#moving on to shouting it into the void

[disregardandfelicity]

it bothers me sooo much that this is how they lay down to sleep. what kind of poses are these! why not get under the blankets! this looks so deeply uncomfortable. i know they're vampires but do vampires not want to get snuggly and warm! not even with each other just in the giant bed they're stiffly posed on top of!!!

[lurkingshan]

I say this with love: some of y’all couldn’t hold a grudge to save your life and it shows

[q-uzi]

welcoem to roblox i wanna play with you welcome to roblox its better with two yeah

[something-of-a-hermit]

K did anyone else notice Crowley had longer sideburns in season 2 and instead of the sideburns covering his tattoo he just moved his tattoo down his face?

Bc I haven’t seen anyone say anything about it

[finniestoncrane]

sorry i was going to be productive today but now it's 6pm and i just tanned two edibles and i'm about to launch myself into assassin's creed valhalla and/or collapse into the sofa and watch the simpsons i SWEAR i will be a better friend tomorrow u-u

[kyliafanfiction]

I sometimes feel like characters who do truly monstrous things while also having been victims of some pretty insane shit themselves are sort of an exercise in empathy. Or at least, should be seen as such.

Like, in real life, if a person who has been horribly broken by their experiences and failed by society than proceeds to rape someone - it's hard to feel the justifiable sympathy/empathy for that person (without excusing their rape, never do that) because well, you can look at this actual human person they hurt, or worse, and it feels gross and disrespectful to the rape victim.

And this is understandable. (And applies to more than just rapists/rape victims of course, that's just the most visceral one and thus picked for that reason)

But a fictional rape victim is... fictional. You can't 'disrespect' their trauma, and while obviously rape/whatever else is real, and people may related to the rape victim and thus see your comments about the rapist also being a victim as somehow being about their experience...

Well, it's not.

Because the rapist here, didn't actually hurt a real person. Fictional characters are objects. They're objects that often grab us by the throat and refuse to leave our fucking heads, yes, but they're objects. They are tools used by writers to tell a story, and readers to tell a story.

And one of the things fictional characters are good for is allowing us to consider experiences we never had, and imagine ourselves in other circumstances and lives. (Also just fun and fascinating and interesting to watch their stories).

It's very easy to feel for the rape victim in fiction, and rightly so. That's Level 1 Empathy there. Granted, some people IRL fail that, but that's not really what we're talking about here.

Advanced Empathy, hard Empathy is feeling for the rapist. Not for the rape, of course, even if they feel guilt about it, but if someone really was failed on multiple levels and was broken and damaged and went through the sort of psychological wringer that would leave most of us here on tumblr catatonic - they do deserve the same Empathy any human (any person) who went through all that.

Even after they also do the bad thing, critically they still deserve Empathy. And that is fucking hard. I very often have a hard time feeling bad for truly awful people who also deserve empathy and sympathy, real and even fictional (despite all this, yeah, I'm not perfect on this) for what they (separately) went through.

It also becomes even harder when what they went through is utterly bound up with what they did. How what they went through and experiences is in part responsible for what they did - because they still made a choice. The circumstances may have left them not in their right mind, may have left them feeling without choice, may have driven them to things they normally might not think of or do, but they still chose to do that bad thing. And that's not okay. They still hurt someone.

And yet - one cannot remove the action from the circumstances. So you can still feel empathy, and elucidate all the factors and circumstances as to what led up to their choices and why, and it doesn't change that they did the horrible thing. The rape, or the murders, or whatever.

But circling back - with a fictional character... they didn't hurt a real person. There's no one who is real that suffered. The things the character did IRL are bad because they hurt real people.

So you're not being disrespectful to the victim by feeling that empathy, or sympathy. By exploring the things that they were a victim for. Even by wanting to focus on those things - fictional characters should be compelling in all their aspects, if they're written well.

And yet, of course, if you do that empathy and do talk about what the bad person went through and all that context, people come at you. They call you evil, just as bad as the (again, fictional) character, or they say that you're treading dangerously close to the arguments people use to defend the real people who do these things in real life. Or you're disrespecting all the victims of these crimes IRL. Especially of course, if the person coming at you has a reason this comes close to home.

But again - fictional.

In an ideal world, we'd all feel sympathy and empathy when it's called for, regardless of what the person did. Even the worst most monstrous people deserve human treatment in prison. And if you don't have empathy, that's hard. Even if you do have empathy, that's hard.

So if you look at a fictional character (who doesn't hurt a real person by virtue of being fictional) that does horrible, vile things, but went through so much, and you still can't empathize or sympathize with them... I mean, it doesn't make you a bad person, not even close, this is still fiction, and there's people I should empathize with in fiction that I don't, but...

It's still a failure of your ability to be empathetic. And we're all humans. We're all failing at that, among other things, all the time. But... it's good to be aware of that. at least?

At the very least, bear that in mind when other people are talking about that context, and that victimization. And please, for the love of god, don't fucking pretend that the victimization didn't happen, that this person who did do terrible things (in fiction) suddenly didn't also (in fiction) experience awful shit, as if doing a bad thing erases all the bad things done to you.

Again - it doesn't necessarily make you a bad person, but like... the horrible state of prisons in our society is a real, actual problem. The way we as a society dehumanize people who do bad things is a real actual problem for a lot of reasons (not least because it creates an incentive for authority that wants to dehumanize a person or a group to expand the definition of 'did bad things' to make their dehumanization now acceptable, among other things).

So yeah. Fictional character who suffers but than also makes others suffer - that's a useful exercise in Empathy. And doing that doesn't make you or anyone else a bad person, or actually defending the sorts of crimes, IRL or Fictional, that this character did. Contextualizing is not whitewashing, empathy is not erasing, and humanizing is not disrespecting the victim(s).

