#perhaps i also just dont like people who lack empathy. i know its not their fault and just how some people are....

[alchemiclee]

do you ever feel like some people dont understand the difference between pity and sympathy/empathy? (people don't even know the difference between those two, to be fair) giving someone sympathy or having empathy for them is not the same as pitying them. someone trying to reach out and seeking or expecting sympathy from you or wanting empathy isn't wanting you to pity them!!!!!! dont mix the two up 😭

[hikari-ni-naritai]

Thoughts on fakes being more real than the real thing?

okay i finally am on my lunch break and have time to talk about this. sorry i did not mean to have audrey make you send me this ask but i do appreciate you doing so!

anyway just so that everyone reading is clear on this, the concept im discussing here is specifically a fake that is indistinguishable from the real thing. this isnt really a concept that can be applied to a physical thing, like if i made a fake rock that was chemically identical to a real rock, ive created a real rock. its more about intangible concepts.

when i was first introduced to this philosophical discussion, i was deeply, deeply religious, and i (perhaps unexpectedly) fell firmly into the 'the fake is worth more than the real' to explain the concept of original sin and christianity's belief that humans are inherently evil. the idea is that, if you have one person who is naturally good, and another person who is naturally evil but through concentrated effort becomes indistinguishable from a Good Person, the bad person is better because of their choice to be good despite their nature, whereas the good person simply does it without effort. i was always a very philosophical bitch, much to the chagrin of religious people in authority over me. needless to say i am no longer religious.

now, in my wisened age. i have taken a more reasonable stance. i do not believe there is any meaningful difference between a fake thing and a real thing. and theres a lot of things i apply this to! perhaps due to religious trauma, i still see myself as a fundamentally bad person. its hard to think of myself as good when im privy to my own thoughts, where im cruel and judgmental and lacking empathy. im sure others have similar thoughts, but i cant know anyone else's thoughts, so that doesnt do me any good. but if i treat people well and keep my darker side to myself, i am indiscernible from a good person. similarly, thanks to my upbringing im not really capable of accepting that things like positive reinforcement could actually work, or that there's a political system better than handing me personally unlimited power to kill politicians and rich people until better people are put in power, or the current ones stop doing evil shit out of terror. but regardless of how i feel about it, regardless of my severe misanthropy, i fake believing in positive reinforcement and less tyrannical forms of government. i support the things i know are good for people, even if i dont personally believe they are. and my outward support is the only thing that is really relevant, because most people arent reading my blog. the fact that its completely fake doesnt mean its worse.

and yknow, believing in this sort of thing is also good in that it kind of makes you immune to impostor syndrome. like oh, youre not a REAL artist because REAL artists like, idk, go to art school or whatever? well thats fine because being a fake artist is not really any different from being a real one! i bet even if you DONT believe this, and you're one of those people who believes theres some intrinsic value in the "real", you could pretty easily get away with faking it! and by faking a belief that theres no difference between the fake and the real, you can eventually come to believe it for real! or not. but it'll sure look like it!

[astrowaffles]

toji to me is a very downtrodden character and thats the base of like aaalll my analysis of him. i think its a good idea to keep in mind that they're all living in a Secret Society with like negative morals and seemingly a core principle of might makes right. its not Just a lack of therapists, here, right, its an actively hostile environment. and then you have the zen'in upbringing which kicks that up a notch. i dont think toji is actually all that convinced of his power, bc he grew up being told he was worthless without cursed energy. he Never gets revenge on the zen'ins. why? his trauma response to this (get OUTTTTT) is different than maki's (spite them & eventually overcome them-- for approval ? hm.). shes intimidated by them sure but shes got that rebel spirit! girlboss. anyway back to the point bc i have one -> toji never escaped the zen'ins. he Wants to affirm that he's strong without cursed energy despite all the evidence that he actually is (and look how that final attempt went!). id like to propose a theory: he didnt think he could hide a child with The Zen'in Power Of All Time from the zen'ins. i dont think he could either tbh. ok actually are you caught up on the manga 🤨

Hello again! I really love this view of Toji's character, and it will surprise you to learn that I agree with you. I actually do. When I've been replying to your asks before, I've been talking from the perspective of his parenting decisions. But you're right, to take this any further we need to look at his actual personality/character.

Reasons to be sympathetic to Toji (a.k.a extend him the poor little meow meow factor):

abusive ex-family

no support

no therapy

dead wife

poor

gambling addiction

Toji was abused and was brought up in an environment where he literally meant nothing. He was useless. His reaction to this (get out, cut all ties, get stronger) is a response I'm actually proud of him for. So many people are probably still rolling around inside the Zen'in clan, having never got the balls to get out. Toji even chooses to change his name.

Being a cycle breaker is hard. For many people, it's impossible. For Toji - it was impossible. I extend sympathy and empathy to him here because it's DIFFICULT to let go of your upbringing and do it differently, do better. Toji can't bring him self to leave the jujutsu world. Nanami did it, and could have left forever if he so chose - but Toji can't. He's not a sorcerer but he can't let go of that being part of him, he can't stop his Zeni'in upbringing from shaping him. Neither can Maki, but Maki chooses to actively confront the clan and make physical changes to her life.

Toji just drowns in his spite - again, another thing we can hand him a poor little meow meow card for. He doesn't have the tools to heal or make better decisions. We feel bad for him. We sympathise. We want to still see him as a basically good person (and, to be honest, he probably is) who's just been scarred by the world.

So, to go back to what you said: you're right. He doesn't escape the Zeni'ns and I'm not convinced he wants to. He wants to show them he's better but he also can't bring himself to directly call attention to himself.

So let's bring this full circle and talk about what the original post was about: Toji's parenting. You said you still don't think he's a good parent. You're right, he isn't. He never will be. No Toji stan will ever be able to convince me that any of Toji's parenting choices were the right ones. But let's be sympathetic again, let's see how we can cut him some slack for those terrible decisions.

Does Toji even know how to be a parent?

We don't know a whole lot about Toji's parents. We know he hates them, if he ever truly knew them. We can infer he doesn't want to be like them. We're sure he never actively abuses Megumi, only passively, through abandonment. Perhaps he feels this is better than getting directly involved with a small child. He's described by the wiki as a cold person, specifically since his wife died and he 'reverted to his old self'. It's highly possible that Toji chose to abandon Megumi since he thought it was genuinely the best possible path. Toji can be cold, violent, and calculating, and he maybe felt he was in no position to be doing any parenting. We can sympathise with this!

(But he's still a bad father).

Did Toji sell Megumi to the Zen'ins so the kid could train to be a sorcerer?

It's definitely possible. I think this is what @honestlyyoungtyphoon was trying to tell me. Toji can't help a sorcerer kid, but he knows that Megumi needs training and he knows the Zen'ins would love to give it. And, yeah, maybe he's had this plan ever since he realised Megumi's technique, because he knew the Zen'ins would find out somehow.

Reasons this is still a bad parenting decision: the Zen'ins, while they treat their sorcerers well materially and are much kinder to them than they are to non-sorcerers, are still power hungry little bitches. Everyone knows this. While Toji would have no way to create a better plan, he knew himself it was bad. You ever wonder why Gojo went to see Megumi straight away? Because was Gojo was raised how the Zen'ins would treat Megumi. Gojo was living the life that Megumi would live in the future. And Gojo knew that it wasn't a life fit for anyone.

Toji knows that Gojos knows this. Toji knows Gojo could help Megumi. Toji passed the baton. And honestly, this is probably a reveal of part of Toji's true personality. He willingly sent a guy, his own personal enemy, to Megumi because he knew it was good for Megumi. Toji has a lot of pride and it must have taken a lot to ask that. THIS is probably what the aggressive Toji stans mean when they tell me Toji was a good parent.

So, overall: Toji is a damaged person who never received any kind of help and support from anyone except his (now dead) wife. There are many factors that help shape his decisions and parenting choices. Toji is probably a basically good person who is simply hurt by his circumstances, and even his truly awful decisions such as abandoning Megumi could have their roots in a belief that it was truly for the best. However: a good person does not make a good parent.

Toji was a shit dad and we love him <3

[re-ikrmso]

I dont think I ever put this up here! its kinda an unfinsihed thing, but mostly finished. i’m just gonna put this up here as a little art to go along with a little blurb in my head (mostly because an idea just popped up in my head, and i just really wanted to try writing it out.) the picture doesnt exactly match but...

=Scenario/Event: 

-Blue(Unicorn on right, blue/grey hair) slowly gets convinced that they’re a horrible person by Mangie(Cyborg alicorn,grey/red hair.)

-Mangie deflects Blue’s questions on Mangie’s lack of sympathy and care towards other people to imply that it isn’t their fault or to lessen the blame.

-Mangie uses this confrontaiton as a “bonding” moment, as a moment between two people who can’t ‘understand’ how other people feel.

-Mangie makes themselves out to be the better person as they make no effort to be ‘better’, while saying that despite Blue attempting to help people, all they do is hurt other people even when they don’t mean it. 

-Character development does not save Blue from being crushed by thier anxiety.

---

= writing practice below (tried to...i can do better! i just need to do better) 

also i don’t know if i should put any warnings? but its just like a realy small moment kinda compressed into writing. perhaps one day i can write this better to make it more emotional/intense/weird. Also, there’ a lot of the belief below that “not understanding emotions/lack of empathy=bad person” below, so just keep that in mind. dunno how i feel about that belief myself, but enough ramble! also like, i’ll admit a decent part of that below is based on my own thoughts but it does have relevance in those two’s stories/relationship. it’s not very nice, so don’t read if you get uncomfortable easily. i got uncomfortable myself writing this, but i may be sensitive.

 “We’re really, not that different! We don’t understand other people...Or thier feelings...but unlike you, I make the choice to not care! I can change! But you...”

Mangie smiled.

“You’re just an inherently bad person.”

Stop.

“You try to help other people but you don’t help them at all--because you can’t understand half the things they’re saying!”

STOP-

“YOU’RE INCAPABLE OF EMPATHY! YOU’RE A MONSTER, JUST LIKE ME!”

 “STOP!!!”

Mangie clammed up instantly, but Blue knew they had lost. A few hiccups escaped Blue’s mouth.

“I hurt people because I don’t care. You can’t help but hurt people, even if you don’t want to.”

“...”

No, not now-

But it was too late, and Blue felt Mangie draw them closer into a cold embrace. Blue’s sobbing just made Mangie hold them tighter against them.

“There, there...You’re just like me, I know it.” 

Blue felt disgusting. But...there was nothing left for them to say.

[phoenixfire-thewizardgoddess]

I never understood vegans opposing eggs. Unlike milk, you dont do anything to get a chicken to lay an egg. They just do it. And if you don't take them the eggs will just rot and get gross.

It depends, anon.

Farm eggs and local eggs are great bc you know the animals are treated fine. It's the cage eggs I think they're protesting, and those animals have truly horrific lives and (where financially possible, although it isn't for everyone) we should aim to buy farm eggs.

Cage eggs are from chickens that live in tiny wire cages, many have the front half of their beaks removed, and only the girls are kept. You don't wanna know what they do to male chicks who are born, it's not good.

You should also be skeptical of the conditions for barn chickens, esp if thebox says a ridiculous amount of animals per metre or hectare. Do they get outside time, and what do they get fed? There's a farm near us which has a dedicated livestream on their chickens for people to see how they are cared for. Next time I get eggs I can share the link, its on the box.

Like any animal that's been domesticated, chickens have been carefully bred for their laying capacity so they do lay a lot of eggs, sometimes several a day.

It's best to ask a farmer about the hens and eggs, but realistically they're a byproduct unless they've been fertilised, and from what I recall of the chickens we had when I was little (and they were rescues so they might have been atypical) they would brood on these eggs until they started to get... smelly.

Unless we gave them ceramic/plastic alternatives to sit on and took the real ones. If there was no other food available, they'd eat their eggs too.

If we should be upset by anything, its the grain-fed cows.

There's a farm that does it in a town I drive past several times a week, and its awful. The animals are packed into this little paddock with no grass, its consistently a muddy churned mass bc urine and rain etc.

I don't know if the persistent muddiness is why there is no grass or if that's deliberate to make sure they only have grain fed. It's just not great, they don't DO anything during the day, just stand there and mill about a bit. As far as I'm aware the RSPCA and other organisations have visited and by the loopholes in laws, they're feeding and caring for the animals, so its fine. At least on a farm or in a paddock they get to do what cows do, and chill most of their life, these guys and grainfeds in other shady little places most likely, aren't getting a lot of that.

Not to mention those awful pig-breeding locations that keep being caught where sows are pinned to the ground by either a head or body restraint to prevent eating a piglet or rolling on one. Like, yikes.

And before anyone brings it up, shearing a sheep is safe. You do not take the whole goddamn skin off for the sake of wool, it's a haircut.

And yes, sometimes the little buggers wiggle about, so they get a nick or two but they naturally produce lannolin, which soothes and protects the cuts. If there's anything we should be angry about, it's the lack of regulations around mulesing and docking (trigger warning for blood, injury and medical proceedures without proper anaesthetics). If we had better protections and rules around animals, perhaps the government would be coerced into subsidising the provision of anaesthics and appropriate tools (medical grade) to farm areas with animals that need docking of tails or mulesing, to keep them safe.

