#flashback to safety

[turtleblogatlast]

Small but significant character moments that I actually really adore are from both the times we see the boys as tots. There is a reoccurrence that happens in both of them that I find so incredibly interesting.

For the turtle tot short, Splinter leaves the boys with weapons. In the short, Raph is the one who suggests they do “what Lou Jitsu would do” and Leo is the one who takes point when Splinter comes back to reprimand them. Leo, in taking point, is the one to defend them and get Splinter off their tails.

And then, in the flashback regarding the Kuroi Yōroi helmet, Raph is the one who grabs and throws “Skully” as a way to replace their missing ball which breaks it into pieces, but Leo is the one who speaks for the group and rushes into action to fix the teapot.

I love this for multiple reasons, but the biggest are how it shows that Raph has always been inclined toward the bold and fun and making the plans to include his brothers in what he loves and believes they’d love, whereas Leo has always been inclined to be the “Face” of the group and shoulder the attention even if it’s potentially negative all while coming up with on the spot attempts to fix the situation.

[deeva-arud]

Ohh Playful Land Deeva save me

[gordon-freeman-phd]

It's time to suit up, Gordon.

[the-obnoxious-sibling]

“Being a pirate is all about going your own way.” // “Come with me, Buggy!!”

is this post totally redundant after the similar post i made last week? idk. i guess the main difference is that this time i’m looking at the same topic in an unambiguously romantic light? the shipper goggles, as they say, are on, and i want to talk about these scenes in that context. so, if you’ll forgive me for repeating myself a bit, let’s talk about this again:

as much as i enjoy the heartbreak of “they always thought they’d be together but miscommunication tore them apart” takes on shanks/buggy, the very first flashback we get about them—the first things we learn about them at all, really—tells us this isn’t true.

and i think what we get is more romantic.

Chapter 19, Pages 12-13. i know last time i said they’re at most 12 here, but looking at these lanky-ass teenaged designs that’s nuts. i fully believe oda hadn’t thought through their ages/the timeline at this point, and they were originally supposed to be about luffy’s age when buggy got his devil fruit. which is not relevant to this post in any way, but it’s my post so i get to go off-topic if i want.

Shanks and Buggy have their own goals as pirates, and at this time they understand them to be mutually incompatible. Buggy thinks Shanks’ travel-and-adventure-oriented take on piracy is soft and foolish; Shanks doesn’t care for Buggy’s exclusively treasure-focused take. They’re sometimes friendly, sometimes not, they’ve fought side by side, but they know this time as allies and crewmates is temporary. (Buggy plans on taking his treasure map and the Devil Fruit and leaving the crew immediately.) Maybe they’ll become friendly rivals, ‘fighting to the finish’ when they run into each other like Roger and Whitebeard do, or maybe the next time they see each other they’ll literally fight to the finish. Who knows?

“That’s also what being a pirate is all about.” It’s very sensible behavior. Smart planning for the future.

Which means the contradictory ways they act later—Buggy secretly deciding to follow Shanks, Shanks bluntly asking Buggy to come with him—are not about these characters thoughtlessly clinging to the status quo. They are not in a “we were always together and I never thought that would change” situation. Deciding to stick together is a considered, emotional decision: “I know we don’t make sense together but I don’t care, I want us together anyway.”

Chapter 1082, Pages 8-9. i was cursed the moment i saw these pages with Unable To Stop Thinking About It disease; only time will tell if seeing it animated makes it worse or cures me.

This argument is a codependent breaking point. Buggy’s pinned all his dreams on Shanks, hoisted that poor boy up on a pedestal, and it all falls apart when Shanks reveals thoughts and plans that don’t match Buggy’s perception of him. He can’t bear to be around him now that the false image has been revealed. (Shanks, poor thing, seems to have had no idea any of this was happening.)

But if Shanks hadn’t said no to Laugh Tale in this moment—or maybe if he’d offered a soft no of, idk, “okay, sure, once we’ve got a strong enough crew”—Buggy would have gone with him, still projecting wildly onto Shanks. He’d convinced himself that being a member of the Pirate King’s crew was enough for him, that he didn’t need to be Pirate King himself if Shanks got the title and he was with Shanks.

