#needed to put this into words somewhere

[iamacolor]

the political mess that is France at the moment became even more messy when yesterday the leader of the historical right wing party called the Republicans announced on TV that he would consider an alliance with the main far right party for the next parliamentary elections to oppose the new alliance of the left (even though his party has historically been against any alliance with the far right - which he has said himself several times over the years - given that it was created to follow the ideology of Charles De Gaulle, who led the resistance army during ww2). But then most of his party said "we are absolutely not doing that", when the vice president reacted on TV she said "we're going to fire him, I don't know yet how we can do that since he's the head of the party but we'll find a way " and then the far-right leader confirmed the alliance while most of the republicans were saying no and some were even quitting. then today they tried to organise a council meeting to fire the president but he locked the doors of the headquarters so that no one could come in and he's inside while the rest of the party's leaders are outside and the main secretary announced he's fired and they've picked another interim president. so he posted about how the party's status don't allow the decision and so he's still the president. but now they apparently got a key and they're forcing the doors open. there's a new twist every 10 minutes

[thevirgodoll]

to all of my dolls finding themselves:

originality is the "aesthetic" you are looking for. individuality is the "it factor" you are looking for. from your personality, pieces, hair, cadence of voice...even down to your favorite foods or special interests. you aren't supposed to change every aspect about yourself to be more palatable for everyone you meet. that actually makes you BORING!!!

"but so and so is doing this" "but what if people don't like it" ... so??? don't take people disliking your aesthetic as a sign that you need to do something different. like, of course they don't like it or have second thoughts - it's because THEY wouldn't do it themselves because it wouldn't go with THEIR given aesthetic. HELLOO??????

unless they are like minded, stop asking other people to weigh in on the things you CLEARLY like about yourself. especially if it's a core personality trait or interest. your LIFE isn't a group project. your LIFE is not a co-op game.

and yes... people will try to force you to assimilate and follow the crowd by speaking misfortune on your rebrand, your expression, your hobbies, your chosen path out of jealousy. however, that jealousy is lowkey unspoken respect for the fact you have the candor to go against homogeneity.

your authentic dedication to everything that makes you YOU is what will bring you the illustrious life you so fervently seek in the end...not some book a celebrity wrote or a youtube video. it's in YOUR DNA to be a star already in anything you want to do.

there isn't one tutorial on this world wide web that will help you if you don't realize you have the components within you first. there is NOTHING wrong with you!!! you are EVERYTHING that is right already!!!

NEVER conform to the way they think you should shine.

[underwhelmingalchemist]

The fact that maia arson crimew, the trans catgirl therian who leaked the 2019 TSA no fly list and posted it online, has a link on its pastel pink uwu aesthetic website to her own Wikipedia entry that contains hyperlinks to the articles for 'United States grand jury' and 'criminal charges' is purely iconic.

No notes maia. You're doing great

[judyalvqrez]

Lately I’ve been obsessed with how feral and animalistic Scratch (and by extension the Dark Presence) is portrayed in Alan Wake 2. In the past Alan has said that it’s hard to personify the Dark Presence because its behaviors and motivations go beyond what human psychology and emotions can express, but it’s interesting to me that some behaviors and emotions usually associated with feral animals like wolves seem to fit this version of the Dark Presence/Scratch better. In the same way Alan is the owl and Saga is the deer, Scratch is the wolf. I mean, he constantly bares his teeth and growls. In the Dark Place the Dark Presence hunts Alan, while in the real world Scratch hunts Saga, both stalking their prey. Saga also gets repeatedly attacked by shadow wolves, who at one point kill a deer when she solves a nursery rhyme. And I absolutely love how the old saying about how animals are most dangerous when they’re cornered and/or wounded can be applied to Scratch in multiple situations, but especially when the Cult of the Tree attacks the lodge. At that point the Dark Presence was still weak from joining with Alan, but now they’re under attack, Casey is gone, and cultists are coming to kill them. Even though we don't actually see it and Alan doesn’t remember, it’s obvious Scratch managed to come out. And Scratch doesn’t just kill the cultists, but fucking rips them apart, judging by the piles of bodies and gore and hanging entrails. Don’t even get me started on The Bad Boy in Number One Fan, where they practically take the wolf motif and beat us over the head with it all under the guise of funny jokes and fanfiction tropes. 

As much as I love the old portrayal of Scratch in AWAN, this much darker and feral version of Scratch is just so fascinating to me. Anyway, TLDR:

[puppyeared]

i feel like im not making any sense but does anyone else feel like there are stories that let u run with them and ones that spell everything out for you

[discoscoob]

THINKING ABOUT YANDERE NEO…

ִ ˙ ✩°˖💿 ⋆｡˚ A shameless ‘Don’t Worry Darling’ ripoff from your resident Harry Styles fan :)

After forcibly removing you from The Matrix, Neo’s hope that you would eventually learn to accept your new life in the real world never comes to fruition. So he has to try alternative measures.

