#depressed trauma adult and teenager that makes fun of him (they would die for each other)

[serenedash]

older Ryou + his apprentice Ripley, they're very important to me,

[DO NOT REPOST/REMOVE COMMENT]

[mychemicalaromanticism]

things ive already established r on this post

besties this got so fucking long but heres a giant ramble about cherri

okay so. there are huge differences betwn cherri as a hyperviolent drac hunter and cherri as a friend of the four and cherri as the girls mentor. with the first one he was 17 and desperate to distance himself from his upbringing so he went all in on Being A Killjoy. he was always one of the first ppl to rush into a fight and he fought hard. he blew up his fuckin hand with that attitude. and all the while he was just racking up more unaddressed trauma and eventually he ran away from that, too. giving himself radiation poisoning was more appealing than facing his problems.

so as a teenager/young adult hes kind of constantly in a panicked state. hes scared the people from his past are going to find him and drag him back with them. so he lashes out and he runs away over and over again.

i said in another post that he has some past life shit goin on which usually would give him a connection to the witch that manifests early in life, but with all the stuff hes gone through he has been Preoccupied. he can become oblivious to almost anything that doesnt apply to whatever hes focused on. not in a hyperfocus way its likeeeeee. when u live on survival mode during prolonged periods of stress. hes immune to magic bullshit bc hes too tired and scared.

anyways around his mid-20s he finally has a little more stability (as much as the average person living in the zones can have, that is) and he finally notices that Weird Stuff happens around him. basically: out of my list of Powers People Connected To The Witch Have he has the prophetic dreams/enhanced intuition as well as a form of sensing ghosts where he can see auras and kind of like, echoes of past events in ppls lives. that look like auras. itz complicated and not of utmost importance so im leaving it at that.

anyways thats what makes him start writing poetry. just 4 funsies he'll describe his weird experiences and embellish them to make em pretty. just as a casual hobby n all that.

he would forget fun ghoul in between the times they ran into each other but its pretty easy to be reminded of who fun ghoul is. the most insane 10 year old cherri has ever met. cherri isnt a brother figure to ghoul. hes just. his friend that happens to be more than twice his age. its whatever lmao

to cherri, ghoul is kinda like a stray animal he keeps seeing. which is hilarious. ghoul actually goes and finds him to introduce him to jet when they start running together, and cherri meets party and kobra (spark and birdie at the time) when he drives the four of them to a party. because he has a truck hell yeah. so now instead of one stray animal he has, like, a feral cat colony that he drives around occasionally. i have no real-life human relationship equivalent to them because irl if some guy that is not related to any of you and isnt even a childhood or family friend and theyre hanging out with you? they are usually not a safe person lmao. but this is my fantasy land and im too stubborn to change anyones birth years even though ghoul being born in 2004 makes everything really hard to make not creepy.

so yeah hes a casual somewhat friend of the fab four. hed probably get more and more concerned as they got famous. the beginnings of any sort of protective feelings, awww :) that sets him up for becoming the girls mentor.

OH FUCK. THE GIRL..... i think if i was in my late 20s and i heard that the gang of 13-17 year olds had adopted a 5 year old kid i would go bananas. what the fuck. it is a LONG while before cherri meets her. but he has the strongest affection for ghoul (if you could even call it that) and ghoul absolutely adores the girl and swings her around under her arms like a cat to show her off to cherri and its very endearing and the girl is sweet and funny so its easy to be around her. and (unfortunately) she is somewhat used to interacting with weird easily agitated people so she kinda gives him space. cherri isnt quite the uncle figure the fandom usually makes him (i luv uncle cherri sm but he simply cannot exist in the universe ive created, f), but hes a little similar.

and then the four had to go and pretend to die. lol.