Make no mistake, flystrike is horrific and needs to be prevented at all costs, but there's also a lot of people out there doing things without real training or proper equipment and the animals are the ones who suffer. You wouldn't call a person off the street to do your cosmetic surgery, bc they're not trained.

----

Back to the main topic, because my brain works like a whirlpool of little fragments of info:

But good farmers, good producers and people who know their business are out there doing right by their animals. They provide food and care appropriate, handle the removal of excess eggs or honey safely, because it's a business but its also a way of life.

It's when things get industrialised that the time, attention, care and empathy goes out the window. They become a thing in a box to be used and destroyed as soon as it stops making money; not a living thing that needs time, care and attention.

Or something eloquent that explains the point better

[honestlyandrogynousnightmare]

A study in Sherlock Holmes (s1e3)

So lets start this off on his inhumane tendencies. (FYI I do not believe he is a “high functioning sociopath”, pointing out his inhuman and sociopathic actions at the start of the series is just necessary to point out his development later on). BORED. This is truly when we first see how Sherlock acts in the absence of cases and distractions. He decides to shoot at a wall. The second odd thing we see is the head in the fridge. Its not exactly normal to keep heads in your fridge, though I'm not judging if you do. This sets his actions and beliefs throughout the episode up, perhaps not entirely ordinary and somewhat inhuman. This is continued through his behaviour towards the people who are making the phone calls. Its not that he doesn't entirely care, he focuses more on the case and the so called game instead. And that isn't entirely bad at all, its just clear that here, he lacks empathy for people. For whatever reason that is, whether he truly is a sociopath or he hides his feelings and emotions because it helps with cases. Though his focus on the case itself can go a bit far, especially the “although i did technically solve the case” part. Buttttt there is development by the end of the episode. Throughout the whole episode he ignores all the people getting killed but by the end he points out to Moriarty that "people have died" which shows that he does actually give a damn.

However, he does clearly feel upset when the old woman died and he was clearly stressed out of his mind when he has 10 seconds to save the little girl, so the emotions are there and you cant prove me otherwise lol. 

Something else I noticed is that he is self aware of his lack of sympathy towards the victims. This is shown so greatly through the “heroes don't exist, if they did i wouldn't be one of them” quote. It not only shows that he is aware of the usual human reactions when bad things like this happen, it shows that he is aware of his emotional repression (or sociopathic tendencies if you believe that) but you could also say (this could be a stretch but oh well) that he doesn't entirely believe in himself either, because after all, his causes are good, he is on the good side but doesn't see himself as a necessarily good person. 

Continuing on from my point on the study in TBB, i love his appreciation of the things he doesnt care much about. This is shown through the whole thing about the solar system, he cares about it so little that he doesn't know that the earth travels around the sun but he appreciates the beauty of it. 

The ending of the episode is beautiful to me. When he thought he had to set the bomb off, his entire façade was broken. For those 2 seconds, vulnerability and perhaps even regret are the only things written on his face. Because he doesnt want to die, hes young, finally made a friend and loves his job, death is probably  the last thing he wants. I saw this in a tumblr post a while ago, i cant remember the name of the blog but they said that this was the rebellious, rule breaking, disobedient child Mycroft sees and i think its a perfect summary.

This one could be a stretch too buttttt Donavan calling Sherlock a "freak" his expression does seem to change a little. It has always seemed to me that he really was bothered by people making fun of him, especially as he was made fun of at Uni and probably even before that. I'm not sure if it's me seeing things but it just shows that he does feel things and is actually affected by people like Donavan.

Now onto relationships:

The key thing about his relationship with John is the contrast between them, it's interesting how two such different people manage to live together. John is clearly still not entirely used to living with him, or perhaps will never fully be because let's face it, Sherlock isnt the most ordinary person. Their differences do seem to cause some issues though. Espiecally because John is prioritising lives instead of the game itself. Something I love is the "I'd be lost without my blogger" phrase. As funny and sarcastic as that may be, he does mean it. Because she literally would be lost without John, and that is shown throughout the rest of the series, everytime John and sherlock are separated, they're either not happy or one of them nearly dies. He does also give John a chance at deduction, not to make fun of him, just plainly giving him a chance which shows that it's not all arguments between them and that they are really friends. There is that small scene when John first steps out at the pool, when we cant see the bomb yet, when Sherlock really does start doubting John, so many emotions pass through him in that millisecond, I dont even need to list them, think about what you thought when first watching that. It was set up that way, us and Sherlock are meant to have the same reaction, shock, confusion, doubt, literal pain. Obviously that passes quickly, those emotions turn to worry for John. Something I feel like Sherlock never experienced to that extent, worrying for another person's safety. One other thing is the fact that they non verbally agreed to die together which is so telling of their relationship and how strong it is

His relationship with Mycroft is literally a classic sibling relationship put to the extreme. Sherlock is childish towards Mycroft, doesnt do a case hes interested in because Mycroft suggests it, and Mycroft is the stereotypical older sibling, calls Sherlock stupid every moment he can, acts like a greater human being but really does care about him.

Now onto Moriarty. Their characters mirror eachother so much, they have always been two sides of the same coin in my opinion. It's literally in their names "Colsultant Detective" and "Consulting Criminal". They're both smart, enjoy the game more than any outcome, and both have a great fashion sense. Sherlock admits it himself, "I cant be the only person in the world that gets bored", he knows why Moriarty is doing this, because hes similar to him, at least in that moment in time. Moriarty is what Sherlock could have become without Mycroft, whether he wants to admit it or not, Mrs Hudson, Lestrade, Molly and John. Though I dont believe they are overly similar later on in the series, when Sherlocks true colours start coming through, at this moment in time they are very similar. But anyway, their differences will be explored later on, when Sherlocks emotional side decides to show up. Though I wanna point out that Moriarty knows about Sherlocks sentimental side. He knows that he has a heart, and it's clear that Sherlock is just hiding that because Jim says that they "both" know. That heart, will later be "burned", apparently. And though Moriarty may not actually win after TRF, I still hold the opinion that he does partly, as throughout season 3 we do see how burned Sherlocks heart was buT THATS AN ESSAY FOR ANOTHER TIME!

[romantic-suggestions]

thank you, i dont wanna pressure you into giving advice so if you dont want to please dont. also im kinda paranoid so if this sends off on anon please dont post it!! but it feels like nobody actively looks for me unless they need something from me, i dont have any friends in my life right now, i dropped all of them because they didnt listen to my feelings/they were just kinda bad to me, a while ago i dropped an ex who manipulated me and it hurts so much thinking about it, why doesnt he feel sorry? and if he does, why cant he hurt? why did i get used for character development its not fucking fair every friendship i have they get something out of me, they get the boost they need to start their next project and be successful its not fucking fair why do i have to self loath and theyre able to move on? why does it seem like everttime i find someone i love we get distant?? i know i cant stop that but it hurts, alot. if distance doesnt kill us i always get replaced, when am i going to find someone who loves me for me, not what i can offer them?? it feels like people only love me because they can use me for something i hate it why is it when i set boundaries im a bitch, why is it when i tell people something is uncomfortable i have to give an essay on why they should respect me. i feel so stuck like i keep comparing myself to others, why did i have to be so stupid in the past? i used to say slurs that werent mine 2 years ago to impress the friends that didnt care about me and i cant move on from it, why did i have to be so stupid? i cant handle people criticizing me, it feels like they hate me and theyre jealous, or am i jealous of them for being able to point out something?? i dont know

I'm sorry for not responding sooner, but in truth, this ask has been on my mind all day, and I've been wanting to approach this with some good words. You remind me a lot of my younger self, and I want you to know that you're lovely, and I'm sorry you've been surrounded by such horrid people!

I'll start off by saying that everyone (and I mean *everyone*) has done horribly embarrassing things to impress someone. Please don't beat yourself up over the slurs, because the best thing to do is to recognise you've said some horrible things, and if you've hurt anyone with those slurs, apologising to them is really good <3 . You know they're wrong, your message says as much, and I want you to know that wallowing in that isn't going to help you grow. Righting the wrongs and surrounding yourself with positive influences is best, because you've grown from who you were two years ago! And that's definitely for the best :)

When you said that people only seem to notice you if they want something from you, it made my heart pang. I'm so sorry you've been surrounded by these sorts of people, and I want you to know that there are people out there who will want to get to know you for who you are. They exist, and I understand your apprehension around people given how you've been treated, but I promise that they'll be safe to open up to. Sometimes it takes a change of scenery (school -> university, moving to a new town), sometimes a setting of boundaries, but when you find them, they'll be your friend through thick and thin. Heck, most of my closest friends I made when I moved cities for uni! They will come out, and they will find you <3 or perhaps you'll be in a safe place to put yourself out there!

Good for you on dropping those friends!!!! That sounds weird, but rest assured, it is far better to have no friends than friends who drain you, use you, and aren't really there for you. I'm sorry that you feel as if you're no more than a plot device in someone else's story... I wish I had a better way of wording that, but I do know that it will not be that way forever! Having a strong sense of identity and getting involved in things does help detract from that transience, but it's the people you're around just as much as yourself! I do hope you can find some lovely people soon <3

With your ex, I can tell you from experience that people who manipulate and use don't tend to feel things like being sorry, except for being sorry that you got away from them. They're not the norm. My dad's the same way... he's done some utterly atrocious things to his children, and yet feels a sense of entitlement to us, as opposed to apologetic. It genuinely does suck a lot when you see someone move on without so much as a tear, but it's not you; it's their lack of empathy. You're doing so well anon!!! and please don't let him, and all those stupid ex-friends, get you down!

Someone will love you for you. I don't know how old you are, but for some people it happens quickly, others it takes a while. The teenage years are filled with so much volatility in the way people love and forget, the twenties are a messy time of personal development, and I do know of some people who've had to wait until they're out of college before they even begin to meet people who see past the exterior and to their heart. That sounds so depressing (I'm sorry!!), but be assured I have yet to meet someone who hasn't found someone who understands them truly, past all the distractions, through everything. You will find them! Work on yourself, and the people will come <3 (my DMs/ask box are still open too, if you're ever like "wtf help who am i what is a self?")

I don't know if this is good advice, but it's advice that I've learned over the years and I wish I could dispense to my younger self (of course I probably wouldn't've listened, oops), and I hope it does you some good <3 please feel free to come back to my ask box if you need anything! You've got this anon <3

[redspiderling]

Ok so im a trans myself. I didn't think it was bad when scarjo wanted to play a trans. Dont get me wrong I had problems get jobs and had a lot of people talk bad to me. But like she said, she is a actor and its her job. Also with her in the main role it would gain way more attention and its a good way to get people to talk about this. Now when I talk about that with other people they just say that the lgbt-community should chill.

Hi anon!

It’s really lovely to see people respond on tumblr with messages and I honestly appreciate it, even if it means I end up writing essay long replies xD

It’s undeniable that there is bias in the film industry. And outside of it. And I believe this is a complicated issue. There are 2 things to consider. First, what is an actor’s job, and then, what is the process of casting actors for roles.

Actors can be anyone, it’s in their job description, and thanks to modern technology, now they can be anything as well. Whether they should be anyone is up for debate. But there’s no right or wrong here. Some people believe that specific roles are meant for specific people, and some don’t. 

Those arguments are not between people who want equality and people who don’t, but between people who don’t share the same ideas as to how we will achieve equality as a society.

If you ask me, I think people should be allowed to be cast in any role. I don’t think casting trans people in trans roles would help the trans community any more than if you would cast trans people in any roles. 

The assumption that “if they’re not cast as trans they won’t be cast as anything” shows a lack of understanding over the craft of performance arts and over the process of casting. Not to mention that, as far as I’m concerned, equality doesn’t come in steps, it’s not like you can “start them easy” through type casting people for their identity, and then easing in to their humanity beyond that. Either you accept someone the way they are as your equal, or you don’t. There’s no middle ground. 

Another reason on why people should be cast in roles regardless of their race, gender identity, or sexuality, is the fact that stepping into another person’s shoes is the very core of what acting is about. Because through immersion and empathy, comes understanding. And by seeing someone as you would see yourself, as a performer and as a viewer, comes equality.

By the way, political correctness in arts is a double edge sword. Yes, it means you get a more proper portrayal of minorities, but it also means you restrict these minorities to “appropriate” roles once again. It’s just this time, instead of typecasting as the Evil Secondary Character, you typecast them as the Good Man Bystander. Gina Torres talked about this at an interview, from the perspective of someone who comes from a minority group, and she described it much more eloquently than I ever could.

Also, corporations seem to have taken this to heart and are abusing the cause to make money. For example, it has become popular to remake famous titles with female cast members. What that means for companies is that they can re-brand an existing product and make money. It also means they are making shitty movies because they don’t care about the content, since what they are selling is the female presence. Does that educate the masses on equality? No, what it does is getting them to “blame women for ruining our movies”. Completely stupid and ridiculous btw but it’s a negative byproduct of this latest fashion, a fashion that I don’t personally see as entirely right or wrong.

And since we reached corporations, lets talk money.

There are different types of film making. There’s corporate, and there’s indie. In indie productions, all bets are off. We’re doing this for the art, so we care about the message, the content, what we give out to the world. Corporate means money.

