#my wall of thoughts

[winterune]

I hate how i can't let out my emotions until it has completely overwhelmed me.

I hate how my grief is often times delayed.

So now I'm just feeling this tightness in my chest with no energy to do anything.

Like I envy people who can cry freely.

[crumb-crumblet-s-crumbington]

little bee and ratchet from 10 years ago,...

[egophiliac]

IF YOU GO NOW TO SILVER'S PROFILE IT SHOWS "SILVER VANROUGE" I AM!!! NOT OKAY!!! WAUGH

OH MY GOD 😭

like...it wasn't even just "oh we'll call you Silver Vanrouge now", they just straight-up made the adoption official, under the statute of Malleus Says So. he's legally recognized as Lilia's kid! I'm so happy for them!

this may take some getting used to though

[hymnoeides]

Do you fw vikjayce

No ghey make my stomach hurt

[rassblerry]

🎭 Here in the garden 🍦

[wacuoms]

[captmuldoon]

Black Sails really tapped into a very specific kind of ghost story where your ghost is not actually you but someone else's perception of you - the person they thought you were and should be. Imagine hating knitting and embrodiery, and you're no good at it, but you do it because you're a governor's wife and people expect you to be at his side, quiet with your head bowed over your needles. You buy a new wardrobe of dresses because your role necessitates it, but you keep your old clothes hidden in your rooms because you can't bear to let go of that part of you yet. And then you die and you come back as a haunting and you're faceless and voiceless, and you're wearing a dress that means nothing to you, and the only sound you can make is that of your knitting needles hitting each other again and again. And this is how the person you love brings you back: a voiceless, faceless thing in the corner.

[bberetd]

PIGTAIL DAISY ACQUIRED!!!

[freshfrenchtoast]

Kageyama's backstory only being revealed near the very end of the series is really interesting from a meta perspective.

For reference, his chapter is 387 out of 402. That's 96% of the way in.

To contrast, other characters like Tsukishima and Yamaguchi's backstories are shown in Chapters 87-88.

Now, we do get the explanation for his "King of the Court" title in Chapter 6, at the start of the series, but we don't see how he got to that point, or why he started playing volleyball in the first place like Tsukishima's and Yamaguchi's stories show.

It creates this situation where, despite being the deuteragonist, the character our protagonist, Hinata, is practically glued to the entire series, we barely know anything about him.

We don't even know he has a sister until that point whereas other characters' siblings like Natsu, Saeko, Akiteru, Alisa have all made appearances way before then. Even Oikawa's sister, though we don't see her, we at least know she exists because of Takeru.

He's both closed off to us (the audience) as well as the other characters in the series, and this results in them finding him rude or disliking his character in general (see: the "Kageyama is abusive" discourse that somehow keeps popping up even now).

Chapter 387 takes place in 2018 and was published in 2020 so it takes him 6 years of in-universe time and 8 years of irl time to really open up.

And the catalyst for all of this is Hinata fulfilling his promise of beating him.

You see, another thing to note is that, whenever Hinata thinks of Kageyama, he's always looking at him from behind.

His internal image of him is someone who's always up ahead, someone he needs to catch up to, meaning Hinata can only see one side of him, he cannot see all of Kageyama until he catches up and passes him.

Which he finally does here.

In this shot Hinata is finally the one who's looking back at Kageyama. At this moment, Hinata (and by extension the audience) can see him for all he is, can see how he was just a lonely boy who's been waiting for someone to meet him where he is, to keep running alongside him and not quit the race.

Someone he doesn't have to go easy on. Someone who would actually tell him to hurry up instead of slow down for a change.

His someone better.

[see-arcane]

There is so much to love about Sinners, but one of my favorite parts was the running theme of flipping the table on static storytelling tropes. And my favorite out of that pile?

Christianity is not the Magical Universal Good That Keeps the Monsters at Bay, and Hoodoo—or, nodding to cinema history, [INSERT ANY NON-CHRISTIAN FAITH HERE]—is not the Weird and Wicked Supernatural Scary Evil, Only Here for Curses and Pearl-Clutching Taboos.

In Sinners, Christianity isn’t held up as an evil in itself, but it is held up as itself, specifically as it actually came to be when it was introduced (forced) onto those people who never asked for it, didn’t want it, and had gods and cultures of their own which were largely crushed underfoot by colonialism and doctrines that generations were forced to choke down to the point that modern descendants now follow and spout a religion their ancestors had to have slaughtered or beaten into them. Remmick, an Irish vampire revealed as being old enough to have been a young man in an era before Ireland had been overtaken by Christianity, at the cusp of having it forced on them while their land and rights were stolen, can recite the Lord’s Prayer verbatim. Those words not only do nothing against his vampiric nature, but he admits the words give him comfort, even as he still hates the men who forced those words upon him and his father.

That scene coupled with Sammie’s interaction with his own father in the church was so beautifully and insidiously vindicating. Because Remmick and Sammie’s father are both leading congregations. They both have these groups of people following along, reciting what they want those groups to recite—even as they both come from groups that this religion was forcibly grafted into, they stand in places of power and command, and therefore it has become good! They both want Sammie to use his musical gift for their purposes, not his own wishes. They both disregard his fear and pain as they lay hands on him before staring crowds who wait to see him bow to their will.

Vampirism is the greater existential terror, especially as it is under Remmick’s rule. A potentially eternal undeath that traps the spirit and has one single controlling mind puppeteering their body and will. But Christianity as it’s framed in the reality of Sammie’s life is shown explicitly not to be the savior of the story, having so many of the same bones as the nightmare he barely escaped with his life.

Give up your gift and your desires and your free will to the Church, son, it’s the only way! Be a lesson for my followers and then we can acknowledge your torn face and the blood on your clothes and the absence of your cousins! Drop the guitar and give yourself to worship and leave behind all the evil sin that is joy not taken from sitting and reciting the Bible! Drop the guitar, son!

