#has this discussion come and gone

[swagspren]

“The King was Dalinar’s Tien” in WoR is truly such a ???? line/ moment . That realization is given so much gravitas but it’s like actually what are you on about that makes no sense

[lovereadandwrite]

my bby has done nothing wrong ever in his 1000 years of life THIS IS SLANDER !!!😩😬

[kiraman]

are people aware of the fact that Mizu is not canonically in any way shape or form.............. queer....bi.....

(quick note here because reading comprehension stays dead and people may not read the tag novel: I want bi Mizu! I hc her as sapphic! I love sapphic Mizu)

[dude-iloveu]

wouldn't it be nice to obsess over that aromantic man as his own character rather than a part of a ship once in a while? :)

[clownsalot]

im very normal about fuuta in general but i dont think im ever going to emotionally recover from his fire motif and what it represents for his character and how he reflects the greater theme of justice so that means i must rant about it

(more under the cut because this got longer than i expected whoopsies)

so anyway fire is pretty obviously supposed to be symbolic of his passion for justice right? that fire is all over the place in bring it on. he's wielding it to take down enemies, his signature weapon is a flaming sword. it's what he uses to lead the campaign against the people he's after, the people he's deemed in the wrong.

it's a fucking flaming sword, it's badass as hell!!!! it's what a hero of justice, a knight, would use!!!! it's cool as shit, it's his symbol of justice.

that's how he sees his justice in trial 1.

he's righteous, he wants so badly to believe he was a hero, he was doing it all for a good cause, for justice. his passion for justice was a tool he used to meet those ends, to be a hero, to wave it valiantly in the face of enemies.

the fire, however, is conspicuously absent once he's noticed the blood on his hands

interestingly, despite backdraft as a song title being much more related to his fire motif than bring it on, fire is actually surprisingly absent from the mv's visuals. fire, as in actual orange burning fire, doesn't show up much at all in backdraft except for when both fuuta and his victim begin turning to ashes, and a short bit near the end right after the last chorus when the spraycan explodes in fuuta's face. you know what the mv does show a lot of though?

smoke. and ash. the byproducts of a fire, the byproducts of fuuta's passion for justice.

bringing it back to firefighting for a moment: as many people have already pointed out, backdraft as a firefighting term refers to when a fire that has consumed all available oxygen suddenly explodes when more oxygen is made available, such as when a window or door breaks. the thing about fire hazards, though, is if the fire and the heat don't do someone in, usually it's the smoke. the smoke inhalation causes breathing difficulties and suffocation, making it even more difficult for a person to escape the fire.

in backdraft, instead of fire itself, what we're shown is these byproducts of a fire. the smoke is damaging to human health, and the ash shows that the fire has burned things up and caused destruction, in this case killing someone. all we're shown is the negative results of a fire, in sharp contrast to its badass, positive portrayal in bring it on.

hell, even fuuta himself starts turning to ashes and the spraycan explodes in his face, showing how even he is experiencing the negative results of a fire that has gotten out of his control, how even he has gotten burned by his passion for justice. or, is it es' desire for justice?

translation of fuuta's t2 vd by onigiriico

Me, too! I was like that, too! I also didn't think it'd turn out that way!

You and I are exactly the same breed! The only difference between us is the clothes we're wearing.

fuuta's justice and es' justice, it's all the same in his head now, he directly tells es that they're the same, that we're the same. it's all the same hunger for justice that ends up causing harm even if that wasn't the intention.

you know that saying that fire is a good servant but a bad master? i think that's pretty applicable to fuuta's situation. his passion for the pursuit of justice was great when it was still a tool, a sword he could wield, after all he did manage to shed light on some people's wrongs and bring them to justice. but once it exploded, when it became a backdraft that even he could no longer control, it did more damage than he intended.

it burned even him, it killed a middle schooler. and he recognizes that in backdraft. he only shows us the ways fire that becomes a hazard can go wrong.

translation of fuuta's t2 vd by onigiriico

What did I do? All I did was say that what's wrong is wrong! I was just going off at a bad person online!

