#debating if I regret or not

[invisiblemelonmoose]

No one told me that my cute shiny eevee would lose her skill to get me more ingredients once she became a cute shiny umbreon... OTL

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Lan Wangji Goes To Lotus Pier AU: Part 3: Enveloping Feelings.

(Part 1, Part 2, Part 4 (soon))

[beaft]

anyway i'm always fascinated by the people who think that trans men transition purely to escape misogyny and gain social capital. idk how it is for other people, but since i transitioned i have not only experienced more misogyny than i ever did before but also lost access to the public spaces and support systems that might have helped me deal with it

[fallowtail]

“So, how did you end up here?” “Well, I fell in love with a white girl with a cute, cute butt and then she inherited a haunted house and then….”

My @cbsghostsdaily Spooky Gift Exchange gift for @alexisrosemullens !! 👻

[booksandabeer]

Ramblings on Fandom: Peggy Carter, Steve Rogers, Delusional Shippers, and Alleged Misogyny

So with the release of Season 2 of What If…? emotions are once again running high, the outrage is outraging, and people are up in arms about the whole Captain Carter situation. While I do think that some reactions are a little overblown, even needlessly aggressive in tone to the unfortunate detriment of their otherwise convincing arguments, I share the confusion and frustration about the sudden centering of a long-dead & never excessively popular character, the sidelining of the Steve-Bucky friendship, and the as-inexplicable-as-it-is-total exclusion of Sam Wilson as Captain America. However, I’m not here to talk about the show because (1) I haven’t watched this season and have no plans to (why waste time torturing myself with something I know I’ll hate?) and (2) other people have already written dozens of metas about it, so what could I possibly add at this point.

What I do want need to talk about (lest I explode) is something that has irritated me for a long time and that is now happening again: Every time someone even mildly criticizes Peggy Carter, expresses doubts about her suitability as a heroine, or even just questions her disproportionate importance to the franchise post-EG, inevitably a certain section of fans will come out of the woodwork to immediately throw around accusations of misogyny and yell about how we’re all just a bunch of delusional Stuckies who are mad that she got "in the way" of our ship. Sigh.

This is gonna be a long one, so I’ll put it under a cut. Rant incoming. You've been warned. If you don't want to read, simply keep scrolling.

First of all, let me state very clearly that I’m not debating the existence of misogyny and sexism in fandom spaces—or in the media from which these fandoms originate. At all. It exists, it’s a thing, I’m not denying that. Which is exactly why it frustrates me endlessly to see these accusations thrown around as a gotcha! argument to shut down any and all critical debate around a female character. All it does in the end is escalate rhetoric and radicalize attitudes.  

In the case of Peggy Carter, specifically her treatment by Stucky shippers, I’ve always found 'misogyny as a motive' to be a largely unsubstantiated accusation.¹ Now, I neither presume nor do I want to speak for the entirety of Stuckynation, so I will not claim that there aren't corners of the fandom where people discuss her in ways that I find off-putting and deeply unserious, but I will say this: If you genuinely believe that disliking one (1) fictional female character equals “hating all women” and wanting to suppress and marginalize their presence in fiction and real life alike—then I think we need to take that word away from you until you’ve learned its true meaning.

You might also want to ask yourself how exactly reducing a female character to a mute trophy wife or a heroine who has to act out her love interest’s recycled storylines helps your feminist fight.

As for the “getting in the way of your ship” part of the argument. Very simply put: No character can get in the way of something if there never ever was “a way” to that something to begin with. “Being mad” implies that there was a reasonable expectation that wasn’t met, a substantive hope that was crushed. Now, I’ve said this before and I’ll gladly say it again a million more times: No Stucky shipper in their right mind ever truly thought that there was even the slightest chance that Marvel Studios owned by the Walt Disney Company would allow Steve “Captain America” Rogers and Bucky “Winter Soldier” Barnes to be canonized as an explicitly romantic pairing in their billion dollar franchise. Be serious. That was never in the cards. I wish we all lived in a world where it was, but we don’t, and it wasn’t. The best we could ever hope for was for Steve and Bucky to get a good, satisfying, in-character ending. And if, in Steve’s case, that would’ve included hints (or more) about a possible rekindling of his, uh, aborted romance with Sharon—then so be it. But we never got any of that. The characters never got any of that. Instead they sent Steve into 1950s suburban hell, literally trapped him behind a white picket fence, and condemned him to a life of passivity and lies, all so he could be married to a woman he barely knew a long time ago in a completely different world; who built and ran a top-to-bottom Hydra-infested organization, but apparently never noticed that there was anything wrong with her life's work. For decades. Great. As for Bucky—well, we’ve all seen the devastatingly grim-faced, utterly lonely, and deeply sad version of him that was presented to us in TFATWS. Happy endings all around, I guess.