when the girl was kidnapped, fucking everyone who knew her was ready to storm the city then and there. like regardless of how little you knew her, if you had ever met her you would fucking die for her. she is pure childish charisma and shes precious. i love the girl. so cherris immediately on board with whatever plan the four make to get her back. ive already talked abt how it fucked up the girl tho; there was no way to tell her that the four werent actually dead, she sees the building collapse and she shuts down. and cherri has to fight against his instinct to leave the radio station and never come back when he sees an eight year old girl sitting dissociated on the couch. that fucks everyone up.

i just realized i havent talked about literally anyone else at the radio station. i think cherri started lingering around the station bc it was safe and sheltered while also not being a popular spot. there are less kids there (people pass through but its not a hangout spot). he was kind of just hanging around to get away from the heat and noise and dr d took notice. because that man can see ur soul and no one knows if thats literal or not. so theyd chat a few times a day and show pony was the one 2 get him out of his shell a little and also was the first one he mentioned his poetry hobby to. im making this all up right now as im writing bc i dont know anything about LITERALLY any of the ppl associated w the radio like im not even going 2 try with chimp n newsie i do not have the willpower to tackle all that. justttt. cherri pony n D become bros and live 2gether there.

back 2 the regular timeline. the rescue mission happens in 2019. the girl lives at the station until 2023. during that time she is very much depressed and withdrawn and is only happy when the four come to visit. none of the Adults know how to help her so they just keep her safe and cared for and hope she'll open up to them.

she does not. she takes the weird cat thats been hanging around and she runs away.

cherri does not see her for three years. shes still worse for wear in the mental health department and he can see all kinds of visions of what shes been through since the last time he saw her and he fucking hates the ultra vs bc they remind him of his past. he does not want her going down that path but its obvious that she isnt crazy abt the ultraviolence thing either so thats a relief.

they have a kind of tense relationship throughout the comics. he feels like he failed her and that spirals into feeling like he failed the four for not being a good adult to them and fun ghoul for not helping enough when his commune was bombed and all kinds of shit and that irrational thinking mixed with plain old, yknow, caring about the girl, is what makes him take a bullet (laser. whatever) for her.

i was trying to figure out the timing of each of their ghost experiences, but i want both of them to talk to the witch and im just gonna make it like dreams where a whole buncha stuff happens but irl its been like seconds. so its like barely a second while the girl has her Witch Convo and cherri FINALLY gets a straight answer, yes there is weird shit going on with him having powers. he doesnt have any story-significant past lives because im lazy, hes just an old soul. like really fuckin old. the amount of latent life experience and stuff his soul/energy/whatever has picked up along the way makes him VERY noticeable to gods n stuff. he fuckin lights up all the alarms like what the FUCK is that over there. she wasnt rly able to get to him or even properly notice him while he was a kid and a young adult so shes happy to finally see him again. he has a STRONG sense of familiarity with her. they know each other on a wild ass level that he cant really comprehend.

welp thats some more lore I'll have 2 think abt. anywayz

post canon is when he and val get to have the most awkward spiderman meme moment of realizing that they have the same trauma SOOOOO thatz fun lol /s sorry kings i thought it would be fun to give u something fucked up to bond over <3

not much changes in his personality. he has a better understanding of Weird Magic and delights in freaking out the ultra vs but for the most part he returns to his life at the radio station. i love him

THIS GOT SO CRAZY LONG I DID NOT MEAN 2 GO THROUGH EVERY PART OF HIS LIFE LIKE SOME WEIRD CHARACTER STUDY but here we are. this is basically a first draft like almost all of this is subject to change but u gotta start somewhere. so heres my start i love this guy. its probably obvious but i have not read ANY twitterverse killjoys stuff </3 maybe i will someday idk

[chiibinomonodamon]

Let’s Clear Up Some Misunderstandings about ZackRay, SHALL WE?

Yes, I think we shall......due to all this idiotic discourse going on here.

*Note: I cannot speak for ALL ZackRays but I do believe from my interaction with many of them, they have similar feels. What I’m posting here however? This is coming from my own personal feelings.

