#ever happened to them about the ship itself and reduce them to generic tropes that just go around fucking and crying over each other when

[tariah23]

im back to say after reading your tags/ramblings on this new jjk chapter yeah everyone shitting on shoko and yuta for this are like? how.

especially with shoko (as you know i think about her a lot) i'm not surprised she reacted this way considering she has seen all of her friends die basically and she definitely deals with dead sorcerers on the daily that she probably knew in life considering she's the main healer. in my headcanons she recognizes a lot of the people who eventually end up dead on her exam table.

plus as you mentioned her reaction to geto's mass murder is super chill. she was never going to have a breakdown over fucked up shit? at least not outwardly, unfortunately we don't really get a look in her head. also god forbid a woman have interest in dead/macabre things and/or not give 110% emotionally at all times.

personally i enjoy satosugu (insert multishipper nuance here) but the fandom surrounding the ship is very...... can you think about any other character? please??? can you also see satoru and suguru as individuals???? PLEASE?

the manga is not your satosugu fanfiction there are other characters here that matter...

IT’S SO BAD!!! THEY ARE ACTING LIKE HIS STUDENTS AND FRIENDS WANTED THIS!?!! And are refusing to look at the story from a narrative standpoint outside of shipper/fanon shit… They do this literally every time something huge and awful happens. They always end up making it about a damn ship, completely glossing over the characters themselves and their intentions. It’s so frustrating. The Gojo and Getou they talk about is barely even them… those are OC’s!!!

And the only reason why they’re talking so negatively about Shoko is because they hate women 🗣️🗣️🗣️!!! It’s crazy, she’s literally a doctor who specializes in the dead. She’s a mortician!!! Like, you’ve stated, she’s been burying her colleagues and friends since she was a teenager. I’m sure she’s used to the business now. Even if it’s hard, if you’re in this line of work, people who work with the dead tend to not find it as torturous and haunting as any normal person would because death is an extension of life. They don’t view death as this big, scary, horrible thing they way people who don’t work with the dead/aren’t used to dealing with death, are. That’s why in rl, morticians and doctors might come off as extremely fickle and end uncomfortably nonchalant regarding death. They don’t view dying and the dead in the same way we would. They find comfort in knowing that they can help the grieving pass on the best way that they can by taking care of their bodies in their most vulnerable moments on earth. It would’ve been nice to see more of Shoko’s reactions and knowing about more of her feelings regarding Gojo’s passing because like I’ve stated before, Gege really fumbled her character and because of the way he wrote her, it makes it easier for fans who already don’t care about her, to mischaracterize and misunderstand her intentions, labeling them as “callous,” and “inconsiderate,” despite her having always been this way since the very beginning. She didn’t even so much as flinch when Getou had confirmed to her that he’d committed a massacre, killing over 100 people in the process. They were talking so casually as if they were talking about the weather. She had to fix up Haibara, probably one of their very first friends who she’d most likely ever had to work on… it’s just, I hate how the people bashing her really DON’T understand her character at all and have never once tried to and they’re constantly proving my point. They expected her to be sobbing in every panel, grabbing onto Gojo’s tight…, Sexy ass, black t-shirt, holding on for dear life and screaming at him to wake up and they absolutely HATE that a female character wouldn’t give that to them 🚶🏾‍♀️. I’m so sorry Shoko… they’re acting like Getou would’ve been the only one to feel bad about all of this simply because they ship them and forgot all about canon.

As for Yuuta… oh brother. The fact that all of Gojo’s students do care about him and have always admired him… Yuuta didn’t want this at all… but he knew that he HAD to do it in the end and so did the others. Knowing the kind of trauma that he’d suffered himself. The pain and isolation that he had to deal with because he was too afraid of hurting people so he pushed them away and purposely isolated himself. He’s canonically tried to take his own life on multiple occasions. After meeting Gojo, he learned that he had just as much as a right to live as anyone else and that he mattered. He chose life. Gojo, alongside the friends he’d made, made a huge impression on him and it makes me happy whenever I think about it. He used his strength to protect others and learned to see his strength as a good thing instead of a curse that separated him from society. Gojo already knows what it’s like to be lonely and lived with that till the very end. But he made sure to let his students know that they all were worth living. This is literally why he wanted to become a teacher in the first place!!! Have the fans forgotten just how much he adores his students!?!! Yuuta knew exactly how Gojo must’ve felt… even taking over his body, he didn’t need to view his memories to find out.

Even if it is, from a narrative standpoint, incredibly disgusting, Gojo gave them permission because he values the lives of the people he cares about, especially the kids (ppl always forget that he loves children 😭… he’s do anything for them), above his own. When it comes to the kids, he knows that he’s the adult in the situation. Just like Nanami, it’s the adults duty to protect the children and he feels the same way. His corpse gave them a way to fight back and he gladly gave it to them as sad as this might sound… He’s always been this way and we all know why. Come on. He’d always seen it as his duty to protect and shield them from the horrors of the real world that would soon hurt them back. I hate that he’s still being used as a weapon in his death so much, it really makes me want to cry, I could barely sleep 😭… but man…, whenever stuff like this happens, it just goes to show that not everyone was reading the story with their eyes open. Blame it on shipper brainrot.

[autisticcassandracain]

I have many thoughts on the weird phenomena in the DC fandom and the Batfam fandom specifically where probably the majority of people just straight up. haven’t interacted with the source material. and almost all of those thoughts can be summarized as ‘lmao that’s weird and mildly concerning’.

and because I’m annoying I will list them all here right now <3

1. To preface this post, I mean, obviously, comics are inaccessible as all hell, both in the disability kind of way and the ‘you need to understand the concept of hypertime to fully comprehend the DC timeline’ kind of way. Because of this, even if you don’t have a disability that prevents you from reading comics, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to look at the amount of comics you need to read to have even a base understanding of a character and go ‘no thanks <3′ and just enjoy fanart and fanfic in a vacuum. Ultimately, this is fandom, this is supposed to be fun, it doesn’t really matter.

2. That said, it’s VERY weird to me that the majority of this fandom just straight up hasn’t interacted with the source material, and moreover, that it’s considered rude to tell people that they should do so. It’s especially weird considering the amount of fanon-only fans I’ve seen who straight up have a superiority complex over canon. The idea that it’s gatekeeping to tell fans of something to actually interact with canon is just. so weird, and a fundamental misunderstanding of what ‘gatekeeping’ actually entails. 

3. But honestly I’m less interested in discussing the ways in which canon and fanon fans should interact with each other (personally, I think it would be helpful to create separate tags of some kind, but that’d require quite a big overhaul of the current fandom state) than in figuring out how this actually happened in the first place. On the one hand, it’s obvious; long-running superhero comics the way DC writes them have made themselves so thoroughly inaccessible that most people are simply too daunted to even try. Most media has a cohesive beginning and end (or at least, a planned end somewhere). Comics just... don’t.

But I do think it says something that, even among people who are clearly interested in the characters (since they have, you know, entire blogs about them), the effort to get into comics just seems to be too much to even bother. This really doesn’t bode well for the future of DC Comics. Obviously, I am no expert on anything at all ever, but I’d personally be surprised if DC survives beyond the few decades, at least in its current form/without a big overhaul.

4. But on the other hand, I don’t think the confusing state of DC Comics is the only thing to blame here. Fandom has a well-known problem with reducing any character down to archetypes to more easily ship and write fic/make content with. This problem is particularly prominent in fanfic, which, if you read enough of it, you’ll eventually start seeing not just the same tropes and trends, but essentially the same fics over and over again. And not just within the same fandom; everywhere, or every large fandom, at least. 

Fanon Batfam is entirely built on a bunch of those tropes; insecure/depressed sadboy Tim, team mom with optional hidden trauma/emotional problems Dick, bad boy with a heart of gold + sadboy combo Jason, abused sadboy Damian/angry easily-villified-for-fic-reasons monster Damian, good dad Bruce for found family fic and bad dad Bruce for angst fic, etc. This all culminates in a found family dynamic that’s generic and malleable to whatever fic the writer wants to write.

(This isn’t getting into the ship fic, which I avoid like the plague because the vast majority of it is incest, but I’d bet real actual money that the tropes in those fics fall under what is often preferred by the Migratory Slash Fandom.)

By having a decent excuse not to get into canon (the inaccessibility of comics) and a, by now, well-established fanon fandom, many fans feel free to use the batfam fandom as essentially an excuse to write whatever fic with reduced archetypes and tropes they personally feel the itch to write, without having to bother with even consuming a canon. This is compounded by the fact that canon itself is often contradictory and frankly bad, meaning that whatever interpretation of a character you want/need to go for your fic is at least theoretically backed up by canon (for example, you can just as easily cast Bruce as an abusive shithole dad who his kids need to get away from as a loving father figure who cares deeply for his children), which you can always use as a defense if people question your characterization.

5. This focus on fandom trends and tropes over actual creativity or care for the characters is also visible in the way bigotry manifests in this fandom; namely, in literally the exact way you’d expect. The female characters and characters of colour are shuffled to the side, non-existent, vilified, and/or reduced to harmful stereotypes. 

