#fine to RB tho

[the-bearer-of-bad-ideas]

and now for the fun monthly game of Do I Actually Want To Be Fucking Dead Or Is It Just That Stupid Organ? the gameshow where you lose more than you win

[explosionshark]

Oh yeah and sorry for the spam but I was looking through my notes and I think I forgot to mention it but in Who Am I, the contrast between the Faith/Riley intimacy scene and how freaked out Faith was by it and the much more wholesome and good for each other intimacy of the Willow/Tara magic scene that was in between them that was real good.

okay yeah i think this was a brilliant choice the show made.

i also think the depiction of faith's sexuality on the show is deeply and obviously troubled but kind of incidentally a little bit genius?

under the cut to discuss issues of sexual assault and some of the darker things the show has implied about faith

like to be clear i think that the way the show often equates faith's desire for sex with her evilness sucks and is bad.

but i also think the kind of hyper-sexuality we see from her fits in very well with all of the very strong implications that she's a victim of CSA.

i've talked about this before, but i can't find any of the posts on my blog so forgive me for repeating any points

but there's a lot of alarming details that point to faith being a CSA survivor. she makes a lot of comments about her mom's predatory boyfriends, there's the "let me stay the night, promise i won't try anything" line she mocks, there's hitting on giles, in later seasons she makes reference to events that could have only happened pre-sunnydale involving a man who asked her to dress like a school girl. all of it paints a pretty horrible picture, especially compounded with all of the implied details of the physical abuse faith suffered at her mother's hands.

so you have a young girl with a horrific background of abuse and victimization and then you give her powers but no stability, no support - is it any wonder she went dark? when faith's relationship to power has always been the ones who have it make the rules and everyone else just deals with it?

because i think this is something you see explicitly in the way faith transgresses against xander and riley.

with xander in particular, it's like. the scene where she assaults him begins with him asking to come in "just to talk, i swear" to which she replies "think you could make something happen if i didn't want it to?" which is just. a horrible bit of foreshadowing, and very telling as a first reaction. it's actually a great precursor to the riley stuff, because xander shows up and tries to connect with her emotionally. he tries to imply that he knows her, that he cares, and her immediate reaction is to dissect that genuine offer of support for the ways that it must be an attempt to manipulate her. he wants to brag that he had sex with her, or else he's trying to trick her into sleeping with him again. she denies that they have a connection because "it's just skin" which is fundamental to the way she thinks about sex. it's a tool - it offers relief or power, but not anything else.

"what do you want to do with this body?" is what faith asks riley. "am i a bad girl? do you wanna hurt me?" i mean it's not hard to read into this. fucking riley isn't about riley, it's another one of faith's weird sexual proxy deals with buffy and it's about being buffy and it's about dicking buffy over. when riley is kind and genuine in bed, when he tells 'buffy' that he loves her is when faith starts to flip out because the script she keeps trying to lay over buffy's life keeps breaking. she flips out, gets panicky, tells him "this is meaningless" in an effort to reassert something she believes to be true about sex -- that it's a tool of power with, at best, an inauthentic veneer of intimacy.

if there's one specific turning point in faith's post-graduation day redemption arc it's here. THIS is when she starts to realize she's fucked up, that her entire worldview was wrong.

to accept that she was wrong about about sex is to accept that she was wrong about power. it means the narrative of her life is all wrong. that she was hurt by her mother and by men who preyed on her was not, in fact, the uncaring laws of power in action but deliberate acts of cruelty that needlessly victimized her. it also means that every fucked up thing she's done to buffy, and xander, and angel, and riley, and everyone else is, in fact, her fault. she loses the ability to hide behind a law of the universe - we're not at full accountability yet, but this is where it starts.

right here:

when Faith stumbles out of bed, trembling and panicking, and Riley asks "what happened?"

"nothing," faith says, stricken. she says it twice, actually. the second time sounds like more of a lie.

[obligatory disclaimer here wrt the fact that consent here is. a messy thing to talk about. given that this whole post is in regards to fictional characters and that the sex between riley and faith is 1) not framed as rape 2) utterly and completely fantastical given that it's facilitated by the use of a magic artifact i've avoided using the language of irl sexual assault to discuss it. ymmv]

[butchfalin]

the funniest meltdown ive ever had was in college when i got so overstimulated that i could Not speak, including over text. one of my friends was trying to talk me through it but i was solely using emojis because they were easier than trying to come up with words so he started using primarily emojis as well just to make things feel balanced. this was not the Most effective strategy... until. he tried to ask me "you okay?" but the way he chose to do that was by sending "👉🏼👌🏼❓" and i was so shocked by suddenly being asked if i was dtf that i was like WHAT???? WHAT DID YOU JUST SAY TO ME?????????? and thus was verbal again

[lilyminer]

The back pains still haven’t gone away, fuck. Another reason I kin that old man ig.

[dizzybizz]

hawthorne sprite HAWTHORNE SPRITE!!!!!!!! yippee

[seaweedstarshine]

Late to the game as I’ve kinda been kinda non-here for a minute but I scrolled through the Dot and Bubble tag, and thought I wanted to write this post into existence.

