#like a self fullfilling prophecy

[catcatb0y]

Does anyone else hit that point in conversation where it's like. Everything is a wall.

Not because everything actually IS a wall, but because you hit a wall once and that makes you suddenly doubt /everything/ you have to say?

Like, 'well I picked the wrong answer once, and I don't want to do it again-' it's like the equivalent of picking the same answer bubble too many times on a test, but you can't take the answers back and the first time you used that letter it was a guess (and it told you immediately after that you were wrong).

With every minor mistake, that wall just gets higher and higher and you get smaller and smaller...

[summertimemusician]

Local Self Proclaimed Mythology Buff is Delighted by the Impromptu Renaissance of People Being Interested and Obsessed with Homer's Odyssey Due to Hit Musical Adaptation, more after 11

[alicentsgf]

i remember at catholic school this boy got picked to be jesus in our good friday passion play and he had to sing a hymn for it. and like he was a good singer honestly ! but we were only 8 and i guess nerves got to him on the actual day because he was so so squeaky it was fucking painful and i was far too close for audiological comfort given that i was sat at his feet playing mary magdalene and so i said (admittedly maybe a bit too loudly) to my friend salome wife of zebedee that jesus needed to 'die quicker because my ears hurt' and a be-habited arm stuck out the front row of the audience to grab me by my veil and haul me away. ah memories. happy holy week my babes.

[hyvee]

I miss my cats

[inejswag]

what if the reason jesper always makes it even though always at the nick of time and inej always makes it to the rescue and survives against all odds time and again is because kaz believes in them..

[earth-to-ezra]

another tag vent because ugh feelings

[insanityisfine]

.

[therevengeoffrankenstein]

been playing with the idea of a sequel to the w wip which was something that has been in my mind since i first made the w wip but like originally it was as a joke. because it's so counter-intuitive to the message of the w wip to have a sequel. lenny isn't supposed to win. what lenny is doing is bad, and actively making them unhappy. letting them continue to pursue their hopeless goal (which is the only thing the sequel(s) could be) would be counter-intuitive to the message of 'being stuck on things that are bad for you is bad for you in the long run' and ironic for me to literally be doing to myself by continuing the series.

len would obviously be ridiculously over aged up (and the only character significantly aged up in the entire cast) and even more unhinged. there is an homage to frankenstein and the monster from hell in this. there is a great classic horror tribute in having a series with increasingly out-there sequels.

i could do an entire series of the w wip but i kinda don't think that'd be healthy for me. the film already loops in its own way. but what would hurt to do another film. and another. and another and another? it's all one big looping tragedy that lenny has trapped themself in by refusing to move on, and an entire series of them just trying and trying and trying and trying and FAILING FAILING FAILING FAILING! but still continuing to try would just further drive that cyclic tragedy home even more so than just having the first film end similarly to how it began. insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, after all.

[coatl-cuddles]

Hello, Sky? Yes, I'd like to order three (3) doomed, self-fullfilling prophecy princes? Thank youuu

[etherealspacejelly]

Wait, are you serious? About not having a defeatist attitude towards climate change? Because if so…Thank you.

i am!! very much so!!!

the thing is with capitalism, all anyone cares about is profit right now this second. as long as you're making a whole bunch of money now, who cares about later, right?

and because of the way the world is, the best and easiest ways to make money right now are some of the worst things for the environment

so the Big Companies that are doing the vast majority of the global carbon emissions and pollution and so on dont want you to stop them from doing those things, because then they cant make money, or cant make As Much money.

they want you to give up on climate activism. because climate activism Works, and if you continue to push for more sustainable practices then they'll have to implement them and lose money

so there is a very large incentive for Big Companies to try to convince you that Everything Is Hopeless and we are going to die so you should just give up now and stop doing all of that pesky stuff like. trying to save the planet.

climate doomerism is a self fullfilling prophecy. to combat that, we must have Hope. hope that change is possible, hope for a better world, hope for survival. because that keeps us working, it keeps us pushing, and if we all keep pushing then things will start to move in the right direction

we are making progress, no matter what anyone tries to tell you otherwise. the good news is there, you just have to look for it. dont let a bunch of billionaire assholes who would let your whole family die for an extra 0.001% of profit convince you to give up.

they're not going to change unless we force them to. and we have the power to do that! and that scares the shit out of them.

[jessaerys]

"i got mommed" shiv marrying tom because he was meek and bendable and nothing like the men in her life and then bringing tom into the fold of the men in her life just to fullfill the self-fullfilling prophecy of having married her father !!! girl freud can't keep gettign away with it !!!!!!!!!!

