#it is the human experience to be consumed

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

So I’m a minor (16 to be specific) and I frequently watch and read stuff with explicit sexual or 18+ content in it. I live in an extremely conservative Christian household and things like explicit fanfic are pretty much the only option I have for learning about sex that isn’t abstinence only. I do feel bad about it, especially when I see adults online say stuff like “oh i watched lots of inappropriate things as a teen that i really shouldn’t have” and it makes me feel like I’m ruining myself in a way that I won’t realize until I’m an adult? Right now I don’t see what the big deal is but i get the feeling that when i’m 24 or something I’ll wake up one day and be ashamed of this for some reason i’m not mature enough to know yet. Should I just stop and wait until I’m 18 to continue or what?

hi anon,

okay. I'm gonna hit you with something:

turning 18 does not actually change the way you feel about porn or sex or anything. the difference between being seventeen and 364 days and being 18 is nonexistent. there's not a magical switch that changes you as a person; that comes from lived experience. if you're 18 and your experience is still that porn and smut and what have you i something that you should feel bad about, it's still going to feel that way and a birthday won't change that.

look, the whole notion of "I saw [x] that I shouldn't have when I was young" is like. okay. so you saw something that was a little mature for you that you didn't quite get? awesome. did you die? no. most people's hangups about sexuality don't come from seeing a rogue titty when they were a teenager, they come from the culture that person was raised in that made seeing a rogue titty feel like something to be ashamed of instead of a completely natural part of life.

story time! when I teach my 4th-6th grade OWL classes (Our Whole Lives, great human development program) I always start by holding a meeting with the kids' parents. I've been doing this for seven years, and every time without fail some of the parents will recall seeing porn for the first time as a kid. these guys were kids when printed porn magazines were still a thing, so they were discovering them in all kinds of places - the bedrooms of their parents or their friends' parents, at bus stops, in the woods, once even stowed in some farm equipment. and they remember it feeling illicit and exciting, sure, and possibly making them confused or even horny for the first time in their young lives, but like... that's it. none of these people are irreparably damaged by seeing porn. in fact, they've grown up to be the kind of people who go out of their way to make sure their young kids are enrolled in a queer-friendly, body-positive, diversity-embracing sex ed class to counter stereotypes and misinformation they might receive elsewhere.

looking at things that arouse you is morally neutral. it can be a great way to help you learn about what turns you on, and even if it's not the best source of factual, realistic depictions of sex, it can still help you discover things - hell, I only figured out what the clitoris was by reading Young Justice fanfic (shout out Snaibsel).

you can't ruin yourself, at any age, with the media you like to consume. what makes you uncomfortable and anxious is the attitude you've been taught to have about that media, which is something that has to be actively unlearned, because it's certainly not going to just disappear on its own when you become a legal adult.

tl;dr obviously no one is making you watch porn and you shouldn't if it makes you uncomfortable, but if you drop it right now and come back when you're 18 don't expect to feel any different if you haven't done any more unpacking re: the conservative Christianity of it all.

[creekfiend]

I am normally unable to experience the experience of "actually enjoying food" to the extent that I would go out of my way to consume it even if I didn't need to, but when I do a weed I can access this human experience, so I will just be like sitting at my kitchen island at 3:00 in the morning being like "I would eat this waffle even if I didn't have to. holy shit. is this what people feel like normally ???all the time???"

I feel like. it's kind of. weird. I mean. I literally did not understand why other people would be like "yes I would still choose to eat food even if I did not have to to stay alive" like I fundamentally could not comprehend that in terms of like how different our respective experiences with eating would have to be to produce that difference? and then I just. for the first time. was like oh! okay this must be why people like to eat food on purpose. KAKSJDHFHFJGJF

[voidmagika]

mm maybe I shld post here lol

[whalesfall]

btw. your search for the most morally upright and ethical piece of media that has the most correct “representation” will destroy your ability to find the most profound and beautiful and human of stories. and may even destroy the stories themselves before they are created. if you even care.