The Hollywood Star ticket is dying. What I mean is, at this day and age, the idea that an actor or an actress can carry a movie to the theatres with their name on the title alone is no longer an option for the most part. 

Once upon a time people would flock to the movie theatres for Bogart, for Hepburn, etc. That’s not happening anymore. Having said that, there are still a few names that grab people’s attention. Scarlett’s is one of them.

It has been said many times before, that when a production company decides to produce something outside its safe zone, they need to know they’ll get their money back somehow. One surefire way to get an edgy (for corporate productions’ standards) script to production is by bringing in the big guns. People were saying “well, trans actors need to start from somewhere, if they want to be cast in this way themselves”. Yes, they do need to start from somewhere, but that somewhere is not, and never has been, risky productions. It’s indie films. 

Also, I don’t see why a future trans actor superstar should be instantly assumed as the go-to for trans roles. I don’t think they would appreciate being called in whenever Hollywood needs a trans representative.

Anyway, to close this endless reply, at this time in the world, Rub and Tug would never be produced without ScarJo. And it didn’t. Is that fair? For me as a potential viewer, no, I’d like to see that film regardless of the actor as long as they were good for the job. For the people putting the money in? Perhaps. If I were investing millions of dollars I would want some assurance as to whether or not that investment will be proven fruitful. 

And make no mistake, this has nothing to do with equality. It has to do with a studio taking a risk and producing a script that would have never seen the light of day if not for the cast that would carry it into the theatres.

[whitewolfofwinterfell]

Angel and Cordelia (Cangel) - an in-depth analysis of their relationship

Angel and Cordelia are a ship I never expected to ship before watching Angel, but since finishing the show around November, I’ve fallen in love with them (and the show generally) and wanted to compile a post where I could express all my thoughts and feelings about them. This meta will be very in-depth and is divided into 9 sections: 

1. ‘Pensiver Face’: Opposites Attract - Will explore Angel and Cordelia’s personalities and the ways in which these two unlikely characters came together and brought out new and wonderful sides to each other. 

2. ‘Help the Helpless’: Finding purpose - Discusses the way in which Angel and Cordelia found purpose in their lives through meeting and the creation of Angel Investigations.

3. ‘We’re family’: Belonging and Family - Insight into how Angel and Cordelia created a family and home with each other that provided them with a sense of belonging (perhaps for the first time in their lives).

4. ‘My Dearest Friend’: Friendship and Love - Looks at Angel and Cordelia’s friendship and how that was at the core of their relationship throughout the series.

5. ‘You’re not alone’: Emotional connection - Uncovers the profound emotional connection Angel and Cordelia established with each other.

6. ‘It’s the stars’: Everyone can see it - Reflects on the common ‘Everyone can see it’ trope and how that was important to Angel and Cordelia’s relationship.

7. ‘Were we in love?’: Romantic love - An exploration of when and how Angel and Cordy’s romantic feelings for each other developed.

8. ‘I’ll be seeing you’: Missed Opportunity - Analyses the writing in seasons 4 and 5, and the ways in which Angel and Cordelia’s relationship was hugely disadvantaged by the writing.

9. ‘There are no people like us’: Why Angel/Cordelia are misunderstood and live in Buffy/Angel’s shadow - Unpicks some of the common misconceptions I’ve seen about Angel and Cordy’s relationship and the how comparisons made between their relationship and Buffy and Angel’s is unfair and does a disservice to both couples. 

As you can see, section 9 does discuss Buffy and Angel, because I really couldn’t discuss Angel and Cordelia without also talking about Angel’s relationship with Buffy since she was so significant to Angel. It won’t be anti-Buffy/Angel (because I’m a huge Bangel shipper, as anyone that follows me will know), but I just wanted to give a warning for those that are a big fan of the ship as you might not want to read. However, the primary focus throughout will be on Angel and Cordelia’s relationship on ATS (I don’t really give much focus to BTVS since their interactions were so brief and lacking).

Before we get into it, I wanted to say this post is long, (coming in at around 9k words, whew! I had more to say than I realised), so if you’re interested in reading you might want to grab a drink or a snack and make yourself comfortable. 

1. ‘Pensiver Face’: Opposites Attract

What makes Angel and Cordelia’s relationship so special is that it’s between two unlikely characters who, on the surface are polar opposites, but that compliment each other beautifully. Cordelia was specifically chosen to be a regular on ATS because she was the opposite to Angel - Whedon stated that Cordelia’s bright smile was needed to counteract Angel’s broody persona (x). The fundamental differences in Angel and Cordelia’s personalities meant that together they brought out different sides to each other. Angel was known for being reserved, contemplative, melancholy, deep and pessimistic, whilst in contrast Cordelia was known for being outgoing, bubbly, outspoken, shallow and optimistic.

Both characters came to ATS season 1 displaying these characteristics which they were well-known for on BTVS, but through meeting each other, they changed. Angel smiled more with Cordelia than arguably any other character in the Buffyverse (x) (x) (x) (x). Her infectious personality, witty sense of humour and straight-talking attitude coaxed him out of his shell. Also, because he was more submissive by nature, Angel responded to Cordelia’s assertiveness - she wasn’t afraid to take charge, call him out on things, make demands of him and ensure he stayed on the right path. She was the one that took charge of the business, launching Angel Investigations from practically nothing; she persuaded Angel that he should pay Gunn for working with them; she didn’t easily relent after he fired her, Wesley and Gunn; she told him he needed to set boundaries with Fred when she had a crush on Angel to prevent Fred from getting hurt; she held him accountable for getting Darla pregnant in season 3; she consistently encouraged him to fight for Connor no matter how hopeless or difficult it became and even in her brief return in season 5 she continued with this pattern. She straight up told Angel that he’d lost his way, lost sight of their mantra to help the helpless and had become entangled in the messiness of W&H. In doing so, she set Angel back on the right path. It’s strange because generally people view Angel as having more positive traits than Cordelia, but despite his good intentions, he was more prone to giving up and wallowing than Cordelia. Angel was more malleable, more willing to accept the bad in the world whilst Cordelia, on the other hand, persevered no matter what obstacles came her way and was firm in her morals. She knew what she believed to be good and she didn’t stray from that no matter what. That clear-cut attitude really helped Angel, who being a vampire and having seen so much evil, often become lost in the blurriness between good and evil, and became disheartened about fighting the good fight on numerous ocassions. Cordelia was truly Angel’s centre of gravity and moral compass - she was the one he relied on most in his redemptive journey and helping the helpless. That’s why throughout the series there was such a heavy emphasis on Angel needing Cordy (x) and why he proclaimed to be lost without her. Angel needing Cordelia was also demonstrative of a deeper emotional connection between them, which I’ll discuss later on.

Whilst Angel and Cordelia’s differences helped/changed Angel, they did the same for Cordy. Cordelia as a person was very focused on superficial gratification. She sought popularity and status, and she enjoyed money and material objects because of the pleasure they brought her. Her desire to become an actress reflects those desires she had. Although Cordelia demonstrated on BTVS that she was much more than the stereotypical popular-shallow girl she was portrayed to be (x), she wasn’t inclined to be considerate of others and empathy didn’t come naturally to her. In comparison, Angel spent a majority of his time thinking of others and had a wealth of empathy, for everybody regardless of whether they were those he loved or strangers; good or bad. There’s no doubt that the visions were a large part of what enabled Cordelia to be more empathetic since she was quite literally experiencing the traumas of others, but being close to Angel also impacted this. Until Cordelia became friends with Angel (and Doyle, Wes and Gunn), she’d never really been prioritised or cared for unconditionally. Angel’s kindness, consideration and support enabled Cordelia to open up emotionally in a way she never had before, not just to those closest to her, but to everybody. Ironically, a vampire (albeit a vampire with a soul) was the deepest insight Cordelia had gained into humanity. Angel devoted himself to helping others and Cordelia witnessed first-hand the positive impact that had on others and the rewards it brought. Whilst she fought against evil alongside the Scoobies on BTVS, it was being part of Angel Investigations that truly showed her the true meaning of fighting. It gave her purpose and belonging, which in turn allowed her to blossom in an entirely new way.

2. ‘Help the Helpless’: Finding purpose

Despite being different in many ways, Angel and Cordelia had one main thing in common - they were both seeking purpose, meaning and belonging in their lives at the start of ATS  - and they found that with each other.

On BTVS Angel went through a traumatic ordeal with losing his soul, being killed by the woman he loved, being trapped in a hell dimension, coming back to life and then having to break up with Buffy. After Angel was cursed and his soul was restored, he retreated into the shadows and lived like a hermit for a century. He no longer belonged in the vampire or the human world, and he was so consumed with the guilt about his actions as Angelus that he was paralysed. He lived a lonely and purposeless existence - until the moment he saw Buffy. Buffy symbolised hope for Angel, because she was destined to fight evil and helping her provided him with a purpose for the first time in decades and I strongly believe that this (amongst other reasons) is why he fell in love with her. So when he split up with her and left for L.A. he lost his purpose along with Buffy. It’s clear that Angel’s time with Buffy and the Scoobies had been so significant to him that he couldn’t return to the life he had before he met Buffy, he needed to continue helping people, but he didn’t know how. Meeting Doyle immediately provided him with a sense of purpose by providing him with a connection to the HP, but as I already mentioned above, Cordelia really cemented that. Although Doyle knew he and Angel had a mission that they needed to work on together, he didn’t know how to make that a reality. Cordelia’s practicality, pragmatism and organisation is what took an idea - helping the helpless - and made it a reality - Angel Investigations. Like I said, Angel knew he wanted to help others but he didn’t really have a plan. When Angel Investigations was born, it became so much more than simply helping the odd person in distress after having stumbled upon them by chance. It became an indefinite commitment and mission which provided Angel with a true purpose - a purpose he realised was the singular most important thing to him in ‘Epiphany’ (2x16).

Cordelia was also in a similar place to Angel when she arrived in L.A. at the start of ATS. During her time on BTVS Cordelia’s character was built upon her status in high-school - she was pretty, rich and popular. Although she wasn’t afraid to stand up for what she believed in (such as defending Xander against her HS friends), she generally sought the approval of others. In HS Cordelia felt that she was somebody and that really came from her popularity and status. However, she admitted that that popularity came with a downside and that she was in fact, very lonely as a result of it (x). Cordelia’s experience in her relationship with Xander only fuelled that loneliness she felt because she isolated herself from her friends to be with him, and when he cheated on her, her ‘friendships’ with the rest of the Scoobies were revealed to be superficial in nature and quickly broke down. By the time she came to ATS, she had left high school and therefore was without her boyfriend (Xander), friends and the status that HS afforded her. This explains why she was on a mission to become a famous actress - to reclaim that status that she’d lost but on an even grander scale. The problem with this is that regardless of how shallow Cordy may have appeared, she clearly craved more than just popularity, fame or money. She’d already had that but it hadn’t  fulfilled her. Enter Angel. Cordelia saw that Angel (and Doyle) needed guidance and that she could bring something important to the table. When she joined Angel and Doyle and set up Angel Investigations, she found her purpose just like Angel did. Initially, Cordelia’s desire to stick with Angel may have been because she didn’t have any other particularly appealing options, but it became so much more than that and by the end of season 1 Cordelia was wholly devoted to helping the helpless (x). In ‘Disharmony’ (2x17) she told Harmony that despite the popularity she had at HS, she was happier than she’d ever been because of the work she was doing, and having that sense of purpose came from meeting Angel. ‘Birthday’ (3x11) further reaffirmed this, when Cordelia chose being with Angel and helping the helpless over her dream of being a famous actress. 

The creation of Angel Investigations (not just the business but also the family) wouldn’t have happened if Angel and Cordelia hadn’t of come together in the way they did. From the beginning, they were the heart of everything it was and when Angel lost Cordy in season 5, he admitted that he lost his way and was lost without her (again, this beckons back to Cordy being Angel’s centre of gravity). Poetically, Cordelia kissing Angel in ‘You’re Welcome’ (5x11) and passing on the vision to him quite literally set Angel (and co.) on the path to their final battle and brought purpose back into his life. But in addition to bringing purpose to each other’s lives through their shared mission of helping the helpless, they brought something else, perhaps more significant - belonging and family.

3. ‘We’re family’: Belonging and Family

Although Angel and Cordelia had bonds with others prior to ATS - Angel had relationships with Darla, Dru, Spike, Buffy; Cordelia with Harmony, Xander and the Scoobies - they never had with anyone else what they found with each other (and the rest of Angel Investigations) (x). In season 1 Cordelia referred to Angel as being her family and Angel reiterated that later in the series. The unconditional support, acceptance and care Angel and Cordelia had towards one other was unlike anything they’d had in any of their previous relationships (particularly for Cordelia).