[dduane]

An anonymized non-anon query

(A note: my ask box isn’t open to anons at the moment, because I started getting inappropriate messages that I didn’t care to see. Maybe I'll eventually go anon-open again. But the present situation isn’t going to stop me from answering asks where the person’s uneasy about having their username revealed. Like this one:)

[text:

Can't go on anon so this is a little mortifying to be Seen™ but;

Do you have any words for fandom girls who are no longer in their 20s and starting to construct people in their heads who shame them for "still being into this stuff"?]

First thing; funny how it's always fandom girls who come up against this, isn't it? If it was some 90-year-old fandom boy in question who'd been painting his face red and white and following Manchester United since he was nine, no one would turn a hair. In fact, everybody in that cohort of interest would be praising him for his commitment and loyalty. It's almost as if some people have bought into the idea that the rules are different for girls somehow! Something to do with the idea that where girls belong is home making everybody a sandwich. I wonder where that might have come from...

Anyway. What you're describing here is something a lot of us have run into: the pressure to (allow me briefly to stand the well-known trope on its head) Be Like All The Other Girls... and to be prepared (and indeed resigned) for that inevitably to happen IRL. This stuff starts sneaking into your head in a very innocuous way: by disguising itself as "being prepared" for what you're afraid might happen. And it's very hard to avoid having that concern slowly but surely turn into a dread of what's going to happen. (For there's a horrible seductiveness about self-fullfilling prophecy... even if you know you've built it yourself. Part of your mind, that frightened advanced-fight-or-flight part that's always trying to keep you safe by predicting all the possible futures, starts feeling satisfied with itself when it finally has the evidence to say, "Well, at least we were prepared for that!")

So it's best to be proactive about managing this, I think, before things start to get bothersome. Develop a quick switchblade-style defense that you can pull out of your brain's back pocket at short notice. And then, when you're used to using it on those rogue ideations, disarm the sneaky "attacker" more thoroughly by taking it apart, gradually, at the more straightforwardly analytical end.

Let's start with the switchblade: a good-old fashioned mantra. How about this:

"Nobody gets to gatekeep my joy."

This can be used as a silent affirmation any time you feel the need. Any time you start feeling that pressure—that annoying whisper from the conjectural voices in your head that want you to think about how maybe you are too old for this kind of thing—pull out the mantra and shiv them in the gut with it, three times. (Threes are always good for this. Think how many spells have to be done, or names spoken, in threes. The rhythm's an archetype all its own.)

What you'll notice, with repetition of this intervention over time, is that the incidence of this kind of thinking gradually gets rarer and rarer. It might take a while to go away completely... but you'll know what to do if it rears its head again.

But also: this response can when necessary be repeated right out loud in front of whatever sorry piece of breathing meat has the unutterable bald-faced gall to actually try to gatekeep you to your (digital or otherwise) face. Pull it out, set your features in an expression of amused calm (because what you do to your face makes differences in your brain), and hit 'em with it. And if they continue to try to argue the point with you, you get to just keep repeating your base-state mantra until they give up and go away.*

...Now, since good mantras normally run deeper than the mere words, it makes sense to inquire into an underlying issue:

Why do people do this to other people? (And I don't mean this as a rhetorical question with optional eyeroll: I mean it as a possible diagnostic.) There has to be a reason people pull this shit... as mandated by the favorite (different) mantra of psychiatric professionals everywhere: "All behavior is motivated."

One aspect of this to consider: the "you're too old to be into this stuff" response is usually a learned behavior. People for whom the perception of "insufficient" age or maturity is an issue have routinely picked it up from others. There are a number of reasons why they parrot it... the likeliest being that simply want to be seen saying the thing that lots of other people they know also say; so that by so doing, they can be seen as Smart. (This is of course just another a manifestation of our old generally-maladaptive friend, the so-called herd instinct.) And nine-tenths of those other people, I can guarantee you, got it in turn from others still. "They're too old for this" is rarely going to be a spontaneous insight. (Except when used pertinent to certain contact sports, and some types of opera.)

Yet why does the trope perpetuate itself so enthusiastically?

Leaving aside personal living-arrangement issues in individual cases, I think it's because in some people, underneath the expressed trope, there's a genuine fear... an insidious variation of the well-known impostor syndrome. And it's this:

They're afraid that whatever it is they've got at the moment, it's may well be the wrong kind of "this stuff"... not a real joy. (Some people will take this to mean, "The kind of stuff, or joy, other people will approve of." Cf. the "seeming Smart" thing.) And, as they get older, they may be becoming afraid they may never have it.

