#it can make AND break a family

[azerishi]

Sam, placing a +4: I never remembered UNO being this boring.

Natasha, calmly adding another +4: That's because we played 17 rounds already, and you never won one of them.

Bucky, grumbling as he picks up 8 more cards: This shit ain't team bonding, it's more like team-breaking.

Pepper, sighing as she sets down a reverse card: Fine. Whoever wins this last round gets Peter cuddles for the rest of the night.

Avengers: *suddenly all determined and focused, glaring at each other*

Bucky, sighing: See? Team-breaking.

[giantkillerjack]

Today my therapist introduced me to a concept surrounding disability that she called "hLep".

Which is when you - in this case, you are a disabled person - ask someone for help ("I can't drink almond milk so can you get me some whole milk?", or "Please call Donna and ask her to pick up the car for me."), and they say yes, and then they do something that is not what you asked for but is what they think you should have asked for ("I know you said you wanted whole, but I got you skim milk because it's better for you!", "I didn't want to ruin Donna's day by asking her that, so I spent your money on an expensive towing service!") And then if you get annoyed at them for ignoring what you actually asked for - and often it has already happened repeatedly - they get angry because they "were just helping you! You should be grateful!!"

And my therapist pointed out that this is not "help", it's "hLep".

Sure, it looks like help; it kind of sounds like help too; and if it was adjusted just a little bit, it could be help. But it's not help. It's hLep.

At its best, it is patronizing and makes a person feel unvalued and un-listened-to. Always, it reinforces the false idea that disabled people can't be trusted with our own care. And at its worst, it results in disabled people losing our freedom and control over our lives, and also being unable to actually access what we need to survive.

So please, when a disabled person asks you for help on something, don't be a hLeper, be a helper! In other words: they know better than you what they need, and the best way you can honor the trust they've put in you is to believe that!

Also, I want to be very clear that the "getting angry at a disabled person's attempts to point out harmful behavior" part of this makes the whole thing WAY worse. Like it'd be one thing if my roommate bought me some passive-aggressive skim milk, but then they heard what I had to say, and they apologized and did better in the future - our relationship could bounce back from that. But it is very much another thing to have a crying shouting match with someone who is furious at you for saying something they did was ableist. Like, Christ, Jessica, remind me to never ask for your support ever again! You make me feel like if I asked you to call 911, you'd order a pizza because you know I'll feel better once I eat something!!

Edit: crediting my therapist by name with her permission - this term was coined by Nahime Aguirre Mtanous!

Edit again: I made an optional follow-up to this post after seeing the responses. Might help somebody. CW for me frankly talking about how dangerous hLep really is.

[turtleblogatlast]

Something I love about Leo is that, canonically, he IS capable of cooking, he’s just completely incapable of using a toaster. He’s banned from the kitchen not out of an inability to make edible food, but because being within six feet of a toaster causes the poor appliance to spontaneously combust.

[bixels]

While I do think anon was rude, I do think it's pretty shitty to set up all this stuff you were going to add the au and then just drop it. It's disappointing. Definitely unfollowing.

Bye.

[blowjob-horseguy]

The Steve and Nancy flirting in season four becomes much more interesting when put in the context of steddie and ronance I think. Because it's less backsliding their character development and more about 2 kids in the 80's falling back on the closest het relationship available when confronted with queer feeling and queer people. It's less taking an ambitious independant woman and sticking her with the stagnant nuclear family man because the script says so, and it's more about the triangulation of desire. In this essay I will-

[twinstxrs]

there’s something so personal about the scene in fantasy high s1e7 where gorgug calls himself stupid & fabian, who up to that point had basically entirely been acting like the bad kids (especially gorgug) were beneath him & had also been the one calling ragh stupid two lines ago, instantly says “okay, do not put yourself down like that. don’t you dare do that to yourself.” like it was obvious he liked the bad kids at that point but the instinct to protect his friends manifesting as an immediate strong refusal of gorgug’s self-deprecating talk kills me. that boy loves his friends so bad oh my god i feel sick.

[raraeavesmoriendi]

Okay but watcher originally wasn’t going to leave the old videos up. Like that is something that they backtracked on and are trying to gaslight people about. They did an interview with Variety where they told them that they were going to slowly remove their content from YouTube.

