Toshitsugu. Like Toshiro's mother, Maizuru doesn't have the agency to do as she pleases in their relationship; he has the ultimate authority. For instance, she doesn't seem to want to raise Izutsumi, but she has to anyway.

While Maizuru's role as Toshitsugu's mistress is significant, she's also the Nakamoto clan's teacher and Toshiro's primary maternal figure. She cares deeply for Toshiro: tailing him, feeding him, and taking responsibility even for his actions as an adult. While it might seem sweet that she cares for him like a son at first, Maizuru was notably fifteen years old at the time of his birth. In the extra comic below, he's six years old and has already been in her care for some time. Even if we're being generous and assuming that she didn't start raising him until he was six, she was still only twenty-one at the time she was parenting her boss/lover's child with another woman.

Maizuru's roles as mistress and maternal figure, in addition to her role as retainer, demonstrate the intersection between gendered and class oppression in the Nakamoto household. Despite her original role being a retainer trained in espionage, Toshitsugu presses her into performing gendered labor for him and eventually, Toshiro. She's expected to be Toshitsugu's lover, perform emotional labor for him as his confidant, care for his child, and carry out domestic tasks like cooking. She says, "Even during missions, I was often dragged into the kitchen." If she was a male servant, I doubt she would have been expected to perform these additional tasks. She can't avoid these tasks either, stating that her "own feelings don't factor into it."

Toshitsugu disregards his wife's and Maizuru's desires and emotions to serve his own interests. Because he has societal power over them as a nobleman and in Maizuru's case, her master, neither woman can escape their position in the household hierarchy.

As a result, Toshiro grew up within a structure where men and male nobility, in particular, wield the most societal power. The hierarchical nature of his household and society discourages everyone, including him as a clan leader's eldest son, from questioning and disrupting the existing hierarchy.

The other Nakamoto household members also internalize its sexist, classist power dynamics.

For example, Hien expects that she and Toshiro will replicate the uneven dynamics of the previous generation, regardless of her personal feelings. She sees her and Toshiro's relationship as paralleling Maizuru and Toshitsugu's relationship; she is the closest woman to Toshiro and his retainer, so she's shocked when Toshiro doesn't attempt to begin an intimate relationship with her. Notably, she doesn't have actual feelings for him. Her expectations are centered around the household's precedent of placing emotional, sexual, domestic, and child-rearing labor onto the female servants without any regard for their personal desires.

Hien also probably knows that her position in the household will improve if she is Toshiro's lover because she's seen it improve Maizuru's position. However, the fact that being the future clan leader's lover is the closest proximity she, as a female servant, has to power further reveals the gendered, class-based oppression she and the other women live under.

It's important to note that the Nakamoto clan bought Benichidori, Izutsumi, and Inutade as slaves, so they have less power and agency than Maizuru and Hien. The clan further dehumanizes Izutsumi and Inutade as demi-humans; their enslavement contains an additional layer of racialization.

Toshiro isn't oblivious to the gendered, class, and racial power dynamics of his household. He tries to distance himself from participating in its exploitative power structure. He walls himself off from Hien, who he's known since childhood, to avoid replicating his father's behavior and making his servant into his lover. He disapproves of his father's enslavement of Izutsumi and Inutade, and he lets Izutsumi go when she runs away in the Dungeon.

But does any of this absolve him of his complicity in his household's sexist, classist power dynamics and racialized slavery?

The short answer is absolutely not.

Despite his distaste for his father's exploitation of his servants and slaves, Toshiro still uses them. He refers to his party as "his retainers," and he has them fight and perform domestic tasks for him. You could argue that Toshiro doesn't like to and thus, doesn't regularly use his servants and slaves. In the context of him asking his retainers to help him rescue Falin, Maizuru says, "The only time he ever made any sort of personal request was for this task." But it shouldn't matter whether exploitation is a regular occurrence or not for it to be considered harmful. Toshiro asking Maizuru to cook him a meal still constitutes asking his female servant to perform gendered labor for him. He's also very accustomed to her grooming and dressing him.

Maizuru sees feeding, washing, and even advising Toshiro romantically as fulfilling Toshitsugu's orders to care for his son. They aren't fulfilling a "personal request." But just because her labor has been deemed expected and thereby devalued doesn't mean that it isn't labor or that she isn't performing it.

Maizuru's dynamic with Toshiro is also complicated by her role as his maternal figure. She loves him and wants to take care of him, and she doesn't have a choice in the matter. During Toshiro's childhood, the onus was on Toshitsugu to cease exploiting his lover and release her from servitude, but Toshiro is now an adult man. Seeing as how Maizuru defers to his wishes and calls him "Young Master," they still have a power imbalance that he's passively maintaining. Ideally, he would not ask anything of her until he has the authority to release her from servitude.

