#no harm in that tho right

[puppydewmelon]

Ratchet and clank double sided charm I designed and then had a heart attack when I converted it to cmyk and never ended up getting it ordered. Another time, perhaps

[tunamayojazz]

saw that fav ship trope: chronic sleeper x chronic insomniac tweet and guess what! it's them

[morrigan-sims]

And I forget sometimes I'm just flesh and bone.

As he stands in the ruined bathroom, all Rook can think is, At least now I can breathe.

[sandinmybed]

can i be fr for a minute?? sending abuse to people online for holding different views than you is not activism and in fact actively hurts your cause. most people are not extreme in their viewpoints, you can give them a new perspective if you're willing to spend some time explaining shit. if someone is saying something you disagree with and you rush in there to condescend to them and call them disgusting and subhuman and dont even TRY to explain calmly why their views are harmful, they're going to shut you out instantly and double down on their views.

most people are simply genuinely ignorant to the issues they're talking about - they just pick their views up from the news and the world around them and express opinions because that's what every person does. if you run in there and tell them they're scum for it, what then? if someone does that to you, are you going to think "maybe i should do some research" or are you going to think "this person is an asshole, im blocking them." a lot of you think you're activists and then refuse to do any kind of actual WORK to support your cause.

[femmesandhoney]

tras trying to claim something is a human rights violation against trans people when it also affects every other citizen is so funny like...yeah we know you're human too but how is that specifically about trans people come on now 😭

[the-yearning-astronaut]

Do people know there's a difference between:

an aro spec character being "cured" of their aromanticism by their "one true love" by the end of the narrative

And:

An aro spec character who finds one of the few people they happen to click with in an amorous (but not necessarily romantic) way by the end of the narrative

Does anyone understand that aromanticism is a SPECTRUM and that someone writing an aro character finding someone they want to be in a relationship with might be doing so for reasons other than 'curing' them?

And the same thing for ace spec characters! And, you know, actual people.

[yesokayiknow]

everyone’s always like aw man sorry that you brought your friend back to life and she came back wrong and twelve’s like >:| bc clara’s exactly the same as she always was

[milimeters-morales]

i know ppl avoid it bc of how quickly it can just become stereotypes against black and homeless people, but i enjoy thinking about hobie’s bad habits or things that many people would consider gross that he developed as a result of homelessness, loneliness (by which i mean my headcanon of his early childhood), & the way his world works in general. Bad dental hygiene because he’s so stressed about other things he has to deal with + he wants to keep saving whatever toothpaste he has. Not bathing for weeks on end despite all the moving around and fighting he’s doing because he wants to save soap and clean water + it’s hard to let his guard down for an extended period of time when he’s so used to not having anyone to watch out for him. Not having the healthiest hair or any actual routine anymore because of too much stress and too little time to focus on it + not having people around that would stress the importance of it as he grew older. Forcing himself to eat food he hates and will make him sick because he doesn’t want to waste the food (if nobody else will eat it) + sometimes getting extremely angry at people taking the smallest bits of food even as a joke if he wasn’t going to share it. Having a bad attitude towards people who don’t deserve it can easily be seen as the “black man angry beast grrr” racial stereotype, but i’m talking about how the mental and physical strain that Hobie’s going through in daily life + being Spider-Man means he’s just gonna be an ass sometimes. He hasn’t eaten in 40-something hours and doesn’t know where he’s gonna sleep tonight and if his other friends are safe on the streets, he’s not exactly gonna be a happy guy in that moment

[rawliverandgoronspice]

The more time goes on, the more I think we (= westerners, especially white westerners) are just so fucking bad at guilt. I feel like guilt is among the most pernicious and dangerous emotions out there --not because guilt is literally deadly in isolation, it is an excruciating emotion but it will not kill you in itself, but because we have been trained to associate guilt with worthlessness (I partially blame christian values, the idea of impurity and sin --not to downplay, of course, the danger of a community judging you or being expelled from that community on the basis of being considered a danger to its other members due to the thing you've done that has been generating this guilt), and so we must, absolutely must, protect ourselves from simply feeling that guilt and processing its cold indifference washing over us, and we must do so through any means necessary. This can involve defensiveness, denial or reject of that guilt altogether so we are mentally protected from having to reevaluate ourselves and our place in the world, or can involve wallowing in and using it to self-harm --focusing on the pain and on self-hate rather than on what the guilt is telling us about ourselves and our heritage; blinding ourselves to it still in a twisted way.