I’m trying to figure out if you’re footstamping at me or what, but babe it’s not worth it.

they’re going to do with their videos what they deem they need to bc they’re not actually our weird friends and we don’t know them like that, they’re guys who make video series who are trying to figure out how to keep a studio afloat in a landscape currently dominated by media conglomerates owned by people like jeff bezos. that is the cut and dry of it. yeah, they probably changed their minds and reversed their earlier decision, but if anything the way people are frothing at the mouth about losing their ~comfort content~ (which. yikes don’t get me started), one would think that would be a relief.

look, I had a whole essay here but I have shit to do so, short version: watcher could have strategized and rolled this whole thing out differently, and who knows, maybe more things will change. maybe they’ll change their content output schedule for their own channel. maybe they’ll add shows or cut , or re-scale for international viewer accommodation. I’d hate to be their PR person right now. but it is what it is. if you can’t pay them, don’t. do not subscribe. literally no one is forcing you. if you wanna see their stuff that badly, find someone who can and password share. they literally said it was fine.

cards on the table, I don’t even know if I’ll be getting a sub until October, or at all, bc I’m a grad student and I have bills. but I’m not about to sit here and act betrayed and hope they fail a. because I’m an adult who understands that no matter the size of the staff, providing employee benefits and insurance costs money, as does making any kind of for-fun content in our current hellscape, and b. it’s kind of shitty to watch people turn around and act like a media company is their friends personally stabbing them in the back and betraying some grand marxist ethos when it’s literally just people who don’t have things like mousecorp and netflix behind them trying to make their shit on their own terms. I’m not going to sit here and pretend they’re some rich greedy corpos trying to wring money out of us poor broke smol beans out of malice when they’re not even in the same ballpark. they’re allowed to ask to be paid for their time and their labor. if people can’t pay them, then they can’t pay them, end of. some things we just have to go without and that’s just how it shakes out; there are worse and more critical things I could be missing out on that I will be paying that money for instead.

but I’m not about to insist their stuff be free forever because ~I want it~. because that’s not what it comes down to, in the system that we currently operate and exist under. I’m not entitled to their shit like that and frankly no one is.

watching people openly hope they crash and burn bc it won’t be free anymore just makes me chalk it up to one more shitty example of how consumer culture has just made people not think about how stuff is made as long as they can get that instant gratification, but like. water is wet, news at 11.

[gothhabiba]

“poverty we have in favour of abundance we have yet to organise” i fundamentally disagree. Its fundamentally impoverishing to take away child from their carers and give them to a bunch of strangers. if thats not whats going to happen what is exactly? so far all i read is a dystopian nightmare and people saying “but no it will be great i promise”

[regarding this post and broader recent discussion of family abolition]

I'm getting a lot of responses in this same emotional valence (as does anyone who talks about "family abolition," and again, this is the exact emotional response which Sophie Lewis preëmpts and responds to at the beginning of Abolish the Family)—I'm chusing this message to respond to not to pick on you specifically but to try to unravel some of the assumptions that underlie this objection.

1.

I did my best to outline some of the major actionable demands of a programme of family abolition and include links to further readings that laid each of these demands out, including the abolition of parent's property rights over children & freedom to mete out "corporal punishment," the end of social and economic dependence on the family that works to impoverish 'family outcasts' or to force them into abusive situations, &c.

Yet, amongst all of these things, the questioning of the naturalness of the social/economic/legal/political category of "mother" (and investigation of how the category is sexed, gendered, & racialised) is what draws the most ire, and commonly the only thing that is responded to in people's objections to "family abolition"—as though it is the weakest part of the argument, and not the conclusion we necessarily come to through an understanding of the economic and social position of the "wife," the "single mother," the "single woman," &c.

What about the affective / emotional nature of the presumed "naturalness" of the mother relation causes the questioning of it to meet with such a disproportionate amount of resistance? Could we understand this individual emotional attachment to the concept of motherhood and its positioning as "natural" to be part of, or a result of, the naturalizing work that discourses about femininity and labour* do?

2.

Where does this spectre of an infant being "taken away from" its biological parents (actually, and tellingly, "mother" far more often than "parents") come from, and why does it keep being dragged forth? Communal raising of children is indeed part of the speculative programme for (most?) people who advocate for the abolition of the "family," but what part of that entails that a child must not be raised in part by, or anywhere near, their biological parents?