Now, people naturally try to protect themselves from experiencing their own fears whenever possible. This one's no different. So one way such folks find to distract themselves from the fear of having no joy is to devalue such joy in others. That way, whatever they see themselves as having their noses spitefully "rubbed in" can be perceived as no longer a real threat to them. They can start seeing it as a bad joy, a weak or silly or stupid joy. And (in this case specifically) an immature joy.

(With this in mind, the passage in which C.S. Lewis deals with this toxic fetishization of "maturity" is worth quoting in full, since we so frequently see only the last couple/few lines:)

“Critics who treat 'adult' as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”

...And you hear there the voice of a man who'd dealt with a whole lot of critics in his time on this subject—some of them quite famous and elevated types, trying to discredit him for what we'd now think of as "clicks"—and had routinely made them ever so sorry they'd engaged. Also, Lewis was an enthusiastic reader of "the pulps" until his dying day, and you should have seen some of his responses to those who tried to tell him that "at his age, he should be over that science fiction stuff by now." I'd have to go digging for the cites, but... hooboy.

Anyway, and as a closer:

You're not required to—at someone else's mere behest—even think about changing your way of thinking and living in the (probably hopeless) hopes of pleasing or placating other people you've never met. And most specifically:

You are in no wise required by the Universe to curtail your personal experience of joy in order to try to make scared and small-souled people more comfortable.Your soul gets to be its own size, and have its own joy... in its very own shape, volume, and richness.

So if anyone pulls the "You're too old for [x]" crap on you, I encourage you to just let that attitude sail on by you and fuck straight out into the Oort Cloud and beyond. Let passing alien spacecraft on their way in-system gaze at it in wonder and say, "Wow, look at that go! Didn't think they had warp drive here yet."

...Anyway: let me know how you get on.

HTH!

*This is a basic assertiveness-training technique that I feel is much undervalued in daily usage. Every time someone comes up with a new reason you should stop doing what they don't like, and expects you to respond to that... what makes them think you're required to come up with a new and different reason not to? Who made that concept up? And why waste useful originality on someone arguing with you in the kind of bad faith that refuses to accept your answers? Just keep repeating yourself with the main reason until they give up (probably in great exasperation: too bad...) and bugger off elsewhere. :) ...But see the useful 1970s work When I Say No, I Feel Guilty for effective DIY approaches to this problem.

[danmei-confessions]

One thing that really bothers me is when people try to make light of Shen Jiu's abuse of Luo Binghe, especially when they compare it to Liu Qingge beating his disciples. It's frustrating to me because it makes me feel like no one else has read the books, since I've never seen this brought up, but Liu Qingge’s disciples weren't *children*.

In book 2, after Shen Qingqiu emerges in his mushroom body, he runs into Yang Yixuan and describes him as a youth of 17 or 18 then observes, "the color of his robes confirmed that he really was from Bai Zhan Peak, but Shen Qingqiu could summon no memory of ever having seen such a young disciple before." (Page 152).

Now, I'm not saying this doesn't mean there are absolutely no young disciples there, but even still, Bai Zhan Peak is full of warriors. There's a difference between fighting with a disciple and tying a disciple up and beating them without giving them a chance to defend themselves.

This isn't Shen Jiu slander; he's actually my favorite character despite his behavior because I feel as though he has a lot of potential.

I understand that there were a lot of misunderstandings about his actions, such as killing Liu Qingge, but he was NOT a good person.

I don't mind when people write fics and "Jiu-mei"-ify him. I mean, some people want to write softer fics and characters, and honestly, if Luo Bingge--who his character mirrors--can become a softer version, so can he.

I just hate when people act as though it was canon that he wasn't that bad and was just a poor misunderstood boy who wanted love. He actively pushed people away and was a self-fullfilling prophecy. And he did, in fact, want Luo Binghe dead and was mad he was still alive.

If you're going to mischaracterize my favorite character, at least admit you didn't read the extras, or it's an au where he's softer. I do it all the time, any small change in his past could lead to him acting differently. Personality isn't set in stone and is most often dependent on the situation. But don't insist it's canon and take away what little agency Shen Jiu has. He knew exactly what he was doing and would hate his "fans" for implying otherwise.

.

[nevermoreconfessions]

Yayyy finally a confessions account! <333 Ok so I genuinely like Montressor as a character. Not just "like to hate" and not only because he's sexy. Maybe I'm delulu and resting on hcs but there's things about him that I even think are relatable?? And I don't think I'm the only one either. A lot of people pretend that they hate him when they actually love him, but they're just scared of gettin hate for it. Or it could be that I'm coping.

The deeper we get into the story, the more I like Montresor. Or, I guess, I love to hate him, too.

@blacknedsoul-blog has a wonderful analysis of Monty being White Raven's "bad ending," but they also include a fantastic section on Montresor's character. I recommend it, there's a lot of beautiful insight.