Then we turn to the Hoodoo and to Sammie’s musical conjuring. Annie’s magic and expertise is the only reason anyone survived the night as long as they did, and the only reason anybody was lucky enough to die as a human being. Her mojo bag saved Smoke’s neck from Stack twice, whereas everyone who went outside and got jumped by Remmick—or, in Grace’s case, rushed out in a literal blaze of glory to stake her turned husband—who might have worn a cross or been some manner of churchgoer, all got taken out by the vampires. Sammie’s power is not part of a Christian magic, but as the film points out, it is sacred. Those strings and his song pulled reveling spirits from the past and the future to dance with the present. That passion, that talent, that joy, that humanity, was so magnetic that it cast a spell...

…and it did so in what his father and many aghast others would deem a den of sin.

Sinful because of dance. Because of games at a table. Because of sex had for the sake of pleasuring each other—notably, each time with a miserably married woman, both getting to experience lovers who actually wanted them to enjoy themselves (sorry about that climax, Stack), rather than rote marital rutting for its own joyless sake. Because of nocturnal jubilation, separating oneself from the labors of life and the constriction of ‘polite and upstanding’ society.

Raucous joy is sin.

Faiths other and older than Christianity are sin.

Refusing to let yourself be absorbed into a coercive collective, no matter how well it sings or friendly its smile, is sin.       

Sin, sin, sin. The movie sins in this way, and so many glorious others, if only because these things which are not evil are painted with the label of ‘sin.’ Things that ‘are not done’ in a civilization choked by white supremacy and an increasingly puritanical Christian lens that leans deeper and deeper into disdain for empathy while championing strict control and obedience to patriarchy, bastardizing itself even as its original messages of love and goodwill are stretched so far and thin as to be nonexistent.

It’s sad to know how timely this story is. Here we are in the 21st century, strangled by conservative overreach on so many monstrous levels. But the story of Sinners does exist and it is being played like a loud and joyous song. A thousand thanks to Ryan Coogler for doing this all so artfully and so powerfully. I honestly can’t recall the last time I’ve seen such a thing on screen, if I’ve seen it at all. Here’s to more of it.

[winterune]

Even though i do enjoy school better now, to a degree, despite its hellish unholy weekly assignments (i do! Like it's MUCH better than studying medicine. At least I actually enjoy what I'm studying. I only need to suffer the assignments jdhdh), I still wish sometimes I could have those days where I do nothing but read a book back :')

[luminarytex]

my babygirls oh how i love them and their joy

[omaano]

something something the clones were already decanted with blood on their hands

also, boba, you're the absolute worst influence

time to shelve this project for another two months because i have no idea how to go about render it any further orz

sketch, credit to the original hades 2 warsong update wallpaper and ramblings about this piece here, and the rest of the Hades AU project here

[livingasaghost]

i think one reason why so many people fail to understand andrew and neil's relationship is because people don't know what it is to be aspec. and obviously the aspec umbrella is wide and varied and no one size fits all, but at the heart of their relationship, neil is demisexual. and i fully believe andrew is some form of aromantic. and obviously their shared history of trauma (of all kinds) colors their relationship and their sexualities and actions. but aspec people (and the people in relationships with those aspec people) develop such different relationships than allo people. they care differently, and it's often the care that becomes most important, rather than (just) the attraction. like yes, i choose you because i see you because i am interested in you because i don't quite understand you but i want to, i need to, and i am committed to sticking around regardless of whether we are a legal partnership or not.

people argue all the time that andreil would grow to say i love you some day, that they'd eventually heal enough to get married, but that isn't healing. that's ignoring a vital part of each of them. not only are they both still learning what love is, but love is not what their relationship is built around. they did not ~FaLl In LoVE~ they built a partnership around taking care of the other person. sure they were attracted to each other in their own ways, but andrew doesn't look at neil like he's his happily ever after romance. neil is the person who wants andrew to live, who wants andrew to be happy, who wants andrew to know that he has value even when he's not a good person. and andrew is the person who wants neil to be safe, who wants neil to be happy, who wants neil to know that he has value even when he isn't playing exy. their "romance" comes from holding each other up, from calling each other on their shit, from being a safe space when the world has proven it is anything but. neil is the one who almost starts to imagine some kind of long-term partnership in such conventional terms and andrew is so unconcerned with what that partnership looks like...he just knows the two of them will continue holding each other up as long as they can. and sure they'll have sex and sleep in the same bed and get cats together and all that "romantic" shit, but it's more than romance. it's a life. it's security. it's a chance to rewrite the trauma of their pasts.

and yeah to an outsider all that is romantic, sure. but i don't think andrew and neil see it like that. their relationships is all facts and truths. they feel safest in these absolutes, in the trust they are building together, in the shared language they are crafting between tentative touches and long stares. but to label it something as banal as ~romance~ undersells just what's happening to them. they don't need to say i love you because they know that all of these pieces that make up their shared life together say that for them, and they wouldn't know what to do with those words anyway. their "love" is not the same as other people's anyway. they don't need to get married because anniversaries and dates and marriages minimize just how long forever is, and they are already joined together by the understanding they share.

if the two of them got married or started "dating" it would send the wrong message to people who will never understand. neil isn't andrew's ~boyfriend~ he's the man who convinced him that life can interesting enough to stick around for. andrew isn't neil's ~lover~ he's the man who refused to let him run away from the life he always wanted. it's not romantic, it's survival. it's selflessness. it's learning how to care for yourself by caring for someone else and letting them care for you.

[edlinklover]

i need to study this man in a lab

[clouvu]

Cooking up an older Clervie outfit design so I don't have to keep drawing her looking like her child self but Long