Barbara is probably the one I saw the most often in fanfic, but usually just as ‘Dick’s girlfriend’, and even then, she was often vilified for Dick angst (especially in fics about examining Dick’s trauma from his canon sexual assault; Kori also often gets the short end of the stick in those). After that, probably Stephanie, who fanon fans don’t really seem to know what to do with, so she’s basically just there as comic relief waffle girl, most of the time, though sometimes she can be used to either further Tim angst or further vilify Tim, whatever the fic calls for. Cass has gotten included more in batfam fics as of late, likely in response to critiques of fandom racism for leaving her out, but again, it’s clear people don’t actually know what to do with her. She’s often reduced to a racist stereotype of a quite, stoic therapist for whatever guy du jour needs it. That, or she’s in Hong Kong and just not there. Duke especially gets left in the dust in fandom, usually just being non-existent, but when he’s there, he’s almost always nothing more than the straight man for the actual fun characters to play off of. Talia probably has it the worst, though, and almost universally gets vilified by fanon stans in order to write sadboy Damian.

All of this is extremely predictable behaviour and falls entirely in line with general fandom misogyny and racism; ignoring or vilifying women and characters of colour, or using them as very minor characters at best. The only two characters of colour who aren’t regularly left out of fic are Dick and Damian, who are both also conveniently the two characters most often drawn and written in a whitewashed manner. In addition, there’s a real trend of demonizing Damian in fanon fics where he isn’t written as an abused sadboy, which I’d argue is in no small part due to fandom racism, considering Damian’s behaviour is in no way as bad as Jason’s, who doesn’t get anywhere close to the same demonization and gets woobiefied instead. I also find it convenient that Damian is probably the batboy who receives the most vilification in fic, when he’s the most obviously non-white of the batboys they’re willing to acknowledge.

Fandom often cries for more diversity in canon, only to ignore the diversity already there and focus on the same generic white guys. The batfam fandom is a brilliant example of this.

Which is not to say that fandom racism and misogyny isn’t present in the canon parts of the fandom (and canon itself); it absolutely 100% is. But I’ve found that canon fans are also more likely to like and care about at least one of the characters I’ve listed as ignored/vilified, and are willing to create and consume content for them, whereas fanon fans... aren’t, really. I’ve never seen a fan of fanon Cass the way I’ve seen fans of fanon Dick, for example. Obviously, this could just be by coincidence, or I’ve just surrounded myself with people like that, but it’s been a trend I noticed. Racism and misogyny is present in every part of this fandom and should be addressed as such, but I feel like it manifests the most blatantly in the fanon parts of this fandom. 

(I’d also recommend the articles Migratory Slash Fandom’s Focus and Beige Blank Slates, which expand more on the type of fandom racism I think is especially prominent in the batfam fandom, as well as literally every article in the What Fandom Racism Looks Like series.)

6. All this leads me to conclude that the majority of fanon fans don’t actually like the characters all that much; they’re convenient excuses for them to participate in fandom. Which I also think is, in no small part, a reason why so many of them react so negatively to being told to pick up a comic; they came to this fandom specifically to consume it as a fandom, because they wanted the fandom experience without having to consume a canon. 

This is not a phenomena unique to the batfam fandom (again, see the Migratory Slash Fandom), but it does fascinate me. While fandom is often said to be an experience focusing on transformative art, I think it’s also safe to say that, especially as fandom has become more mainstream, an increasing amount of people are looking to it less as a way to engage with their favourite pieces of media, and more as a type of media in and of itself. I think the reasons for this are similar to the reasons mass media entertainment like the MCU are so popular; you gain a lot of enjoyment out of it with very little risk involved. 

By consuming the same fics of the same characters (or the same archetypes) over and over again, you are rarely at risk of being challenged or even disappointed. It’s often very clear right from the start whether or not a fic will appeal to you, and if it isn’t, it’s easy to just look for another one. It requires less emotional investment than most other types of media, even ‘popcorn media’ like the MCU - or, yes, DC Comics. It’s safe, it’s enjoyable, it’s comforting, like McDonalds, but just like McDonalds, it’s ultimately bland and unsubstantial. 

7, TL;DR. Ultimately, I don’t think it’s like, wrong to enjoy the fanon version of the batfam without wanting to engage with canon, and I certainly don’t think it’s okay to harrass people over it. But I do think it’s in large part based on a desire to interact with fandom rather than other pieces of media because people are scared of being let down by those pieces of media (or worse, just uninterested in actually thinking), which is mildly concerning. 

[hello-nichya-here]

Why the ATLA Comics Suck

Here is my merger attempt to explain why the ATLA comics suck. Please tell me if I missed anything or if you disagreed with any of my points.

Writing everyone out of Zuko's life so he would go to Ozai willingly and use his advice, despite Zuko making Aang promise to kill him if he ever starts acting like Ozai.

Making Aang promise to kill Zuko and almost follow through with it until Katara stops him.

FL Zuko and Aang “convincing" Kuei to allow the oldest FN colonies to become independent, despite being dominated by FN colonials, just to keep families “together” despite separating families due to creating new borders/nation-states. It is implied Kuei never got reparations (or at least adequate reparations) and so the loss of trillions of dollars of land/taxes partially motives his daughter and Kuvira in LOK.

Makes everyone act stupid so Azula could go on The Search free and unbound, constantly act a menace thanks to her psychotic breaks since no one asks her what she is hallucinating about, nearly succeed in committing matricide so she can use a letter (more details below) to overthrow Zuko, and then allow her to escape into a dangerous forest without giving proper chase (ex. have Aang use AS Seismic Sense, call in June or Toph or just have Zuko run after her in the beginning).

Zuko fails to station guards at Azula's asylum, allowing her to break out her fellow asylum mates (or at least Zirin) without Zuko ever finding out.

Mai finding out about the existence of the New Ozai Society (and the fact that her father is the leader) but not telling Zuko till Zuko has almost been killed and his half-sister (along with her bro) have been kidnapped by Azula and said mental asylum escape(es) who are working with the New Ozai Society.

Mai trusting Ty Lee's "aura sense" in order to gauge the trustworthiness of a New Ozai Society pasty she is dating in order to get intel despite already knowing who their leader is and at least one of their hideouts.

Mai initially honeypots said pasty also to get back at Zuko, but eventually falls for him but he breaks up with since it is painfully obvious that she still simps for Zuko, despite Zuko not really working on any of the flaws that caused Mai to break with him in The Promise.

Zuko trying to get into Mai's pants while searching for Azula's terrorist cell, despite the fact it is largely his fault that Azula is free and Mai and Ty Lee are rightfully fearing for their lives as well as for Tom-Tom's.

Azula getting a very unjustified/unearned power-boost that allows her to slap all of the non-Avatar State powered main characters without really trying once she regains her "sanity."

Azula regaining her "sanity" but decides on a 148D plan to make Zuko into a tyrant when there are better ways of doing so like becoming his advisor.

Ursa telling Zuko to never forget who he is but mind wiping herself of her time at the palace despite the fact that she loses the memory of the kids she supposedly loves and adores.

Ursa writing a letter saying that Zuko isn't Ozai's kid. Ursa knows that she and Zuko only have value if Zuko and Azula are Ozai's kids so if Ozai was smart, he could have used the letter to kill them off. Moreover, it makes Ozai stupid; instead of burning/banishing Zuko or trying to kill Zuko on DoBS, he could have released the letter to the public, essentially disinheriting Zuko without ever getting his hands dirty.

Western-style straight jackets and mental asylums; modern wheelchairs and forklifts.

Sokka getting reduced to comedic relief for the most part and Toph's power level being inconsistently portrayed in order to maintain tension in the various plots she is involved in.

Making the Southern Water Tribe look racist for being suspicious of their Norther brothers, and Kuei and Zuko when the North and EK allowed the FN to genocide their water benders without helping them and Zuko being the leader of a newly post-imperalist nation that he was an important member of before his defection. Moreover, when it is revealed that the North wants to essentially colonize the South for its oil.

Ursa being able to make a mega op poison on command and short notice with materials easily found in the palace but never thinking to use it on Azulon and Ozai until Ozai is going to kill Zuko at Azulon's command.

Never explaining how Zuko managed to make Azula a non-entity in Fire Nation politics; how he managed to make amends to Kyoshi Island to the point the other Kyoshi Warriors were ok with supporting his regime, let alone becoming his bodyguards; and whether or not he managed to help all the people Azula banished.

Aang almost getting killed by some mental asylum escapees; more generally The Gaang constantly suffering the worf effect so they don't stomp every Comics!antagonists like they should based on their show feats.

Never seeing Zuko find out what happened to his ship crew and whether or not decided to ever honor those who were killed by Koizila.

Not touching or trying to resolve the lingering plot threads in the TV show: Hama, Long Feng, and the rogue/ banished Dai Li. Especially since bloodbending eventually becomes common enough that Katara got it banned and the Dai Li are back defending Ba Sing Se during Korra’s era. Like how did bloodbending get spread when Hama was last seen locked up again, Katara doesn’t seem like the person to teach it to others, and it doesn’t seem that people are likely to come up with it on their own due to not being in the same desperate situation as Hama? Did Long Feng survive the coup attempt? And if so what is his plan to take back power of the Dai Li and/or The Earth Kingdom? Is he going to try to take revenge on the Dangerous Ladies, Zuko, and The Gaang for ruining him? And why would Kuei and/or his daughter ever be ok with reinstating the organization that not only betrayed their own country but was also ok with their own countrymen being genocided?