Angel prioritised Cordelia, he devoted himself to keeping her safe (x) (x), he was always concerned for her well-being and he took the time to get to know her as a person. He didn’t like Cordy because of her status or popularity, he liked her for her and he expressed that numerous times - he told her he liked both versions of her (old and new), that she was an extraordinary woman and that he’d never known anybody like her (x) (x). Likewise, Cordelia accepted Angel - warts and all - without white washing his past or being ignorant to his darkness. She knew Angelus had done terrible things, and that Angel wasn’t immune from making mistakes and she held him accountable for that. But she also encouraged Angel to be open with her about that side of himself, telling him to drink blood in front of her and reassuring him that she and Doyle wouldn’t judge his vamp face (x). Cordelia came face to face with Angelus multiple times and she knew that even with a soul Angel had the capacity for darkness, but she still saw the good in him and believed it out-weighed the bad. She was never under any false illusions that Angel was perfect and that’s why she was firm in her promise that if needs be she would stake Angelus without hesitation.

It’s really that unconditional support and acceptance that led them to consider each other family. What’s most significant about this is that neither of them really had that before ATS. Angel (Liam) grew up in a volatile family situation with an abusive father and Cordelia’s family was so insignificant in her life that we only had a few references to them throughout the course of BTVS and ATS and not a single appearance from them. Neither of them really had a true home or family until they found each other. The friendship they found with each other (and the rest of Angel Investigations) truly was one of the most beautiful things that ever happened to either of them and provided them with a true home for the first time in their lives. In fact, in season 4 Angel explicitly said when Cordelia was missing “We’ll do whatever it takes to bring her home, where she belongs”, which perfectly sums up the title for this section about belonging and family. The bond they forged was one of the first they established with another that felt completely secure and contented (which is also why Cordelia reacted so negatively to him abandoning her, Wes and Gunn in season 2 over Darla), because at it’s core it was a friendship built upon familial love, which in my opinion, is the strongest and most enduring love there is.

4. ‘My Dearest Friend’: Friendship and Love

The most common argument I’ve seen against Angel and Cordelia as a romantic ship is, “They should’ve just stayed friends, they were better that way”. My issue with this is that Angel and Cordelia didn’t just fulfil one or the other - friendship or romance - they fulfilled both and so much more (x). What makes Angel and Cordelia’s relationship so special is that they morphed from acquaintances, to coworkers, to confidantes, to friends, to family, to lovers and were often some (or all) of these things to each other at once. Their feelings for each other cannot be boxed in, because they encompass so much, but there is no disputing that they loved each other.

Angel and Cordy had a profound connection spanning across the entirety of ATS, that no amount of words I type can quite express. They were a constant presence in each others’ lives for years, they were by each others’ sides through some of the most significant events of their lives and they shared it all - the highs and lows, the good and bad. Even when their romantic feelings came into fruition, their friendship remained unchanged. Nothing could change that fundamental dynamic between them or the ease with which they communicated and bounced off of one another. Any scene between Angel and Cordy has a natural chemistry (the nature of that chemistry is up to interpretation), and even when Angel was a awkward, bumbling and flustered fool, their interactions never felt strained or uncomfortable. This is because they knew each other so well and were so attuned to each other, but also because their relationship was already so well established by the time they realised they had romantic feelings for each other that there was no danger of those feelings complicating or endangering that friendship. It’s why in ‘Spin the Bottle’ (4x06) Angel told Cordelia that she was his dearest friend and he wanted that back. He was able to push aside his romantic feelings and desires because her friendship was more important to him than anything else.

Some may claim it’s weird for two people who referred to each other as family to be in love with each other, but when you’re in love with someone they are your family. The fact that Angel and Cordelia had that kind of connection provided them with the closeness, comfortableness, familiarity and security for those romantic feelings to blossom. Angel, in particular, had an aversion to romance because of The Curse and his experience with Buffy, but he felt so safe with Cordelia that it’s almost like he allowed himself to feel that way about him. Likewise, Cordelia was rather guarded in matters of the heart given her romantic history with Xander, but she felt so safe with Angel that she was able to finally open herself up in that way without even really realising she was. That profound connection between them can’t really be quantified, but can be seen in their actions.

5. ‘You’re not alone’: Emotional connection

When I say that it would do them a disservice to try and box Angel and Cordelia’s relationship into the platonic or romantic arena, that’s because of the emotional connection they shared which extends beyond such labels.

According to Wiki, ‘Emotional intimacy is a psychological event that happens when trust levels and communication between two people are such that it fosters the mutual sharing of one another's deepest selves.’ It involves trust, mutual trust, sense of community, understanding, open communication and sharing a duty. As you read this I’m sure you’re realising that Angel and Cordelia had all of this. They lived in close proximity day after day for years - they worked together, they fought together, they laughed together, they loved the same people (Doyle, Wes, Gunn, Fred, Connor), they grieved together (for Doyle and Connor), they shared the same beliefs and morals and they were united in the same mission to help the helpless. All of this led to them developing a profound emotional connection whereby they came to rely on each other and trust each other, and were able to open up to each other without fear of judgement or rejection (x). Throughout the series Angel and Cordy had multiple heart to hearts in which they confided in each other, encouraged or reassured each other and those talks became more regular as their connection grew. Something as simple as Angel calling Cordelia ‘Cordy’ (which he didn’t do until ATS ‘Are You Now or Have You Ever Been?’ 2x02) demonstrated that developing connection between them.

Again, it would be futile for me to list every example of when Angel and Cordelia had a scene that showed this emotional connection (particularly since you’ll have seen them all if you’ve watched the show), but off the top of my head some key examples would be - Cordelia helped Angel open up about Doyle’s death after Angel accidentally called Wesley Doyle; Cordelia helped Angel to open up about Buffy’s death after he’d spent 3 months trying to come to terms with it; when Cordelia fell ill from a vision Angel reassured her that her value to him wasn’t invested solely in her visions; generally Angel supported Cordelia repeatedly through the trauma of her visions; after Connor was born Angel developed an overly-protective paternal instinct and wouldn’t let anybody hold him, and Cordelia was the first he allowed to hold him; after Connor’s kidnapping Cordelia was able to simply sit with him in the silence and provide the emotional support no one else could and when Angel was insecure about bonding with Connor (after his return) she reassured him he was a capable and loving father. 

Nothing showed the depth of that emotional connection more than the beginning of season 4 when Angel was at the bottom of the ocean. In order to hold on to his sanity, Angel repeatedly dreamt of Cordelia in various romantic scenarios and admitted to Wes and Gunn when he returned that the one thing that had kept him holding on was the thought of returning home to Cordelia. Cordy and his love for her was the tether to his humanity, his hope when everything was hopeless, his light in the dark. 

I could continue exploring this because their emotional connection is demonstrated in nearly every scene they have together, but the point has been made that Angel and Cordelia consistently opened up to one another and were by each other’s sides through the hardest of times. Although they both had the rest of Angel Investigations (Wesley, Gunn, Fred and Lorne), they primarily turned to each other in their time or need or when they were feeling low. They instinctively knew what to do/say to ease each other’s insecurities, fears or anxieties and were each other’s source of emotional strength. What’s even more significant about this is that their connection was so profound, that even those around them noticed it. 

6. ‘It’s the stars’: Everyone can see it

‘Everyone can see it’ is a popular romantic trope whereby a couple are perfect for each other but don’t realise their feelings for one another, but everyone else around them does. This was an integral part of Angel and Cordelia’s relationship since they found it very difficult, as friends, to make sense of their romantic feelings for each other and to acknowledge those feelings.

The first person to notice the chemistry between Angel and Cordelia was Fred in ‘Offspring’ (3x07). After seeing them sparring Fred spoke about kyrumption (two heroes meeting in battle and recognising their same fate) and moira (the gut physical attraction between two larger-than-life souls). Angel’s feelings for Cordelia had already been present long before then, but Fred’s observations provided him with an opportunity to acknowledge them for the first time and reflect on them. 

Lorne being an empath naturally had an insight into Angel’s feelings and in ‘Waiting in the Wings’ (3x13) he revealed that he’d read Angel and knew he had feelings for Cordelia. Like Fred, he also spoke of kyrumption and told Angel that the way he was feeling for Cordelia was real. Lorne consistently was attuned to Angel’s feelings for Cordelia and understood that they’d grown beyond friendship. He also actively encouraged Angel to act on them because he believed Cordelia felt the same way about him and he shouldn’t miss the chance to see what they could be. 

I watched ‘Waiting in the Wings’ with commentary from Whedon last week and in that he explained that the spell was a way for Angel and Cordelia to act on the feelings they had for each other (that they were only just starting to realise) in a way whereby they didn’t actually have to admit that they had those feelings and wanted to act on them (because they were afraid of the consequences). Fred and Lorne’s observations are very much the same - they’re a conduit through which Angel was able to internally explore his growing romantic feelings for Cordy and slowly come to the realisation that he was in love with her. 

7. ‘Were we in love?’: Romantic love

Although I’ve been primarily focused on the general connection between Angel and Cordelia and what they brought to each other’s lives, there was definitely romantic love and attraction between the two of them and it’s important to discuss that.

I think when people compare Angel and Cordy’s relationship to Angel’s relationship with Buffy people feel Angel’s love for Cordelia wasn’t romantic or passionate, but it was, it’s just that the love he had for Cordy and their relationship was so fundamentally different from his relationship with Buffy that the two can’t really be compared. Buffy was Angel’s epic, great love - it consumed him from the inside out, it was intense, passionate and devastating - but Cordy was something entirely different. She wasn’t supposed to be some big epic love, she was supposed to be a friend with whom he developed a strong bond with and slowly came to fall in love with over time. Their love wasn’t characterised by angst-ridden scenes, grand speeches of forbidden love and sexual tension - it was grounded in family, friendship and emotional connection (as I’ve explored above). Their feelings for each other weren’t sudden and didn’t start out big (they truly were just acquaintances at the start of ATS season 1), but as they spent time together, shared experiences and got to know each other, their romantic feelings quietly grew in the background until neither of them could ignore it anymore.

It’s frustrating that we never got a clear admission of love between the two (all of their love confessions were to other people or cut off before they finished), but there is no doubt in my mind that Angel and Cordelia were in love. Their actions proved that and from a personal perspective, I could feel the love between them. Everyone will have different interpretations of when they believe the pair fell in love, but interestingly, I don’t think there’s supposed to be ‘one moment’ that they fell in love, because the whole point of their relationship is that it was never that clear cut. They didn’t go to bed one night as best friends and wake up the next day a think, “I’m in love with Angel/Cordelia!”. It was a subtle evolution of feelings over time, which neither of them truly noticed until it was brought to their attention by others, because they were so used to being friends and navigating within the realms of that, that they didn’t consider the possibility that their feelings could have gone beyond that.

Since ATS was primarily focused on Angel’s POV, it’s very easy to follow Angel’s evolving feelings for Cordelia and attempt to pin-point the moment at which his romantic feelings came to fruition. Like I said, I don’t think there was one particular moment where Angel realised his feelings for Cordelia, but in my opinion, they had definitley developed by ‘Dead End’ (2x18). At the beginning of season 2, Angel had a crisis due to Darla’s return and he fired Cordelia, Wesley and Gunn. It was really the darkest we saw Angel get in ATS whilst he had his soul, he truly lost his way for a while and Cordelia was so hurt and angry by his actions that she couldn’t forgive him. When Angel finally realised he’d made a mistake cutting his friends out of his life, he did everything he could to make amends, but he seemed most affected by the loss of Cordelia’s friendship and he was determined to earn her forgiveness. What’s interesting about this is that at this point one could argue that Angel’s friendship with Cordelia wasn’t that profound and it didn’t particularly matter if they made up, because they still could’ve worked together as co-workers (although it might’ve been a little awkward and uncomfortable). But Angel was adamant that he wanted her friendship back and almost the entirety of ‘Epiphany’ (2x16) was focused on Angel’s desire to make amends with Cordy and his devastation when she refused to accept him back. This continued in ‘Disharmony’ (2x17), with him desperately fighting to earn her forgiveness and ending with him winning Cordelia over by buying her clothes, which he was visibly happy about (x). Angel’s reaction at the prospect of losing Cordelia beckons back to ‘To Shanshu to L.A.’ (1x22) when we witnessed for the first time how scared he was to lose her and also suggests that at this point in season 2 his romantic feelings were developing for her. In the following episode ‘Dead End’ (2x18), he was so focused on making Cordelia feel better (and this was likely a continuation of him making it up to her) that he brought her food and his reaction to her saying she loved him was perhaps the brightest smile I’ve ever seen on Angel’s face (x). In ‘Belonging’ (2x19), Angel’s attraction to Cordelia was made clear when he saw her in a bikini and he also expressed anger at the director of the commercial she was filming for treating her like a ‘commodity’ and a ‘slave’, forcing him to apologise to Cordelia for the way he spoke to her and telling Cordelia he would rip his head off if she wanted him to. When Cordelia was sucked into the portal to Pylea in ‘Over the Rainbow’ (2x20), Angel’s profound emotional connection to Cordelia was clear (x) - he just wanted her back, he didn’t care how or what they had to do and he expressed that he couldn’t lose Cordy again after just getting her back (also that one line, ‘It’s Cordy’, that Angel says to Wesley when he tells Angel it’s too dangerous to go through the portal and they may never get back holds so much emotion). When Cordelia admitted to loving Groo in Pylea, Angel mistakenly thought she was saying it to him and was disappointed to learn otherwise. So basically, by the end of season 2 Angel undoubtedly had romantic feelings for Cordelia, but wasn’t yet aware of them. Season 3 continued to build on that by allowing Angel to heal following Buffy’s death and reach a resolution  in ‘Heartthrob’ (3x01) whereby he could start to process his feelings for Cordy, putting him a situation where he was faced with the prospect of losing her again, therefore cementing the depth of his feelings for her (‘That Vision Thing’ 3x02) and having Fred share her observations about his feelings for her, finally allowing him to fully acknowledge them for the first time. 