1. “Shipping ZackRay means you support pedophilia.”

A: F*CKING NOPE....first of all, let’s get into what “shipping ZackRay” means, for me, okay....

Yes, I ship ZackRay. I referred to it as a Platonic Until Legal Love”. Which seemed to give people the misconception that “it’s waiting for a child to turn 18 so they can consent to sex”.

THAT IS NOT WHAT I MEANT.

Perhaps that was a very poor choice of words. Ugh. So let me explain in more detail:

I feel that Zack’s feelings for Rachael will remain platonic until she grows older and then it is possible for romantic feelings to be slowly realized over time.

Because let’s get one thing straight; I don’t think we can deny:

Issac Foster is not able to recognize what love actually is, even by the end of the series. Nobody has taught him this. He’s not emotionally mature enough to understand it. Yes, I think he feels it towards Ray subconsciously. He feels something. He knows he cares for her in a “I would be glad if you did not die/ I don’t think I can live without you” kind of way. But he hasn’t thought of it outside of that. Therefore, if he is not aware of a romantic attachment, he can’t really act on it, which cancels out (God forbid) any type of sexual feelings he would have towards her. Which cancels out “waiting until she’s legal”. Which I agree, is messed up. Ick. Btw I hate Usagi Drop’s ending. A lot.

So if you’re under the impression that I’m expecting Zack and Ray to suddenly start making out right after the last scene, uh NOPE, I’m not. What I ship...(what a lot of people ship) are those possibilities far....FAR....into the future where Zack eventually understands that Ray is the only person he wants to be with....for the rest of his life. Period. And what exactly is wrong with two consenting adults agreeing to be with each other? That’s right.

NO-THING.

It’s not wrong just because he knew her when she was a young teenager. He was not looking at her in that way. She was simply important to him as a person. And if she were to try to kiss him or something while she was young, his response would likely be “WTF ARE U DOIN”. An appropriate one, yes. XD

I was ALSO referring to my own feelings when talking about PULL. In other words, I don’t really approve of sexual ZackRay content unless she is portrayed as an adult. Mmkay....moving on.

2. “ZackRay shippers look for porn of the ship while Ray is still a child”

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO. THAT IS GROSS. NO THANKS, I REJECT.

3. “ZackRay shippers think adults being with kids IRL is okay.”

..........whatisthisIdon’teven.

Hey, is Zack your favorite character? Yeah? THEN YOU MUST THINK SERIAL KILLERS IRL ARE REALLY COOL!!! YOU WANT TO BE ONE, RIGHT? KILLING PEOPLE IS GONNA BE YOUR HOBBY TOO, RIGHT?

..........uh......see how idiotic that sounds? Don’t you just love being accused of that shit? Yeah, it’s really fun, isn’t it?

4. “ZackRay shippers are horrible, spiteful people who attack antis for disliking their ship”

Okay, there is a difference between “disliking a ship” and “opening attacking strangers online”. You don’t like our ship? Fine, I can respect that. Let us go our separate ways and not speak of this matter again.

DON’T.

GO.

LOOKING.

FOR.

FIGHTS.

Don’t call people out on social media posts. Don’t reblog their posts and publicly ridicule them. Don’t reblog their art and insult it. Don’t mention their names, don’t bully them, don’t TRY TO GET OTHERS TO BULLY THEM. This is sick. This is just wrong. I have recently found out that kids under 18 do in fact ship ZackRay. Which means when you attack, stalk, and harass them on tumblr, YOU COULD BE EMOTIONALLY HURTING A CHILD. Ironic for all the antis going “PROTECT TEH CHILDREEEEENZ!” Yes, protect them from your toxic attitude, how about?

5. “ZackRay shippers create content that is harmful because pedos can use it to groom children.”

