#its been a while since i read/watched it

[smokeygrayrabbits]

darker than black is criminally underrated and I'm taking it personally. the following will be a list of headcannons that I might expand on later but probably won't because summer work is kicking my ass.

hei and November 11 have an awful frenemy relationship. November thinks Hei is adorable and so fun to tease. Hei wouldn't spit on November if he was on fire, and regularly shoves him off of any roof they find themselves on. everyone thinks they're in love. but they're both shady, emotionally constipated morons so who knows.

despite his insistence that he hates his team, Huang makes a point of always having snacks for them in his bag. protein bars for hei, tuna for mao, and those little water jelly cakes yin likes. he carries rubber gloves too, for when hei is a little too zappy to touch

Heis landlady is an overbearing saint who has made it her life mission to spoil poor little Li who's all alone in a different country! poor baby reminders her so much of her own son, who's moved out by now. she hopes that someone is looking after her boy the way she looks after Li. she also thinks Li eats way too much take out, and gets in the habit of leaving him homemade meals and having him over for dinner at least once a week. Hei has no idea how to handle this. nobody has taken care of him like this since, maybe ever. Mao gives him shit for it constantly, but if the landlady's cookbooks are often found suspiciously open on the counter displaying some of Heis favorites, then Mao certainly had nothing to do with it. nope.

[bitchthefuck1]

you know what, I actually will talk about this because it's bothering me. The issue with focussing so heavily on syd and carmy's potential for a romantic relationship isn't that there's something inherently unintellectual about romance or whatever, it's that a lot of people seem incapable of doing that without immediately flattening the story and ignoring or intentionally misreading any and all nuance for the sake of that romance. Every scene suddenly becomes about how it impacts their relationship, every analysis is done through a romantic lens, every frame or line of dialogue becomes about finding some easter egg or hint that "proves" these people should start dating. Their dynamic is absolutely a fundamental part of this show, but if you can only see it as a will-they-won't-they, you miss so much of what the story is actually trying to say with these two.

There are good versions of this story where their relationship is romantic and there are good versions of this story where it isn't, but as soon as you decide them being together is "the point," you lose the ability to actually judge the story for what it is, not what you want it to be.

[glauces-notebooks]

rewatching night at the museum for the first time in a while and wow. i missed this film.

[geodebiome]

i think hannibal lecter's (tv show version) relationship with god is so cool to think about. love this fucked up little cannibal and how he keeps challenging god to show his face for once. will you speak to me if i turn this man into a cherry blossom tree?

[beaulesbian]

i think what made me actually interested in reading one piece from the start (and wanting to catch up quite quickly after watching opla), was seeing how is it now continuing with all the main characters.

that the core of the strawhats are all there, especially zoro and nami who were with luffy since the beginning, that all the strawhats are sticking by luffy still after 1000+ chapters and episodes, and made me so curious to dive into the story, and reassured me that it will be worth my time

[gaylittleguys]

ok I know people have written/talked about Ginger Snaps (2000) as a trans allegory from Ginger’s perspective but when I first watched it I read it as a trans-allegory horror from Brigitte’s perspective. More along the vein of being a transmasc teenager and seeing female puberty and the transformations that come from that as horrifying, and fearing that happening to you too.

[iwakuraz]

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[jihancheolover]

i’m obsessed with i want to eat your pancreas’ philosophy on chance vs choice. and as many things are for me, i think kagehina is a poignant example.

when kageyama and hinata meet in the junior high match, it’s not entirely chance, yes the brackets were random but part of the reason is that hinata even bothered to create the team in the first place. and they choose to say those things to each other (main culprit “what have you been doing for the past three years?!”) which cause more conflict. they could’ve ignored each other and moved on but they chose to speak up and insult acknowledge each other (this also says something about their strong first impressions of each other! but that's a discussion for another day)

they also do not meet at karasuno by chance (although i feel this was obvious?). they both choose to go to karasuno because they admire someone on the karasuno team (the little giant and coach gramps ukai for hinata and kageyama respectively) and for kageyama there's the additional external factor of not being accepted into shiratorizawa. even more importantly, both of them chose to continue pursuing volleyball despite previous failures (hinata badly losing the only official match he’s played, kageyama’s teammates abandoning him). only a great amount of passion and persistence got them to push through.