Here's my short tidbit of commentary:

Montressor is the shining example of the cycle of abuse.

In Chapter 87, we see the brunt of it — Monty has severe religious trauma. This is highlighted by the phrase, "You've had the devil inside you since the day you were born," told to him by his own mother. His. Mother.

Monty was a victim nearly his entire life by the religious community that raised him; they called him the devil from the start — so, he became one. Self-fullfilling prophecy.

What a rotten man. What a God-fearin' devil.

[dragonfly0808]

The Trix’s Fates

MAJOR SPOILERS FOR THE END OF SEASON 3 AND WHAT HAPPENS TO THE TRIX

Well well well… I’ve got some explaining to do.

I knew from very early on that I wanted the Trix to have a tragic ending, with one of them dying, one of them going crazy and one of them just being utterly defeated at the loss of the other two. After some debating, I pretty quickly knew who would end up with which fate.

So… I’ll go by parts, going from oldest to youngest, starting with:

Icy

Icy is the one who goes crazy, losing her mind.

I chose her for this since she’s the leader and the oldest, and losing one of her sisters leads her to fully going off the deep end, she goes too far, gets in too deep.

At the beginning of her story, Icy is very controlled, very paicient and has a full plan. She’s crafty, resourceful and has a family history with dark magic and the dragon flame.

But what sets her off the road is no longer fully being in control due to being out of balance after losing a sister and no longer caring about what happens to her. She has no real end-plan, she has no real goal other than to get back at the Winx and hurt them as much as she can. She was no longer interested in the Ancestral Witches until her plan of collapsing Andros was thwarted.

Icy has a lot of warnings, the very first being when Darcy decides to leave, refusing to stay and watch Icy get herself killed. Instead of letting go and running away like Darcy begs her to do, Icy chooses revenge.

She goes to her home planet, her uncle tries to dissuade her, to warn her of the dangers of the magic that has taken the lives of too many family members, she kills him in order to access that same magic.

She has chances to stop, but she chooses revenge, she feels like she has no other purpose, no other road to take other than to finish what she started the very first time she attacked Bloom.

Icy goes crazy and loses control because it’s the complete opposite of who she was when the story started, she loses everything, included herself.

She choses revenge, choses to continue her family’s mistakes, choses to take the risk of awakening the Ancestral Witches but in the end, she loses it all to those very choices.

Stormy

I went a bit deeper into Stormy’s fate in another post but I chose Stormy to be the one who dies to show her being a bit of a self-fullfiling prophecy, her rage, the very thing that often gives her an edge in battle and helps her in her power to become stronger, is the very thing that kills her.

I chose Stormy to be the one killed also because I had very specific storylines in mind for Darcy and Icy but as for Stormy I just felt like dying would actually be the most interesting, unexpected thing I could do with her.

I thought it could be a very tragic thing to see Stormy, who we know to be fearless and brash and impulsive… die due to a mistake, die in fear of something that she created.

In case you somehow haven’t noticed, I love angst

Darcy

Darcy is the last one standing… well… ‘standing’. I thought that my version of Darcy would be the most devastated to be left alone.

Darcy in my rewrite, has never really been alone. At first she had her brother, then she had Riven, then she had the Trix.

She’s the youngest, the one that they want to protect the most.

To her, being alone is truly the worst case scenario, which is why I chose her to have that fate cause I am cruel. Darcy herself tells Riven in their final goodbye that she’s not used to being alone and that she isn’t good at it.

She gives up. A big part of her dies with her sisters and she turns her back to the ideas of revenge and dark magic.

She was always the ‘lesser evil’ of the Trix, which I feel makes it even more tragic that she ends up so very alone.

Darcy is betrayed once by her brother, being left alone, then she betrays Riven, leaving him on his own, and in the end, Stormy is killed and, seeing Icy is heading down a road that will end in death or worse, Darcy can’t bring herself to watch, to keep going.

————

The reason why I wanted to overall make the Trix’s fates so drastic and tragic was for 2 main reasons.

First off, as a contrast. We see the Winx keep growing and becoming more powerful, while the Trix, as a commenter once said, peaked in high school and have just been going downhill, not truly developing their power after becoming convinced they were at the top of their game in s1.

The second was to show consequences and how high the stakes were for s3. To go all in with the angst and show how, the very first villains of Veiled Wings are destroyed by s3, while our heroes are very much affected and nearly destroyed by s3, but manage to prevail.

[kragehund-est]

lmaooo my buddy thought he could break free from the chains of fate. we literally warned him, like, dude you're just gonna become a self fullfilling prophecy 😂 dumbass