So. Am I mad that Steve didn’t get to ride into the rainbow-colored sunset with Bucky at the end of EG? No. Because that was never going to happen anyway. Would I have been mad had he ended up with Sharon or another female character in the 21st century? Also no. Granted, I wouldn’t have been ecstatic about it, but mad? No. But am I mad that Steve ended up with this specific female character under these specific circumstances as presented in canon? Fuck yeah, I am.

The thing is: I personally believe Steve and Peggy to be fundamentally incompatible when it comes to the way they view the world and their respective places in it; their morals and values; their capacity for compassion and empathy; their ability and willingness to compartmentalize, compromise, and collaborate with people and institutions whose ethics and/or politics do not align with their own. I have a real hard time believing that a relationship between these two (or worse, a hasty marriage) could be either happy or long-lasting.

I don’t believe Peggy to be inherently evil, I don’t hate her, I simply think she operates within a different moral framework than Steve (and even genuinely believes it to be a righteous one).² Your mileage may vary, but I personally happen to find that framework reprehensible, even indecent, and ultimately dangerous. After all, over the course of the 20th century, we have seen exactly where that kind of “the ends justify the means” brand of pragmatism leads—over and over again. Not to mention that the people who use this line of argument to defend characters like Peggy (or real-life politicians for that matter) never seem to want to look too closely at who gets to define what "the ends" are in the first place and who decides when they've finally been met.

(Never. The answer is never.)

And to be clear, there is absolutely nothing wrong with depicting, and even centering a narrative around a morally (dark)gray character—oftentimes it’s actually the more interesting option—but you cannot at the same time claim that they are purely good and should be only admired as such when their actions literally tell an entirely different story.

So, no. I will not accept Peggy Carter as the shining aspirational heroine that the MCU so badly wants to sell her to me as—while simultaneously continuing to reveal things that paint an increasingly darker picture of her character. And I will certainly not celebrate seeing one of my favorite characters of all time—whose defining trait was that he couldn't ignore "a situation pointed south"; who used to fight for the little guy and against the establishment; who once said about the very organization that Peggy Carter helped build that it was so corrupt, it all needed to go—rendered morally inert for some hollow happy ending that may as well be a conservative’s wet dream full of false nostalgia for an America that never really existed. I cannot find it in me to be anything less but mad about that.

But that does not make me a misogynist. It does not make me a delusional shipper. It makes me someone who looks at what the MCU has been telling me about Peggy Carter for years now—over and over again—and takes it at its own word.

--------

¹ If you’ve actually read a a fair number of Stucky(!) fanfics you will have noticed that the reverence afforded to and "page time" devoted to her character and her relationship with Steve is somewhat disproportionate to anything that's backed up by canon—well, up until EG, where she was suddenly reanimated as The Great Love of Steve’s Life—and in my experience, it's highly unusual for any fandom to put so much (mostly) positive attention on another character, let alone a potential love interest that is not part of the endgame ship.

² I also want to emphasize that if you love Peggy and she's your fave: good for you! I genuinely have no beef with you. People can agree to disagree. All I ask for is that we maybe stop willfully ignoring the less savory aspects of her character. You don't need to pretend she's perfect to justify your affection for her. I LOVE Steve, and yet I have no problem conceding that he is FAR from perfect.

[oceanwithouthermoon]

currently thinking about unreliable narrator saiki kusuo, and the fact that if the manga was written from anyone else's perspective then everyone would see him as a tsundere stalker, borderline yandere..