From Cordelia’s POV it’s much harder to guess when her romantic feelings for Angel developed, because we didn’t get as much insight into her. I do think her feelings for him didn’t come as soon as Angel’s did for her and neither did the realisation that she felt that way. ‘That Vision Thing’ (3x02) hints that Cordelia’s feelings for Angel may have begun to grow beyond friendship when she said, “If I lose the visions I wouldn't be able to help you anymore. You wouldn't need me.” Notice, Cordelia was concerned with Angel needing her, not the rest of the team. Also, since Angel was so devoted to saving Cordelia and explicitly told her she was more important to him than his vendetta against W&H, we can assume this impacted Cordelia’s feelings towards him since this was perhaps the first time she noticed how committed he was to keeping her safe and how much he wanted her in his life. I also think that witnessing Angel go through the process of becoming a father significantly impacted Cordy’s feelings for Angel. Seeing him take on the role of a father showed an even softer, nurturing side of him and the bond Cordy developed with Connor also brought them closer together. However, ‘Birthday’ (3x11) is the first episode that properly affirms the depth of Cordelia’s feelings for Angel. She was given everything she ever wanted - fame, money, stardom - and she gave it all up to return to Angel. Despite having no memory, upon seeing Angel so broken, Cordelia instinctively leaned in and kissed him fulfilling the old fairy-tale trope of true love’s kiss breaking the spell. I think from Cordelia’s POV, she was much more closed off to allowing herself to acknowledge her romantic feelings for Angel because she didn’t even consider Angel a romantic option given The Curse. This also explains why upon Groo’s return in season 3, she resumed her relationship with him despite having clearly developed profound romantic feelings for Angel that led her to prioritise him above Groo repeatedly to the point that Groo himself noticed that she had feelings for Angel.

This brings me back to the main point about Angel and Cordelia’s romantic feelings for each other never being straightforward or easily defined. In ‘Waiting in the Wings’ (3x13) it was clear - spell or no spell - that Angel and Cordelia shared a mutual sexual attraction and that Angel’s canonically confirmed romantic feelings for Cordelia were reciprocated. Yet Cordelia didn’t confirm her feelings for him explicitly to the audience until 9 episodes later in the finale of the season. This is for a number of reasons, but primarily because it was easier to continue denying their feelings and remain friends than face the complications that a romance posed. Even if they had been given the chance to openly express their feelings for each other, what would’ve happened next? As Angel said to Lorne in ‘Waiting in the Wings’, what could he offer her (as a cursed vampire)? It would’ve been too complicated and they knew that.

That criss-cross and complexity of their love is part of the reason I love them so much, because it’s authentic and relatable. Particularly in the case of friends who have fallen in love - it’s no easy transition and it’s definitely not easy to make sense of your feelings Plus, Angel and Cordy had the added complications that went with their life (Angel being a vampire, The Curse, Darla, their friends, Angel Investigations, W&H and the supernatural world generally, to name a few). In an interview a long time ago SMG said that the most heartbreaking thing about Buffy and Angel was that it was unfulfilled love, and in this respect so are Angel and Cordelia. It’s heartbreaking because they truly loved one another but they were never even given the opportunity to see what they could potentially be. They missed their chance and because of that they were always left wondering ‘what if?’ 

8. ‘I’ll be seeing you’: Missed Opportunity 

The fact that Angel and Cordy never got their shot to be together (which they discussed in ‘You’re Welcome’ 5x11) is the tragedy of their love. However, it wouldn’t be the same love story if it didn’t have that unresolved element to it. Everybody longs for closure and resolution with their ships, but the truth is, in real life few people truly get that, they simply have to move on and live with their regrets. But whilst I love Angel and Cordelia’s relationship and story as it is, there’s no escaping the fact that they were done dirty in seasons 4 and 5 in regards to the writing and as a result their story did go in a...shall we say unfavourable direction? 

Everyone that’s ever watched ATS has problems with season 4 (I could write a separate post about the problems with season 4, particularly in regards to Cordelia’s character), and when it comes to Angel and Cordelia’s relationship, there’s a lot that was handled badly which unfortunately, derailed the beautiful development that took place between them in season 3. We still had a lot of key moments that played out between Angel and Cordelia in season 4, but the main problem with the season is that we don’t actually know when Cordelia was actually Cordelia. At what point was she herself, if she ever was? Did she really have amnesia? If so, can we count amnesia!Cordy as still being Cordy to an extent? When did Jasmine start to take over? Did she have any agency at all when she was possessed by Jasmine, even if it was only the briefest of moments? All of these questions remain unanswered and make it very difficult to fully assess the Angel/Cordelia relationship during season 4, but I’m going to try to anyway. 

What remained clear throughout season 4 was that Angel loved Cordy. In fact, despite Cordelia technically being absent for the majority of the season, it was very Cangel-heavy, perhaps more than the seasons before it. Angel had multiple dreams/fantasies about Cordelia, devoted himself to finding her when she was missing at the start of the season, was visibly distraught to have her lose her memories and strike up a relationship with Connor, and lost his soul from a fantasy of making love to her. In my opinion, this is the season that really affirmed that Angel was in love with Cordy beyond any doubt. When Angel asked Cordelia if they were in love and she replied, “We were”, I strongly believe that was Cordelia. She’d just gotten her memories back so Jasmine hadn’t had chance to worm her way to the forefront yet, and I believe in that moment that was Cordelia finally breaking through and telling Angel that she loved him. Although the circumstances are ambiguous to say the least, I believe this to be the first admission of love exchanged between the two whereby the words were said plainly (because obviously they said ‘I love you’ to each other repeatedly before this moment in other ways). However, this doesn’t undo the dirty that was done to Angel and Cordelia in this season. Despite the fact that we know Cordelia wasn’t responsible for any of her actions since she was possessed by Jasmine, it’s still very hard when watching her with Connor to separate Jasmine from Cordelia. And from Angel’s perspective, he literally watched the woman he loved have sex with his son. Finding out afterwards that it wasn’t actually Cordelia doesn’t reduce the devastating impact of witnessing that and the way the Cordelia!Jasmine arc was written did taint some aspects of their relationship by forcing Angel to have to witness ‘Cordelia’ enter into a romantic relationship with Connor and have a child with him. Also, it was utterly ridiculous and unbelievable that Angel and co. wouldn’t recognise that Cordy wasn’t herself. This is definitely a writing issue, because the whole possession thing was handled so badly in the respect that Cordelia seemed like herself (even her sleeping with Connor was believable due to her amnesiac state), but it was still not in-keeping with the show that none of her friends (and especially Angel) would notice that Cordelia was possessed. Overall, season 4 did a huge disservice to Angel and Cordelia’s romance (although the biggest disservice was definitely done to Cordelia’s character) and whilst their relationship was beautifully developed in seasons 1-3, season 4 stopped that development in its tracks. 

Season 5 continued to do a disservice to Cordelia (and Angel and Cordelia) by practically erasing Cordy from existence (I know that backstage issues with the cast need to be taken into consideration here, but the lack of consideration to Cordelia’s character is still a valid point to discuss). Despite how utterly terrified Angel was whenever faced with the prospect of losing Cordelia, in season 5 he was visibly fine about Cordelia being in a coma and wasn’t even attempting to pull her out of it. The fact that Angel (and co.) would simply stand by and go on with the rest of their lives without devoting every single second to waking Cordy  is ridiculous and completely OOC for all of them. Angel, Wes, Gunn, Fred, Lorne and Cordy were deeply connected and would have done anything for each other, and there’s no way they would’ve given up on Cordy like that. But back to the point, despite Angel being in love with Cordelia throughout season 4, there was no reference to his feelings for her until ‘You’re Welcome’ (5x11). Now, don’t get me wrong, I love that episode and I always will, but I also can’t help but notice how out of place that episode feels within the rest of the season. In the episodes leading up to it Cordelia was barely mentioned and in the episodes afterwards, her death was completely ignored with only a few passing references from Angel near the end of the season (don’t even get me started on the fact that she didn’t even get a funeral. What the hell was that all about?!?!? This is Cordy.) Furthermore, Angel reverted back to being actively in love with Buffy (particularly in ‘The Girl in Question’ 5x20, which is honestly such a bad episode, I can’t even) with no consideration given to the fact that he had feelings for Cordelia. Personally, I believe all of these consistencies come from fan pandering - the reaction to Angel and Cordelia becoming a couple was very negative so they reverted back to the Angel/Buffy relationship because it was so popular and well-loved. But back to, ‘You’re Welcome’, the episode definitely redeemed some of what was done to Cordelia (and her relationship with Angel) by giving her/them a satisfying ending after an horrendous season 4, but nothing can truly make up for the fact that Angel and Cordelia’s relationship was so abruptly ended in the manner it was. It also can’t make up for the fact that we missed out on two entire seasons worth of development that we would’ve potentially got if the Jasmine plot hadn’t taken place (again, I understand this was largely down to behind-the-scenes complications with Charisma and Whedon). 

These flaws in the writing (and execution of the relationship) in seasons 4 and 5 is far and above my biggest criticism of Angel and Cordelia’s relationship as a whole (although it’s a criticism of the writers more so than Cordelia and Angel or David and Charisma). It never would have made sense for Angel and Cordy to have a plain sailing fairy-tale romance, but they had so much more potential and could have grown to become something even more beautiful if season 4 had continued to build upon their development from seasons 1-3. ‘You’re Welcome’ perfectly demonstrates the potential they had and what they could’ve become if Cordelia hadn’t been possessed by Jasmine. And that was only a taster and we could’ve had, we could’ve so much more. In my opinion, there were no limits on where their relationship could have been taken since it was so well written, built-up and established leading up to season 4. The fact that we’ll never know how the relationship would’ve played out if it had continued is sad, but as I said, that missed chance that they had is key to Angel and Cordelia’s relationship. It’s the one that got away, the love that could never be and that one person whom we always wonder, “What if?” about. 

9. ‘There are no people like us’: Why Angel/Cordelia are misunderstood and live in Buffy/Angel’s shadow

The final section I wanted to do is an exploration of the reasons why I feel Cordelia and Angel are misunderstood as a ship and how I believe this primarily stems from the fact that they live in Buffy/Angel’s shadow. This is where I’ll be comparing Angel/Cordelia and Buffy/Angel, so if you’re a fan of Buffy/Angel, you may not want to read this final section. However, this isn’t anti-Buffy/Angel, it’s really me working through my own thoughts and feelings as both a Buffy/Angel and a Angel/Cordelia shipper (yes, we exist haha). 

People have a tendency to make comparisons between the Angel/Cordelia and Buffy/Angel relationship two relationships, when in reality (as I’ve mentioned above) the two aren’t really comparable. Angel’s relationships with Buffy and Cordelia were distinctive, took place under completely different circumstances and brought different things to his life. Angel was fully engaged in a romantic relationship with Buffy for 2 years (on and off), but he never had the opportunity to do that with Cordelia. The romantic feelings were there, as was the potential for them to act on that and see what they could be, but it didn’t happen. So to compare the two relationships (when technically Angel and Cordy never entered into a romantic relationship) is futile to say the least. However, people naturally make those comparisons and when they do they seem to come up with two key reasons Angel/Cordelia are inferior to Buffy/Angel:

1. Sexual relationship/chemistry - It hasn’t escaped my attention that Buffy and Angel have a lot more sexual chemistry than Angel and Cordelia. Honestly, in my opinion, nothing can really compare to SMG/David chemistry, it’s so damn good. However, this criticism simply fails to understand that Angel and Cordelia’s love/connection never was primarily one of a sexual nature (notice that every fantasy Angel ever had of Cordelia was romantic not sexual). Romance was definitely part of their relationship (particularly in seasons 3, 4 and 5) and they had an attraction and they had chemistry (’Waiting in the Wings’ damn well proved that), but their relationship was never about sex. In comparison to Angel and Buffy, their relationship was deeply rooted in attraction. From the moment they meet each other they’re very physically attracted to each other and in seasons 1 and 2 they both make references made to how badly they want to kiss each other whenever they’re together, whilst in season 3 they discuss the difficulties they find in fighting against their sexual attraction to each other. As a result, Angel and Buffy’s relationship was always heavily steeped in sexual tension. The fact that Angel and Cordelia’s relationship didn’t have the same level of sexual attraction doesn’t make that relationship any less important, just different (which I know I keep saying, but it’s kind of my whole argument here - the two relationships are so fundamentally different you can’t compare them). 