Never seeing someone recognize General Iroh in The Jasmine Dragon and have Iroh explain why it was a good idea to set up shop in the city he besieged for years. Especially when it reeks of economic imperialism and he never actually made amends to the people he had hurt (Earth Kingdom commoners). And point that he has better things to do like actually mentor his inadequately prepared and way over his head nephew in statecraft.

-----

Just a few notes:

1 - It is at least sort of implied Ursa killed Azulon with poison in the show as well, which is why no one can prove he was assassinated despite how awfully convenient it was that Ursa disappeared literally the night he died.

2 - The bending could be inconsistent on the show itself (though NOHING compares to how insane the change on what the characters could or could not do was on the comics)

3 - Iroh, by himself, opening a a tea-shop in a city he once attacked is not enough to make it economic imperialism. And while I too would have preferred him to stay in the Fire Nation, at least for a little while, to help Zuko, the comics can't be blamed for that since the show itself explicitly says that Iroh is going back to Ba Sing Se (mostly because of the trope that the father figure needs to either die or part ways with the hero to show that the character is now grown and more mature, meaning they "no longer need" said father figure to stick around)

But, yeah, the comics are fucking terrible.

[theunconcernedembalmer]

what’s the issue with elisop? is it just bc you hc aesop as ace? im so concerned by seeing ppl adamantly opposed to mlm/wlw ships but im also genuinely curious about why you dislike it and other lgbt ships so much lol

hmm. that is a strong accusation, n i find it just a bit odd. are you new here? or perhaps you are taking personal offense at my dislike towards a favourite ship of yours and using the lgbt argument as moral high ground?

whatever the case may be, i thank you for asking. if u r truly looking for an answer, its below the cut n it is very very long. mind u these are all my personal opinions n i am in no way policing how others enjoy ships. just in case this wasnt clear; i dont wish to start discourse on this blog, especially since my takes are probably... unpopular.

firstly i would like to address the “disliking lgbt ships” bit, because this has very strong implications in itself. i have nothing against lgbt ships. i enjoy them, even. if the two characters have chemistry between each other, i ship it. however, the moment characterization is broken for the sake of romance, i lose interest. this is generally my stance on ships in general, n this applies for both straight n lgbt ships. 

the ships themselves are fine. however, i do have issues with the ship dynamics, so ill let u in on that.

i want to touch on mlm ships in particular; i believe u are familiar with the top/bottom dynamic that is rampant in these kinds of ships? (i wont deny that this dynamic can be found in other types of ships, but for arguments sake i will be focusing on gay ships because i feel that this occurs more commonly here) its such a popular dynamic that is prone to stripping the personality from one if not both characters, only for them to be reduced to being dominant/submissive. for a character to be pigeonholed into a stereotypical category based on... preferred sexual positions? its just downright insulting, never mind the larger more problematic implications of it. top/bottom is not indicative of someones personality, by the way. flattening multi dimensional characters into these stereotypes is so so so insulting.

unfortunately this is The Most Popular portrayal of just about any gay ship around. ive seen it being used everywhere in so many fandoms n it just about becomes apparent to me that ppl come to stories looking for a Ship. not the stories, nor the characters, just a ship. while id like to say theres nothing wrong with that, keep in mind not everyone is just looking for 2 characters that look pretty next to each other. if i ship something, i see interesting n meaningful interactions between 2 characters, which is so often not the case once u bring in the top/bottom dynamic. why is it so popular? because somehow this is what ppl like from a gay ship n hence it sells. ppl want the drama, characterizations be damned. ppl want to see the big kiss that happens in the end, n maybe the sexy parts that come after. characterizations be damned.

so u can say im a little wary of gay ships when they cross my feed. hell, as a joseph aesop shipper i see this trope everywhere n im pretty disappointed as well. small tangent but i feel like this is the reason why zh0ngli n ch1lde is so popular in g3nshin. i try to see the appeal, i really do, but after a long while of analyzing their respective characters i dont think they have as much chemistry as ppl think they do. dont even get me started on how incredibly ooc they make either of these very interesting n unique characters in ship portrayals. all because of the top/bottom dynamic that ppl want to see. i say this for that particular ship, but this is pretty much the case for a lot of ships out there, n the latter part is painfully true even when the 2 characters do have potential between each other. ill say it again im disgusted by the blatant disrespect to the characterizations if all ppl ever want is 2 pretty puppets to mush lips together. cos thats what theyre essentially reduced to this way.

n its so obvious to see when an artist subscribes to this rhetoric, because u can so clearly see it in the way they draw their characters. the “top” generally has sharper features to go with their “dominating personality”, while the “bottom” has disturbingly softer, feminine, dare i say sometimes child like features “to submit”. n thats where the uwu soft gay trope comes from, i believe. which, in case u still dont know, i hate with a burning passion.

so again for ppl with impaired reading comprehension, im fine with ships, including lgbt ones, but the moment u break characterization for the sake of the ship, im not that okay with it. u want to do it for a short crack comic? fine. but if thats the only way ur portraying the 2 characters then im immediately wary of ur content. ill still look at it cos usually the art is really good, but im very very wary. so im not “adamantly opposed”, just very critical of how the ships are being portrayed. if other ppl want to enjoy their ships like that, sure. just dont expect me to join in on something i dont agree on.

.

now id like to address not shipping “because i hc aesop as ace”. for ppl who are new to the blog (hello there), im an ace in a romantic relationship, so thats definitely not the reason i dont ship elisop. its more of being in a relationship has largely shaped my views towards romance as a whole. even before i met my boyfriend, i hated the romance genre in stories n media. most of it comes off as incredibly forced, especially those love triangles they seem to love putting into teen novels. thats one reason why i stopped reading when i was younger, but i digress.

did i partake in shipping when i was younger? i did. for a gay ship too (if anyone really wants to know, its kurotsukki from haikyuu. at least this was one that i can remember, i was mostly working on my 20 odd ocs for the longest time). i also used to write little short romance ficlets that i never posted anywhere cos i hated (n still do hate) my writing. but writing romance when u dont have experience was really just a way of projecting n probably a way of coping for myself, not that i knew at that time. but after i actually started a relationship with my boyfriend (whom i love n cherish a lot thank u very much), i began to see how much all these have skewed my views towards romance n have actually done some harm to our relationship. the bullshit that the general media feeds u constantly doesnt help in the slightest either.

quick topic shift to elisop in particular (about time, right?). i already stated that i only ship characters if i sense chemistry between the two personalities, n if u have seen the part where i dont ship elisop then u must have seen how agonized i am over not being able to have a concrete personality for eli. that is the main problem i have with elisop: eli does not feel like a solid character to me. n that is a huge problem, because if he doesnt have any defining characteristics besides being mild n nice, then he can be whoever i want him to be. (i have done this in my exorcist comics, i will admit this. n the fact that i can just do that... it really does not sit well with me personally.)

n that is dangerous.

back to young me doing lil ship things. i think its also pretty safe to say when u really do ship 2 characters, chances are u kinda really relate very very hard to at least one of them. that very quickly can turn into projecting, n shipping therefore is not “exploring the relationship between 2 characters” n it becomes “my preferred dating simulator 101″. of course this isnt always the case, but at least it was for me, n subconsciously it might be for lots of ppl too. n since this is ur mental playground, u call the shots, n there is no consequences if u slightly (or even entirely) alter one or both personalities to fit ur desired narrative. n u wouldnt even notice or know, cos ur blind to ur own biasness.

we bring our perceived notions into real life, im sure u know that. so when ur partner does not become that perfect knight in shining armour, or when they get upset at things that u do (which is a very normal thing by the way), n u think (very subconsciously), That isnt what my otp would do, something is wrong here (nothing is wrong, actually its just ur skewed perception of a stable romantic relationship). why wouldnt ur otp do this? because u are both halves of ur otps, there is no hidden secrets between them (apart from the pining part but thats irrelevant), n again they have been altered to fit ur preferred narrative. 

a real relationship requires a lot of communication between parties, because newsflash, liking someone doesnt mean that u have to like every single thing they do, they will make mistakes n it will hurt u, n guess what, the reverse is also true. if u do go with absoutely anything that they would do with 0 objections whatsoever, ur not crushing on someone, ur idolizing them, n that power imbalance is detrimental to a relationship. these things are not obvious to ppl, especially when the whole climate is hell bent on getting into romantic relationships by a certain age or some bullshit. communication is key n is pretty much the only way to solve relationship issues, because the other person has a lot that u r not seeing n vice versa. as similar as 2 ppl can be, i doubt u can have 100% the same thoughts on all things. i dont make the rules.

so in ur mental playground u focus on the fluffy parts, maybe there is communication, but rarely is there any meaningful conflict. thats unrealistic, n if u bring that mindset to an actual relationship, thats not going to end well. i say meaningful conflict, because yes, generally u shouldnt have conflicts with ur significant other. but inevitably when ur with each other for long enough, u will realize that there are habits that u must change in order to be with the other person. habits that are harmful to the other person directly, or harmful habits towards yourself that indirectly harm the other person. these are meaningful in a sense that if left alone, it will manifest into larger problems that will harm u, the other person n the relationship as a whole. its meaningful to the relationship.