Throughout the story, Toshiro acts as if he has no agency and quietly disapproving of his father's actions absolves him of his participation in maintaining oppressive dynamics. While his father still ranks higher than him, he's essentially his father's heir. He has much more power than Maizuru, the highest-ranked servant. At the very least, he could leave his slave-owning household.

Unfortunately, his refusal to confront injustice is consistent with his character's major flaw: he does not express his opinions, desires, or needs. While this character trait obviously hurts his friendships, it also furthers his complicity in the injustices his household runs on.

Toshiro's relationship with eating food — the prevailing metaphor of the series — also parallels his relationship with confronting injustice. Maizuru mentions that he was a sickly child, so the act of eating may have been physically uncomfortable for him. As an adult, his refusal to eat crops up during his rescue attempt of Falin. Denying himself food might have been punishment for not accomplishing important tasks like rescuing Falin and/or a way to maintain control over something in his life when he felt like he'd lost control over the rest of it, again in the context of losing Falin. (Note: I suggest reading this post on Toshiro's disordered eating by @malaierba.)

But he cannot and does not avoid consuming food forever.

Similarly, Toshiro keeps his distance from his retainers and tries not to use them until the Falin situation occurs. His efforts to avoid exploiting his retainers amount to inaction — things he doesn't ask of them or do to them. But his inaction does nothing to dismantle the existing hierarchy that places his retainers under his authority, denies them agency, and often marginalizes them as not only servants or slaves but as women, and he ends up using them as servants and slaves anyways.

Returning to the narrative's themes of consumption, Toshiro cannot avoid eating just as he cannot avoid perpetuating the exploitative system of his household. The Nakamoto clan consumes the labor and personhood of those lower in the hierarchy. The retainers' labor as spies and domestic servants is the foundation of the clan's existence. Thus, the clan consumes their labor to sustain itself.

Within this hierarchy, the retainers' personhood is also consumed and erased. As Izutsumi describes, they are given different names and stripped of their agency to reject orders or leave. Maizuru and Hien also say their feelings are irrelevant in the context of Toshitsugu's and Toshiro's wants and needs. Both women are expected to comply with whatever is most beneficial and comfortable for the noblemen. Clearly, despite Toshiro's detachment from his household's functions, these social structures remain in place and harm the women under him.

Although we know the Nakamoto clan has male retainers, the choice to highlight the female retainers seems intentional. We're asked to interrogate how not only being a servant or a slave in a noble household impacts a person's life and agency, but how being a woman intersects with being a member of some of the lowest social classes.

Toshiro only distances himself from his father's behaviors of infidelity and exploitation so long as it doesn't take Toshiro out of his comfort zone. He doesn't free his slaves. He's far too comfortable with his female retainers performing domestic labor for him, and he barely acknowledges their efforts; they're shocked when he thanks them for helping him save Falin. He hasn't unpacked his sexist (or classist or racist) biases because he perpetuates his household's oppressive hierarchy throughout the narrative. Considering all of this, he inevitably brings this baggage to his interactions with Falin.

Falin is presumably one of the first women he's had extended contact with that isn't his relative or his family's servant. Because of his trauma surrounding his father and Maizuru sleeping together, he understandably falls for a woman as disconnected as possible from his father and his clan. He seems to genuinely like Falin, respects her boundaries, and graciously accepts her rejection. His behavior towards her is overall kind and unproblematic.

But if Falin had gone with him, she would've likely been devalued and sidelined like the other women of the Nakamoto household. No matter how much he loves Falin, simply loving her cannot replace the difficult work of unlearning his sexism. Love, of course, can and should be accompanied by that work, but by the close of the narrative, we gain little indication that Toshiro acknowledges or seeks to end his part in exploiting and devaluing women and other marginalized people.

A spark of hope does exist. Toshiro expressing his feelings to Laios and Falin suggests that his time away from home has encouraged him to speak up more. Breaking his habit of avoidance may be the first step towards acknowledging his complicity in systems of injustice and moving towards dismantling them.

Special thanks to my very smart friend @atialeague for bringing up Toshitsugu's relationship with Maizuru and the replication of dynamics of consumption and class! <3

[labotor]

my bougie dwarf LoF rook Tyarva and her sugar baby silly charming professor who she adores so very much <333

[tubbytarchia]

I don't know what this is all I know is that LimL Joel makes me really emotional

[bemorch]

¿Buscaban al caos? Pues hallaron al caos

Here’s my entry for the @de-fanzine-cpr-pale Pale_ fanzine! Chose the song El Outsider by Café Tacvba to illustrate Cindy's pov of Martinaise.

You can check out the complete zine here (for free)

Translation (or my best attempt at it):

(Page 1)

I am the outsider, I am the sidestepper

Misfit with a cause, I have found you

And there’s no one like you

(Page 2)

I’ve seen you around, kicking the rules

Walking desire paths better than roads, which are already walked

Life might be sad, for everyone else

(Page 3)

The joy that exists from opening the doors

Laughing at the mugs of those that have us locked up

This way the outsider, this way the sidestepper

Will never have anything, and neither will he need it

(Page 4)

He has himself

This is why, my friend

If you find others that are also other

(Page 5)

Tell them that fire burning away goes

[sketchy-tour]

These were meant to be warmups. ANYWHO!