[dashing-through-ecto]

rainbow DASH

This is actually the worst thing I've ever drawn

[mariocki]

Lalla Ward makes a brief appearance as Lady Augusta, intended bride to an ill-fated aristocrat, in A Ghost Story for Christmas: The Ash Tree (BBC, 1975)

[sage-lights]

very grateful for smoshblr because i don't think i could ever really express to people irl how much smosh means to me but to have a community of people who intrinsically understand and share that love is soooooooooo wonderful

[four-eyed-floozy]

So I've been a horror rpg nerd for like YEARS and if you're new and want to get into it, it might be hard to know where to start (in light of my last post)

These are my general recommendations, I also recommend OFF and Ao Oni fangames as well. There's a lot of creativity in some of the fangames. This is BY FAR, not the definitive rpg horror game rec list, but I think I have most of the popular ones.

[avianii]

welp. I did a thing

[seaweedstarshine]

Hi! Long time no yap but I've been really bothered by this thing and I know you're just the person I can go to with this (even if we don't always end up agreeing at times).

I got into a tiff with someone in a comments section of a post that was about Amy (Which character do you think deserved to become a villain? or something similar). They brought up Amy's abuse of her boyfriend. I may have tried to defend Amy (key word is tried. I am officially rubbish at debating) but then I may have said something? Because they said that I (and apparently a lot of other fans) was excusing Amy's abuse because of her trauma. It got me stumped because isn't young Amy's treatment of Rory rooted in her trauma? Did I miss the memo where we separate trauma and abuse? Am I missing something?

That statement bothered me a lot because if there's one thing I never want to do it's defend an abuser. So here I am, humbly asking and hoping to clear the muddy waters.

Your really confused and disturbed moot, Tia 💌

TIA!!!!! Thanks for the ask 💌 , and I send you all the hugs.

Discussion of abuse, trauma, ableism, infidelity, and unhealthy relationship dynamics beneath the cut.

(First off… while I really appreciate your faith in my explaining skills <3 <3 <3 my passion for traumatized characters and mentally ill+neurodivergent rights doesn't make me especially qualified to fully clear muddy waters especially not knowing the full context, but I feel you, and what follows is my informed perspective!)

Speaking generally first, harm done in media is best examined by the impact on the audience, with a different lens than harm done to real people. While relatable experiences in media can be useful and validating and incredibly important, you can’t be “defending an abuser” when the abuse is fictional. It's actually normal for traumatized/ND/mentally ill people to project onto mentally ill villains, when villains are the only significant representation for those stigmatized symptoms in a media landscape that excludes and demonizes us simply for existing. RTD can't stop people who hallucinate from reclaiming the Master's Drums and projecting onto the Master, for example — 90% of the best Doctor Who psychosis fic by psychotic authors is about the Master, whether RTD likes it or not. It's not true crime.

(This is speaking generally. Amy Pond is very much not the Master.)

Abuse is a behavior, and there can be many reasons for it, but reasons based in trauma don’t make it not abuse (some forms of generational trauma can propagate abusive parenting styles, when the parent thinks abusive parenting is normal, or lives entirely vicariously through their child). This absolutely should not be taken to mean trauma correlates with abusive behavior; rather that abusive behaviors from traumatized people are more likely to present in specific ways.

Abuse is also a targeted behavior, based in control — not consistently displayed C-PTSD symptoms as seen in Season 5 Amy Pond through many aspects of her life. Mental health symptoms don't become abuse just because they hinder one partner from meeting the other partner's needs. Any life event can do that.

Without knowing the context of the arguments, this is the aspect of their relationship I've seen you talk about before (which I also feel strongly about), and what I assume is what you were debating? So, here I will talk specifically in regard to Season 5.