2. Buffy is Angel’s one and only true love - There’s no denying that Buffy was and always will be Angel’s great love, but to quote one of my not-so-favourite shows (The Vampire Diaries), contrary to popular belief, people can (and usually do) have more than one great love in their lives. Clinging too tightly to the Buffy/Angel relationship ignores the immense changes Angel undergoes on ATS and the fact he moved on from Buffy (up until Spike’s return in season 5, which reverts him back to being kind of obsessed with Buffy, which is such bad writing and so inconsistent that it annoys me. And this isn’t  including crossovers either, because damn, they’re so problematic/inconsistent and I didn’t even realised until I watched ATS, but I can see now why the writers didn’t want to do too many crossovers despite the fans wanting them). Buffy was always in Angel’s heart and he always carried her with him, but he didn’t actively pine over her or yearn for her when he moved to L.A. (he did more so in season 1 and particularly after the events of ‘I Will Remember You’, but he slowly moved on). Angel conclusively and healthily moved on from Buffy - he established a life for himself which he loved and made him happy, he found a home, friends and embarked on a new love with Cordy. When two people have shared a love like Angel did with Buffy, it never goes away but it does change and it almost grows dormant (for reference, there’s a brilliant meta that discusses Angel moving on from Buffy which you can read here). To use a real life example here, my mom (who’s now 50) has been in around 5 serious long-term relationships in her life and has been with her current partner for 5 years and is completely in love with him. However, she’s openly admitted to me that she loved my dad more than she’s ever loved any man and she still regards him the love of her life. That doesn’t mean she’s still in love with him, because she’s not. She hasn’t seen him in two decades, she’s moved on and she’s found love with someone new. That love she had with him is a memory in her head and her heart, but it has no place in her life now. She’s a different person, her life has changed dramatically and that love is in the past. If he rocked up now he’d be a stranger to her and regardless of those memories she has of him, he’s no longer the person she’s in love with. That’s exactly what happened with Buffy and Angel. They always loved each other, but Angel truly did move forward (whether Buffy moved on is something I’m less unsure of). In ‘Heartthrob’ (3x01) Angel told James that he’d lost the woman he loved (Buffy) and that he had loved her with his whole heart. In response, James said that that couldn’t be true because if it was, when she had died Angel would’ve died along with her. After that, in a scene with Cordy (x), Angel admitted that he was okay and had dealt with Buffy’s death and how he felt guilty about that. In my opinion, this episode (and those scenes in particular) confirmed that Angel had moved on from Buffy and had gotten to a place where he could finally open himself up to Cordelia wholeheartedly. In fact, David spoke about how Angel had moved on from Buffy and that Cordy was what he needed (he also mentioned Darla, which is a topic I won’t get into because I could write an entirely separate post about that too) and here’s what he said: 

Interviewer: Darla killed herself, right? The baby's mother? Who's gonna step up and help Angel raise the baby? Buffy?

David: God, no. Buffy's pretty much out of the picture. They've played their storyline and that's just the past. I think between Cordelia and Fred he'll be mommied to death. But, Buffy's just the past.

Interviewer: Oh, come on. Buffy can never really be just the past, can she? I mean, that's Angel's soulmate.

David: I think Darla was probably his soulmate. I mean, they spent a hundred years together, then made a baby. You can't just--

Interviewer: Well, then Buffy was his first love.

David: Angel was Buffy's first love, but Angel loved Darla in a sick way.

Interviewer: I'm a Buffy/Angel fan. Sorry.

David: You're forgiven. No, I'm just saying that the two shows are on different networks and it's not gonna happen. There's no more story there for those two. Buffy isn't Angel's priority anymore. In season one and two of our show, she was always in the back of his mind, well, now it's all about the baby and Buffy is just, well, she's just a person he used to know.

Interviewer : Awww, come on! The story there was so incredible.

David: And like every good story, it came to an end. And then started over. On. Different. Networks. (again with the emphasis)

Interviewer : Is Angel going to hook up with Cordy?

David: Well, I'm all for it. I don't know what the writers have planned in that regard, but I'm a fan of Charisma's work and I'd love for our characters to be romantically involved. Cordy is really what Angel needs, I believe. (x)

See, it’s important to acknowledge that as amazing as Buffy and Angel’s story was, they broke up and went their separate ways. As David rightfully pointed out, it was the past and Buffy was no longer his priority. It’s always frustrated me that Angel was expected not to move on and to pine for Buffy, whilst Buffy was allowed to move on and find love again. The argument is that Angel was so much older than Buffy that he couldn’t or rather shouldn’t want to find love, whilst Buffy was still young, but the problem is, although Angel was technically old, he was still a teenager himself in terms of his experiences in love. He didn’t have a soul for 100 years so was incapable of love and then he spent 100 years when he had a soul cut off from the world. He had barely experienced anything the world had to offer and he certainly hadn’t had the opportunity to forge connections with others or explore the world of love. Buffy was able to move on from Angel and experience different types of relationships/loves with Parker (urgh), Riley and Spike (amongst others who she flirted with or briefly dated post-BTVS season 3). Angel deserved the same opportunity to experience new types of relationships that were different than the one he had with Buffy. I’m going to use another quote The Vampire Diaries because I feel it sums this up perfectly, “I realised that I may not be able to explain what I feel for her, but it is something, and, yeah, maybe all love isn't true love in the messed up way that you and I have experienced it, but I think this could turn into something even better.” This right here is exactly how I perceive Angel’s feelings for Buffy and Cordelia to be. Angel had only ever loved one person, Buffy was all he’d ever known of love and it was so big, messy and all-consuming , but with Cordelia he realised that love didn’t necessarily have to be like that and that there are different types of love. 

There’s no disputing that Angel never loved Cordelia in the same way he loved Buffy (which this post explains perfectly) - Angel will never love anyone the way he loved Buffy, but he did fall in love with Cordelia and she enriched his life in new ways and filled a void in him in much the same way Buffy did. During ATS Cordelia surpassed Buffy in importance simply because of the place she had in Angel’s life - she was the center of his world and without her it wouldn’t be the same (we saw that in season 5). It would be unfair to claim Angel couldn’t or shouldn’t love someone else just because he had such an intense love with Buffy. What makes his relationship with Cordelia so special is that it was so different than the love he had with Buffy. Those two loves will always sit in contrast to each other, but will never overshadow or replace one another because they’re both significant and special for different reasons. 

The point of talking about this was really just to highlight that Angel and Cordelia’s relationship is not by any means invalid or inferior because of Buffy/Angel. Both relationships are important and exist in contrast to each other. Angel and Cordelia’s relationship does tend to be misunderstood and/or unappreciated due to the nature of the writing (which had a lot of problems in seasons 4 and 5, and even a little in season 3) and because they’re too heavily compared to the hot and heavy romance between Angel and Buffy. However, Angel and Cordelia’s relationship developed organically over time in a subtle way and is demonstrative of how much relationships can evolve as life progresses and circumstances change, and how two people can grow together. Theirs was a story about two people, who in the beginning were indifferent to each other, but grew to know each other profoundly and found a lot through being in each others lives - purpose, belonging, family, friendship and love - and through having and sharing that, they fell in love. It’s not a conventional romantic love as most of us would expect, and they didn’t have the chances to fully explore their romantic connection because their story ended prematurely, but it was a beautiful relationship embedded in human connection and friendship at the deepest and purest level.

If you got to the end of this, thank you so much for reading. This took me days and days to write and edit, so I’m really grateful to you for reading and would appreciate likes/reblogs if you found this interesting. I’d also love to hear your thoughts on this topic, so if you have any feel free to stop by my ask box :)

[fireeaglespirit]

@fireeaglespirit @viviane-lefay i do worry sometimes with the stories I write if things might be too much for you. To be fair I dont think in any fanfic Ive ever written anything too explicit but now Im so conscious of other people’s viewpoints and being inclusive that it is a concern. Ultimately I write what I want to/need to but I am aware it might not be for all tastes hence always trying to follow ratings etc.

Replying here so it doesn’t cause any problems with OP, etc..

Ohh. I’m sorry if this worried you.. tbh this was very random and I wasn’t even thinking about fiction when I rb this. This one reminded me of a few times I went out with friends and colleagues and I just felt starkly asexual, lmao

About my tolerance regarding sex and explicitly in fiction, I’ll be honest with you…

There’s hardly anything I could say I wouldn’t read about. I just don’t feel ‘triggers’ or anything of the sort, no hard feelings when it gets to fiction and I value your will to be conscious of other viewpoints but its practically impossible to cater to all tastes like you said, so don’t worry about it much… there’s always someone out there who will feel offended and others who will fiercely love it.

As for myself, I’m very tolerant to sexual content in fiction, idk? I don’t seek it out particularly but its not a deal breaker either.

I know some asexual people are less tolerant, I usually just get a ‘meh’ feeling whenever those subjects are touched in much detail, idk some works do get nasty and bothersome because of much detail involving sexual practices so I just give up on them or put them aside when they bring me no joy but I gladly consume material with sex on it as long as I like some aspects of it. Also, I’m good at ignoring or glossing over things I don’t like in fiction… when I read explicit scenes with intercourse it does nothing to me and my eyes focuses on the sentences I loved such as regarding the feelings between the characters and subtle interactions instead of the physical/carnal aspects of it, and this makes it all worthy it.

Even so, some works might become overwhelmingly depressive or repulsive so I might put them aside even if I enjoyed an aspect of it or I might just skip through them and this happened recently to a series of fantasy books I tried to read which were actually really good but they were so overwhelmingly and unnecessarily dark and had an horrid oppressive atmosphere towards women an sex so I just felt no joy reading them? Its not like I was traumatized by its tone but it felt like a chore and I couldn’t care about it further and no character inspired me whatsoever that the world could change for the better, so I dropped them.

But its not like I’m judging it, I just feel weirded out to some things and I just imagine the kind of mind that takes upon themselves the chore to write a whole series of book which has nothing but suffering and misery in them, especially concerning women, lol. We already had this shit in history and still have in some places in the world so I kinda feel like its not interesting for me to read about it in a fictional setting, especially if I don’t feel like the writer is going to challenge the setting.

But I’m aware most people are much more sensitive… these things can be horrid for those who are more sensitive, and perhaps my own asexuality protects me from feeling it fully as I don’t even think of myself as a being capable of partaking in this (weird, I know), so I have problem even projecting.

But I did felt really strongly for the way women were oppressed absurdly and had their agency completely obliterated, so that sparked a sort of empathy or kinship in me which made progress in such book a chore…

You got my point and this just illustrates a bit my relationship to fiction and things that irk me since you were interested in my opinion… I have another example of fantasy book with lots of sex in it:

I read asoiaf even thought its full of sexual stuff but I don’t feel joy at these parts, yet the work is so good on other themes that I ignore it for the most part… but even so, recently I’ve read F&B and it was kinda overwhelming on the sexist aspect with myriads of female characters turned into child brides and raped and dying at their childbirth repeatedly it just got very tiresome and repetitive near the end, because there where almost no counterpoints to it, unlike in the main series where the situation is dire for women but we have characters challenging it more often and idk. F&B just lacked on that front.

So, this shows a bit my sensitivity towards sex is more related to sexism and the feeling that women are confined to their reproductive aspects: motherhood, childbearing, marriage, sensuality, etc.. I don’t have a problem with sexual intercourse per se as you can see, but that’s from my unique point of view and I know some asexuals are more repulsed towards it, but you asked my opinion…

So, if its consensual sex: its not my cup of tea but I don’t feel like its a deal breaker…

Just to give you a positive sex example: when I see an OTP of mine getting to the point of having sex I think its pretty sweet, like when Jon and Dany consummated their love on that boat… I was happy for them, for all that it means, the symbolism between the union of ice and fire and just two characters which I love dearly, finding happiness and comfort in each other. What’s not to love about it??

This is a rare stance I can say I saw a pair I ship get to that point xD

I love shipping as you know, but its more about the psychological aspects and potential for character development and even when I’m reading fanfic about my OTPs I enjoy more the angst and symbolism than the ‘hot’ parts which usually just makes me go ‘meh’ (again).

So this makes me say: when sex is the focus of works I could feel like I’m too asexual for this, even if it regards an OTP, it just doesn’t have a very exciting effect on me or I’m not explicitly interested in this part of a relationship, when so many other things caught my eye… sometimes subtle interactions and dialogue and and gentle approximation (touches, caresses, kissing, etc..) is so much more exciting for me to read about than the ‘thing’ itself, lol.

To sum it up: when its there just for p*rn or even worse, shock value it just makes me go ‘meh’ or ‘ugh’ or ‘uhh why am I even reading this?’

This reminds me of Vivi’s take on the ‘hiero gamos’, in this case I just say I might even enjoy the theme as long as the scenes involving sex are meaningful and passionate and the aspect I value the most about them are sublime and platonic instead of carnal but I’m aware the carnal aspects are very important for the characters and the audience so I also worry when I get to show my stories people will think they lack sexual content ^^  I get you.

Now that you know my feelings towards sex in fiction, to a broader sense I just wanted to say..

There’s no way to guess people’s sensitives but it doesn’t mean you need to walk on eggshells afraid to trigger people all the time, hell no! I’m all for freedom of creation. At least around me there are no metaphorical ‘eggshells’.

Everyone has their own set of opinions which makes them unique, not just me, I mean…  even so I will let my snowflake syndrome show but I’m quite peculiar if you could say, so I sort of grew a strong ‘carapace’ towards the world as I deal with people with completely different views and values on a daily basis which might make me have inflamed political opinions while at the same time, I’m very flexible and forgiving when it comes to fiction in general.

