#just to make the audience cry

[auqroix]

stop killing yourself kim dokja you're making the audience sob depression style

[atopvisenyashill]

i was thinking more about characters Performing Gender, but not necessarily Transgressing Gender. I wound up focusing on Ned and Sansa bc I feel like I understand them the most but-

Sansa as a hostage is imo the most obvious (bc it’s so well done) moment of someone clearly Performing Gender but not being transgressive in that performance. Which isn’t to say it’s not a complicated performance; it’s a fine line Sansa walks between weaponizing her gender to protect herself without seeming too fake. She’s trying to placate the Lannisters by playing the perfect, dedicated, air headed betrothed because it’s the only defense she has - if she outwardly rebels, she will be punished in a likely violent and/or sexual way (which isn’t even conjecture - when she says “or maybe he’ll give me yours” Joffrey has her struck with an armored hand). She’s not quite successful in being convincing but that’s because it’s a rather extreme situation; despite no one believing her, she does make herself seem meek and stupid enough that no one suspects she’s plotting to escape with Dontos until she’s well away from KL. The fact that she even has Dontos to confide in is because of Sansa’s relationship with gender! When she saves him, she covers her rebellious slip by playing up Joffrey’s intelligence & his role as King; she reaches for “tools” of her gender AND of ~proper manhood~ to save a life and herself from another beating. Her retreats into the godswood and silence are very much Sansa attempting to recharge from these draining interactions, the same way a knight would need to stop and eat and rest after a fight. She is fighting, constantly, by forcing herself to stay within the narrow confines of a specific type of gender performance as a way of shielding herself from harm.

Ned yelling at Cat is another big one, and I’ve seen the scene referred to as Ned using his patriarchal power to scare Cat, which is a great description. It feels like a Performance because Ned is putting on this terrifying Lord Stark mask in an attempt to get Catelyn to stop asking about Jon (and Lyanna). This is not how he usually acts with those he loves! When Ned is with His People, he is welcoming of questions, curiosity, emotion, even transgressive thought (to a point! the idea that Ned is a feminist because he lets Arya learn to fight is Not accurate but you can’t deny he allows significantly more flexibility wrt gender expression than most of the fathers we meet in this series. the bar is in hell tho). Yet when Cat asks him about Jon’s mother, Ned scares her so well she stops asking & still remembers the moment bitterly over a decade later. And if that snippet we see through Bran’s eyes of Ned praying that Cat will forgive him does come after she asks (like it’s suspected), it’s clear not only that this is a performance he’s putting on & weaponizing against Cat, it’s one he does not like using as a weapon against someone he is close to. After using the power his gender gives him to cause harm, he retreats to the godswood and silence to pray and rest, much like Sansa. A spiritual cleanse, the way a soldier may pray after battle, to reset and reconnect Being A Proper Man to Being A Kind Man.

I think there’s something interesting in that two of the characters most widely defined by how well they adhere to Westerosi gender norms both dislike feeling like they had to weaponize their gender. They are exhausted by the performance, because it’s a performance. This isn’t Sansa getting excited over tourneys, or Ned teaching his sons to fight; it’s toxic masculinity, it’s structural misogyny. It’s something they’re good at, excel at, and connected to something they enjoy but when it’s paired with violence, whether done by Ned or done to Sansa, it crosses over in their minds from an innate part of themselves (The Gender) to a performance necessary due to survival (The Gender Role). And that after these performances, both retreat to nature & god as a way of resting and cleansing from the experience.

[yuhi-san]

I’ve seen a few posts pointing out how stampede vash lacks the anger that 98 and especially trimax vash has. Which is true.

And it is important. Because vash isn’t the too morally strong or good or kind to be angry or whatever. Vash has a lot of rage about a lot of things. he chooses to be kind despite it rather than not being angry at all.

His sheer determination to not give into anger and choosing kindness over and over again is very important to who he is.

(personally I think that while tristamp vash went through a lot already too, he simply has not quite reached that point)

What I haven’t really seen are post pointing out that stampede vash, unlike 98 and trimax vash, does not cry.

Vash cries a lot. Some of it is for the comedy and because he is dramatic like that and also he isn’t above trying to get pity that way (with little success lol).

But he also cries a lot just… because. I don’t know how to explain it.

Like vash has no shame or inhibition to cry when that’s what he feels. Not gonna lie, I know trimax mostly from spoilers so far (shame on me) but especially in 98 vash cries very freely. He cries when he thinks he will have to watch that ex-mob boss or whatever being shot. Cries after killing, cries after monev kills all these people and he wants to shot him but wont. And so so many more.

Like that time he just suddenly drops his donuts and cries in the middle of the street.