His idea comes from the training programs but he tries something a bit more ambitious, he’s The One so he can practically do whatever he wants. He creates a whole simulated suburban town, designed like the 1950s and he keeps you plugged into it. Your mind is wiped of everything that came before and all you know is this simulation, you believe it to be the real world, you believe Neo is your husband and you’re happily married but you keep having such vivid dreams, where you live a completely different life (the life you had in the matrix) in a completely different world that is far more advanced and you have a successful career, you tell Neo about these dreams every morning before he “leaves for work” (unplugs from the simulation) and he acts amused telling you how absurd they sound.

One day you’re running errands when you see Neo’s car parked outside a motel. You watch him enter one of the rooms and your mind thinks the worst, that he is having an affair. Determined to confront him you storm over to the motel and barge into the room you saw him disappear into, prepared to find him with another woman only to be greeted by an empty room. Your feet quickly rush to the bathroom but that’s empty too. Feeling confused you come back to the room and notice the phone hanging off the hook and carefully put it back while your mind races wondering if you were imagining things. You startle when the shrill sound of the phone ringing echos through the room, making your heart leap out your chest. You quickly answer it and everything goes dark.

When you wake up, you’re in an unfamiliar dark room, you can feel the cold air against your skin as your blurry eyes try to look at your surroundings. It’s hard, your eyes hurt, you’re unaware of how long it’s been since you last used them. You look down, realising you’re strapped down to what looks like a dentist chair, you panic and start crying out for help. You notice all these strange ports on your skin with wires attached, you feel like you’re in a nightmare. Then Neo comes running into the room, realising you managed to escape the simulation. He soothes you, telling you this is just a dream as he plugs you back in.

Once you’re back inside the simulation, you wake up confused, the ‘nightmare’ still fresh in your mind and Neo is there ready to feed you some lie. You fainted in front of a motel he tells you but your memory tells you otherwise, you feel confused, wondering where the nightmare started and reality ended.

The next day while Neo is “at work” you revisit the motel room, it looks just like it did in your “dream” and the phone is sat on the beside table. You sit on the bed and hesitantly lift the phone off the hook and put it to your ear after taking a deep breath. Nothing happens. All you hear is the dial tone. With a sigh you put the phone back down and shake your head, convinced it was all just a dream you return home and your life with Neo continues as normal for a while again…

[lotus-pear]

BOY WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT NEW CHAPTER........

[queerprayers]

As Ramadan begins, and I see Muslims reflect on this year's fast in particular, I remember my similar thoughts as Lent began. What does fasting mean when you are forced into it? What does it mean to enter a holy season while drones buzz incessantly? What is reflection, charity, sacrifice when your whole family has been murdered? How do you give your children the gift of faith when they're traumatized or starving or gone? How can you look to the feast at the end of the season with hope when there is no sign of change?

I think of the pictures the Lutheran church in Bethlehem shared on Ash Wedesday, of Rev. Munther Isaac smearing ashes on children's foreheads. What does it mean to remind a Palestinian child that they will die? To look them in the eye and say they will return to dust and think, But please, God, not today. Not today.

Seasons and holidays have been a blessing to me in my darkest moments, but nothing I've experienced can come close to comparing. I can hope the faithful are finding God in this time, but when does that become a selfish hope? What a horrible expectation to have of them, while my country funds their bombing. Who am I to hope there is holiness in that? when I decided not to fast for mental health reasons?

I see a video of children celebrating the beginning of Ramadan. I don't have a right to wish them joy but I marvel at their faith that is more than I have ever had. More than they should have to have. I pass by dates in the grocery store and don't buy any. I wish those children could come to my door this evening. I would buy all the dates in the store. I donate to a Gofundme instead that I hope can get to someone who needs it.

A friend asks what she should do for Passover if this is still what the world looks like and I say, knowing it's not really for me to answer (none of this is), you do what you've told me you do every year. You pray for God to pass over those surrounded by violence. You ask for freedom for those who need it. You sing the songs of people who had to survive so much, many of whom didn't make it to the next year's holy days. The holidays come when there is war, like they have for centuries. There is always violence. We keep the faith anyway.

Lord of many peoples and names, I repent most of all this Lent of my country's crimes. I ask for many miracles, knowing that I am called to work to bring them into existence. I ask for those children to make it to next Ash Wednesday. And the one after. I ask for dates for every child to break their fast. I ask for a silent sky.