We all know Amy — she's never attached to Leadworth because she never wanted to leave Scotland, no steady therapist because none of them stick up for her, can't stick with one job yet her first choice is a job that simulates intimacy because her avoidant behavior (a known trauma response) isn't sustainable to her wellbeing. Rory knows her fears of commitment stem from her repeated abandonments, it’s why he’ll always wait for her, and it's why he blames the Doctor “You make it so they don't want to let you down.”, who apart from having caused a lot of her trauma, has actively taken advantage of her being the “Scottish girl in the English village” who's “still got that accent,” because he wants to feel important, so yeah, I think interpreting Amy's issues (and how Amy and Rory transverse them) as Amy abusing Rory indicates a fundamental misunderstanding of their relationship, as well as a misunderstanding of the (raggedy) Doctor’s role in Amy’s formative self-image (which of course she works through in Season 6, but I am sticking to Season 5).

Abuse is always based in control. That just doesn’t fit here. While Amy's detachment from her real life includes things like calling Rory her “kind of boyfriend” (which she is upfront about to his face; differing commitment levels isn't abuse, though it can be a relationship red flag for both parties IRL) — her Season 5 disregard of Rory’s feelings occurs only in response to the fairytale embodiment of her trauma. It's never a response to Rory; it's a response to the Doctor, who stole her childhood and led her by the hand to her death. She cheats on Rory with the Doctor in her bedroom full of Doctor toys, drawings, models, she made from childhood to early adulthood.

(And yes, like many repeatedly-traumatized people, Amy is prone to being sensitive and reactive. Take her “Well, shut up then!” line in The Big Bang; but given Rory responds to this by hugging her, clearly he doesn’t take it as her actually dismissing him. He knows her better than that.)

And by no means do I meant to imply this is fair to young Rory, poor Rory, who's left struggling with the feeling that his role in her life is in competition with the role of her trauma (aka the Doctor). But not every unhealthy relationship dynamic is unhealthy because of abuse. Labelling Amy's treatment of Rory in Season 5 more accurately isn't the same as excusing her harmful choices — but making mistakes is part of being human, Amy's mistakes are certainly understandable, and she works through them out of love for Rory.

If there's one thing to say about Moffat women, it's that Moffat allows his female characters the same grace that the male characters *coughTENcough* have always had, to hurt and struggle and make realistic mistakes and overcome those mistakes and to heal without being demonized.

Amy isn't perfect, but she is a fully realized character, and her story gives us a resonant depiction of childhood trauma.

[mossy-paws]

you should totally draw skateshot with boombox watching from a distance

You are on THIN ice there anon. /lh

[fountainpenguin]

Origin of the Pixies

Fairly OddParents ~ (August 2016 - Ongoing)

"Talk of these things should be reserved for fathers and sons. I'm Head Pixie. I'm your aldra mór, but I'm no one's daddy."

Head Pixie backstory longfic

Drama & Angst (I hear there's fluff in here somewhere...)

First-person POV

Dead Dove

Summary

After being infected with Wolbachia pipientis - the real-life bacteria that causes insects to reproduce asexually - Fergus Whimsifinado soon finds himself a single father struggling to provide for 500+ genetically-identical offspring he never really wanted in the first place. Suddenly becoming the first member of a brand new species means complex politics to deal with, a Pixie World to build, a shipping company and a therapy business to manage, and a budding interspecies war to survive... ... All on top of raising children.

Not Rated; Creator Chose Not to Use Archive Warnings

Read on FFN | Read on AO3

Chapter Recaps | Gen 2 Pixies Sheet

Cloudlands AU - Detailed warnings & other AU info

More Fairly OddParents 'fics

This work has a largely T tone. Borderline M for themes like 'queen bee' insect people fighting to the death, getting abducted by Cupid's family for study, being forced into a will o' the wisp's harem to ensure milk for newborn Sanderson, and general themes of non-human reproduction, child loss, and war.