Vash is friendly and sociable on a surface level but he has cut himself off from so much. Keeps so many things on the inside. Crying seems the one thing he doesn’t hold back on. Maybe his only genuine outlet for the pain.

Vash hides his scars, his pain and much more but he never hides his tears.

Vash, in 98 even says ‘is there something wrong with that?’ when the kids note that he is crying despite being an adult.

In contrast to that, stampede vash never really cries. He even states that he doesn’t deserve to.

We see him shed tears just once, at the very end when it becomes clear to him that he can’t save nai and that his brother and him have grown so far apart that he barely recognizes him anymore. He sheds silent tears for nai, for them, at what he certainly believed to be the very end.

Stampede vash is not only a lot more timid than his counterpart but seems overall more repressed and and emotionally dulled/exhausted

[transmascutena]

when someone comes out of episode 31 and 32 still believing nanami is in love with touga

[iguessitsjustme]

It’s about how Cha Yeowoon represented everything everything everything that Tae Myungha hated about himself and he fell in love anyway. He fell in love with the broken sad boy who just needed someone there.

It’s about how Myungha took care of everyone else but neglected himself. He neglected the sad boy who just needed someone there.

What Myungha needed was nothing more than himself.

It’s about how Yeowoon fell in love with Myunga and in doing so learned to love himself enough to advocate when he was unhappy and he’s needs weren’t being met.

It’s about how Yeowoon learned to give people he hated a chance because he gave Myungha a chance and he learned people are wonderful actually.

What Yeowoon needed was to give himself a chance.

And now they have each other and they’re both happy. But more importantly, they are choosing each other and choosing happiness. They no longer need each other to be happy but they get the choice and they choose each other.

[almightyhamslice]

Banban goes to heaven and just sits down and cries because he's never been to a place so kind and loving to him unconditionally. It is a perfect world but he does not believe he deserves such compassion from the universe and can't fathom being given good things without also suffering.

And heaven is literally just the candy mountain from Kipper s3 Arnold's Balloon Trip for some reason.

[dennistakesamentalhealthday]

dennis is an angry character btw im sorry but he is full of rage but that rage is not exclusive his anger does not negate sadness and fragility and insecurities in fact they work together and dtamhd was one of the first times where his anger was not used as a joke via a surface level rage explosion from him but instead explored the fragility of his anger. the way he keeps reassuring the workers he encounters (and himself) that he's not mad. when he tells daisy he's not mad but he is a little bit upset. dennis is angry and that anger is what makes him so fragile. he was upset and it manifested as rage bc he doesnt know what to do with his own sadness

[possamble]

(why does the read more cut keep breaking)

thank you marcille for letting my indulge in one of my favourite scenes to write (white girl total breakdown: bitch edition)

[collarful-clover]

I’m sorry for not posting countdown day art do you guys still love me

[roz-ani]

I can excuse gory murders, but I draw a line at selfishly lying to your patient/"friend"

Y'all ship these two? Smh...

[solar-satan]

I felt the need to make this, it also makes me laugh so hard this is my "Anime characters in Red" alignment chart

I also am aware that I'm revealing what era of anime I was around for which for some reason feels more intimate than me just telling you all my secrets

[crimeronan]

i should probably clarify for the sake of being sensitive re my tags on the vid i just reblogged: some people do in fact get sad enough to kill themselves when they get caught doing bad things. i could be wrong in my assumption that somerton absolutely did not do that. i also don't really care whether he did or not because it's so unbelievably tacky to open an apology with "i don't want to make this a sob story, i was just so sad i tried to kill myself and everyone who has a parasocial relationship with me needs to feel bad/guilty/worried on my behalf, and everyone who doesn't have a parasocial relationship with me needs to feel bad/guilty/worried if they wanted to hold me accountable for anything. but i'm so sorry for making this a sob story! it's not like this is a prerecorded video that i have full editing control of or anything"

like.... i don't care if you actually were in the hospital or not. you chose to open your apology video with the most blatant and pathetic kind of emotional manipulation possible & i don't care for it. it's literally no one's problem except yours and your loved ones' if you were in the hospital. it's no one else's responsibility. certainly not the responsibility of the people you wronged.

people doing this shit brings out my lowest-empathy tendencies because it gets to my high-empathy friends and i've known too many people held hostage by their partners/friends/parents threatening suicide over the years, so whenever i see people being like "oh, he really does seem upset, though" i'm like.

listen. i know he looks sad in the video. i know he's saying he wants to be dead.

You Don't Have To Fuckin' Believe Him.

[public-trans-it-deactivated20240]

I'm... honestly kinda tired of tumblr. Like, I like it here but also seeing people I care about get deleted by staff sucks. Seeing the 'queerest place on the internet' be extra draconian to queer (and especially trans) people is miserable.

I dunno.