And the antis seem to be under the delusion that they are SUCH special snowflakes because they were groomed this way; no guess what, ZackRays are also humans (despite what you may think) and have fallen victim to the same shit. Also, news flash, anything can be used as a grooming tool. YES, ANYTHING. And there are WAAAAAAAAAAAAAY more harmful ships out there (THAT ARE CANON) than ZackRay. I’ve been an anime fan for a long ass time. You think I don’t know about all the lolicon kiddie porn? You think I don’t know about Boku No Pico? THAT’S the shit you should be worried about kids and pedos finding. Not that I think fiction is really going to increase child rape crimes. If someone is intent on harming a child, they will. Reading or seeing fanart online isn’t going to influence that. They have a psychological disorder, unnatural addiction, and a lack of morals. These issues are rooted far deeper than just seeing stuff online. Getting rid of that stuff will change literally nothing. The only way a pedophile can change is to get professional help. And schmucks ranting online about how fans shipping is bad is NOT professional help. It’s certainly a professional waste of time.

6. “If shipping ZackRay is a groomed victim’s way of coping with that trauma, that’s unhealthy.”

STOP.

Are you a psychiatrist? Are you an expert in dealing with rape victims? Have you examined this individual you are criticizing?

No?

Then f*ck off. Every person is different. Every story is different. This is a stranger on the internet; who the f*ck are YOU to tell them “that coping method is unhealthy”? You don’t know their life story. You don’t know what works for them. Do you think everyone with anxiety copes with it the exact same way? Depression? Eating disorders? I happen to have an anxiety disorder, myself. Recently a friend of mine informed me that she was also diagnosed with one. I told her my symptoms and I told her what I did when I got an attack.

Guess what?

What she experiences and what I experience are as different as f*cking night and day. I was trying to be a helpful friend but it turns out I was not able to help her at all. I thought I could because I thought I was experienced. But I’m not. It was a real eye-opener.

So don’t generalize people that way. You know nothing about what they went through. Get off your f*cking high horse.

Conclusion: These six misconceptions were the most problematic ones I can think of. Now some Q and A:

Do you draw NSFW ZackRay?

No.

Will you reblog it?

No.

Do you write NSFW fanfics?

No. I’m really not into sexual stuff at all and would be terrible at writing it.

Do you support people who do?

People have the right to draw and write whatever tf they want. Censorship is bad. Just don’t harm anyone IRL. Please.

Where do you draw the line at romantic ZackRay content YOU draw, write, or reblog?

Cuddling, chaste kissing, hand-holding; absolutely nothing worse than what you’d see in a Disney movie. Romance-wise. I got nothing against Zack swearing like a sailor the way he always does. xD

Do you ship ZackRay because of their ages?

*bangs head on wall*

No, I ship them because of who they are as individuals and how they act when they are together.....you know, like a normal person.

Thanks for reading my long-ass rants.

Feel free to PM me, ask more questions, send me hate mail, whatever. I’ll probably just print out your hate mail and use it as toilet paper though...if I didn’t already block your ass. :’D

[revmolly]

Resist/Dance ~ An Easter Sermon

My first Easter sermon at First Church Berkeley! It included compulsory group dancing. And I still didn’t get tomatoes thrown at me!

~

Rev. Molly Baskette ~ First Church Berkeley UCC “ResistDance” ~ John 20:1-18 Sunday, April 16, 2017 ~ Easter Sunday

I know a lot of people named Jesus.

There is, obviously, the person who brings us together today:  the radical, brown, refugee, outsider, preacher, prophet, child of God who could not stay dead no matter what they did to him.

But I know others. There is Jesus, our cheerful and capable janitor here at Beth El. And I just met another Jesus, the undocumented man I met at the sherriff’s office on Thursday, when Rev. Rachel and I went to advocate for the rights and dignity of our immigrant neighbors. Jesus is everywhere, if you have eyes to see.