If no family abolitionist is saying that every child ought to be reassigned to some other random communal housing unit immediately upon birth (and, if anyone is, I have yet to come across it!), why is this the image that is brought up repeatedly in response to arguments for family abolition, as though the image is 1. an argument in itself, that 2. meaningfully responds to the programme being put forth? In what inheres the shocking nature, the emotional effectiveness, of this image? What assumptions and attachments does that effectiveness reveal?

3.

You've said that it is "fundamentally impoverishing" to a child for them to be "take[n] away" from "their carers" and "give[n] to a bunch of strangers." You haven't laid out how we can determine who a child's "carers" are—the "carers" fundamentally, properly, 'rightly' belonging to the child in your grammatical construction (in fact, in terms of property law, we ought to say the people the child belongs to—and we can see this arrangement reassert itself in your use of the word "give").

Incredibly, "carer" seems here to mean something other than "the people who are caring for the child"! "Stranger," similarly, must mean something other than "people the child has never had contact with," since in this fantasy these are the people who are raising the child... So if "carer" doesn't mean "person who cares for," and "stranger" doesn't mean "person who is strange," then where do these labels come from? What assumptions are you recreating when you use them in this frankly counter-intuitive sense with the assumption that I will know what you mean? (See also a message I got reading "i am not a mother but i already know i would rather die than have my baby call some strange women mom," emphasis mine.)

I think that probably you've used "carer" because you know that "biological parent" is a weaker proposition—and yet, in regards to the legal structures I'm talking about, it is biological parenthood which confers automatic, presumptive "rights" over a child upon someone (in default of other specific legal arrangements which someone must chuse to enter into in order to renounce those automatic, presumptive rights).

It is the idea that biological parenthood (or adoption, or "using" a surrogate, or any of the arrangements people may enter into that fall between these categories) ought to give one or two people complete control over another human being, such that that human being has no recourse at all from abuse, coercion, forced isolation, being raised in a cult, being denied transition or other medical care or put through conversion therapy, &c., so long as their caretakers do not in theory fall afoul of the very high standard of legal "child abuse" in a way that someone in practice actually cares to pursue—it is this reality, which is ideologically baked into your assumption of who a child's natural, automatic "carers" are for them to be "taken away from" in the first place, that family abolitionists want to change.

But nothing about biological parents no longer having automatic, presumptive rights to do basically whatever they want with or to their children automatically means that children will be taken away from them in the sense of enforced physical distance!

I think we need to look at what is ideologically entailed in assuming that a) parenthood in which a parent does not have quasi-property rights over their child is not "real, natural" parenthood, such that removing "parental rights" equates to "taking a child away"; b) certain people are just inherently strangers or strange to a child by virtue of the circumstances of their birth in relation to the circumstances of the child's birth, regardless of the actual social relationship they have with that child, and the ways in which this division between "naturally connected" versus "naturally distant," "natural proper and correct" versus "naturally strange," "inside" versus "outside," and the concept of the "stranger" (and the foreigner as the "eternal stranger," the racialised as the "eternally foreign") play into a situation where you can say "a bunch of strangers" and assume that you will be understood, and that this will be understood to be obviously bad.

*E.g., women are naturally caretakers, having a child is naturally the ultimate fulfillment for any woman (thus women who do not or cannot give birth are not fulfilling their function or are not "really" women), women love and are never exhausted by any aspect of gestation, childbirth, or childcare and they certainly don't need any help, &c.

[wonder-worker]

I've been thinking about the tragedy of Elizabeth Woodville living to see the end of her family name.

I don't mean her family with her husband, which lived on through her daughter and grandson. I mean her own.

Her sisters died, one by one, many of them after 1485. When Elizabeth died, only Katherine was left, and she would die before the turn of the century as well.

All her brothers died, too. Lewis died in childhood. John was executed. Anthony was murdered. Lionel died suddenly in the peak of Richard's reign, unable to see his niece become queen. Edward perished at war. Richard died in grieving peace. For all the violence and judgement the family endured, it was "an accident of biology" that ended their line: none of the brothers left heirs, and the Woodville name was extinguished. We know the family was aware of this. We know they mourned it, too:

“Buy a bell to be a tenor at Grafton to the bells now there, for a remembrance of the last of my blood.”