I think it's also complicated to know how to manage guilt in a world where we're generally (as a whole) deeply powerless. It feels unfair to be called out about not doing enough when you know that pulling even mediocre heroics on your own will most definitively do almost nothing, hurt you, and be buried in a way that might be extremely unhelpul --not to mention, that it would actually hurt you in a very real and final way and lead to entirely thankless results, even if it was the morally correct thing to do. I do not want to pretend that it's not, very often, the results that awaits even serious and well-practiced activism --or even mild activism, major shoutout to everybody who got maimed or arrested or even killed on zero basis simply because they happened to be at or even near a protest, when they were not brutally attacked for no reason even outside of activism because an officer was racist or sexist or queerphobic or simply bored that day. There are genuinely good reasons to be scared.

So we feel guilt because of this fear, because of our isolation from any serious movement and the fact that we privilege our comfort over letting action taking over whatever else we have going on, and because fear and comfort knowingly keep us into inaction --or action that doesn't feel like enough, or that we feel doesn't achieve much of anything (which I think is never true: even giving someone a glimpse of hope for a second because we made an effort towards them is always always worth it in my opinion, it's not nothing and it's not a cop-out --of course it's not enough and we collectively need to find ways to do more, but it's not nothing and it should never discourage people from taking action --but I digress). But I think we start making a mistake when we point at this very real powerlessness as a shield from the guilt. Both can coexist. Both have to coexist. It isn't fair that some people are being forced to be courageous when we can afford to remain cowards. It is not even a moral judgement that condemn our souls forever, weakness is human and lack of individual reach against an overwhelmingly powerful and removed system even more so; it is a simple fact that we *have* to acknowledge if we want to take a clear look at the actual situation instead of camouflaging it behind self-justifying walls to give ourselves temporarily relief from that awful feeling. And I'm not saying it's not a constant effort, to keep those instincts of self-preservation at bay, or that some people don't have really good reasons that they cannot act more than through social media or miniscule donations or by talking about it around them, or being powerless to even do that without putting themselves into real and concrete danger --or that letting guilt in will be pleasant or even healing. It won't be. But it's also not the point.

Yeah, I get that it's hard to truly reckon with the fact that almost everything that made us (= westerners, especially white ones) is soaked with blood, imperialism, white supremacy, sexism, queerphobia, and a whole sweve of truly rancid ideologies that we cannot afford to passively accept as our lot. We were not given a choice in that legacy, and we don't have a ton of leverage over reorienting our haunted civilizations into something that isn't a horrible nightmare; but it is a fight that is happening right the fuck now.

I genuinely think guilt is a feeling we are not taught to handle in a healthy way; and because we have essentialist, pseudo-religious and punitive justice concepts terminally untangled with that feeling, guilt governs our politics and our private lives in the most rabid and unchecked way imaginable. But guilt will not kill us, unless we allow it to, and it will help literally nobody if it does. Guilt isn't evil in its soul-crushing pain as much as it is informative. Guilt is unbearable, unfliching clarity. But fever boils us alive because there is an infection that needs to be destroyed.

[seaweedstarshine]

Hi! Long time no yap but I've been really bothered by this thing and I know you're just the person I can go to with this (even if we don't always end up agreeing at times).

I got into a tiff with someone in a comments section of a post that was about Amy (Which character do you think deserved to become a villain? or something similar). They brought up Amy's abuse of her boyfriend. I may have tried to defend Amy (key word is tried. I am officially rubbish at debating) but then I may have said something? Because they said that I (and apparently a lot of other fans) was excusing Amy's abuse because of her trauma. It got me stumped because isn't young Amy's treatment of Rory rooted in her trauma? Did I miss the memo where we separate trauma and abuse? Am I missing something?