When I graduated from seminary, my husband Peter and I moved to Mexico for a year, to work at an orphanage, the Casa San Jose. As problematic as we now know orphanages to be for child development, the Casa was a pretty happy place, all in all. I’m Facebook friends with many of the kids we tended back then. They are young adults now with families of their own, some of them in LA, with or without documents, making a life. And they unfailingly talk about the joy of that time in their childhood--how much fun they had, how they took care of one another, how in spite of the trauma and burdens they bore, they felt safe and loved.

When we lived there, there were 141 kids on site. And three of them were named Jesus. Clearly, we had a problem. How to differentiate between all the Jesuses? The eldest, a handsome teenager, got to be, simply, Jesus. The next youngest became Chuy, an affectionate nickname for Jesus in Mexican culture. And the youngest of all was 4-year-old Chuyito, little tiny Jesus. Chuyito was a dead ringer, I imagine, for the original model, childhood edition: curly brown hair, winsome brown eyes. He barely ever said a word, and always hung his head to the side, in curiosity or skepticism, as if anticipating the day when he would be debating the Pharisees.

Chuyito loved to crawl into my lap and stay there for hours, and I loved him there, because we were both pretty homesick and lonely, and when life is hard you need a soft place.

My favorite memory of Chuyito is not from that year, but a couple years later. When Peter and I left the Casa to go home to the US, we discovered we were homesick for Mexico, and so we’d travel back with a group from whatever church we were inhabiting, and give them a chance to fall in love with the kids the way we had. On our first trip back, our group brought a backpack for each of the hundred-plus kids, stuffed to the brim with clothes, art supplies and toys, and handed them out on our last night together. The boys, including Chuyito, put their backpackson immediately and refused to take them off. Then we strung Christmas lights, rented a DJ and a speaker, and had a giant dance party on the patio. Bankers and little boys do si doed and swung one another wildly to salsa music and Madonna alike. Chuyito, now a full-on boisterous 7-year-old, danced like a maniac for hours with his backpack on, until his movements finally slowed, until he fell asleep, face down on the tile. With his backpack on. Even Jesus needs to rest.

I have a friend, a UCC minister, who suffers from pretty debilitating depression. You’d never know it. She seems happy enough, and is one of the funniest people I know. But her depression has almost ended her marriage; it has hobbled her parenting; it caused her more than once to reconsider her career as a person who has to be hopeful as a profession.

My friend told me something once I’ll never forget. There are times when medication doesn’t do its job, when prayers fail her, when nothing is working to shift the great gray elephant of depression that sits on her soul. And this is what she does in those moments: she changes one thing. Just one thing. “If I’m lying down, I get up. If I’m standing up, I sit down. If I’m inside, I go outside. If I’m outside, I go inside. If I’m alone, I get with people, if I’m with people, I get alone. If I can change one thing, then I can change more things. If I can change more things, then perhaps I can change everything--or, God working in me can, anyhow.” All she has to do is make one little movement.

I myself have never suffered from a lasting or truly devastating depression. To be perfectly annoying about it, being happy has always come pretty easily to me. But this year has tested me severely. Some mornings, including this week, the news has flattened me to the bed, immobilized me as surely as a deep depression. Pick your poison: Syrian children sarin gassed, America making mushroom clouds in Afghanistan, North Korea testing ICBMs, flying coach while Asian on United. Health care under threat, public schools under threat, the rights and lives of immigrants and refugees, black folks, Muslims, queer and trans under threat. We don’t know who will live and who will die before this bitter cup has passed from us. All this against a backdrop of winter rain, such needed rain but a rain that now feels like it will never end, a perma-rain that chills the soul as well as the body, a new and possibly forever climate-chaos abnormal.

I’m trying to remember that this is an Easter sermon.

If I often feel despair these days, I who have every advantage, how must it be for those who don’t share my privileges? Those who face actual and immediate threats to their lives? The undocumented, the brown-skinned, the broke?  I have my whiteness to shield me from ICE and the cops, my paycheck to shield me from poverty. I even have a faith to shield me from sorrow if I choose it, to hide in a La La Land of Easter joy where everything turns out all right in the end.