Rabadan Mubarak, from the bottom of my heart, knowing that I cannot bless this season, but praying God will.

[lightbulb-warning]

so has anyone figured out WHY there is the Need To Share our Artworks™ or is it just the vibes and our Soul apparently

[greensaplinggrace]

Alina didn’t choose to have her powers taken from her and she didn’t intend for them to be lost. You can’t say Alina chose her ending when the ending was deliberately forced on her without her consent, and she is actively upset by this.

It has been said before and I will say it again:

Alina explicitly wants her power in the books. She has conflicting feelings on it, which is normal, but does on multiple occasions admit to herself as well as others that she likes the power, that she wants it, and that she does not wish to lose it.

This is not due to a lack of conceptualizing Alina liking her powers and Alina’s greed for power as separate things. This has nothing to do with Alina’s greed. Outside of Alina’s greed for power, she comes to love this part of herself she neglected all her life because she was raised by people who could not understand her and who taught her to be wary of her own people and culture, so much so that she subconsciously avoided dealing with who she actually was.

Equating Alina’s power with her greed is exactly what those oppressing grisha do in justification for their hate crimes. You are using the same logic as a cast of people set on genocide and oppression. Not to mention the direct connection between grisha being based on jewish persecution and how the thing that defines grisha is equated with greed, which is a highly common antisemitic depiction of jewish people.

Alina is the ethnic jew raised by goyim. She is the repressed queer child of homophobic parents. She is everybody who only got to realize and express themselves after finding and connecting with their community late in life.

A story about a persecuted minority hunted because of what makes them different ending with your main character, who is a part of that minority, losing that piece of themselves and being forced to assimilate, is incredibly problematic. And anybody who makes this criticism about “Alina choosing” forgets that Alina is a character who’s only choices are those made for her by the person who wrote her.

Another thing that people constantly misrepresent is that Alina is not happy to be stripped of her powers at the end, and explicitly expresses sadness, grief, rage, and anger about the loss of her powers. This is separate from her finding happiness despite her grief, but the grief never goes away. Which means that anybody saying she was happy to lose her powers or chose to do so is factually incorrect. Her agency is stripped from her in the end.

She doesn’t get to choose the peaceful life because the peaceful life is chosen for her. This is not a natural ending to a meaningful character arc of self realization. This is the regressive and brutal shafting of a character who’s arc was abused at every turn, and who’s actual development was walked backwards. Not because of her powers but because she is prevented from ever finding peace with her powers by the narrative.

She doesn’t have to fight a war ‘because of her powers’. She has to fight a war because her people are fucking oppressed. Laying the blame on what makes her different instead of the people who have singled her out because she is different indicates a severe lack of understanding in regards to racism, persecution, and oppression.

Her powers didn’t become so corrupt that they failed her in the end. She didn’t see the consequences and choose peace to avoid them because she wasn’t allowed to see anything at all. Her path was decided for her before she could even look down the other.

People focus on Alina and her powers because that is the story. It is a story about realizing something crucial about yourself that has been kept from you and repressed your whole life. It is an incredibly important story to tell. It is a coming of age story about self realization and self actualization and finding agency after a life where you realize you had none.

Blaming Alina being grisha for why she is stripped of her grishaness is fundamentally flawed argument. If the greed for power was what was supposed to be punished, then she would only have lost that which she sought in her greed. And if a balance needed to be reached, then there would be just as many sun summoners as shadow summoners in the world. Because she lost more than that and because of the discordance in thematic symbolism, the message becomes a punishment not for “greed” (which shouldn’t have even been the message in the first place for a plot and setting like this), but for something else. It becomes a punishment for her being grisha and coming to love and accept herself for it. It becomes a punishment of reveling in one’s difference. It becomes a statement about living outside of the boxes society tries to place people in. It becomes a message about oppression and assimilation on the side of oppression and assimilation.

The most important criticism about the ending will always be about the framing of Alina losing her powers. Alina choosing peace and love over power as a message would only have been able to work if Alina had been able to choose it. And to do so she would have had to choose it when she still had her powers. That is the only progression her developmental arc of “choosing peace and love” could have taken if it didn’t want to become regressive and strip her completely of her agency.

[carnivalcarriondiscarded]

sometimes ya just gotta scribble your favorite character giving you words of encouragement. even if that favorite is a guy from your own brain

[hexiewrites]

on nanowrimo

(copied from my thread on twitter)

the discourse about NaNoWriMo is so heartbreaking. three of my fics - including my most popular - were written or partially drafted during NaNos. forgive my bit of nostalgia rambling here, as I mourn the final death of the thing that taught me I could be a writer too.