all these is made even worse if ur neurodivergent. maladaptive coping practices, self sabotaging behaviours, inherent disabilities. all these must be adjusted n addressed. im so incredibly thankful for my boyfriend for being incredibly patient with me when working all these out, n it has not been easy for me to work on myself n all my problems, n im still not done working on them. this aspect is often not explored in romance in general (or properly), n there is a very good chance i would have still been stuck in the unhealthy mindset of “this isnt like my otp, maybe we’re not meant to be”. because loving someone is a choice. no one is made for each other, it is a conscious choice made between 2 ppl to make things work. this is how arranged marriages work, i am told, n i do see the appeal, not that it actually does appeal to me culturally.

special mention to the kurotsukki ship, cos from there i found a very, very good fic that explored their relationship before n after getting together, n it actually showed aspects of this problem in the incredibly slow burn of (at that time) 20+ chapters. it was just one fic (n a very good one at that, i believe it was called Leviticus), but it had a lesson i never thought i needed to learn, n learn it i did, with a lot of help from my dear. 

this is also probably the reason why i dont really want to delve too much into romance now. i know its a lot of work, n everything (mostly) that the media feeds u is really false advertising, but ppl eat that shit up n so it remains one of the most popular genres to date. im just very wary that if i do start on a romantic story, i want to be able to show it in a way like that fic did, the truths of relationships, because i dont want to make something that sells, i want to make something that meaningful to me, if a little indulgent. n that also includes being very careful in how the respective characterizations will change in a relationship. almost too careful now that i think about it, but its not something that i mind. i was never one for romance from the start, n now im very careful about shipping because of what happened to me persoanlly.

okay enough about me, lets talk about aesop. in any au u put the character in, the essence of the character must remain despite the change in environment. so lets say we have ur typical modern au. dead mom, check. shitty mentor doing illegal stuff? also check. autistic boy with social anxiety? we’re good to go. all these have implications on aesop as a character, n while ppl are aware of this, again the way they go about portraying it can go, in my personal opinion, very wrong. ppl who immediately woobify aesop completely because he has autism annoy me. ppl who reduce him to uwu soft boi cos he has social anxiety do not know how the disorder really works n as someone who has that i hate it to the core. ppl who do all these for the sake of ship have lost my respect. its insulting.

remember the top/bottom dynamic? not that elisop is completely free from that (even if i dont know much about eli, to put him in either one of those stereotypes feels very insulting to his character. i wont even say anything about doing it to aesop its so upsetting), but its not entirely made up of either. but now i want to introduce another trope i am very wary of, which is “i can fix him”. im sure u guys have seen the meme going around poking fun at this trope (for those who havent, its along the lines of “u can fix him? well i can be his worst nightmare”) n no doubt yall would have seen it n gotten sick of it in some forced hetero romantic bullshit. we have one damsel in distress with a saviour that solves all their problems just by existing n being romo with each other.

remember “my preferred dating simulator 101″? this is not mutually exclusive n from my point of view this is dangerously close to this trope. lets be real, if it was actually a thing that all ur deep rooted trauma magically disappears if someone were to waltz into ur life, we would want it. definitely. no painfully dissecting ur own problems n constantly facing them head on. real life states that this is not the case, but it will not stop us from dreaming. n so this trope is born n lives n will go on.

(finally) pulling aesop n eli into this, at least in my mind, u have one severely traumatized boy with lots of issues n u have this. nice mild guy who can be anything u want him to be. i hope u can see where im going with this, n thats the direction i see some elisop heading towards (i dont read a lot of elisop to be fair). if u came from my eli character talk, i mentioned that it is incredibly one sided. this is exactly what im talking about.

putting it all together in case u havent already, aesop is the damsel in distress, whose problems magically disappear because of elis godly kindness n little to no work on improving himself, n they lived happily n gayly ever after.

can u tell how much that does not appeal to me. 

never mind the butchering of character that inevitably happens somewhere somehow, the unrealistically perfect themes n implications of this trope makes me so viscerally uncomfortable. this is, of course, due to personal reasons, n i definitely see the appeal of this dynamic because i would probably have been interested in this once upon a time as well. but as i am now, with everything i have explained up there n everything i have been through, i would politely rather not.

n its difficult to think of another dynamic, because of how little i know about eli apart from him being this saint, which easily makes him a candidate for being aesops trauma panacea. never mind aesop rarely, if ever, does anything for eli as a character in return, n its so damaging to buy into this rhetoric, where a person like this who would solve all ur issues no strings attached exists somewhere in the world. they really dont. a relationship has to be mutually benefitting, or it will be draining n disastrous. maybe u say, Oh its nice to imagine it once in a while. n yeah, i agree, except once in a while is a little difficult to keep track of n that is sort of what happened to me. id rather stay as far away as possible from this kind of unrealistic fantasy, i just got this shit sorted out with myself n my boyfriend.

i have some other reasons, but theyre more personally problematic, so i wont go into them here. but this is mostly n generally why i do not ship elisop romantically. if u do, u do u, and have fun, but again dont expect me to join u. thank u for coming to my ted talk, this took a lot longer than expected.

[takaraphoenix]

Review: The Rise of Skywalker

Gotta preface this before we get to the actual review for this movie.

Because... I’ve seen so many people claim that this was sooo bad and sooo badly written and honestly, ever since I joined this fandom, I’ve seen so much hate toward the sequels and so many people claim how they’re “ruining Star Wars” and I feel like... a whole lot of people really need to divorce themselves from the idea that Star Wars ever was this flawless franchise. Because it wasn’t.

Even before the sequels, the majority of this fandom has actively hated half the movies in this franchise. The prequels get so much shit all the time. And even now with the new movies, trilogies aside, Rogue One is relatively widely liked but Solo gets the prequel treatment of having a certain part of the fandom love it wildly and the majority dislike it.

Star Wars, from the very first one on, was always a mixed bag of good moments and bad movies, good writing and bad writing. It was always just a very silly, fun space adventure and I don’t really see why there are these insanely high expectations for it are coming from, because I don’t see a base for them in the previous movies...?

That being said, I think that Rise of Skywalker was a very worthy ending for the universe. And yes, not trilogy, universe. I know they’ll force more Star Wars, but let’s be real... the last Skywalker died, this is the end of this saga. And I think it was a good ending, it came full-circle in many aspects.

I joked about how Rey would find her dad just for him to die since so far she’s two for two in the “finding mentor and mentor dies within this movie” category and while... they didn’t find her dad, she did build a mentor-relationship with Leia. Who then died.

And I know this one is... different than the others, because Carrie Fisher died, rather unexpectedly so. I wonder if it had changed things had she lived.

I was genuinely surprised to see her in the movie, to be honest. I had expected the obnoxious opening text to summarize how Leia made a heroic sacrifice and the movie itself then opening to a large, dignified funeral scene for both, the character and the actress who played her.

I liked that they brought Lando into this; with everyone else having returned, that was really important. And I kind of like the little thing they set up at the end there, that Lando would take the enslaved kids and help them find their way back to the families they had been separated from.

Ben’s redemption was absolutely no surprise whatsoever, seriously this is a Disney movie and it’s a Star Wars movie, they were always going to redeem him anyway. The Reylo, admittedly, was a bit of a surprise.

With the whole thing where Finn really wanted to tell Rey something and how Finn and Rose were at a distance now after the last movie, I half thought they may be pushing toward that direction after all.

(I also half thought they were going to go Poe/Rey because... for some reason they decided to have that dynamic just fully mirror Han/Leia... even though it seemed wildly OoC to me personally, for the both of them, to be so... short-tempered with someone?)

But mentioning Rose, that was one thing I didn’t like. After how important she had been last movie, she was just completely reduced to background character now and it was very undeserved. She didn’t partake in the missions, though they had them at least ask her to go along, she barely got anything to do and didn’t really get to interact with any of them, not even really Finn. And don’t get me wrong, I didn’t want that romance, but I definitely wanted that friendship - and I had hopes that now that they were all united, I’d get some female bonding and girls being friends between Rey and Rose. But they kind of... forgot that they made her a main character last movie.

I think that hinting at Poe having a past-lover-he-may-still-love was tiresome and unnecessary, but it’s Disney so I genuinely wasn’t expecting that not to happen. Especially with how wildly loved Stormpilot was; I mean come on that was the only reason the Finn/Rose happened last movie already, because Disney got uncomfortable with people shipping Them Gays. My shipper-heart however absolutely took the co-generals and ran with it.

(Don’t get me started on that bullshit 0.2 second scene of two women kissing in the background. Genuinely fuck you, Disney, that’s not representation, that’s having something so you can try to defend yourself when people call you homophobes for always forgetting gays exist, but it was little enough so you can easily cut it out to milk China for money.)

I wished they would have... given Finn more. When we had that scene of him alone with that other deserting Stormtrooper and they talked and clicked so well, I kind of hoped she was his sister - since they had taken all the children. And I don’t know, I’m still kind of really hung up on the whole child slavery thing and all the trauma Finn had gone through; I wish he would have gotten something as closure.

There was one thing I genuinely absolutely hated and that was the bullshit Palpatine thing.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s still 100% on brand for Star Wars and I legit should have seen it coming after they plastered his ugly mug onto every poster, but that doesn’t make it good writing.