Elizabeth lived through the deposition and death of her young sons, and lived to see the end of her own family name. It must have been such a haunting loss, on both sides.

[carnivalcarriondiscarded]

hold on wait im unable to Scribble rn but i had this Lights Out interaction in my head and i need to put it somewhere before i forget. Okay so the scene is Howdy, Poppy, Frank, and Wally are all having quiet time in the post office. just vibing.

Howdy: i'm going to say something harsh

Poppy: that's alright. we understand <3

Frank: go ahead, it's better than bottling it up

Howdy:

Howdy, near tears: you're all so boring i think it's actually killing me

Poppy / Frank / Wally: ...

[nerdie-faerie]

I'm once again thinking about the missed opportunities to have Klaus and Kol bond more. Part of Klaus' whole motivation as a vampire is to get his werewolf part back and to finally be stronger than Mikael (sort of, I'm simplifying) both of which can be obtained by breaking his curse. But Kol? Kol is the only other original that can relate to having a fundamental part of themself ripped away from them. Klaus might not have known he was a werewolf until he killed, but he likely still had a connection he couldn't explain, as evident by him going to watch the wolves transform. And something he'd never been able to explain was now gone. He might only be able to realise the connection afterwards through its absence.

Kol though. Kol had grown up with magic, a connection to nature and the world around him in a way the rest of his siblings supposedly didn't have. And then he gets turned. And not only has his baby brother died, his father has just murdered him and the rest of his siblings after forcing them to drink human blood, which he'll later learn. Now, not only does he have to deal with the grief of Henrik's death and also his own but also the loss of his magic. A loss that's likely only worsened by Kol being a self-proclaimed child prodigy.

Kol is pretty much the only one who could understand what Klaus is going through with the binding of his wolf. We know Kol searched for ways to get his magic back/carry on practicing magic in the same way that Klaus was looking for ways to break his curse. While Klaus likely could still feel his wolf there despite being bound, Kol has no access to his magic anymore. I just think they should've been able to bond or connect over their shared loss of an intrinsic aspect of their selves at the hands of their parents

[treasureplcnet]

Semi-desperate Mithrun in regards to Kabru post-canon is so fucking real. On top of everything else, the guy kinda sorta literally gave him a will to live. Like. Mithrun's an acts of service logic type guy and was already attached to him. And how the fuck are you gonna return a favor like That. Beyond the continuing demon hunting and shit he probably rings up Kabru once a week like "You wanna hang out. I know you're stressed all the time every day. Come hang out with me." And is like yea, this is a normal response to a guy making you see you still have a life. And doesn't process the fact he's in weird complicated some kinda love with him.

YES !!!! mithrun hasn't desired (or hasn't believed he desired anything besides revenge) and when he's starting to develop feelings for kabru, he's nervous and a bit surprised. to me the realisation is slow and methodical, like "i miss kabru. i want kabru around. i feel his absence. what does this mean. all a part of newly wanting things i guess. totally normal to do this." -> 6 months later "oh"

and last time he fell in love, mithrun became a dungeon master and his entire life changed. now he's got his life back, learning about loving that, and kabru complicates many things. i think even kabru would have hesitations, mostly over how he believes elves can't understand short lived races, and if there is a 'future' for them that they'd both be happy with. i want to see them work it out together. it's very beautiful to me :)

[vethbrenatto]

This group that you used to work with, the Nobodies, do you resent them for all leaving you? Absolutely fucking not, I would have done the same. They very, very smartly took off and I very, very happily took the debt. It’s what you do for family, you fucking take care of them.

--

What happens your past trauma does not loosen their grip? I suppose my first instinct would be to break its fingers.

--

I’m out.

[shrikeseams]

When you idly think about Celegorm possibly being most like Nerdanel of all the sons of Feanor, and then you start thinking about Nerdanel getting a post-Darkening moral decay arc all of her own to mirror her son(s)'s.

[welshaphrodite]

I just realized that so many Athena kids were in Cabin 6 because claiming them was a strategic move on Athena’s part. What do you do when a bunch of highly capable, clever strategists feel wronged? They will organize and rise up against you. To claim the Athena kids, and claim them early, didn’t allow resentment to reach a boiling point. If fact, it probably strengthened their connection and loyalty to their mom, making it more likely for them to remain on her side in case things ever went south.