So yeah, they fictional character did bad things. But there's more to them than that. And you can say but and talk about what comes after but without disrespecting the fictional victim. Because the fictional victim... is just as fictional. Just as not real.

Is it possible for this to end up being taken too far? Yes. But that's a reason to be mindful of yourself when it comes to real people, not to never do it. And when it comes to fictional people - again, fictional. Nobody was actually, really hurt.

(I really do want to make clear, before people read the tags, that this applies to all crimes these sorts of characters do, rape was just picked as the one to use as the example.)

[veilguardss]

i know people talk about anders immediately going all “i’d drown us both in blood to keep you safe” on hawke but it is also so deeply funny to me that after flirting with blackwall like, twice, he skips the drama and goes straight to “you’re not like other girls”

[soft-girl-musings]

driving to work: amazing, sunshine and butterflies, maybe life is worth living bc look at all this green

being at work: If I Have To Stare At One More Windowless Gray Wall I Am Going To Start Throwing Darts At The Customers

[katzenklavierr]

I've just been hit by the realization that having my own apartment means I can print out dumb pictures and hang them on the walls of not just my bedroom but the entire unit

I'm going to put Shadow the Hedgehog Nice Cock dot PNG in my bathroom and no one can stop me

[mecharose]

i desperately wanna find more writers who look at writing more like an engineering project with literary analysis and character psychology as like. ur blueprint. ur hammer and nails. i also might just be a freak in my approach tho

[sprooknooky]

Omg why do they look like that <3

[missskzbiased]

A nugget from a WIP that I'm excited to write, cuz I can make everyone suffer and reconnect the way I want to

"Penelope..." Portia pinched her brows, sighing once more, feeling like she had aged ten years in one night, "Don’t play games with me. I’m not daft and neither are you, so take this chance to tell me the truth or I’ll uncover it myself," Her mother's gaze pierced through her soul, and Penelope felt her resolution yielding little by little, "What has happened in here?" She asked one last time, stern enough to earn an honest answer.

"Eloise" Penelope stated simply, resignation sinking upon her as her legs weakened beneath her. She sought her bed, sitting down, eager for some support, "Eloise has happened"

"Elaborate" Her mother ordered, her tone commanding as she closed the distance between them.

"I reaped what I sowed" Penelope managed to articulate through a whisper, her voice trembling with a mix of desperation and sadness, "Eloise saw me in a new light, in a way no one else had ever seen, and she hated it. She hated me. All of me"

And then, the realization came.

Penelope fought to restrain her tears, but it was proven futile as one solitary droplet trickled down her cheek, swiftly followed by another, and another, and another. Soon, an unstoppable stream poured down her face, each tear a testament to her overwhelming emotions. Then, there was no turning back. Her sobs echoed, unrestrained and incessant, a symphony of distress, painting a vivid picture of her rotten insides. Tilting her head back to halt the flow, her throat clenches and strains, instead, suffocating her. The intensity of her feelings gurgled its way down her lungs and knocked the air out. For a fleeting moment, she is convinced that she was dying, that her heart would burst out of her chest or stop altogether, that she would drown with her feet planted on land. Instead, air kept flooding into her lungs, blood kept pumping through her veins, and the crushing sensations kept slaughtering her.

Only when the realization settled in, and she was certain that she would live to see another day, that she curled in on herself, pressing her palms against her eyes, surrendering to her sorrow. Wailing like never before, she let it all out while Portia stood still, shocked into befuddlement. Then, Penelope felt an awkward pat on her back.

For a moment, she wasn't even sure she felt anything. It could have been anything, really, so light was her mother's touch. The moment was fleeting, but it returned a few seconds later. This time, Penelope could distinguish the shape that the brief, firm collision had — a hand. The third time, when the pat was heavier and even more awkward than the first two, she had no doubts —  Portia was comforting her, or trying to. The fourth time, her hand slid from one shoulder to another, and then her chest was pressed against Penelope’s face, and her mother was embracing her.

A hug.

Her mother was hugging her.

[lurkingshan]

Me watching Moving ep 6

[windwardstar]

Fandom really really really needs to get with the program that trans mascs exist as like both a concept in the first place and the as like real people who actually exist

How the fuck. Do people. Think. Trans men don't count as mpreg?!? It's the one scenario that is actually not only possible in real life but happens regularly!

And. If. Your first??? Explanation for why a guy could have a vagina is that it's omegaverse? Or magic? Or that in an au of Mulan where a girl dresses up as a guy... but the canon character is a guy... you jump to omegaverse rather than Trans guy. That is literally the easiest explanation here.

Like. Please. I.m begging you. Realize trans mascs exist.

Also while I'm at it. Where are the trans people in omegaverse stories????? Like this is supposedly a genre for deconstructing gender and playing with it but it really just seems like a way to dive headfirst into biologic essentialism and completely ignore that trans people exist? (Because trans tags and omegaverse tags seem to have like no overlap.) (Although the intersex tag sees plenty of use with omegaverse but I'm guessing that is a fetishistic hot mess given the other rampant problems I've noticed and general awareness that intersex topics aren't handled well by society in general)

Like. Idk. I just. The fact trans men and mascs are just like apparently lower on the thoughts that occur to writers for why a "girl" would be dressed as a guy, why a guy could be pregnant or have a vagina than magic or gender essentialism: the au. Is just.

[sukunasstarlight]

I FORGOT I HAD HSR INSTALLED

[meova101]

Zandvoort definitely hates Logan huh