it's not a coincidence that they can pull off the minus tempo freak quick either (again i think this is obvious but i feel i have to mention it), it's a combination of both their talents and skills which they have polished and honed for personal improvement. this makes kageyama's innate talent, years of practice and hinata's jumping talent, fearlessness, practice, an explosive chemical reaction resulting in the freak quick

of course luck is a factor and sometimes you can’t control external circumstances, but ultimately these things happen because of the choices they make. every single choice and decision we make daily has brought us to where we are today. both kageyama and hinata, after meeting each other, gain something essentially important to their lives (greater motivation, a best friend, someone who understands their batshit crazy love for volleyball and is just as passionate), something they were in severe need of (a friend and a partner respectively), they learn to become better versions of themselves and push each other to fly even higher. i truly think they would not be where they are now had they never became friends, hell maybe even if they never met.

but isn’t it nice to think that their meeting wasn’t coincidence, or fate- it’s an accumulation of every choice they had made leading up to that moment. “perhaps i’ve spent 17 years waiting to be needed by you. just like cherry blossoms wait for spring!” i think this quote rings true for kagehina as well.

[devotedlystrangewizard]

the school arc to me is so good because it drags ciel out of his position as a powerful figure and literally places him in the shoes of the person he could have been. the circus arc ALSO drags him out of his position as big bad queens watch dog/head of the phantomhive estate but the school arc feels like a mockery of a future that never was. this is what he could have been had his parents not died. and even then its NOT because he will never be that kid.

he never was.

[yoihino]

Auuaghh undertale fandom video essays my beloathed. Is it really so much to ask for just one (1) of these to be made by an actual fan who was in the fandom? Like it is so clear they are talking about it from an outside perspective or that they got into it just fpr the video and uggh. Where is the love? The appreciation for the aus and their creators? For the history for the fandom? Honestly I just want like a text post of someone saying 'hey remember those times? They were wild and they may not have been perfect but we sure had a lot of fun'.

[idkaguyorsomething]

on the one hand, i sort of get the logic behind having martha and mickey becoming an item. they both got the short end of the stick around the doctor, especially whenever rose got brought up, so they’d be able to understand each other’s experiences and probably treat each other right. on the other hand, it’s almost hilarious how i don’t think they even had a single conversation with each other before the showrunners decided to hook up the (at the time) only black companion with the (at the time) only other major black character, with one of them completely forgetting about the fiancé she mentioned in a previous episode and the other one just up and leaving the entire dimension he’d lived in for the past few years, knowing full well it would be impossible for him to ever return

[haveyoureadthistransbook]

I want to read Manhut. I saw Jesse Gender's video about it and it sounds like a fantastic spin on zombie horror and I have the stomach for a lot of what is warned about it... but some of the excerpts from the trans protagonist she read chilled me to the core because I sometimes see my unaltered amab self as a bit of a monster (much like TERFs would describe me) and some of the passages really hit that nerve hard. at risk of mild spoilers, can you at least tell me if the book offers some semblance of hope or sense that the pain and discomfort of the experience will be worth getting to the end? I really do want to dig into horror fiction with a trans twist but I would really rather not enter hopeless escapism when reality is already so bleak

I personally really enjoyed the story, because I felt that despite all the bleakness and horror there is there is also care and love and hope for a better future and a loving community. But it is very, very bleak and upsetting at points and self-hatred/dysphoria/dysmorphia play a huge role.

I will delve a bit deeper into the story under the cut, warning for spoilers and a general discussion of the ending (without major spoilers, just the vibes):

There are three trans protagonists in the novel (and two cis ones). Two are trans women without bottom surgery (mentioned because it influences how they treat themselves and how other people treat them), one is a trans man that's not on hormones. It is an apocalypse that heavily focusses on the body and so dysphoria is a near constant companion. One of the trans woman is built bigger with muscles and unable to achieve passing and gets referred to as a brick/treated like a man repeatedly by others in the story and her headspace is quite bad at times. Her story is heartbreaking and a lot of really bad shit happens to her, BUT she was my favorite character and it is clear that the author really loves her too. The other trans woman is smaller and can pass, obviously still faces prejudice, but in a very different way. The trans man also gets repeatedly misgendered and infantalized. What was also really hard to read is that there is a fat disabled caracter and her chapters are very heavily filled with a lot of hatred for her own body in a way that none of the thin abled characters experience. In general it can be hard to handle the self hatred of the characters at parts, especially when you are in their POVs and that is something you need to prepare for. The dysphoria also focusses specifically on certain body parts at times, particularly built/height/shoulders/face shape, so that is something to be prepared for.