I don’t expect much of the population to be like this so I’m also self conscious when it gets to writing my own stuff because I know people can feel very strongly about it and you’ve seen the way fandom reacts to minor things and bash creators when they perceive flaws in their work… I’m just not a judgmental person, its not in my nature. I just ignore things in fiction if I don’t like and I became even more relaxed over time in regards to this all, lol I nearly reached a ‘nirvana’ as I don’t even feel strongly negative feelings in regard to this.

Snarky and bitter comments from time to time? Yes… but no hard feelings. RL needs my hatred, lol so I don’t have it to spare with fiction any longer.

Anyway, on an unrelated sub note… as you might have noticed, I don’t feel comfortable about current fandom trends and specially policing, and with reason as this gets very serious and quick with literally ‘wave chain reactions’ of hatred sparked apparently from nowhere. I hope people could create more freely instead of the political correct police and restraining of creativity we have now. It was good for a while and I’m all for diversity and change in status quo (for the better), but I think this has gone too far and I perceive a lot of rigidity in fiction right now due to fear of fandom backlash we have creators afraid to make their thing and afraid it isn’t ‘inclusive or progressive’ enough… so they bend themselves endlessly until fandom ‘approves’ them, but even so someone is bound to scream and say the work is offensive and the cycle of hatred is restarted.

I know this reply was like a huge egocentric monologue and I strained with non related issues at the end, but you asked my thought on this so I tried to convey it with detail.. including things related to the perception we have concerning fictional themes and I just kinda had to vent at some parts of it.

etc…. This doesn’t mean I forbid judgment from others or criticism or that I forbid people from harshly criticizing works of fiction, just that sometimes it gets more harmful than beneficial and scare people off, and I felt like saying that.

Anyway,,, just want to say nonetheless I find it very sweet and considerate that you are taking different opinions in mind while writing, but you don’t need to worry at least from my part, and I don’t think you ever got even close to being explicit in your writings so there’s absolutely nothing to worry about.

[thokage-archive]

i'll bite, what's your opinion on BAKUGOU KATSUKI

BITCH IM READY 2 GOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!

FIRST OF ALL……,,,,, SWEATEAL,

THATS MY SON! I WOULD D I E FOR HIM.

secondly, he is an extremely complex character & I beg all Bakugou haters to read what I’m about to write. I don’t think anyone needs to love him or kiss his ass by any means, let alone excuse his behavior towards Izuku. BUT! I beg of you to have some empathy for a fucking 15-year-old boy that has been through hell & back, is clearly emotionally stunted, obviously grew up in an emotionally manipulative, verbally abusive, and very likely, physically abusive household. 

As someone who was raised in a household like that, and as someone who was both the bully & bullied growing up, I just need you to understand how complex he is & that he is worthy of redemption!!! (after all, he is a child, he should be granted the opportunity to grow & learn from his mistakes. I don’t think people should give up on him just yet, lord knows where I would be if the people in my life had given up on me at 15). 

Deadass though…. let’s get into his fucking problems™ first because I am the last person on earth to act like he is perfect. 

#1 problem - extreme anger issues

It’s made clear from the start of the series that Bakugou expresses himself best through anger and violence, something he obviously learned from his mother. Horikoshi, in fact, has SAID that him & Mitsuki are essentially the same person. So can we all just take a fucking moment & imagine Bakugou as a parent…. imagine someone with that type of irrational & immature anger parenting a child. How tf do you think that kid is going to turn out? How does a kid being raised by a verbally abusive parent grow up?

Well!!! Luckily, this series provides us with two very good examples,

a) bakugou katsuki

while on the opposite end of the spectrum is 

 b)  todoroki shouto. 

Everyone deals with abuse in different ways, especially different types of abuse. While Bakugou is dealing with abuse by taking his anger & projecting it out, therefore reflecting his abuser, Todoroki internalizes all of his emotions & is extremely distant and at times submissive for fear of punishment.

Bakugou wards off his weakness/being punished by his mother for being weak, by expressing brute strength through his anger & aggressiveness, thinking of things such as friends and feelings (other than anger) as weak. Todoroki hides his weaknesses from Endeavor by closing off his emotions from him completely, so much so that he is emotionally/socially stunted.

In short

Bakugou’s emotionally stuntedness = lifetime of anger being his only coping mechanism/outlet & a huge failure on his parent’s part to foster any other sort of emotions 

todoroki’s emotionally stuntedness = lifetime of repressing all of his emotions from his father coupled with a lack of social interaction from peers

In both of their households….

losing = weakness

being #2 = weakness 

emotional vulnerability = weakness

all of these weaknesses = punishable by verbal & physical means

The reasons why people respond the way they do to abuse is very varied. My best guess for why Bakugou responds the way he does leads me to problem #2

#2 problem - His Huge Ass Ego/Superiority Complex

Bakugou is…. a perfectionist. Much like Momo & Iida (he is behind only them in terms of class rank) meaning not only is he a huge physical threat, but also incredibly smart & a very hard worker in all aspects of his schooling. He takes his future as a hero very very seriously, just as serious as Midoriya or Todoroki. He very clearly feels a lot of pressure from his parents & other adults in his life to do well & succeed due to the flashiness of his quirk. Even at four when his quirk manifested all people could talk about was how cool it was & how lucky he was to have it, therefore gassing him up & already inflating his 4-year-old head. 

All of the adults around him expected him to grow up and make something great of himself at only age 4, so he has quite literally been feeling that pressure for his entire life, at least as long as he can remember, which created this giant ego of his. 

(ALSO CAN WE TALK ABOUT ADULTS & PEERS ONLY GIVING A FUCK ABOUT BAKUGOU QUITE LITERALLY FOR HIS BODY. LIKE…. GENUINELY ONLY FINDING HIM WORTHY OF BEING A HERO BECAUSE OF HIS QUIRK BEING “COOL”. BECAUSE IF THAT DONT FUCK WITH YOU GROWING UP, WHAT DOES???)

Now his ego, in terms of how he responds to things, is why he most likely does not recognize what he is going through as abuse. And we all know that from ego, stems immense pride, and Bakugou would be far too proud to admit he was being abused IF he recognized his abuse, therefore he would not seek help for it, or vent / open up to anyone about it. But his ego is also part of the reason why he doesn’t recognize what he is going through as abuse. Admitting, even to himself, that he is abused would seem weak to him. He would have to admit he is not perfect, nor is his home life. He would have to admit that it has affected him, and he would most likely view that as a flaw or defect in his personality. He would never want to be viewed as a victim. (hint hint, how did he handle being called the “victim” of the sludge monster incident? He doesn’t want anyone pitying him or trying to save him from anything. He wants to handle things on his own & thinks of it was weakness to seek out help)

He also uses his superiority complex as a defense mechanism. For example, he overhears Todoroki talking about Endeavor with Midoriya the day of the sports festival right? And he later tells Todoroki that he doesn’t care about his home life and that he should still give it his all against him. This is because Bakugou probably realizes subconsciously that he too has been through some shit with his parents (not necessarily recognizing it as abuse, but not what all other kids go through) & yet he gives it his all. He almost says this as if to prove to himself that he hasn’t let what he has gone through affect him. He thinks it has made him stronger & that he will beat Todoroki despite his hardships, therefore proving him to be superior. When Todoroki decides to not use his flames at the last second it sends Bakugou into a rage because he believes Todoroki finds him unworthy of his full power. He thinks Todoroki is looking down on him, seeing him as weak, and just embarrassed him in front of thousands of people. (This is, by the way, the second time we see Bakugou lose it over the prospect of him not being better than his classmates).

The FIRST time we see it is when he and Midoriya fight one another on opposing teams for All might’s Class. He believes himself to be better than all of his peers & he is absolutely CRUSHED when he discovers that perhaps that isn’t so. After Midoriya fights him and wins, his spirit is broken. We see him retreat to the back of the class & silently watch as the other teams face off. 

His world is actively falling apart around him. For so long he was a big fish in a little pond. He was popular, he was powerful, he was looked up to and admired by adults and peers for his strength. He was talked up so high & told he was so special that for him to be anything other than the best was unthinkable. And yet, here was his childhood rival beating him in a test of strength and wits in front of their mentor and idol. And immediately following him was the son of the #2 hero showing his own display of brute strength & passing All Might’s test without batting an eye through the sheer power of his quirk

Bakugou is so incredibly saddened and shocked by the experience that he gives up, which is something he has never done in his entire life. Midoriya has to walk out after him once the test is over and ask him why he’s leaving, at which point Bakugou confesses, with tears in his eyes, crying, showing weakness in front of Deku, that he cannot keep up. That for once he is below someone and he cannot handle the feeling of failure that accompanies him not being number one. 

He gets over this, being motivated by both Midoriya & All Might to continue. But nonetheless, this is the first instance we see of Bakugou showing genuine fear & hopelessness for his future because he realizes he is not as great as he thinks he is. For him, there is no greater fear for him to face than for him to acknowledge the fact he is not perfect. He is flawed, there are things for him to learn and people he must learn them from and experiences he must go through before he can be number one, and that reality terrifies him. He sees it as nothing but endless opportunities for him to fail. So he determinedly puts on a brave face and screams at Midoriya and All Might that he will be number one no matter what it takes, that he will rise above everyone, even if it kills him. (Which of course it damn near does considering he is fucking kidnapped by villains impressed with his strength/power)

NOW ON TO THE ABUSE PART OF ALL THIS BECAUSE HOLY FUCK I CANT BELIEVE PEOPLE ARE GENUINELY OUT THERE SAYING THIS AINT ABUSE & WRITING WHOLE ASS ESSAYS TO DISPROVE MITSUKI AS AN ABUSER  ONLY SO THEY CAN WRITE HIM OFF AS A ONE DIMENSIONAL CHARACTER/ASSHOLE TROPE

Abuse is not only physical, and to dismiss emotional/mental abuse as not “real” abuse or merely “tough love” makes you an abuse apologist, sorry not sorry. 

The feeling I get from the few interactions we’ve had with Mitsuki, and the times Bakugou has mentioned his home life, is that the abuse he faces is overwhelmingly mental/emotional. He does, however, suffer some physical abuse too, which is essentially confirmed in this new chapter, it’s just unlike the abuse Todoroki suffers from. 

Todoroki’s abuse is blatant, its beatings, starvation, intense physical regimes, etc. The abuse Bakugou suffers is far more subtle and sadly enough, far more common. The abuse he is subjected too is what most of y’alls parents probably just call “good parenting” or parenting the old fashioned way, aka when most peoples parents were shit & everyone thought it was cool to beat their kids into submission & scream at them for hours and hours over simple things. (Sadly, a product of hypermasculinity and misogyny being the overarching influences in parenting tactics, especially in households with a male head. In this case, however, Mitsuki, a woman, is the abuser. So most of y’all tryna ignore it like women can’t be abusive, or violent how men can).

Her physical abuse most likely differs drastically from Endeavors as well. Parents who genuinely believe themselves to not be abusive, but just tough on their kids because they love them or whatever, rarely hit their kids as openly as Endeavor hits Todoroki. We see her slap him on the back of the head, which in another situation & with more context, could be taken as playful, not abusive. But again, all depending on the force of the hit, the intent behind it, how often these sorts of things, occur, and if Bakugou is comfortable with it. How he responds indicates that he does not like it. Therefore she is laying her hands on him in a violent manner, obviously without consent. 

A parent or not, “disciplining” your child or not, that is wrong. And I’m more than positive it happens frequently and in different ways after the new chapter. She is most likely a believer in spanking, which do NOT even get me started on that (my parents literally used to tell me I was fucking lucky to get beat with a belt and not an electric cord), spanking is abuse and I don’t wanna fucking hear it isn’t. You shouldn’t feel the need to beat your kids in any way shape or form to get them to listen to you. She also probably digs her nails into his arm or some shit when he says something she doesn’t like in public, or just generally is rough with him when she disagrees. 

Mentally/emotionally she does not come off as the type to apologize to a child, admit she is wrong to a child, or have a rational conversation with her child rather than beating them. Again, since when has Bakugou himself ever done those things? (and according to Horikoshi, we all know he is a carbon copy of her before entering yuuei). 

Gaslighting is when the abuser places blame on a victim by making them question themselves or attributing the situation to some imaginary fault of the victim. In this instance Mitsuki blames Bakugou for his own kidnapping, calling on his supposed weakness as the source of the problem.

She not only BLAMES Bakugou for his kidnapping, calling him weak and pathetic, but does so in front of his teachers, his idols, degrading him in front of the very people he wants to impress. And for someone like Bakugou, that is probably one of the biggest hits his ego can take and it is most likely killing him inside from shame and embarrassment. 

In fact, I KNOW it is because we later see him TELL Midoriya that he blames himself for All Might’s fall. He thinks he was too weak to handle the villains and so he had to be saved (something he hates having to admit) which lead to All Might’s battle with All for One and eventual retirement as a hero. He literally takes his mothers words and internalizes them to the point of breaking & then expresses them the only way he knows how: violence, by fighting Midoriya. 

So not only do we have concrete evidence of emotionally abusing him by calling him names intended to hurt him, but also of her mentally abusing him by placing the blame on him, causing him to question himself & his capabilities/role in the situation. She makes him genuinely believe that he should have been able to do something about the traumatic experience of being kidnapped by a group of known murders…. uuuuuhhhh does that scream totally normal parent to you? She is not even remotely concerned for his safety…. only how it looks, only with how weak he is. Does that um, cough cough endeavor cough, remind you of anyone? No? Okay. 