That statement bothered me a lot because if there's one thing I never want to do it's defend an abuser. So here I am, humbly asking and hoping to clear the muddy waters.

Your really confused and disturbed moot, Tia 💌

TIA!!!!! Thanks for the ask 💌 , and I send you all the hugs.

Discussion of abuse, trauma, ableism, infidelity, and unhealthy relationship dynamics beneath the cut.

(First off… while I really appreciate your faith in my explaining skills <3 <3 <3 my passion for traumatized characters and mentally ill+neurodivergent rights doesn't make me especially qualified to fully clear muddy waters especially not knowing the full context, but I feel you, and what follows is my informed perspective!)

Speaking generally first, harm done in media is best examined by the impact on the audience, with a different lens than harm done to real people. While relatable experiences in media can be useful and validating and incredibly important, you can’t be “defending an abuser” when the abuse is fictional. It's actually normal for traumatized/ND/mentally ill people to project onto mentally ill villains, when villains are the only significant representation for those stigmatized symptoms in a media landscape that excludes and demonizes us simply for existing. RTD can't stop people who hallucinate from reclaiming the Master's Drums and projecting onto the Master, for example — 90% of the best Doctor Who psychosis fic by psychotic authors is about the Master, whether RTD likes it or not. It's not true crime.

(This is speaking generally. Amy Pond is very much not the Master.)

Abuse is a behavior, and there can be many reasons for it, but reasons based in trauma don’t make it not abuse (some forms of generational trauma can propagate abusive parenting styles, when the parent thinks abusive parenting is normal, or lives entirely vicariously through their child). This absolutely should not be taken to mean trauma correlates with abusive behavior; rather that abusive behaviors from traumatized people are more likely to present in specific ways.

Abuse is also a targeted behavior, based in control — not consistently displayed C-PTSD symptoms as seen in Season 5 Amy Pond through many aspects of her life. Mental health symptoms don't become abuse just because they hinder one partner from meeting the other partner's needs. Any life event can do that.

Without knowing the context of the arguments, this is the aspect of their relationship I've seen you talk about before (which I also feel strongly about), and what I assume is what you were debating? So, here I will talk specifically in regard to Season 5.

We all know Amy — she's never attached to Leadworth because she never wanted to leave Scotland, no steady therapist because none of them stick up for her, can't stick with one job yet her first choice is a job that simulates intimacy because her avoidant behavior (a known trauma response) isn't sustainable to her wellbeing. Rory knows her fears of commitment stem from her repeated abandonments, it’s why he’ll always wait for her, and it's why he blames the Doctor “You make it so they don't want to let you down.”, who apart from having caused a lot of her trauma, has actively taken advantage of her being the “Scottish girl in the English village” who's “still got that accent,” because he wants to feel important, so yeah, I think interpreting Amy's issues (and how Amy and Rory transverse them) as Amy abusing Rory indicates a fundamental misunderstanding of their relationship, as well as a misunderstanding of the (raggedy) Doctor’s role in Amy’s formative self-image (which of course she works through in Season 6, but I am sticking to Season 5).

Abuse is always based in control. That just doesn’t fit here. While Amy's detachment from her real life includes things like calling Rory her “kind of boyfriend” (which she is upfront about to his face; differing commitment levels isn't abuse, though it can be a relationship red flag for both parties IRL) — her Season 5 disregard of Rory’s feelings occurs only in response to the fairytale embodiment of her trauma. It's never a response to Rory; it's a response to the Doctor, who stole her childhood and led her by the hand to her death. She cheats on Rory with the Doctor in her bedroom full of Doctor toys, drawings, models, she made from childhood to early adulthood.

(And yes, like many repeatedly-traumatized people, Amy is prone to being sensitive and reactive. Take her “Well, shut up then!” line in The Big Bang; but given Rory responds to this by hugging her, clearly he doesn’t take it as her actually dismissing him. He knows her better than that.)