And yet I have met so many people, who no matter how systems and circumstances might conspire to kill them, have mastered the art of defiant joy. I guess that’s what you do when people want you dead--staying alive is your only countermove.

And Jesus, himself broke and brown and unhoused, is the best example of living big and beautifully in the face of violence and death. I’m always amazed by his capacity for resurrection. Jesus made a decision. He could have stayed dead. He’d discharged his duty to the human family. He taught us everything he knew, offered us an entirely new way of being human, he loved us hard in spite of our frailties, and in return we rejected, abandoned and crucified him. Who would sign up for more life in the face of that?

I confess that sometimes it just seems like a whole lot less WORK being dead. If you’ve had a near death experience, or even surgery under general anesthesia, you know what I’m talking about. There is something truly compelling and even seductive about the idea of slipping away, into a place beyond pain, beyond suffering. A place of eternal rest that no fear or sarin gas can touch.

Jesus lived through the worst we could do to him; he reached that moment of peaceful surrender, and he made a decision to come back.

And he didn’t do it by half-measures, either. He didn’t shamble out of the grave, explaining himself. He didn’t try to stay under the radar to avoid the authorities. He came back in a BIG way.  We cut him down but he leapt up high. He made resurrection into a Broadway show tune, complete with the choreography of hapless disciples running all over the stage.

The early church fathers came up with a word to describe the Trinity: perichoresis, literally, circle dance. They understood God, Jesus and The Holy Spirit as movement, constant flow from the beginning of Creation. And being dead did not exempt Jesus from his place in the dance.

Did you know that some researchers at Oxford did a study? They taught a group of volunteers, each in private, the same dance moves. Then they taught another group, individually, all different dance moves. They noted everyone’s pain tolerance levels by putting extra-squeezy blood pressure cuffs on them. [who comes up with these studies? I have no idea] Then they set them all free in the same room, on a dance floor, with headphones on.

The ones who had learned the same dance began to sync their movements. The ones who knew different moves, or heard different music, each did their own thing. And when the experiment was over, they measured each one’s pain tolerance again. The ones who had moved in sync were able to stand significantly more pain than before. But the ones who heard different songs, or were taught different dance moves to the same music, experienced either no change in pain perception, or actually felt more pain than they had at the start. Perichoresis, dancing in sync, had legitimately made the synched dancers able to bear more pain.

Of course, they didn’t control for people who find any kind of dancing in public painful. :)

Dance is the body’s jazz hands for the soul. Dance is God on the move. We dance our babies around the kitchen. Practice the moves to Thriller in our bedroom for hours. Dance is the mosh pit, the all night rave, Asian grandmas at Zumba class--all of them just as much church as where we are right now. Dance is the 7-year-old Mexican orphan tearing it up on a tile patio; a 3 year old in the aisles at church who will not be stopped but just HAS to dance to every hymn. Dance is Ghost Ship, the young ones gathering before the fire that night, ready to worship at the altar of joy, and now dancing at home with God; and dance is this community, today on Easter, rising from our own ashes.

Dance is resurrection: the mom in chemo doing a three minute dance party around the living room in defiance of her white blood cell count. Dance is a flash mob practicing for the Climate March, to show how the Earth will rise up against us if we don’t rise up for Her.

Dance is what we do when we have too many feelings and not enough words. Dance don’t cost a thing--it belongs to everybody without regard for ability to pay. To dance is to let God move through us, reanimate us no matter what grim reapers are haunting us, the perichoresis that began before everything, the music still playing, healing us, body and soul.

Dance is THIS GUY. To dance is to laugh in the face of death, and all its minions.  They have not won--whoever “they” are--if we can still dance.

Every day, someone, somewhere, faces the powers of death. But then they change one thing. They make one little move. They put down the bottle. They call the therapist, the DV hotline, the immigration lawyer. They pack a bag. They write their name on the application. If they are lying down, they get up. They join the dance.