I wrote my first NaNo the fall of grade nine. My dad had just died, and I was stuck looking for something to take my mind off of it. I don’t remember now how I heard about NaNo, but soon I’d roped a friend in, and we set off. We were the youngest writers at our meet ups, but they welcomed us with open arms. I read all the author emails, sapped up every encouraging word. that year, I wrote 50,000 words. the next I did 75. I didnt always win, I didn’t always try, but because of NaNo, November has always felt like a month of possibilities in the dark.

in 2016, I moved away for grad school. new province, no friends, an outsider who was quickly homesick and heartbroken. I’d fallen back into dramione and read a TERRIBLE marriage law fic - rapey and gross. And I said “I can do better than THAT. hey look, its november tomorrow!”

I knocked out my 50k and kept writing. the story eventually hit 90k, still my longest fic by a landslide. I mentioned it to my dr, an inability to focus on school but this all encompassing fixation on my story. I got diagnosed with ADHD (the biggest blessing). I started to post.

I’m still not sure why - I wasn’t a bnf with a following - but DTTS took off. As of today its sitting at 219,000 hits. 5,000 kudos. To know that 5000 people have read and liked my writing, asked for more, told me they love it… I still get comments on that fic, and they all remind me that I AM a writer. that i AM capable. that fic taught me that there is a world who likes my work. that fic gave me the courage to keep writing, to switch fandoms, to post without expectation. that fic gave me the hundreds of thousands of words I’ve written since.

NaNoWriMo gave me that. the courage to do something a little insane. to find myself along the way. to step out and say “look, I made this, do you want to see it?”

and AI has taken some of that joy. AI has made me consider locking my fics, so my words don’t get scraped for the machine. AI has made me wary on tumblr - of art and voice notes and, yes, fic too. AI has taken my community and plundered it for our very soul.

and now @nanowrimo has coopted the language of disability. has taken an amazing accomplishment - something that has been part of my life for 17 years - and broken it, just a bit. still, as the leaves turn, as the air cools, the call to my desk is unmistakable. the words are there. they’ve always been there, waiting, ready. in november I will be writing, and mourning a community that made me who I am, but because of all of you, I will not be alone.

[my-blooming-darling]

I love them your honor

[puppyeared]

who up seeing their disorder in a fictional character but feel like its not their place to put a name on it

[apricusapollo]

when the character analysis is written so tragically in a fanfic that you shed actual tears at 1 am

[abyssal-art]

It’s 4 am and I can’t sleep due to chronic pain. So why not talk about the decisions I’ve made for my personal to represent that pain?

I will be focusing on my splatoon sona on this one, as I’ve been using that iteration primarily and had the best basis.

My splatsona isn’t much of a character outside of who I am- I base their backstory off of my own past, and fit it into the world of splatoon. But one thing that I’ve slowly worked into the design is the idea that they’re a “weresalmonid” (werewolf salmonid type deal.) this initially was just a way to incorporate my favorite species in the game into my sona. However, I’ve built upon it due to recent events

I have several chronic illnesses, and they result in chronic pain. I don’t like talking about it but it’s such a constant in my life it’s hard to not have my mind on it at least somewhat. The one-that ironically was diagnosed fairly recently in comparison to others-that causes me most issues is hypermobility. Iva always been in near constant pain due to gastrointestinal chronic pain from another illness, but this progressed fast recently and caused the diagnosis to be a bit more urgent to get so I am able to have the correct accommodations and understand what’s going on with me

But having that diagnosis feels like a damn cage.

Like a monster that looms over me.

Something I can’t control and hurts more than I can properly express.

So I take it to the only way I know how to express anything I am dealing with: art, Character design, Writing.

And that looming monster was personified to some degree

Into the horrorboros.

,,,sorta,,

That weresalmonid idea made more sense in my head now- it crops up at certain times, seemingly at random or constantly, and makes everything worse. Sometimes feels like I’m a bull in a china shop or an explosive with a finicky fuse that just barely is lit, waiting for that last spark to cause problems.

Like having a new tail you can’t control,

Or sharp teeth and claws that hurt.

It’s not something that can be controlled entirely. You can’t declaw a salmonid, nor can you cut off its tail without causing more problems

So there can be accommodations.

Wider space to help adjust to the new tail, or more leniency and care in case a claw nicks or scratches something or someone.

But it’s still a salmonid.

It’s still a horrorboros.

It still hurts, and causes more problems than good

Not even the best accommodations and most lenient people can fix that pain.

It’s still a monster.

Something I cannot control and can cause me to lash out from the pain, or lay in bed for weeks on end simply because I have no energy.

And I hate it.

It’s ugly and painful.

And it shouldn’t be there

Yet it still is

Scales are harder to remove when they’re imbedded in your skin.