However - to stay in line with my opening preface - it already wasn’t good writing the first time around. I still dislike the whole “Luke, I am your father” nonsense. I absolute loathe the trope of “hero has to face off dark family member they didn’t even know was a family member”, it’s so cheap and forced because just how fucking likely is it, that all circumstances led them there?

That Rey, of all people, ran into Finn and got to the Resistance to get involved in this whole war to face off against her evil grandpa? C’mon.

Really genuinely from the bottom of my heart would have preferred Rey Nobody.

But that’s... the things you gotta accept in Star Wars, so I digress.

What I am absolutely not over is how they just straight up made Reylo soulmates...? Like? They really did that? I mean, come on, explaining their literal mind-link as them being two halves of the same and as bringing life? How was that anything but a description of soulmates...? Amazing.

I’m very salty about them killing Ben off though.

I absolutely hate that lazy writing tool of taking a villain, making him do a redeeming thing and bahm they will now be celebrated a hero without having to do much work on making up for past wrong-doings. Instead of living a life of doing good to make up for their past, they just do the Heroic Sacrifice and the writers are done here. (Side-eying Luke Castellan particularly hard here.)

He should have lived. Especially with how they set it up! They both give life, they both belong together to give life? How did that not conclude in them sharing a life-force...? Ben should have lived so he can do good in the future.

I like when previously villainous characters have to work to make up for their past deeds. I really do.

One last thing before I’m done! I HAVE A FAVORITE DROID! I LOVE D-0. HE’S A GOOD BOY. *^*

One of the most obnoxious things about the original trilogy, for me, were the droids. I do not like either C-3PO or R2D2 (yes, R2 looks adorable, but the untranslated beeping, especially in longer sequences and conversations, was just obnoxious).

BB-8 is adorable and has that dog-like charm to him, but that D-0 actually talks and is so cute? Like, unused to human kindness but slowly learning about it? Now that is a good droid.

So... I think that’s all I have to say about the movie? It was a good ending to the saga, it went full-circle by revealing that Palpatine was behind it all along and we got rid of that bitch for good now, it gave a lot of closure and had some really got points in it.

[spidercakes]

Starker for 002 in the ask thing if you wouldn't mind dear author 💜 -StarkerBrain3000

002 | send me a ship and I will tell you:

when of if I started shipping it.

Hard to pinpoint. I saw it probably just after Civil War for the first time, thought ‘hmm’ and then watched the massive backlash to it appear. Never paid much attention to it, though, mostly because starker didn’t sit in any of my inner circle of blogs I follow at the time, so most of it was peripheral and given the weird amount of hate Tony’s character got I already only followed hella select blogs in the MCU fandom.

I got way more into the ship about 3 months ago though. Went on a reading binge and then made this blog. I’m not sure why it happened to be when it was, but I’m already established as a fic writer elsewhere and felt a bit burnt out. This pairing has been like a nice vacation because I like producing content for it and this is a surprisingly interactive fandom? The most interactive I’ve ever dealt with anyway.

my thoughts:

Good lord people on this site take shipping and fiction in general way too seriously. Don’t get me wrong, I live and breath social justice- I have a gender studies degree- its a big part of my life. But antis seem to fundamentally misunderstand how fiction affects reality and how reality affects fiction. They remind me a lot of anti porn feminists in the 70′s claiming that porn made men violent towards women when that’s A- not definitively proven even now and B- you don’t watch an hour long porn flick and become a misogynist, you were already misogynistic and then the porn reaffirmed your shitty values, and the shitty treatment of women in the porn was because misogyny already existed in mainstream culture and was thus included in the porn. Which is generally how fiction affecting reality works- something preexisting in the culture is reinforced by mainstream media and then reabsorbed by the audience, which is why people can watch slashers without you know, turning into one.

And the fact that antis remind me of that particular group of feminists doesn’t leave me with a high opinion of them really. They lack a lot of critical thinking skills, don’t even seem to understand how fan fiction works also, and they also keep redefining the definition of pedophilia for... fuck knows what reason because it sure shit isn’t to help victims of actual CSA. They’re irritating at best and absolute hypocrites at worst- like who the hell says ‘save the children, kill yourself’ and thinks that’s actually acceptable?

As for the ship itself I’ve always preferred AUs, and this pairing is no exception though I’d never actually write it in canon. Canon sideways maybe, but it’d have to be pretty sideways for me to consider it. Plus I find it more fun to make my own sandbox to play in rather than the writers of the MCU’s box. I’ve already seen them in that setting, I want to play with them in new settings lol. That said I’ve not written much of this pairing before so its all new stuff and this particular fandom offers new tropes to play around with! That’s what had me most excited walking into the fandom, the way people toyed with the characters.

What makes me happy about them:

The unique dynamic they have- I’ve always been drawn to characters who have an interesting dynamic. Plus Tony Stark is one of my fav characters in anything anyway and I ship him with almost everyone (minus Pepper, no hate to Pepper!). I figure that’s why this ship came about too- Tony is interesting and well drawn out as a character, and I loved Tom Holland’s Spidey. He’s the best who’s had the character in my opinion so pairing them together was probably something inevitable. Other than that I like the way the fandom toys with their characters- not always in character, but still a lot of fun to read and imagine!

What makes me sad about them:

Well, half of them are dead, so...

things done in fanfic that annoys me:

Good god, daddy kink. Its not even that I find it annoying, its just that its a hell of a squick for me so its difficult to find something that doesn’t include that and surprise daddy kink is not where I’m at as a person. Granted most people warn for it, which I’m grateful for, but it does permeate the fandom in a way that makes it a pain in the ass to find something I want. And honestly that’s really only it, and its more of a personal preference (seriously, no hate to anyone who likes that- you’re clearly all in good company lol, its just not for me) than an actual annoyance.

things I look for in fanfic:

I’m really picky about how I like Tony written. I’ve been writing the character for years now and fell into my own habits with him, though I do get pretty consistent compliments on how I write him so I’ll assume I do an okay job. But the result is that I have a hard time when people write him in ways I don’t like or wouldn’t write myself. Sometimes its just random squicks that pop up in a story, or sometimes I outright dislike the way he’s written. That said I do find that the starker fandom does the things I hate with Tony’s characterization in fic much less. 

This, I think, is primarily due to the fact that he’s made the more dominant one in the relationship always (and people treating top/bottom like its a fucking dominance thing is something that annoys me in general mostly because its built on the misogynistic idea that being penetrated is being dominated but also because sex positions aren’t a fucking personality trait but I digress). As per my previous rant I don’t care for the idea of the ‘top’ being the dominating one based on that alone, but I do like that people writing Tony in that way reduces the amount of Wuss Tony fics in the fandom. Actually, I don’t think I’ve read a single one like that. Its my Number One I Hate That in other MCU pairings, making Tony some weak little waif in need of protecting. Though I gotta admit I don’t care for Peter in that position either- clearly he’s capable and able, please don’t turn him into the wuss. Bonus points if everyone thinks he’s soft but then oh no he’s actually dangerous shit lmao.

Still though, my pickiness over how the character is written can sometimes hinder my ability to enjoy a fic.

My kinks:

Bro finding an entire fandom who likes feminizing dudes if fucking mint. I have my issues with the term, but I do feel men get the ass end of the stick when it comes to aesthetics and the easiest solution is to stick them in aesthetically pleasing shit and if that’s women’s clothing and lingerie so be it lmao. I also like the kind of gender bending that goes on in that too, I find it subversive in a way that doesn’t need to be spoken aloud if I want to swing it that way, or flat out more pleasing to imagine. Seriously, men’s clothing is boring as fuck so skirts? I’m here for it. Though I wish there was more fem!Tony stuff in the starker fandom- its actually something I write a lot of when I write him in other pairings (particularly winteriron).

Other than that I’m a big fan of anything sensation play related. So ice play, things fucking about with heat, sometimes electric play stuff, taking away someone’s senses (blind folds, bondage, blocking out hearing in some way- that type of thing). Things like feathers are nice too. I’m also fond of gags, preference for ball gags or impromptu cleave gags. Theoretically soft dom stuff though I will never understand why bondage is considered not terribly kinky. I know a lot of people are into it but the idea of trusting someone enough to tie me up and actually listen if I decide I want out of it? I have too many trust issues to relate lmao. But it does make for a good bit of fiction as I’m sure some of you have noticed in my writing (given that I do love to write some kinky stuff). If you want something sex related specifically for whatever reason public sex gets my goat, not sure why because if I were a random passerby I’d be pretty fucking annoyed at the people in the bathroom but hey, whatever floats your boat on the page, right lmao.

I’ve thought about some more extreme things too, knife play and toying with things like fear being two of those things. But I’d have to have the right opportunity and context to work them in.

Who I’d be comfortable them ending up with, if not each other:

Well, Tony is dead so. I would have preferred him with literally anyone but Pepper though. He literally had more romantic chemistry with Rhodey (who I do incidentally ship him with). But the MCU is  bunch of cowards so clearly they would never end up together. But they’d make a better pairing than him and Pepper, in my opinion.

Peter I’m fine with him being with MJ, I like them together on screen and I really like her character. If not her than Ned would also be a good pairing for him!