Head Pixie-centric longfic with a focus on:

- Growing up with freckles in insect society, where you're typecast as a violent "queen bee" who'll stop at nothing to defend his hive. Set Daddy's fortune aside for wergild; you're gonna need it. - Accidental selkie wife addition (Please don't send her back to Mom; she needs this job) - Local party boy struggles to prioritize fatherhood above raves - Getting abducted by Cupid's hot grumpy mom, who's absolutely willing to push you to your limits if it means she can unravel your biology and show you off to all her friends - Raising little worker bees... I mean, drone pixies who regularly need their faces licked for pheromone exposure or they'll cry - Cloudlands' most eligible rich bachelor rejects hugs because he fears bee-instinct cuddle death attacks; more at 11 - Building a company up from nothing. Gotta start somewhere- Why not with cupcakes? (Maybe cute kids are good for something after all...) - Raising an heir you're biologically programmed to kill... It's fine- Sis is raising the spare - Why did we think adopting a cù sìth that can steal your soul if you lie was a good idea? - The cool girl who founded the human godparenting division is afraid you'll hurt her with your big, scary muscles and she'd rather "just be friends." oh no. - WHAT midlife crisis? Hahaha... Don't read Chapter 37. - The war over godkids from "Balance of Flour" (Season 7); H.P. and his 4 eldest pixies are drafted on the Fairies' side. Huh... That's gonna cause issues with the whole "BFF with the leader of the Anti-Fairies" thing... - Divorce? Child loss?? Raising some anti-fairy kid with Anti-Cosmo? Uh-oh. - His hat is also a pen

Read on FFN | Read on AO3 | Blog Tag

"I'm impolite and I make fun of everyone! I'm immature but I will stay this way forever <3" (x)

[wils-brother-tommy]

ctommy shouldve gotten a round of applause 4 burning down cgeorges house IT WAS THE PERFECT CRIME CTOMMY NEVER APOLOGIZE RVER AGAIN THEY DONT DESERVE YOUUUUU. AND FUCK CGEORGE

[alicentsgf]

the Bastard Conundrum™

"but laenor claimed them"

yes but since everyone can see they're not laenors blood they cant get away with that unfortunately. if they did somehow look like laenor (or at least rhaenyra) things might have been different.

"why does that matter if it doesnt matter to laenor?"

because westerosi inheritance relies on marriage contracts and legitimate succession for stability; when a marriage between two houses is decided upon its with the expectation the union will produce children that are representative of a kinship and this works to keep peace and order. a major contract with house velaryon was broken by house targaryen whether laenor cares about that or not.

"but corlys and rhaenys are okay with it"

vaemond wasnt. rhaenys barely is. in the book multiple velaryons werent. its not just about family pride its about the instability caused. kinslaying is such a big deal because blood ties are all but sacred - theres a social contract - this idea you owe something to those with your blood and that those ties (usually) ensure you are safe with and supported by your kin. any velaryon not wanting a boy who isn't bound to them by blood on the driftwood throne is perfectly understandable because they have no reason to believe he feels any true loyalty to them. and regardless, we need to consider the precedent it sets for the realm as a whole if a child were allowed to inherit through a man it was known they werent the legitimate offspring of.

"but didnt viserys legitimise them?"

no. legitimisation is a formal process and viserys would have had to admit they were bastards and then legitimise them as strongs or targaryens. they could never be legitimised as trueborn velaryons because thats what they're already masquerading as.

"but he was the king. his word is law. he said they're velaryons."

viserys wasnt all powerful, he couldnt make anything true just by saying it. he had the power to change laws as king, but his contract with his lords was reciprocal - he had to keep to the agreed upon laws of the realm himself (this is why the doctrine of exceptionalism needed to exist for the targaryens to continue practicing incest). viserys would have had to actively change the law in order for his grandson to somehow legally inherit driftmark as the adopted son of laenor, but of course he couldnt do that so he just doubled-down on the lie surrounding their birth.

"these laws are archaic. laenor saw those boys as his sons"

yes. this is feudal world. their way of life is archaic in many ways. and yes this is apparent in how this society and their laws only recognises parentage through a blood tie. dura lex sed lex; the law is the law even if we dont like it, and breaking it has consequences regardless. as primitive as these laws seem they keep this particular world stable, and this situation threatens that stability. change and progress is all well and good, but placing a bastard on the throne by calling him trueborn would not be progress because it would do nothing to encourage recognition of the rights of other bastards (honestly it'd probably just get a lot of bastards killed by their trueborn siblings, now fearful of them posing a genuine threat to their inheritance).

"i dont like it"

thats fine but its still the lore of this world. sorry.