It is definitely not an easy story to handle. To me it was hard but worth it, but I also enjoyed the gore and horror of the story. It is definitely one of the more brutal horror books I've read in recent times, but I found the ending to be fulfilling, fitting and hopeful.

[pandoratheprocrasticreator]

no by all means keep judging cartoon villains solely by if they get redeemed in the end. i know some of us like to talk about other stuff like characterization or entertainment value or nuance as something that makes a good villain. but i think the only thing that actually matters is if the villain ends up on good terms with the protagonist at the end. all the Good TM cartoons with Good TM creators make the villains die a Horrible Death for being Abusers or whatever. and all the Bad TM cartoons with Bad TM creators Forgive Fascists by not making them get publicly executed by the 14 year old protagonist in front of the 8 year old target demographic.

i mean im so glad that more cartoons nowadays are subverting the psyop to support fascists that a few queer artists and queer shows definitely invented in 2017. there are so many popular cartoons doing that. it's almost like there are more properties killing their villains now and in the past than there ever were of properties that didn't do this. and it's almost like whether the villain gets redeemed at the end is more about the context of the story and its themes leading up to a narratively sound decision.

but you know. a few queer shows made by trans ppl were popular and they didn't kill their fascists and even had the gall to make them nuanced while also looking into the harm they did. guess it's trendy to forgive your abusers now because like two cartoons said so. out of like 40 other similarly high profile works that just straight up hit their villains with a bus or smth. by all means. keep heaping praise onto that one show about how they "let their villain just be evil" instead of talking about anything more interesting. that's so subversive, everyone's doing it!

[kawarikisaki]

Im sure this is nothing new, but I’m currently overthinking the logistics of DeathNote for no real reason, it's just on my mind.

Particularly the fact the most basic mechanics of writing someone's name while thinking of their face.

Part of the rules is that it has to be their real name, but what criteria determines that? Is it their legal name? Is it what their parents call them? If you wanted to kill a trans person with the deathnote would you have to use their dead name or their chosen name?

If a baby were swapped at the hospital after their parents named them and then they lived the rest of their life by a different name; would the deathnote only acknowledge their original name that only belonged to them as an infant or would it accept the name they went by their whole life.

Also, what if the person writing the name has horrible handwriting? Thanks to the way the face part works we know that to some degree the notebook reads the user's intent. So would it work even if the name is completely illegible, or does the name need to be able to be read since spelling matters.

And since spelling matters what happens if you write the correct letter incorrectly? Does stroke order? Japanese is a complicated language, and different kanji can have specific orders that your strokes are meant to be written in. Would that play in? I mean probably not, there's no way to really expect Shinigami to intuitively know what the correct stroke order is for a given Kanji.

Back to the fact that you need the face and name, what if you want to use the deathnote to kill someone who you haven't seen in a while and their face has changed significantly since you saw them. Like if someone wanted to kill an actress but she just got a nose job and doesn't look like that anymore, or someone wants to kill their childhood bully they haven't seen in years something like that. Or sticking with Light' MO, he killed a fair number of criminals that were already in prison by using the information he could obtain from police documents; so what if a criminal were to lose a significant ammount of weight in the time between Light writing their name and the criminal having been imprisoned and now thanks to that weight-loss they are unrecognizably gaunt conpared to their intake photo?

...

Not saying that I have a deathnote or anything, I just have questions about the rules.

[todayisafridaynight]

Hey so Snap this is going to be so fucking weird, but honestly don’t care. So I was watching a clip of Drag Race Philippines and it was the make over episode and I think they were making over family members and this father was all about getting into drag. So, I just wanted to tell you never forget how much of a lovely loving kind and caring father you have, who loves you and protects you and makes you feel heard. That’s all.

i'd have to die before i forget how great my dad is thank you for the opportunity to brag about him again anon

[munchboxart]

Look Back coming to NYC/LA on October 4 while NA/CA will get them on October 6-7