#im seriously disappointed

[gl1tzh]

im not a business major, heck im barely an adult and dont even know how to pay taxes, but one thing i know for sure: watcher is NOT gonna profit from this decision. it's bound to just make them all lose money.

i understand all their reasons but this idea is bad, like, bad awful. who even approved it???

[anewp0tat0]

i lied i had like atleast one more weston thought to expell from my brain, before i miss this boat entirely. we're heading to green lands woooo

[cosmicpoutine]

i think bernard dowd should be aroung the batfamily 24/7. not to help with their cases or anything, just to judge them for being absolutely fucking insane

[stromblessed]

Mizu's spectacles, and the levels of her disguise

In drafting some more Blue Eye Samurai meta posts, I find myself writing out the comparisons between what Mizu can and cannot hide about herself, and how that affects how she moves through the world.

Like, I get the jokes about Mizu's glasses, if only color contacts had existed back then, etc. etc., and I think (hope) that most viewers don't take the glasses jokes seriously, as in "I don't care about the suspension of disbelief because BES is a cartoon." But I wanted to write these thoughts out anyway without burying them in a text post about something else.

I think the points I'm going to lay out here are viewed very differently by different people, so please feel free to add to this post, reply, or put your thoughts in the tags!

Not only do Mizu's glasses not actually help her that much, there's surely more to Mizu's mixed race appearance than just the color of her eyes.

In my view, this was pointed out in episode 1:

I'm willing to bet most of us were expecting young Taigen to say "blue eyes," not "ROUND eyes."

Obviously this is still about Mizu's eyes, but not even spectacles can hide their shape.

I don't think the show is obligated to point out everything about Mizu's face that isn't quite as Japanese as the people around her expect. Though the creators have said that they specifically designed Mizu - and her clothes - to read both as "white" and as "Japanese," as well as both male and female. I think there's more about Mizu's features that read as "white" than just her eyes.

This is where my own headcanons start entering the picture, but it's my impression that people can just tell that Mizu looks different, whether or not they can put a finger on exactly how.

There's the little girl who looks at Mizu and then hides on the way into Kyoto:

When there's more to your face you'd like to cover up than just your eyes, big hats are a big help!

By the way, most of these examples have to come from the first half of the season, since by the second half, either Mizu is too preoccupied with fighting henchmen, or everyone Mizu is facing knows who she is already, and she therefore has no reason to hide her mixed race identity.

It's worth mentioning that the mere fact that Mizu has to hide multiple aspects of her identity - her mixed race and her sex - results in her having to choose clothes that really, really cover her up, which doesn't win her any favors either:

(Zatoichi reference, anyone?)

If it were as easy as, for example, tying her glasses to her head and wa-lah, nobody would ever know she was half-white - then (1) Mizu would've just done that long ago, and (2) Mizu wouldn't be so on guard and on tenterhooks 100% of the time the way she's depicted in the show, even when her glasses are on.

Her spectacles sure don't help her in the brothel, which is full of observant women who are trying to seduce her, meaning they get good long looks at her:

Mizu never takes her glasses off, but they still send a woman to her who has light eyes, thinking that must be what will interest a blue-eyed man:

No wonder Mizu gets mad after this, lol

So Mizu never takes her spectacles off in the brothel, it's dimly lit inside, and the women can still tell that she has blue eyes. I'm getting the sense that Mizu putting on her spectacles isn't a guarantee that people suddenly can't tell that she looks different.

And yet no one spots that she's female.

Mizu can hide her breasts, can wear her hair in the right style, can hide what's between her legs, can walk and talk and behave like a man - and she's been doing it for almost her entire life, to the point that not only is she very good at it, but the threat of being found out as female is deadly, but isn't presented in the show as omnipresent.

Let me explain.

She threatens Ringo for nearly saying the word "girl" out loud, because while she's constantly ostracized for being mixed race, being a woman traveling without a chaperone, carrying a sword, and disguised as a man will get her killed or flogged or arrested or some combination of these things.

But in addition, it's been drilled into her since she was a child that if she is discovered as female, the combination of her being mixed race and female will identify her as someone extremely specific, someone known to some bad people, and she will be killed:

I think of it as Mizu thinking to herself, "Being found out as mixed race means I'm treated badly. Being found out as mixed race and a woman means I'm dead."

Mizu's hair is cut as a child. But she isn't made to wear a big hat, or cover her eyes somehow, or anything like that. Because hiding her sex is a more successful endeavor than hiding her race.

Ringo finds out she's female by accident, but once Mizu accepts the fact that he won't rat her out, she relaxes pretty early on in the season. Because the threat of being found out as female is mitigated pretty much 99.9%, since Mizu has gotten so good at being a man. And also, because most of the time, people see what they want to see. Even if Mizu's face makes her stand out as "not 100% Japanese," no one in the world of BES looks at Mizu's clothes, her bearing, her sword, hears her voice, and will ever in a million years conclude that she is a woman, because expectations around gender roles in the Edo period were so rigid and so widely enforced.