Went to a random palette site and picked ones that were reminiscent of Wally's colors but still very different that I liked and grabbed some outfits to do a sort of challenge for myself. Idk, thought it would help me out of my funk.

Suffice to say, I'm feeling a bit better now~ These were really fun to do!!!

[bastardcatthings]

Shaking Jenson so hard all his buttons rattle inside him: "JUST BECOME LANDO'S MANAGER"

[yoosung-ah]

So nobody ever saved V...

[ancomboyfailure]

torn between wanting a reveal in s5 of who warren killed and why, or keeping it vague.

of course, on the one hand, leaving it up to interpretation makes a lot of sense from a thematic perspective: plot-wise, it really doesn't matter a whole lot what had happened, and one of the biggest themes in red valley is that we aren't defined by our worst moments and everyone is human. from a podcast that shows empathy to the worst of the worst, even allowing bryony f***ing halbech to be shown as a human being at points instead of a supervillain, it's irrelevant whether warren was justified or not. it's irrelevant whether he murdered someone in cold blood or did it as revenge or self-defense or because he was pissed off. the warren godby that we know is the real warren godby, and the circumstances of a murder over forty years ago don't define the person that we've been listening to. not disclosing any information about the murder, even after warren himself learns about it, humanizes the character and makes him more than his worst moments. we haven't learned what warren did yet, and it'd be really interesting if that always stays out of focus, as in the end it's not important in the slightest.

and on the other hand, i'm nosy and honestly realllyyyy want to learn any scrap of information about this dude.

[canisalbus]

I've had Ludovicas girlfriend on the brain for months and finally sketched her out. I see her as the opposite to machete in that she has dark colours and softer shapes. Her ears and facefur kinda blend together and she gets big soft browneyes..

.

[katsu2ji]

hanta sero w/ pop princess gf!

a/n: you will have to pry sabrina carpenter's short n sweet album from my cold, dead hands and this is the result of that

YOUR BIGGEST FAN

if anyone tells you otherwise, they're lying to you because this man right here? oh you have him down BADDD

he's there at every single concert, whether it be front row or back stage

wears his "i <3 my gf" shirt with PRIDE!!

you wink at him in the crowd and he's giggling and kicking his feet falling to his knees JAKJBABJ

literally brags to all of your guys’ friends that he heard your album and songs first

SOOO many photos of you guys (mainly him, let’s be fr) looking at each other with lovesick expressions

especially on the red carpet—ohmygod you have this man wrapped around your finger it's insane (PLEASE someone tell me they see what i did there—)

speaking of such events!!!

you guys EAT UP the red carpet. every. time.

cause my god does that man look good in a suit.

and your outfits are ALWAYS on point omg!!!

literally you guys are trending on twitter after every single event because y'all are HOT HOT HOT

your hype man while you record!!! at first he was super nervous to be in there, because he didn't want to make you mess up or do something wrong

but now if he's free on the days you go into the studio TRUST he will be there!!!

jokes around that you should let him have adlibs or do backup vocals LMFAO (he's not expecting you to say yes...unless u wanna say yes...)

but in all seriousness: he might know nothing about music, but it's good to have him around when you get frustrated or upset while recording. he helps to remind you that things don't have to be so serious and, at the end of the day, it will come together!!!

now, when you post pictures of yourself, whether they be from official shoots or pics you took yourself, that man is a FIEND.

all up in your comments like "AWOOGA" and "u got a bf??" and "HOTTT" LMFAO HES A MESS

i'm talking comment spamming, story reposts, the whole nine yards

does not gaf if people see him drooling over you!!!! he proudly let's everyone see how obsessed with u he is HE DOES NOT GAF!!!!

he has perfected taking ur pics—he knows all the angles you like, the lighting, everything

he's on the ground fully laying down just to make sure he's getting the perfect angle for you JKASKDFJ

tbh y'all are just the cutest couple ever <33 everyone is either obsessed with you guys or they're mad cause they aren't LOL LOSERS!!!!

katsu2ji © 2024. please don't copy, modify, or do anything of the sort with my work! i work very hard and you simply do not have my permission.

[nenoname]

always kinda unhinged about tbob causing ford to regress back into his paranoia and isolation, along with the fact that he's kinda aware about it and that his family was there to witness it this time

i really wish we got a bit more of a pov from the rest of the family where they just see ford becoming increasingly reclusive and lashing out during that week (and it being during a visit from the mystery twins!! so they just have their grunkle avoiding them that whole time!!!! what the heck!!!) but also them doing a heist and managing to steal the book from right under ford's nose

+ also since ford said he saw bill's mind shatter, it makes me wonder if stan showed ford his memory defeating bill (which means they both didn't notice the backwards dying message...)