[sizzlingsandwichperfection-blog]

awesomecoffeeclub.com

[deus-and-the-machina]

you know the contrast between how Vergil is presented vs thinking too hard about Vergil’s story is pretty funny. Man’s reputation is this iconic badass, the pinnacle of what video game rivalries can be, the coolest guy to play as, the guy who breaks every game he’s added to,

and then you go to the story and like. man’s lost his free will and autonomy at 19 and then came back a fractured man half of which was a lovecraftian eye beast the other half of which was a chronically ill goth man. and then he reunites and hes in like his 40s now I believe but legit the last time he was actually in a game where he wasn’t being mind controlled when he was 19 which is both sad but also thinking about how this guy who’s considered one of the top badasses of gaming has never really lived life outside of being a teenager.

Anyways this is the secret comedic potential of post DMC5 for Vergil because not only has the human world probably changed a fair bit in terms of technology, if he’s sticking around Dante he’s gonna actually have to learn in depth how taxes and grocery shopping work. Amazing.

[collieii]

i'm sure it's been said but i do love how trimax handles wolfwoods death. i've seen so many stories that have characters die and they just go away after. i'm really used to stories where the other characters aren't allowed to grieve, the story keeps going and it feels like the other characters aren't really affected or get over it really easily. but in trimax wolfwoods death is so important. we see other characters grieving him. vash protecting the orphanage, expanding his power when he really shouldn't, because it was wolfwood's home, even though wolfwood is already gone. he gets an actual burial. vash and livio eating their way through the grief, which is more comedic but still shows us how important he was to the two of them, sets up how in many ways they're fighting in his memory.

even after he's gone he's still present in the story in such a strong way. we can see how he's affected the other characters, even when they don't explicitly mention him it's obvious that they're thinking about him. what he did when he was alive, and his death itself, are so important to the story even after he's not there. not just in a really abstract "this is someone we lost" way (though there are a lot of times his death and sacrifice motivate vash and livio to fight harder!) he's present in the finale in a material way to livio, who uses his serums to help fight against elendira, which ofc also ties into the way wolfwoods choice to ally with vash and fight against knives gave livio strength to do the same. wolfwood showed him that there are things worth fighting for, things worth protecting. that your body is a weapon, but you can choose what to do with it, use it for something meaningful.

and the way vash kills legato in order to save livio? vash outright says that he did it to protect what wolfwood fought for, sacrificed his life for. it's tied to the ongoing arc between vash and wolfwood, their conflict over the necessity of killing others. wolfwood pushed vash into having an understanding of his views when he was alive, demonstrating the necessity of that violence. simultaneously, vash inspired wolfwood to follow his path, a kinder one. vash remembers what wolfwood said to him, and his death gives those words added poignancy. wolfwood well and truly sacrificed everything to protect what he loved and fight for what he believed in. how can vash let that go to waste? he sacrifices something just as meaningful to himself, and he pulls the trigger. it brings him closer to wolfwood in a way he never was before. he understands now, fundamentally, what motivates people, motivated wolfwood, to act as he did when he took lives. there are so many other ways wolfwood is present in the story after his death i can't talk about all of them but it makes me so crazy

[clowfish]

fanart of chapter 18 of The Thief by @wintergrew which is literally the best fanfic I have ever read in my life https://archiveofourown.org/works/14432472/chapters/51578533#workskin

technicalllllyyy tweek is wearing a shirt in this scene but I wanted the drawing to be a bit ambiguous without context

[stormofdefiance]

Thinkin about this. Thinkin about how Black Swan is so divorced from her own physicality, her own capacity to feel. Thinkin about how when she first looked at Acheron she must have thought those would be interesting memories, but nothing more. Thinkin about her face at the end of Rondo. Flushed and heaving and undeniably quivering from sensation, burnt through with an intensity of feeling that must have left her so ALIVE in that moment. HHHHHHHHHHHHH

[urahara-lovepage]

bleach media literacy is actually just a measure of how you read urahara as a character