…but would he have actually liked being a member of that crew?

Like, looking at the things the Red-Haired Pirates do, would Buggy have enjoyed being one of them? Wandering East Blue, hanging out in friendly port towns, collecting treasure here and there but spending a lot of time getting drunk and making friends with the locals? Eventually becoming famous for having a large, weak fleet of subordinate pirate crews Shanks has to sometimes physically step in and protect?

God, no, he’d’ve been miserable. Just seething with thwarted ambition, furious at the perceived disrespect. A real power hungry first officer stereotype, the kind of character that makes you think, Why’s he working for this guy if he hates him so much?

And Buggy must have suspected it would go something like that. But if Shanks hadn’t rejected Laugh Tale, he would’ve gone with him anyway.

(Better to be miserable with you than a loser on my own.)

Or say Buggy agreed to come with Shanks. Obviously his presence wouldn’t change the crew makeup significantly enough to skew the Red-Haired Pirates towards his way of thinking, but for the sake of argument: if he had convinced Shanks to do things his way, would Shanks have enjoyed the kind of piracy Buggy engages in? Taking over and destroying East Blue port towns, ordering your crew killed on a furious whim, single-mindedly hunting down treasure maps and single-mindedly hunting down treasure chests and paying no attention to anything along the journey? Eventually becoming the boss and administrator for a bunch of bounty hunters and mercenaries?

No way; most of that behavior is totally repellant to Shanks. If he let Buggy do that kind of thing under his banner, you’d be left wondering What happened to his morals? Why does he let this guy walk all over him?

And Shanks knew the kind of pirate Buggy was and wanted to be. But he asked Buggy to come with him anyway.

(Better to be miserable with you than have fun apart.)

It’s hard to see a way to make these very different styles of pirating work together. It’s probably doable… with a lot of compromise and honest conversation. The younger Shanks and Buggy had a point, when they said each going their own way was the obvious choice! It was certainly the easier one. Was it the happier one? Who can say.

[everymadara]

Chapter 624

[engagemythrusters]

dogma didn't want to do a portrait but tup and kix made him… and there's only so many flashes he can take before it looks like war.

[frecklystars]

sorry for the long ass post but this has always my favorite scene in the entire film - for obvious reasons - and im so glad greta talked about it and the way she worded it made me laugh so hard i had tears in my eyes. haha... god. my boyfriend sobbing his eyes out over the metaphorical crusts on his patriarchy sandwich......

[wraithsoutlaws]

Screaming about the response you gave me LORD I love those two psychos

Any fun facts you’d like to share but haven’t told us yet??

hmm there is an ongoing rotation of Stuff About Them always playing in my mind but im always so bad at thinking of them when asked kdmdkdkd but there is one thing I keep coming back to while I replay some maelstrom gigs in the game and I dont *think* I've ever mentioned it. At some point Dagger is snooping around some files and stumbles across the database of gang initiations, like the recorded videos  of the optical procedure and medical write ups/complications/cyberpsycho concerns/etc for all the members and he's not really fazed by any this, he *knows* what it all entails and he's been around them long enough to understand what happens and the risks involved. curiosity gets the best of him and he ends up pulling up dum dum's file and watching a bit, and to his own suprise, it ends up really upsetting him. its a brutal, painful procedure with a lot of risks and minimal precautions taken (including no anesthesia) and while he could watch the others no problem, he has to turn this one off pretty quick. He ends up deleting the video too, and he never mentions it to dum dum, but it stays with him for a long time :)

the procedure goes well for dd all things considered but does result in some negative side effects: memory lapses to start. He has a hard time remembering specifics from his past before maelstrom but even his short term memory starts getting worse as he gets older. (Dagger helps him with little memory games which is kinda cute but they're both terrified of him losing everything. This has also led to dd recording a lot of interactions so he sort of his a digital scrapbook of moments between the two of them.) He also gets "stuck in time" sometimes, really vivid flashbacks, often of the procedure where the pain comes back full force and he doesn't know Dagger until it passes (usually a couple minutes but bad ones go longer). Dagger has aggressive night terrors and ptsd from his childhood so they really become each others anchors in these moments.