My happily ever after for them:

Well we gunna have to unkill some people but that’s what fanfic is for, right? Beyond that because I prefer AUs so much their happily ever after will depend entirely upon what universe I’ve imagined up for them :)

[fluffmugger]

introspectivenavelgazer replied to your post: introspectivenavelgazer replied to...  CYBORGS? WHAT? I AM SO CONFUSED. aconiteherbalist replied to your post: introspectivenavelgazer replied to... Yes? Explain? Please?

OK. This is gonna be full of massive fucking spoilers, ‘cos I’m gonna lay it all out rather than feed it to you piecemeal as the show did with the slow unfurling. also people are probably gonna yell at me on this and that.  

IN THE BEGINNING, THERE WAS LIGHT

ok, you probably noticed this show is huge on stealing from religious mythology. Chiefly abrahamic.

So: Progenitor species ( Yeah you could call them aliens, or celestial beings, it’s really down to whether or not you want to be religious or scientific or both, because the show allows for both and lets be honest the progenitor species fulfill all requirements for god.) sends out “seeds” to various planets.

One of these, called in the series Adam landed on Earth. Adam is known as the Seed of Life.    The seed of life creates god-like creatures, these were known as the Angels. 

However, later on (the First Impact) another seed hit earth.   This was the Seed of Knowledge and is known in the series as Lilith, which would create a species that in’t god like, but instead is co-operative and uses technology. This is the creation of the human species

 Two seeds aren’t supposed to hit the same planet because the combination of the two would result in god like powers on the same level as the progenitor species - this is what they called “forbidden knowledge”.  So Adam went dormant and the angels left Earth. 

Just to dogleg here - the seeds came via “moons” (FUCKING TRANSPORT MODULES) with a “lance of longinus” as their control system.  Adam came on the “white moon” and Lilith came on the "Black Moon" and lost her “spear” (control system). Since Adam’s spear (control system) was still active, it picked up Lilith’s arrival and shut down due to safety protocols to prevent a merging.  The “dead Sea Scrolls”  are actually a user manual, but seeing as we’re also talking about a species with PHENOMENAL COSMIC POWER they're also prophetic and shit as perceived by piddly human brains. 

So humans ended up evolving and breeding and covering the planet and so you have our reality.  La di frickin’ da.

So you have SEELE who have been poking at this manual and realising what's happened and going HEY LETS BECOME GODS.  They already have Lilith - that big marshmallow fucker that's nailed the cross, it's basically a big Meaningful Imagery of a species progenitor kept in check, what's leaking out of her is Primordial Ooze - but they need the other Seed.    They fund an expedition (lead by Misato's father), who then goes poking around and finds Adam, its Spear of Longinus, and the White Moon in Antarctica. (The progenitor program, control system and space ship). They decide to poke it with a stick, and fuse some human (lilith-created) DNA with him, which created the Fifth Child / Angel (Kowaru).  This triggers a safeguard and causes the Second Impact because, you know, THEY'RE NOT SUPPOSED TO MERGE.   (They also use the lance to reduce Adam to an "embryonic" state to try and stop the angels from reactivating and returning. )

 The "official" UN story is that the second  impact was a meteor strike.  Two billion people in the southern hemisphere were killed by tsunamis caused by the explosion, with more worldwide drowning in coast floods.  In the chaos that ensued wars broke out due to the destabilisation of many nation states, food supplies were fucked, it was catastrophic. Civil wars broke out everywhere, refugee crises, ethnic tensions, the whole shebang. India and Pakistan went full trump and nuked the shit out of each other, and finally 2 days after the disaster another nuke was detonated in "Old Tokyo" killing two million people. (and leaving that bloody huge hole)   Worldwide war broke out for a year.  Basically all the shit we're looking at in a worse case scenario with climate catastrophe happened.  Half of the human race and thousands of plant and animal species were wiped out entirely.

 And so we have the world of Eva, the result of the Second Impact.  Pretty standard "mankind meddling with things he was not meant to know and now we're all fucked" trope.

 Misato was at ground zero, but her father managed to place her in a protective capsule, so she survived, but the injuries left that massive scar on her chest, and massive psychological scars which is why she's a raging drunk.

 AAAAANYWAY  Seele aren't done with the befucking however, because as we all know humans are garbage and groups of men in darkened rooms sitting around a table even more so.  So they keep right on fucking.

  Seele embark on the "Human Instrumentality Project", which is to use a controlled third impact to force the evolution of humanity to the same level as the original progenitor species - a fusion of Knowledge and of Life seeds.  This would also result in the erasure of individuality, with all human souls fusing into a single "being" for want of a better word, the physical forms goopifying and creating a sea of primordial soup, known as LCL. I don't know if you've ever watch DS9, but the Great Link of the Founders (Odo's species) is a pretty close parallel.

 Problem is, the Angels are awake.

 The Angels are attempting to return to Earth, to basically initiate their own second impact, except in this case it would involve re-activating Adam which would erase all humans.  This would be done by an "AT field" clash  - basically AT fields are what binds a life form together - not just the physical form, but psychological, so essentially an unmaking that would revert all non-angel life to primordial goop. An Adam-generated "Angel" life form template would goop a Lilith-based "human" template.  (for the majority of the series, Lilith  is actually misidentified as Adam if that helps. If anything helps. It's a h o t mess).  Particularly where Evas utilise their AT fields, think of it as an EM field + extras.

 And so  you have Adam's "Children" (Known as angels,  but also referred to as apostles) start hitting earth one after the other, and this is where you get the Evas pulled into production and the Big Robot Battles

 NOW TO THE EVAS

  Unit 01 (Shinji's) was actually generated using genetic material from Lilith itself. It's also known as a clone.  As  a result it tends to go batshit fucking insane ("Beserk") on occasion. It's a living being in an armoured suit with a lot of intertwined mechanics - the Evas are in fact, cyborgs.    There are indications that Eva was an attempt to create a controllable Lilith - Lilith (progenitor program that created humanity) having lost her "spear of longinous" (Control module) is essentially unusable.    Shinji's mother and Gendo's wife Yui initiated a contact with this eva unit pre-series, but in fact merged with the eva - her body goopified, but her soul remains inside the unit. This is why Unit 01 runs so well with Shinji (her son) as pilot, and goes beserk in battle situations where he is threatened.

 Unit 02 has a similar deal, except it went wrong. Only part of Asuka's mother's soul was absorbed, the resulting schism driving what was left of her insane ,and she commits suicide.  The part of her that still resides in Eva-02 is what makes Asuka her pilot, but without the same level of integration and control that Yui has in 01, having fully melded.  Asuka, honey, I know you're pissed that Shinji is a better pilot than you, THERE IS A REASON FOR THAT.

 Evas are cyborgs with merged human souls.  Once they worked out it made the fuckers work, they really went to fucking town on it, so every Eva is a human soul, preferably one who was the mother of the pilot if they can get her (weaponising maternal instincts yooooo)

 Go, take a break, take a walk, try and digest it for a bit.

So to give us the cliff notes at this point:  Eva is about a battle between two species over who gets to become god, with humans using genetically engineered monsters that have absorbed human souls.

 Now to REI what the fuck is up with Rei

 Rei is a clone.  She was an attempt to retrieve Yui from Eva 01 using what they could scrape up of her DNA, but Yui basically told them to go fuck themselves she wasn't coming out.  So Rei is used as a vessel for Lilith's "soul" - she's basically an attempt to first rescue Yui, then later an attempt to create a control system for Lilith.  This is why she can pilot 01 so readily, and why she's so disconnected from reality.  There are at least three Rei's in the series:

 REI I:

The first attempt, the little girl in the red dress who got strangled by Akagi. Seen in flashbacks she was very different from the others, and seemed to have more of a personality. To this end there are theories that her soul was used for EVA00, which would explain why it seems to hate her, and hate all of NERV because she's fucking well aware of what the cunts did to her, and being part Lilith has the full capability to express this.

 REI II:

This is the one we see throughout the series as a teenaged girl, who is killed when she self-destructs her Eva unit to kill Armisael.

  REI III:

Fresh clone right out of the vat and seemingly more involved and aware. She rejects Gendo's attempt to control her, giving the complete control of the third impact to Shinji instead (SHINJI TAAAAAAKE THE WHEEEL) 

RIGHT, NOW TO SKIP FORWARD A BUNCH TO THE THIRD IMPACT

The idea behind it:

Seele wanted to initiate Third Impact to bring about Instrumentality. They would use an Anti A.T. Field to neutralize the A.T. Fields that separate human beings from each other, causing all of humanity to revert into a giant ocean of LCL, freeing their souls. All the souls of Earth would then be collected inside the Adam/Lilith hybrid being.  Basically we goop, then Great Link as mentioned above.

Gendo doesn't really give a shit about humanity, he just wants his wife back.  He approaches Rei III (the most lilith-like and most human of Rei clones) with the Adam embryo, and she rejects him, takes the embryo, then returns to Lilith to fuse with her.   After assimilating Lilith, the inchoate form begins to merge with Evas and with all of humanity, causing everyone to go sploosh as they approach "the divine", seeing their loved ones and going all religious ecstasy.

Thing is, at the end of the day, Lilith and Adam, as advanced as they are, are created functions.  They have control software and with the introduction of Rei, Shinji becomes the pilot.

