#i don't think i'm depressed and i don't think any sane person would like. disagree with me there.

[dykethang]

does anyone else feel like this. or is it just me

[the-golden-vanity]

💚 for the Terror. 💖🧡 and 📖 (but chapter(s) instead of entire book(s)) for Moby Dick

💚: What does everyone else get wrong about your favorite character?

Ooh, it's time to make some enemies.

I really, really dislike the popular fanon characterizations of James Fitzjames. Depending on what particular flavor of queer a fanwork is depicting him as, the kind of... shallow femininity that gets forced on him makes me MASSIVELY uncomfortable. It often comes across as somewhere between homophobic and misogynistic caricature, personality stripped away and replaced with a pretty dress.

I can see where this started, though—the pre-Carnivale dress scene is something that's very important to a lot of Terror fans, and perhaps something that endeared them to a character whose Empire-loving, glory-hounding, "the atrocities I've committed are fun table conversation"-believing ways are (hopefully) unsympathetic to a modern audience. Still, I'd like to see more fanworks engage with that side of James Fitzjames—the tool of an empire that can never love him back.

This isn't to say I don't love queer or trans readings of Fitzjames! I just want to see the character still be a glory-hounding veteran of an imperialist war, and someone I can still believe would shoot rockets at bears.

💖: Already answered here!

🧡: What is a popular (serious) theory you disagree with?

I had to think about this one for a bit. I'd say it's the take that I see floating around on the Internet a lot that Moby-Dick is cosmic horror. If we're taking cosmic horror to mean the horror of the incomprehensible, the impossibly alien, the Things Man Was Not Meant To Know, then there is exactly one chapter that fits the bill—"The Castaway", which includes maybe my favorite passage of the whole book.

However, almost the entire rest of the book is our narrator-protagonist making sense of the whale, as if knowing everything he can about it is his way of coping with the devastating trauma of losing everyone he spent two years of his life living with.

It's almost reverse cosmic horror—rather than a sane man going mad from coming face to face with an incomprehensible monstrosity, our mentally ill (traumatized/depressed/bipolar/open to interpretation) protagonist makes meaning for himself by learning to comprehend the monstrosity.

📖: If you had to remove one chapter from the book, which would you choose?

Ooh, that's a good question. And a hard one.

Moby-Dick is, rather famously, full of chapters upon chapters of whale facts, some of which are even true. I will not be getting rid of any of those. Those are load-bearing whale facts. You pull them out, and the book collapses into a respectable revenge tragedy, rather than the earth-shattering psychological epic that it is. The whale facts represent both the fact that for long stretches of a sea voyage, nothing particularly exciting is going on, and you have time to contemplate things like the immense scarred brow of the whale, and also that this story is being told by a traumatized man who's going off on tangents because he really doesn't want to get around to the part of the story where he loses everything and all of his friends die.

If I had to get rid of one chapter, it would probably be "The Town Ho's Story". Of all the ill omens and tales of woe that the Pequod's crew encounter on their fateful final voyage, this one drags out longest and (to me) was one of the less memorable. However, I'm sure it's probably someone's favorite chapter. Many of them are.

Thank you so much, @georges-chambers/@alienmythologist! You gave me much to think about.

Ask me for my unpopular opinions about boat stories!

[asetoblog]

You know, Final Fantasy 7 is one of my favourite games ever (my top favs are HZD/HFW, all games involving FF7 and - although it's getting worse - Dragon Age) and I would like to write about something that doesn't sit right with me.

Warning: this post is a Sephiroth apology‼️🌸

So, remember the end of FF7 Remake, where Cloud & Co get to the end of the Midgar highway and they meet Sephiroth? In that exact moment, Aerith tells him "you're wrong", marking the word "wrong". She doesn't mean he's wrong about something, she literally means his whole existence is wrong and he shouldn't have been there or anywhere else in the first place.

Now, that remark rubbed me the wrong way, because Aerith is the only character connected to the Planet in this story and she's supposed to be very empathetic of what and how people suffer. She also lived in the Shinra building during her childhood and she hated it, she perfectly knows how things work there and she loathes - rightfully so - professor Hojo, because she knows what an unscrupulous and ruthless man he is. This would mean she met a younger Sephiroth at some point, and yeah she was still a child, but she must've noticed he was a kind and actually very submissive guy (maybe I'll get to this later???). I think she knows he too was subjected to experiments, just like she was, but this doesn't seem to bother her and she goes straight to saying something on the line of "you shouldn't exist".

In another moment in FF7 Rebirth, you can get a dialogue with Tifa in which she tells you she is "sick of Sephiroth cruelty [...]" and so on. Now, I agree with her, all she got from Sephiroth was her dad's death, wouldn't you be fucking pissed at him and hate him and want him dead? Yeah.

Thing is, I agree with Tifa and disagree with Aerith, but all of this makes me wonder: have they thought what a horrible and traumatic life Sephiroth had until that point?

Sephiroth:

-was born an experiment

-was taken away from his own mother, never met her

-doesn't even know his father

-as a child, he's shy and submissive, never gets any friends, he thus grows up lonely

-he spends most of his life in Hojo's lab, among Mako energy, needles and treatments

-no one ever showed him affection nor love, he was simply raised like a weapon in the hands of the most powerful corporation of the world

-his only two friends, as an adult, abandoned him

-one of his two best friends tells him the truth about him without the hint of some tact, he also calls him "monster" not knowing he's feeding the "insane gene" (let's call it that) in him

-the only new friend he gets, a recruit, jumps straight to conclusions instead of trying to help him

-he always said he wanted a "normale life" and he was forced into that. He also was one step away from leaving Shinra before the accident of Nibelheim happened

There's actually more to point out, but let's just take a step back and think about how an entire life of traumas, deprivation and loneliness can drive a person wild and cause Personality Disorders, Depression and Psychosis. I'm honestly surprised he even endured so much for so long and that would mean he'd be ok if only someone really cared for him and didn't see him as a "hero", a "star" or someone unreachable. His snapping point was reading all the history of Gast and Hojo's experiments and learning more about Jenova. That, sadly, adds up to the trauma he has to face and he even cries about it, meaning he was definitely still (emotionally) sane. Perhaps, it would have taken only one word of comfort but not even Zack was there for him, instead he acted a little harsh, in my opinion.

By this I don't mean things had to go differently, because otherwise I wouldn't have had one of my favourite stories out there, I'm just trying to point out how deplorable Aerith's comment sounds, especially knowing she's so caring and empathetic. I just don't like tha fact that such a dialogue line was written, but at the end I am but a humble Sephiroth apologist.

"You're wrong". No, Sephiroth is not wrong, all the people who surrounded him were.