[im-still-watching-anime]

i’m Very Lesbian™️ but also have a really bad aversion to things with major focuses on food or eating so my brain’s been in a constant war forever over whether or not the dungeon meshi lesbians will be worth the food/eating focus of it🙃

[on-softs]

what’s the maxiel fic you’re working on? 👀❤️ if you want to shade

thanks for asking! it’s kind of unhinged

spoilers below the cut:

the premise is:

what if one day like four years from now for no apparent explicable reason

max verstappen

de-aged to like. three and a half. for ~24 hours. like right there while he was sitting on a bench in his driver’s room waiting to go out for free practice.

and what would that do, logistically, to the race of course, but also SPECIFICALLY what would that do to Daniel Ricciardo. who is washed up out of F1 by this point. and now has to care for his husband who is too young to even speak anything but Dutch yet!!!! cuz ya they are married : ) but that means this is all VERY scary for Daniel : (

it has been a bitch to finish. But I’m not far!! I hope!

[zukosdualdao]

i do actually really firmly believe the storm is one of the best episodes (if not straight up THE best episode) of the show

[leofrith]

yeaaaaaah not sure i care for this characterization of anakin to be honest

[unwelcome-ozian]

[simptasia]

@all-seeing-ifer​

they gave him a gun

[flyingpurplepeopleprogrammer]

content: communication, consent, and trauma

So there's a thing that happens in my play. A lot.

Some people I play with will feel themselves plummet, or feel a suggestion start to click in their brain just right, and they'll immediately, intensely, "oh no." They might pause. They might "red." They might freeze or hide or just need a minute. If I were to ask what they were feeling - if they were to answer - they might say it's discomfort, or fear, or panic.

So we'll do what we should do - the decent thing: we'll step back and check on their well-being. I might ask what's going on. And we might talk about it. Just a little "let's not do that" and on we go with other things.

Or maybe it's a bit less immediately dealt with. Maybe we need to communicate through yes-and-no questions and nodding or shaking rather than words. They might need to be comforted or they might need space, but figuring out which means communicating, so we start there.

And the thing is, after the communicating and the checking in - after establishing a boundary and learning that a boundary will be respected - suddenly everything's comfortable and lovely and fun again. Often, with established partners, we'll even find that that little reassurance that they are heard and are respected is all they needed to feel safe throwing themselves into every kind of dark, depersonalising, kinky depravity.

But it's still a need, and it needs to come before the kink.

For at at least a handful of people I've played with, they feel that rush of tumbling into a headspace or things clicking in their mind and - along with or instead of the joyful rush that's supposed to be for them - they find something they recognise, and it's awful. It's scary. Something bad is happening or about to happen, and it doesn't always matter if they think they're in a safe place and doing safe things they asked to do, it feels like they're about to do something they don't want.

See, I'm not the only kinky hypnotist in the world. I'm not the only partner my partners will have ever had. For some people, those best feelings evoke some of the worst memories. But it isn't stuck that way.

For my partners? We talk about it and we don't make it a shame or a deficit. You aren't bad for not being able to do a thing. We check where we are, what we're doing, and ask what we want to be doing.

And it turns out, often, that that horrible feeling goes away and - armed with agency and security - we're able to dive right into to just about anything. It doesn't matter if it's objectifying, depersonalising, scary, or what have you. It's the play we want, and that's the important thing.

I meant to write this post about how feeling safe and able to let yourself go can be hot as fuck and fun as hell - and it is - but here I've been on about trauma, flashbacks, and all how we do the do in the relationships I've had. There's a whole lot of other stuff there, too, that a person could write about. About the how of doing these things or the emotional mess that is triggering someone else - especially if you don't understand what's going on.

It doesn't have to be triggering and trauma - stopping play and making sure people are OK is something to know how to do and practice in general. It's really fucking important, so please, do it.

But that's all I've got for now. My tummy is demanding supper, and writing this ate a lot of emotional capacity. I hope it's worth reading for some of you lot.

[thisisyourdriverspeaking]

@ the race directors, remember the rule is that ALL lapped cars must be allowed to overtake or NONE