I didn't think they would die! I just thought that wrong things are wrong, and that a crime is a crime! You get that, don't you? See? Aren't we the same?

it's just. fire is such a good metaphor for the message of fuuta's character and his arc. it's an amazing illustration of how dangerous it is when you feed a desire for justice too much, when you forget to put a boundary on how you handle that fire. eventually the fire spreads just like how passion for justice becomes zealotry, until more and more things fall under what you consider to be 'punishable' by your standards and goes out of control to hurt people that probably didn't deserve it. it's a warning to set proper boundaries on our own definition and desire for justice and what's 'right' so the good intentions doesn't spiral into harm. it's a reflection of our attitudes towards milgram as the audience responsible for their justice and forgiveness. it's amazing i love it i love fuuta's fire symbolism i love fuuta's character arc and i love milgram's writing so so so much

[difeisheng]

it's been about three months since mysterious lotus casebook finished airing, and in reflecting on my initial reaction to the ending versus now, what's changed most for me during that time is that i'm far less concerned with whether the person we knew as li lianhua is physically alive or dead. he could be in either state. i don't know which, and i don't find it as interesting to choose one over revelling in ambiguity. what's more important to my personal reading of canon now is that li lianhua, as a persona and a mask, no longer exists.

like li xiangyi, although the man might still carry breath, li lianhua is dead in the eyes of the narrative. that phase of life— the life assigned to someone who tried not to be or want more than a ghost— is over. if you choose to believe that the person standing on the beach in the epilogue truly exists in the flesh, there to reunite with fang duobing and di feisheng? in my opinion, that's not li lianhua. he's someone new with a different name, freed of past chains. the man who wears his face may yet live, but if he cannot completely shake loose the expectations people placed on the past versions of him, then no one including himself can move on.

li lianhua must be dead by the end of the story.

[carefulfears]

thinking about how expectant of her own death scully always was, but how completely struck by shock she was in mulder’s, despite how clear it had always been that he would one day die for the cause. tragedy in the x-files as something you should have been prepared for, but never could be, in scully standing at a funeral, as her mother had stood at her father’s, and barely being able to speak. she should be able to do this? bred to be a war widow, attached to an endless line. but no matter how many times she saw him put that gun to himself, or run off in front of another, she really did believe that he would always come back. she really did believe that there would never be a day where he didn’t just appear in the doorway again.

[voidscreamns]

./

[isfjmel-phleg]

Rebekah's social battery: 0%

[kveom]

so I saw people on reddit talking about the woozi situation (and this was specifically about woozi since it was in the seventeen sub) and I'm just????? people are calling it a non-issue because censorship, you don't know how much he's watched etc. and I understand not labelling him as a p*dophile but you can't just call it a non-issue because of all those ^ things because maybe he didn't watch the censored version?? Maybe he finished it and enjoyed it?? AND a big 'get a fucking life' to those people who think this is just some personal unwarranted hate towards woozi. "Ur not a real carat the boys told us to trust them!!!!!" NO

[tardis--dreams]

Feeling homicidal at work today ♡

[dreamsy990]

fuck akuroku as a ship btw not only because its pedophilic because thats obviously a huge issue. but also i think we should be able to have platonic relationships with the same amount of devotion as any romance. not everyone who loves each other is in love DEREK.

[thedreadvampy]

oh boy the depression hole is deep and it is muddy

hahaha I fell into the classic trap! overidentify with your job and considering leaving it will trigger an existential crisis!!!!

[vitiateoriginator]

Had my usual session yesterday and my therapist was like "would you be interested in having our sessions weekly instead of our current setup?" 😳

[catkin-morgs-kookaburralover]

I hope my brother can arrange something so he can bear me part of the journey home after this week is all over and done because I am starting to suspect I will not be a safe driver and it could pose an unacceptably high risk that I'll semi-accidentally drive off the road.

[dylanconrique]

update chicago fire family, i've jumped ahead to episode 5x08, and i wasn't feeling well the past couple of days, so i didn't have it in me to actively live blog the experience whoops 😅