There's this part in Doctor Who Unleashed where RTD says this:

“What we can’t tell is how many people will have worked that out before the ending. Because they’ve seen white person after white person after white person, and television these days is very diverse. I wonder, will you be ten minutes into it, will you be fifteen, will you be twenty, before you start to think, everyone in this community is white. And if you don’t think that — why didn’t you? So, that’s gonna be interesting. I hope it’s one of those pieces of television you see, and always remember.”

And I'm like. Yeah. But the reason this works even as well as it does is largely thanks to the work of the previous showrunner with the previous creative team, which was notably the first era to have any writers of color (amongst other firsts in terms of inclusivity in directors, composer, actors). While Chibnall fumbled whenever he tried to write about race himself, he did have the self-awareness to have Black and South Asian writers writing the episodes where race is the focus (and a female writer for the episode where sexism is a focus; my point is, he seemed to know his shortcomings).

I wonder what the current creative team looks like? (not really, but I wasn't 100% sure for all of them)

To quote RTD:

“...before you start to think, everyone in this community is white.”

This is pretty non-self-aware, right? It's pretty “It is said, and I understand this, there was a history of racism with the original Toymaker, the Celestial Toymaker, who had ‘celestial,’ and I did not know this, but ‘celestial’ can mean of Chinese origin, but in a derogatory way,” right? (from The Giggle Unleashed) It's pretty “and I had problems with that, and a lot of us on the production team had problems with that: associating disability with evil,” right? (from Destination Skaro Unleashed)

—none of which are issues that should be overlooked, but think how much exponentially better they might’ve been addressed if he’d consulted with Chinese writers and wheelchair-using writers before going straight to giving the Toymaker weird fake accents and making Davros walk?

How many Black or non-white people do we think saw the Dot and Bubble script before it landed in Ncuti’s hands?

And this just keeps happening.

And like, from some of the shocked responses I've seen from white viewers to the ending of Dot and Bubble, maybe the episode's unsubtlety was needed? From the way RTD talks about it in Unleashed, the episode was written with a white audience in mind, Baby's First Microaggressions (where of course the microaggressions come from people who are pretty self-admittedly white supremacists). Ricky September, a more seemingly normal depiction of someone in the racist bubble of Finetime, seemed like an interesting element, up until the way he died.

The ending worked for me, because I do think the Doctor's reaction is true to how the Doctor would react. I just keep thinking of how much better the core themes could've been handled by someone with actual lived experience on the subject matter.

[xumoonhao]

pixel art carat bong 💎

[rexscanonwife]

btw here's some Brea and Kepler doodles I did at work and never posted ✌️

[httpiastri]

If mercedes ends up getting max, then where would kimi go???

stay in f2 😁 very good 😁 everyone liked that

[villainsidestep]

“you sure do love writing whole essays in those tags” weeping sobbing etc etc

[the--highlanders]

obvs I'm aware that disney just has the reproduction rights outside the uk, and the show will still be produced by bad wolf/the bbc, but ngl I am kind of concerned that there'll be some pressure on the show to fall into line and stay palatable. even indirectly.

like, doctor who deserves to be weird and out there!!! it deserves to be queer it deserves to be political it deserves to be challenging. and I'm not sure that's what disney would want it to be, and I certainly don't trust them not to throw their weight around in the interests of keeping it profitable

[lavenderteacat]

job hunting is actually such a specific form of psychological torture. just give me money and health insurance pls I want to focus on writing fanfic again........

[transsexualsubstantiation]

fuck it. post shower pics for the tl

[lyriumlullaby-ao3]

alright buds, i wanna hear about your halloween plans!! what are we wearing, what are we watching, where we going and with whom??? lay it on me 💖

[justablah56]

damn I miss playing wolves in my friend's back yard .... rb to play wolves with your mutuals in their back yard<3

[cannibalismyuri]

all's fair (war and peace)

kisses on cheeks and necks and collarbones and fingers / hands on necks pushing me to my best and on my arm pulling me away from the battle and on my face shielding me from my true self / your mouth bruised and bit and divided and conquered while your hands granted me temporary hope and a fucked up nostalgic dissonance from the real world / practice what you preach, i used to tell you / the difference between your preaching and practice never really existed as a discernable distance, but rather a manifestation of fatal hubris staining the cracks of your mantras / love is war and fair, and peace is unrequited and unattainable / the caverns of your love were too enormous for me too even begin to explore the subtleties of it / the vines of my preconceived notions must have wrapped around your throat as you choked out your repeated stories about gratefulness and being sated with the minimum i was given so that i'd never dare hope for more / when you vanished into the humid mist of the mystery that was so inherently you that i never learned to question it, the gasoline left by your presence burned. and it burned bright in the dark and harsh on my skin / your love wasn't fair or unrequited or unattainable. your love wasn't war or peace. your love was elemental / earth, air, fire, wind, water / your love was all-encompassing and destructive, and i drowned in it.