One detail that proved this to me is after the Four Fangs fight:

Ringo takes off Mizu's clothes so he can stitch her up, then leaves her clothes off even after he's done. He doesn't even throw her cloak over her as a blanket or anything. There's a little a straw (pallet?) as a divider there on the left, but anyone could just peek around it and see Mizu and her chest bindings. (I think it's mostly there as a windbreaker.)

And Taigen is right there, but he doesn't give a shit:

Opinions probably vary hugely on this, but my impression is that because the show doesn't make any kind of deal about Taigen being in the room with Mizu here, my guess is that Mizu isn't in any danger of Taigen thinking she's female. Even when I watched the show for the first time, I assumed that Taigen had seen Mizu out of her clothes here, and that he thought nothing of it.

Eat your heart out, Li Shang (Mulan 1998). I actually do think that this scene is a direct and purposeful side-eye to that movie, lol

There's obviously some nuance to how "severe" being mixed race is compared to how "severe" being a woman is for Mizu:

After all, Swordfather can't bear to listen to Mizu confess to being a woman.

So a Japanese man can go wherever he wants, whenever he wants in BES. A Japanese woman has limited options: marriage, religion, or a brothel. A mixed-race man is an eyesore in this story. A mixed-race woman is a death sentence.

May as well eliminate the female aspect, and do what you can about the mixed-race aspect. Because that's just realistic.

Meaning Mizu can avoid the strictures Edo society places on women. But she can't avoid the repercussions that come with being mixed race. And I truly don't think that it's just because "there's no brown contacts yet."

[itsagoodluckkiss]

Anyways, another MENA erasure from roles of characters that are middle eastern and one of the producers of season 2 is an active Zionist that signed the petition trying to revoke Bisan's (the Palestinian journalist recording the g*nocide in Gaza) nomination in the Emmy's. This is another reminder to cancel your Netflix subscription, and if you want to watch OPLA season 2, just pirate it. It's more in the One Piece spirit as well.

[r0semultiverse]

Hey Digital Extremes, why are you limiting our play style to only one romance? Thought this game was about player choice. Let us choose to have the gameplay option of polyamory! 💕

There should also be a platonic New Years night option too that involves no romance for those not comfortable with it!

[zzoupz]

as happy n excited as I am about being somewhat known on the internet, I hope (if a little too late) that it never puts anyone off making friends with me ever. I hope I don't come off as intimidating because if anything I'm way more intimidated by you it doesn't even matter who you are. the niche micro internet celebrity is more scared of you than you are of it or something.

[axvwriter]

Silly Picrew

I keep seeing rounds of picrews of making humans, but has anyone noticed that picrew isn't just humans? You can make stuff like

whatever this thing is. Is it a milkshake? A boba tea-like thing? I have no clue.

This particular picrew found here!

@azulashengrottospiano @names-are-dumb @ryker-writes @cecilebutcher along with anyone else who wants to make one of whatever these drink blobs are

[tacagen]

one of the things that fascinate me about thawne: yes, he CAN be normal with kids! surprisingly normal!

((not at all times, though. his mental illness still spills through and as usual he, in trying to manipulate or hurt others, spits out at them the exact stuff that would hurt him (or have in his childhood/barry's rejection interpretation) the most in the first place lmao))

but at the same time. his like second instinct when doing his bullshit is FUCK THEM (as) KIDS

(and, well. whatever this classifies as)

[moeblob]

Thinking about my dumb OCs ever since I saw a video of two guys trying to demonstrate the kabedon and one of them could not stop laughing...

[azurbee]

you poor fools having to go apologize to Minecraft story mode, meanwhile I WAS A HUGE FAN OF IT FROM THE BEGINNING!!/j

[waterwindow]

Need me a medic main who loves playing medic as much as I love playing soldier

[oicuperp]

how some people in the gotham fandom expect me to react when they try to ambiguously write about a spoiler in the comments/reblogs of my liveblog (they dont know i have a brain and can easily guess the spoiler)

[dead-salmon]

gudaguda event leaks: it'll be a collab with tsukihime based on it's koha-ace origin, welfare will be kohaku, 5star will be akiha

[shitty-proendo-blackout-posts]

[merlinandlove]

Breaking my silence to say that I need everyone reading Fairy Oak because I’ve needed fanfics for more than ten years and the lack of fanwork should be illegal. Honestly these series are just soooo good, I don’t understand how they’re not popular everywhere THEY HAVE EVERYTHING. EVERYTHING. Such a whimsical magic little town with such a great world building and the people and the story everything is just so good. I’ve been wanting to live in fairy oak since i was a kid and the closer i would ever get is through fanfics and fanart but there is almost nothing 😭😭😭 I’m serious go read them, they are beautiful and written with such care 🥰🌱🌸✨