I have a following here, but... like... I don't care? If you follow me I appreciate you, genuinely, but also my follower count has been high enough to stress me out for years now. I have been using addons to block that number everywhere I can, but I still end up seeing so many notifications that I know how many people are there anyway.

Like... I make a big deal out of being extremely abrasive on here, and while I do agree with everything I say, I also word it in such incendiary ways specifically to try and get people to avoid me. Which I think just made me a bigger target for that one... I don't even know what to call it. It wasn't a callout (to my knowledge), just a really weird wave of targeted harassment against me and my friends and it sucked.

I'm half tempted to just vanish off this site at some point and not tell anyone. Y'all wouldn't even notice anyway, I got 2 months worth of posts queued up. I posture a lot about how none of this bothers me, but the fucking panopticon of social media is a hellscape and I don't want to deal with it anymore. I'm sick of having to justify my own existence to people. I'm sick of having the things that make me unique erased for the benefits of some, while also being enlarged as a target for others still. I'm sick of having to feel like I need to hide who I am because I don't fit into other peoples mold.

I'm sick of meeting knew people who I thought were my friends, only to learn they have been disgusted by stuff I'm passionate about ever since they met me. I'm sick of being stuck on the outskirts of issues while being held at gunpoint to choose a side. I'm sick of people trying to make me into what they want me to be. Of being expected to be something specific. Of being in the middle of issues so caught up in presentation that if you use the wrong semantics you are torn to shreds but if someone else uses the wrong semantics you are a bitch for missing the point.

I'm fucking sick of spending my time on this website constantly looking at the Sword of Damocles dangling and wondering when it will finally fall on me and cost me everything. When the harassment will turn from people being shitty to and about me, to people wanting me dead for who I am. Of every complaint about systemic violence I've been affected by being met with "Okay but are you REALLY affected by this, or are you just playing victim?"

I'm sick of the fact that even here on my own little slice of the internet, there are parts of myself that I'm desperate to share but never can, because I know they will be used against me.

I'm just so fucking tired.

[dirty-bear-rick-sanchez]

I can’t believe that Rick canonically had a slap fight with an old man because he was jealous that Summer wanted to spend time with him

Like it 100% sounds like the sort of thing we would make up for a funny post on here but nope… canon

Edit: for some reason the order of the pictures is a bit fucked up but I can’t be bothered to fix it lol, sorry

[quaranmine]

Honestly I'd love to know what kind of comments you'd be adding to the fic for your mother. Very curious :0 (also I'm terrible at knowing what information an outsider would and wouldn't have and/or would need)

Sure, I'll add a few. (Redacted since my google account is my full name.) Also remember that y'all also got the benefit of my author's notes, but I'm not giving my mom the AO3 copy because over my dead body does she look at that account. I'm giving her a document copy. So a lot of the comments will likely be details you guys already got in either a post or author's note.

^^^ This one is written specifically because my mom, like me, has been going to Big Bend National Park since she was young. A member of my family has gone there nearly every single year since....1965? lol. So it's a fun tidbit for her to know I was thinking of it while writing this. (There will be a similar note when the Pinnacles trail comes up, because I named Pinnacles after a trail in Big Bend.)

me trying to explain Scar's general dramatic flair (i also have a comment somewhere explaining that Scar is dyslexic and that is why he occasionally mispronounces stuff in the fic, and why he says the scientific documents the rangers let him borrow were difficult to get through)

nicknames

My mother and I are both Gary the cat stans. Trust me she knows Exactly what I am picturing here.

^^ a few other comments on the story, ranging from "background character details" to "research details" to "totally unecessary personal opinions"

it's also fun for little self-aware asides:

She already knows a significant amount of the plot, including the ending, because I talked to her about it. That is also why she gets to read it, because the moment I opened my mouth about writing it I basically had to. I don't always talk about my writing with her but I really wanted to talk about this one. So! By talking about it I just made the decision for myself that I'd allow her to read it. She is....very excited haha. And I am too? I mean I think I am going to send it to her and then just immediately go back to my apartment so I don't have to be in the same house as her while she's reading it LOL. The embarassment of people who know you too closely reading your things etc etc. But I'm very proud of this story and I don't think she realizes how good of a writer I can be. She knows I'm good at it (like, she's read my essays and newspaper stories) but not how I handle fiction.

[fortes-fortuna-iogurtum]

hi yes I'm doing great and fine at college why do you ask :) (<< person who barely contained crying all the way back to her dorm and then broke down once she was in her room bc her government professor told everyone at the end of the first class that they're going to see horrible things in life and it's ok to be bothered by them, you don't have to constantly 'other people have it worse' about everything and so never let yourself feel the hurt over something and then went on to give everyone in the class a Tim Keller book to help cultivate personal devotions bc freshman year is hard)