And by no means do I meant to imply this is fair to young Rory, poor Rory, who's left struggling with the feeling that his role in her life is in competition with the role of her trauma (aka the Doctor). But not every unhealthy relationship dynamic is unhealthy because of abuse. Labelling Amy's treatment of Rory in Season 5 more accurately isn't the same as excusing her harmful choices — but making mistakes is part of being human, Amy's mistakes are certainly understandable, and she works through them out of love for Rory.

If there's one thing to say about Moffat women, it's that Moffat allows his female characters the same grace that the male characters *coughTENcough* have always had, to hurt and struggle and make realistic mistakes and overcome those mistakes and to heal without being demonized.

Amy isn't perfect, but she is a fully realized character, and her story gives us a resonant depiction of childhood trauma.

[akkivee]

bonds are necessary for the true hypnosis mic to be used according to rei!!!! so bonds not only negate the effects on the target, but also on the user as well!!!!!

[ovaruling]

veganism is much too extreme but our planet burning and being deforested and overgrazed to nothing is, what, nice and moderate? leisurely and we got plany off time? what kind of casual, slow Sunday morning solution do we have to this very calm issue? yall are too funny

[hua-fei-hua]

the 10 yuegui stickers i ordered from @brackenfernsart arrived last night...!! 9 are for a friend but the last one now sits upon a throne on my cork board uwu

[chipjrwibignaturals]

honestly i know a lot of people were upset with mays discussion w jay abt jayson, thought it was too… sympathetic, pointing to redemption etc, but i liked it for the depth it gave him (as well as may, who’s characterized further then as a kind of tragic “i-can-fix-him” type who tries to give everyone the best she can even if it’s ultimately just at her detriment, but that’s not the point)

may says that jayson acts the way he does because he’s ultimately just desperately seeking approval from his commander and mother.

i don’t think it anyway excuses his actions (making your daughter execute one of her best friends and all that is pretty fucking unredeemable), but it contextualizes em. it doesn’t make me sympathize with what he’s done (especially since it’s implied he’s been fairly abusive even since jay was a little girl) , but it sure makes me pity him.

he’s changed then from just An Asshole to a tragic asshole— we know what caused him to change and spiral, the fatal flaw that drove him to worse and worse actions all in an attempt to finally achieve something that, frankly, I doubt he’d ever truly receive (validation, love). it doesn’t make him right. there were countless paths he could’ve taken, ultimately what he’s done is on him and him alone, but. you know why he’s done it. yknow?

this is a man driven to the extreme on a search for something that he can never have, and the tragedy lies in that he doesn’t know that. so he’s kept going and going further and further until he’s discarded so much of himself in pursuit of this thing that to give up now would be to give up everything. might as well go all the way, you’ve got to be so close to getting it now… right?

[catkin-morgs-kookaburralover]

you are so so loved by God and by all of us here on tumblr and I am sending you so much love tonight. please stay. things will get better I promise. <3

.

[magnifiico]

👏 okay, so under the influence of the forbidden magic magnifico just had to dabble in despite his adoring wife telling him not to, he actually has a very hazy memory of all the things he did during that time span

[[disclaimer: this isn't a post about to excuse his actions or claim he's innocent because of that influence—he willingly and in conscious awareness of the possible repercussions of dark magic still decided to use it and should be held accountable. but anyway—]]

he was exceptionally drunk with power (and i use that term very literally here) from the moment he opened the book and started using it. that effect only amplified the more he stole the power of the wishes for himself: each broken wish heightening the magic's control over him until, by the time he was capturing star, he was totally unhinged and barely had any conscious control over his actions

the magic feeds into and intensifies the negative traits he already has: all that narcissism, that hunger for power, that overwhelming arrogance. it has to draw from something, but it still is the reason magnifico goes so completely feral by the end of things

when he's trapped in the mirror, he's himself again—his cognizance is back—but his ability to recollect every little thing he did is foggy (and at first, he still fully believes he was in the right for using the book to begin with; so, yes, still not excused)