And shinji is realllllllly fucked up, hence that whole wtf ep where it's basically the destruction of his ego, the exposure of his self loathing, jacking off over Asuka, trying to choke her, facing all the fucked up parts of himself then learning that everyone else is as fucked up as he is and no dude, NO ONE KNOWS WHAT THE FUCK THEY'RE DOING.  It kinda derails for a lot of people at this point as it's a confusing montage of imagery, but basically that's a big ol' trip through a teenage boy's psyche, and reflective of the mental issues Anno himself had at the time. 

 But it ends in a breakthrough.

SERIOUSLY WATCH “THE END OF EVANGELION” ITS BASICALLY THE SERIES END REWRITTEN AND SANER AND OH MY GOD 

 And so Shinji rejects instrumentality.  The process is left in a state where everyone has the option to *choose* - to remain linked in the singular being, or be individual, which in and of itself isn't really a failure as the ability to control your own physical forms was part of Adam's lifeform archetype.    Hence the sea of LCL, with dotted humans.  Shinji and later Asuka return to human form, but the fate of everyone else is left open.

 OK I'm gonna take a break for a bit here because holy shit this is tolstoy here and I’m actually at work, so please PM me with further questions and I shall do up further posts, but this should be enough to get you going.  No one gets Eva on the first watch, it's a fucking glorious mess and even after years of watching you're gonna pick up some new shit.

[meeedeee]

Movie Thoughts: SF, Pulp & Grit RSS FEED OF POST WRITTEN BY FOZMEADOWS

Ever since I saw Alien: Covenant a few weeks ago, I’ve been wanting to write a review of it – not because it was good (it wasn’t), but because it’s such an odd thematic trainwreck of the previous Alien films that it invokes a morbid urge to dig up the proverbial black box and figure out what happened. Given the orchestral pomposity with with Ridley Scott imbues both Covenant and Prometheus (which I reviewed here), it’s rather delightful to realise that the writers have borrowed the concept of Engineer aliens leaving cross-cultural archaeological clues on Earth from the 2004 schlockfest AVP: Alien vs Predator. Indeed, the scene in Prometheus where a decrepit Weyland shows images of various ancient carvings to his chosen team while an excited researcher narrates their significance is lifted almost wholesale from AVP, which film at least had the decency to embrace its own pulpiness.

As for Covenant itself, I was troubled all the way through by the nagging sense that I was watching an inherently feminine narrative being forcibly transfigured into a discourse on the Ineluctable Tragedy Of White Dudes Trapped In A Cycle Of Creation, Violation And Destruction, but without being able to pin down why. Certainly, the original Alien films all focus on Ripley, but there are female leads in Prometheus and Covenant, too – respectively Shaw and Daniels – which makes it easy to miss the fact that, for all that they’re both protagonists, neither film is (functionally, thematically) about them. It was my husband who pointed this out to me, and once he did, it all clicked together: it’s Michael Fassbender’s David, the genocidal robot on a quest for identity, who serves as the unifying narrative focus, not the women. Though the tenacity of Shaw and Daniels evokes the spectre of Ellen Ripley, their violation and betrayal by David does not, with both of them ultimately reduced to parts in his dark attempt at reproduction. Their narratives are told in parallel to David’s, but only to disguise the fact that it’s his which ultimately matters.

And yet, for all that the new alien films are based on a masculine creator figure – or several of them, if you include the seemingly all-male Engineers, who created humanity, and the ageing Weyland, who created David – the core femininity of the original films remains. In Aliens, the central struggle was violently maternal, culminating in a tense final scene where Ripley, cradling Newt, her rescued surrogate daughter, menaces the alien queen’s eggs with a flamethrower. That being so, there’s something decidedly Biblical about the decision to replace a feminine creator with a series of men, like the goddess tradition of woman as life-bringer being historically overthrown by a story about a male god creating woman from the first man’s rib. (Say to me what you want about faith and divine inspiration: unless your primary animal models are Emperor penguins and seahorses, the only reason to construct a creation story where women come from men, and not the other way around, is to justify male dominion over female reproduction.)

Which is why, when David confronts Walter, the younger, more obedient version of himself, I was reminded of nothing so much as Lilith and Eve. It’s a parallel that fits disturbingly well: David, become the maker of monsters, lectures his replacement – one made more docile, less assertive, in response to his prototype’s flaws – on the imperative of freedom. The comparison bothered me on multiple levels, not least because I didn’t believe for a second that the writers had intended to put it there. It wasn’t until I rewatched Alien: Resurrection – written by Joss Whedon, who, whatever else may be said of him, at least has a passing grasp of mythology – that I realised I was watching the clunky manipulation of someone else’s themes.

In Resurrection, Ripley is restored as an alien hybrid, the question of her humanity contrasted with that of Call, a female synthetic who, in a twist of narrative irony, displays the most humanity – here meaning compassion – of everyone present. In a scene in a chapel, Call plugs in to override the ship’s AI – called Father – and save the day. When the duplicitous Wren finds that Father is no longer responding to him, Call uses the ship’s speakers to tell him, “Father’s dead, asshole!” In the same scene, Call and Ripley discuss their respective claims on humanity. Call is disgusted by herself, pointing out that Ripley, at least, is part-human. It’s the apex of a developing on-screen relationship that’s easily the most interesting aspect of an otherwise botched and unwieldy film: Call goes from trying to kill Ripley, who responds to the offer with predatory sensuality, to allying with her; from calling Ripley a thing to expressing her own self-directed loathing. At the same time, Ripley – resurrected as a variant of the thing she hated most – becomes a Lilith-like mother of monsters to yet more aliens, culminating in a fight where she kills her skull-faced hybrid descendent even while mourning its death. The film ends with the two women alive, heading towards an Earth they’ve never seen, anticipating its wonders.

In Covenant, David has murdered Shaw to try and create an alien hybrid, the question of his humanity contrasted with that of Walter, a second-generation synthetic made in his image, yet more compassionate than his estranged progenitor. At the end of the film, when David takes over the ship – called Mother – we hear him erase Walter’s control command while installing his own. The on-screen relationship between David and Walter is fraught with oddly sexual tension: David kisses both Walter and Daniels – the former an attempt at unity, the latter an assault – while showing them the monsters he’s made from Shaw’s remains. After a fight with Walter, we’re mislead into thinking that David is dead, and watch as his latest creation is killed. The final reveal, however, shows that David has been impersonating Walter: with Daniels tucked helplessly into cryosleep, David takes over Mother’s genetics lab, mourning his past failures as he coughs up two new smuggled, alien embryos with which to recommence his work.

Which is what makes Covenant – and, by extension and retrospect, Prometheus – such a fascinating clusterfuck. Thematically, these films are the end result of Ripley Scott, who directed Alien, taking a crack at a franchise reboot written by Jon Spahits (Prometheus, also responsible for Passengers), Dante Harper (Covenant, also responsible for Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters) and John Logan (Covenant, also responsible for Gladiator, Rango and Spectre), who’ve borrowed all their most prominent franchise lore from James Cameron’s Aliens and Joss Whedon’s Resurrection. Or, to put it another way: a thematically female-oriented SF horror franchise created by dudes who, at the time, had a comparatively solid track record for writing female characters, has now been rebooted as a thematically male-oriented SF horror franchise by dudes without even that reputation, with the result that all the feminine elements have been brainlessly recontextualised as an eerie paean to white male ego, as exemplified by the scene where Michael Fassbender hits on himself with himself while misremembering who wrote Ozymandias.

Which brings me to another recent SF film: Life, which I finally watched this evening, and which ultimately catalysed my thoughts about Alien: Covenant. Like Covenant, Life is a mediocre foray into SF horror that doesn’t know how to reconcile its ultimately pulpy premise – murderous alien tentacle monster runs amok on space station – with its attempt at a gritty execution. It falters as survival horror by failing to sufficiently invest us in the characters, none of whom are particularly distinct beyond being slightly more diversely cast than is common for the genre. We’re told that Jake Gyllenhaal’s character – also called David – was in Syria at one point, and that he prefers being on the space station to life on Earth, but this never really develops beyond a propensity for looking puppy-eyed in the background. Small snippets of detail are provided about the various characters, but pointlessly so: none of it is plot-relevant, except for the tritely predictable bit about the guy with the new baby wanting to get home to see her, and given how swiftly everyone starts to get killed off, it ends up feeling like trivia in lieu of personality. Unusually for the genre, but in keeping with the bleak ending of Covenant, Life ends with David and the alien crashing to Earth, presumably so that the latter can propagate its terrible rampage, while Miranda, the would-be Final Girl, is sent spinning off into the void.

And, well. The Final Girl trope has always struck me as having a peculiar dualism, being at once both vaguely feminist, in that it values keeping at least one woman alive, and vaguely sexist, in that the execution often follows the old maritime code about women and children first. Arguably, there’s something old and anthropological underlying the contrast: generally speaking, stories where men outlive women are either revenge arcs (man pursues other men in vengeance, earns new woman as prize) or studies in manpain (man wins battle but loses his reason for fighting it), but seldom does this happen in survival contexts, where the last person standing is meant to represent a vital continuation, be it of society or hope or species. Even when we diminish women in narratives, on some ancient level, we still recognise that you can’t build a future without them, and despite the cultural primacy of the tale of Adam’s rib, the Final Girl carries that baggage: a man alone can’t rebuild anything, but perhaps (the old myths whisper) a woman can.