[countess-of-edessa]

the thing about taking advice from anyone on tiktok or instagram including catholic and christian type influencers, parenting advice, relationship advice, etc, or internalizing any stories of horrible relationships and betrayal people tell on those platforms, or reading about all the ways interpersonal relationships can end horribly and be cycled through extremely quickly on those platforms is that you are necessarily then consuming the thoughts and experiences of someone who is willing to put their face and name on a public social media platform to talk at you. and like 1% of those people have a good reason for doing so and the other 99% are completely unhinged. so everything you’re consuming has first gone through the filter of "is this person weird and insane enough to make Instagram reels of themselves crying?" and if the answer is yes maybe their advice doesn’t apply to your life because you’re a normal person who would not do that.

[nerdie-faerie]

If the Doctor isn't a timelord then that means they potentially have different reactions to substances than they previously thought, ergo I just know that Thirteen, in all of her feral glory, runs around testing their reactions to things upon learning about their Timeless Child origins without her companions finding out

[soupkiddo]

tried to put myself in the headspace of a transphobe and got pissed off cus it's so fucking stupid

[wolvertooth]

tbh its kind of making me feel emotions going thru the websites of the artists listed in the wolvertooth yaoi anthology. cuz it really was only like a handful of people making art for this ship, and they all knew eachother, 20 YEARS AGO.......like its basically the same as it is now. and there was another group of artists in like the 2012 - 2017 era too. theres just been different small groups over the years. and especially for the older stuff, thinking about how much of it wasnt preserved cuz of being hosted on personal websites, so theres a bunch of work thats been lost to time. and ive come across a bunch of stuff thats been deleted too, only preserved thru deviantart reposts and tumblr reblogs, but also broken links implying there used to be something there.

i'll keep looking :,)

[dayurno]

i just saw a post about andrew and his meds and how he was probably misdiagnosed for depression but he’s actually bipolar which made him manic all the time bc of his meds and!!!! yes to me andrew has always been bipolar. anyways i just had to share this with someone what are you thoughts on bipolar andrew? i know this isn’t kevin related and for that i’m sorry

"i know this isn’t kevin related and for that i’m sorry" HRGJLDHFGDFJG KDFJG FUNNY....!!!! i do answer non-kevin related asks sometimes but the flesh and the spirit must be willing... i'd say it's occasional like an expert briefly commenting on another expert's field

i thought bipolar andrew was canon? isn't it? i've never really had any extensive thoughts about it; to me it was just a fact of the world like the foxes are orange and kevin is beautiful..... well. regardless. i think it's a good hc if that's what it is :) i'm not all that interested in diagnosing aftg characters with personality disorders and i think a diagnosis of something is not always a concrete reality of life and more so a guideline to follow to deal with a specific cluster of symptoms, but as far as they go, andrew being bipolar makes a lot of sense!

i have a friend who went through the foster system when they were younger and a few years ago i do remember we were talking about andrew and they said a lot of how he was written was taken textbook from a 'how to foster troubled children' manual, which i think is most of what i think about re: andrew's mental health. to me it is more interesting (fiction wise!) to think about the material conditions that caused him to develop the symptoms he did, and less so about the ultimate conclusion of them. does this make sense?

tl;dr: i thought andrew being bipolar was already canon, if it's a hc then it's cool :=)

[magioffire]

as much as i appreciate all depictions of trans masc people in art, this isnt some kind of put down like omg you gotta draw ALL your art like this but... its honestly quite nice to see some trans masc characters that  have breasts  and are completely fine with that. like i get that top surgery scars have just become the visual short hand for ‘trans man/,masc’ character but thats not the reality for every trans masc person, not all trans masc people experience top dysphoria all the time, or even at all, and i feel like if we normalized the idea of breast tissue on men it would help to lessen the social stigma of men with breasts, cis or trans. i just love to see trans masc characcters who still have their breasts because its a reflection of the sort of trans experiences and bodies i am familiar with