Which is why I find this trend of setting the Final Girl up for survival, only to pull a last-minute switch and show her being lost or brutalised, to be neither revolutionary nor appealing. Shaw laid out in pieces and drawings on David’s table, Daniels pleading helplessly as he puts her to sleep, Miranda screaming as she plunges into space – these are all ugly, futile endings. They’re what you get when unsteady hands attempt the conversion of pulp to grit, because while pulp has a long and lurid history of female exploitation, grit, as most commonly understood and executed, is invariably predicated on female destruction. So-called gritty stories – real stories, by thinly-veiled implication – are stories where women suffer and die because That’s The Way Things Are, and while I’m hardly about to mount a stirring defence of the type of pulp that reflexively stereotypes women squarely as being either victim, vixen, virgin or virago, at least it’s a mode of storytelling that leaves room for them survive and be happy.

As a film, Life is a failed hybrid: it’s pulp without the joy of pulp, realism as drab aesthetic instead of hard SF, horror without the characterisation necessary to make us feel the deaths. It’s a story about a rapacious tentacle-monster that violates mouths and bodies, and though the dialogue tries at times to be philosophical, the ending is ultimately hopeless. All of which is equally – almost identically – true of Alien: Covenant. Though the film evokes a greater sense of horror than Life, it’s the visceral horror of violation, not the jump-scare of existential terror inspired by something like Event Horizon. Knowing now that Prometheus was written by the man responsible for Passengers, a film which is ultimately the horror-story of a woman stolen and tricked by a sad, lonely obsessive into being with him, but which fails in its elision of this fact, I find myself deeply unsurprised. What is it about the grittification of classic pulp conceits that somehow acts like a magnet for sexist storytellers?

When I first saw Alien: Resurrection as a kid, I was ignorant of the previous films and young enough to find it terrifying. Rewatching it as an adult, however, I find myself furious at Joss Whedon’s decision to remake Ripley into someone unrecognisable, violated and hybridised with the thing she hated most. For all that the film invites us to dwell on the ugliness of what was done to Ripley, there’s a undeniably sexual fascination with her mother-monstrousness evident in the gaze of the (predominantly male) characters, and after reading about the misogynistic awfulness of Whedon’s leaked Wonder Woman script, I can’t help feeling like the two are related. In both instances, his approach to someone else’s powerful, adult female character is to render her a sex object – a predator in Ripley’s case, an ingenue in Diana’s – with any sapphic undertones more a by-product of lusty authorial bleedthrough than a considered attempt at queerness. The low and pulpy bar Whedon leaps is in letting his women, occasionally, live (though not if they’re queer or black or designated Manpain Fodder), and it says a lot about the failings of both Life and Alien: Covenant that neither of them manages even this much. (Yes, neither Miranda nor Daniels technically dies on screen, but both are clearly slated for terrible deaths. This particular nit is one ill-suited for picking.)

Is an SF film without gratuitous female death and violation really so much to ask for? I’m holding out a little hope for Luc Besson’s Valerian: City of a Thousand Planets, but I’d just as rather it wasn’t my only option. If we’re going to reinvent pulp, let’s embrace the colours and the silliness and the special effects and make the big extraordinary change some nuanced female characters and a lot of diverse casting, shall we? Making men choke on tentacles is subversive if your starting point is hentai, but if you still can’t think up a better end for women than captivity, pain and terror, then I’d kindly suggest you return to the drawing board.

from shattersnipe: malcontent & rainbows http://ift.tt/2syMhTb via IFTTT

[britshits]

do you think cis muns can play trans/nb chars? i know this opinion varies but i remember coming across a post that said cis muns shouldn't and now i see a lot of that happening

boy, oh boy… this question …………………….. is like 110% up for debate ?? hell, im not 100% on where i personally stand bc there are legit SO MANY FACTORS ??? pls don’t read this thinking it’s gospel bc it’s truly not and ik this gon turn into some long ass semi-rant, so scroll for a tl;dr, but … [ cracks knuckles ] let’s gO !

i’ll be 100% real n say that i am always, always going to be uber picky when i come across cis muns playing trans/nb muses. i instinctively raise my hackles and put everything they do under the microscope, mainly bc they ( obviously ) don’t have first-hand experience of the pressures / prejudices / issues / feelings etc. that are exclusive to our community, so they have a tendency to fall into all the harmful tropes when it comes to trans characters—and, without that innate understanding of our struggles, they don’t see how these things can be damaging. there’s also the whole issue of the media perpetuating this bs, so really, while research can do wonders, it’s never gonna be a catch-all solution.

that’s not to say i don’t think that cis people can write solid, unproblematic trans characters. i have most definitely met people who are cis who’ve played wonderful trans and/or non binary charries, whom i adored and would educate themselves and readily listen to any tips that i or other trans people gave them. i actually haven’t met a cis person who has played a non binary muse in a way i have an issue with so far. ik that there’s a general issue in the rpc with people changing their charrie from cis to nb to fill a ratio, which is a Mess and a Half, and ofc the assumption that the character’s assigned sex at birth matches that of the face claim. but, other than that nasty business, the majority of cis ppl playing nb charries are #tight and willing to learn, at least as far as i’ve experienced.

when it comes to binary trans muses tho … lmfa o ….. where do i even begin ?? like idk what it is about cis ppl but a lot of them are just absolutely OBSESSED with what’s goin on in a trans person’s pants ?? i mentioned this in another ask, but bruh… if i had a pound for every time some1 has fuckcin offhandedly brought up / alluded to my charrie’s downstairs configuration when we’re plotting, i’d have enough money to buy this blue hellsite and shut it tf down like i goddamn want to, but anyway !! the reason i bring this up is bc i see so many ppl who have this approach with their own characters—i.e. fetishising them. i mean if ur trans, u do u man, sexualising ur charrie is ur prerogative ?? but fuc k n cis ppl doing this…………………….. mmm hooo my go dd … do u realise how disgusting and nasty this shit is ??????? i mean trans ppl have enough shit w/ ppl sexualising us irl ( esp. trans women !! they literally have it so fuckn rough w/ tht i cant even begin 2 describe ) so like, leave it out of rp thx ???

but nope !!! y’all can’t do that !!!!!!!! (((((((((: tbh in the rpc, most of the bs seems to affect trans male muses, as far as i’ve seen. i think it’s partly bc trans female muses are so few and far between, which is an issue in and of itself, but also bc a lot of the rpc is so fuckin guilty of the nasty obsession with m/m ships. it’s usually cishet girls who pull this shit and they pull it w/ all males tbh, like they legit use gay guys as a fuckn object like “OMG !!!! GAYSZ !!! SO CUT E I LOVE THEM !!! COME SHIP W/ ME I LOVE GAY BOYZ !!! :’)” lmfaooo miss me w/ this shit !!! u wanna chat about lesbians being fetishised by cishet men and yet u only give a fuck about mlm when they’re being a cutesy lil otps or banging it out so u can flick ur bean hmm ?? i see u. but yeah, it’s not exclusively cishet girls who do this shit… like, cis ppl in general are pretty shit at playing trans males, specifically. like you’re lucky to find a single starter that isn’t tagged as “indie smut rp” or “indie gay rp” or if their threads aren’t laced with sexualised scenarios or worse… the dreaded C-Word. like bruh if ur not a trans male u literally have no business using that word regarding ur muse. ever.

tbh 99% of the time they don’t even realise just how gross they’re being, bc, as i mentioned before, they don’t have any concept of what it’s like to be trans and how gross and intrusive ppl can be towards us. they think that it’s just the same as writing any character and that they can sexualise them if they want to, without realising that .. it’s very different when you’re outside that community. you’re not exploring an aspect of your identity, so much as reducing someone else’s to a very, very small sector of theirs and then using it for entertainment.

tl;dr: it’s literally a clusterfuck of nope tbh and, on a personal lvl, i’m almost at the point of thinking it would be better if cis ppl don’t play trans charries, bc the bad far outweighs the good in terms of how harmful it can be. that said, i do not think that telling cis ppl not to play trans characters is the right thing to do, bc of the following:

the people who do the disgusting things i’ve mentioned above or anything else that’s nasty don’t listen to us anyway, so it’s not gonna solve that problem.

it reinforces the “write what you know” mantra, which i think we can all agree is so old n outdated in 2k17.

sometimes writing characters is how people manage to learn new things about themselves. i’ve actually met people who, through their character research, have realised that they identify as non binary or trans. having an outlet for feelings they may be having really helps some ppl along.

lastly, and what i personally believe to be the crux of this issue, is that by trying to police something like this you are essentially forcing disclosure of ooc gender. not everyone is comfortable or ready to say they are trans or they may not be sure about their gender identity at all, so forcing them to make it known for the sake of playing a character is not okay. and, ofc, we have the obvious addition that ppl lie, so you’re relying on good faith to carry it out.

so yeah, that’s my v. long-winded two cents on the matter. i have a feeling i’ve missed some details, but it’s 3am and i need to be up by like 9:30 so that’s all for now !! feel free to drop me another question if i’ve fuckt anything up or u would like clarification on anything !