Which back to Bakugou and Todoroki, this new chapter killed me because Todoroki is a sweetheart and he really knows what he went through was fucked up. I can see him trying to get Bakugou to understand in the future that violence is not the way to get what you want in life, no matter how small the act, hurting someone, emotionally, mentally, or physically is not how you get people to do what you want or agree with you. Even though that’s all Bakugou has ever known, he just never recognized it as morally wrong the way Todoroki did, most likely because it was much more subtle & normalized in Bakugou’s household.

That all being said…. Bakugou has made many mistakes and I’m not kidding when I say he is a carbon copy of Mitsuki. I don’t want to go so far as to call what he does to Midoriya abuse because that implies a fundamental misunderstanding of his character in my opinion, but like…. bottom line… he abuses & bullies Midoriya severely. 

Bakugou is a classic case of an abuse victim turning into an abuser. However, he is a child, unlike Mitsuki. He was raised by someone who taught him that abuse is okay and normal. He has not yet matured or been able to view life through any other lenses. His parents have failed in teaching him healthy coping mechanisms, other adult influences in his life, such as previous teachers, have never discouraged his behavior either, therefore he merely copies what he knows. So I understand him not knowing any other ways to deal with someone like Midoriya, his antithesis, and rival. 

In sociology this semester we learned about a famous poem by Dr. Dorothy Law Nolte, a family counselor & writer. The poem focuses on the ways in which children develop due to what circumstances they are raised under. It goes like this: 

(Lines bolded reminded me most of Bakugou, lines italicized reminded me most of Izuku, lines with both… reminded me of both)

If children live with criticism, They learn to condemn.

If children live with hostility, They learn to fight.

If children live with ridicule, They learn to be shy.

If children live with shame, They learn to feel guilty.

If children live with encouragement, They learn confidence.

If children live with tolerance, They learn to be patient.

If children live with praise, They learn to appreciate.

If children live with acceptance, They learn to love.

If children live with approval, They learn to like themselves.

(Full poem)

I kid you not in the middle of class all I could think of was Bakugou and Midoriya and how this poem so beautifully contrasted and compared them.

Midoriya is the exact opposite of Bakugou. Where Bakugou is strong, powerful, fierce, influential, popular, admired, confident, loud & aggressive. Midoriya is weak, small, quirkless, quiet, timid, mumbling & stuttering, friendless, self-conscious, and not very vocal. They are completely different in all aspects, Midoriya represents everything Bakugou strives to not be. He is useless, weak in Bakugou’s eyes. Something he has been told his whole life to not be, and thus he does not want to associate with Midoriya. 

However, the thing that scares Bakugou most about Midoriya is how much they can relate. They were, after all, friends. Best friends as children, they had the same dreams and shared common interests. Their similarities are only on display even more so as they both get into yuuei and progress throughout the year. 

One of the most important moments in Bakugou’s life is when Midoriya reaches out to Bakugou after he falls. Midoriya the small, shy, quirkless kid, asks if Bakugou, the great, powerful, destined to be a hero kid, needs his help. As if that is something he would even want, let alone need. 

I’m sorry but no 5 year old is going to get an idea like that on his own, you can see where Mitsuki’s thinking has already taken root, whereas Inko’s teachings have taken root in Midoriya. Up until this point in time, Bakugou was content with just allowing Midoriya to tag along with him, be a follower, quirkless or not. But this instance Bakugou clearly saw as a challenge for leadership, a questioning of authority. At five years old, he is already so distrusting of the sincere intentions of those surrounding him that he makes it his mission to let Midoriya know that he is above him and will not be surpassed by someone so weak.

It just makes me so fucking sad to see how twisted Bakugou’s logic is due to Mitsuki & the constant almost coddling of his ego that adults in his life have encouraged endlessly. It really isn’t until he meets Aizawa that an adult makes an effort to change that mindset in him. And slowly but surely, along with the help of Bakugou’s probably first real genuine friends that he views as equals and not just tagalongs, he is beginning to change his thinking & learn from his mistakes. Kirishima, Sero, Kaminari, and Ashido are all a wonderful influence on him and I genuinely think with their advice & trust he will be able to change his ways in the future, along with the guidance of All Might and Aizawa. 

And let’s not forget Midoriya, he needs to apologize to him, sincerely, and because he wants to, not because he is pressured into it by anyone. I have high hopes for him and his future relationship with Midoriya, but I don’t think it’ll be possible for them to be best friends again. I just hope Bakugou can realize that he was wrong for treating Midoriya the way he did when they were growing up and can put aside his ego for five minutes to correct his wrongs as best he can. I’m sure it will be in the far far future though because he still has a lot of growing and learning to do. No one is going to just be able to put aside an almost decade-long hatred for someone & admit they were in the wrong, over the course of a year. But still… I have hopes.

All in all, I really really love Bakugou. I have some extremely parental feelings towards him having seen all the shit he has gone through & the many failings he has endured from the adults surrounding him. I just want for him to embrace his friends and place at yuuei and change his behaviors so that he can be easier on himself & others. He deserves to feel that sort of peace.

I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again. Bakugou Katsuki is deserving of love, friends, second chances, and a shot at redemption. 

[lvtvr]

s4 thoughts under the cut

i have criticism and i have praise, but most importantly i have common fucking sense and i dont lose my mind if a kids cartoon doesnt go my way so dont worry about that palios

please read this post in a neutrally speculative tone because that’s my voice in my head as i’m typing it. also of course my opinion is just a star in the sky and your mileage, as always, may vary. warning its the Great Wall of Text

sweet stuff

most importantly its a great time to be a lotor stan. i love my boy my problematic trash fav i love him so much hes officially my favorite character now 1000000000% (it used to be lance, but he’s been dethroned for real now)

not only is he a fucking babe but whenever he appeared the plot was guaranteed to move forward so every time he came onscreen i got my two favorite things in one

listen im just not going to go overboard w this but lets just say i think about him and grin a lot what a fucking GREAT character he’s so MORALLY GREY so FUCKED UP so INTERESTING so sexy

matt holt is in fact a meme! good job fandom, well predicted. the allura heart eyes stuff was lame stock cartoon humor which imo added Nothing of value, but that aside he’s an angel boy and brilliant addition to the recurring cast and i love him

i thought the rain and the big no during the cemetery scene were kinda over the top cheesy but that episode was, overall, really great

okay but real talk that one dog looking captain has to be somebody’s fursona???????????? somewhere a furry is fucking thriving right now

fighting animations and space backgrounds were gorgeous, as always

i adore where they’re taking keith’s development!!! i had some pretty serious concerns post s2, but they’re taking him in exactly the direction i had hoped for

i feel like he’s honestly really happy with the blade, their style really suits him and i mean that both figuratively and literally *wink wonk*

he’s a loner, but he’s not alone. he’s in a position where he’s expected to function as an independent unit within a team, instead of being literally connected to the others in his squad; at this point in time that autonomy is what’s important for his development. he has both the insight to realize that and the empathy to be concerned that it might be selfish or wrong in the eyes of others

but his friends support him!!!!!!!! the group hug oh my god

his self sacrifice... i almost died that was just so. beautiful

im just really emo about keith

why does zarkon hate lotor SO much? i have a feeling it must be connected to the circumstances of his birth. SOMETHING is up and i can’t wait to find out WHAT

and what the fuck is going on with haggar

shes still the most aesthetic character in the show sjlgdjsdgjsg PURPLE WITCH PURPLE WITCH

LANCE AND ALLURA!!!! OMG IM CRYING honestly i am still rooting for no canonical romance but at this point i wouldnt even mind canon allurance, because the way they’re having lance mature and act around her is just... im still crying dont look at me

that said i think its beautiful how canon lance, in stark contrast to the awful character that is fanon lance, is a selfless and insightful boy who -- once he steps out of his theater-kid attention-seeking leo persona -- has a better grasp than perhaps anyone of the true dynamics of the team

he gave allura the speech that shitty lance stans want the rest of the team to give him. i can’t believe he single handedly screwed over all bad characterization. im so proud of him.

salty stuff

lance’s sweet moment at the end of ep6 aside, i’m still pretty bitter about the fact that we know virtually NOTHING about either lance or hunk. to some degree shiro is also still a mystery.

the reason it’s so frustrating is because to varying degrees, keith, pidge, and allura all have some sort of backstory and ongoing arcs

in comparison, hunk and lance have been kind of stuck in support roles for four seasons now. they are occasionally shown maturing, but im just lacking a foundation for what’s driving them?? besides lance’s insecurities, what do we really HAVE?

episode 4 was a waste of time that i hope the under-12 demographic enjoyed more than i did. the meta wasn’t on point like, for instance, the avatar theater episode. also, it treated hunk terribly. like, lampshading how horribly he’s treated as a fat comic-relief character isn’t funny when your writers are the ones giving him that treatment in the first place lol???

it was, how u say, a shitty filler that could have been dropped entirely without affecting a thing

the sailor scout poses were pretty okay tho

why would you create a setup for whatever is going on with shiro and then not so much as allude to it during an entire season? 

like, a forty-second scene implying some weird juju would have been enough, but completely dropping one of the plot threads for six consecutive eps makes for a pretty porous story-tapestry. im assuming they’ll pick it up again but this season is just... a gaping hole, dramaturgically speaking.

if i had written it i would be kicking my own ass for lack of continuity

seriously this makes me feel less bad about my first-draft mess of a fanfic because holy shit lol its a lot tighter than this was

lotor killing narti came literally out of nowhere, and im not saying this to defend him (she was my favorite general and im incredibly sad she’s gone?? im lowkey hoping haggar’s mojo will revive her tbh) -- but, again, we have some really weird writing decisions going on here

lotor was set up in season three as someone who values mercy and explicitly orders his people not to kill. like, im not trying to excuse what he did -- im just saying it seems like a contradiction, based on what we’ve been shown

why wouldnt he just incapacitate her or kill kova instead?? the nature of the psychic bond was never addressed enough to make killing her seem motivated, and his character was never built up as someone who would succumb to a random murderous impulse, so tl;dr I Don’t Get It

also we havent been given enough background on the team to be able to say for sure, but what i assumed was a tight-knit elite group with history seems to have actually been a ragtag group of neutral-aligned mercenaries, temporarily banded together for personal gain.

while i’m okay with a plot-driven show that doesn’t spell things out and leaves most things as implied subtext, i still feel like there is such a thing as being too subtle

like you can’t set up plot threads only to put them completely on pause to have some ships blow up, it will only frustrate the audience and make the action seem like a cover-up for the writers having no idea what the fuck is going on

its not hard!!! to just throw in allusions to things!!!! like we’re talking literally just tossing out HINTS so people remember that “oh yeah that thing existed at all” @ dreamworks please uh... do that?

the pattern seems to be that we get a mindblowing season followed by a mediocre season so time to hype s5!

so anyway those are my two cents ("its more like ten dollars char" yeah yeah i know!!!) and i’m very happy to discuss the events of this season, and for people to disagree with me (as long as its polite and... at least relatively motivated lol)

[deathandindignitybedamned]

Ooooh why not share it! Post it and lets talk about what we agree and what we dont agree! Its fun.

Okay then….let’s take a look at a few points I’ve been mentally circling today: (this is very stream of consciousness think and type thing…but I think it makes some sense. also my computer froze while I was in the middle of working on the first version of this so now I say fuck it here it is)

You talked about Felicity and her conscious and subconscious isolation and how it becomes a sort of self fulfilling prophecy with both John and Oliver (and pretty much everyone else in her life). I 100% agree with that. She isolates to protect herself and when Oliver reads that as “give me space” she subconsciously reads it as an affirmation of that “I’m broken” idea that Noah first planted in her mind which is at this point buried so deep that is has seeped into every inch of her. Being left behind is a visceral fear for her. So rather than reach out to these men, she draws everything so close to her that all she is able to project is these ideas “humor” and “lightness” that John and Oliver are unable to see beyond. I also think Rory was so unexpected that she couldn’t see out of her guilt spiral bring herself to project Fine-ness to him. (I miss Rory can he come back please)Billy’s death is that final straw that breaks the layers of compartmentalization that she’s built up since the middle of s4. The EPs keep calling it a dark arc. I think a more apt description is aggressiveness. She works aggressively around Oliver’s tunnel vision when Black Siren turns up. When asked to get the files on Walker she follows any breadcrumb in order to do that. This is not a new thing for her. She uses an invaluable resource in order to help the team track down Prometheus. Blindly? Yes. But she, perhaps more than anyone else on the team, can see how powerful Pandora/Helix can be as a weapon if yielded properly. She uses it again when Thea indicates that there is a Clear Threat to the team and is then immediately talked down to about her fucking empathy. All of this is playing into Helix’s hands, yes, but she is still trying to take action to protect the people who are closest and most important to her.So on to last night: I laughed at the 5x19 episode blurb because WHY ARE WE STILL ACTING LIKE SHE HASN’T BEEN COMMITTING FELONIES FOR THE ENTIRE DURATION OF THIS SHOW. She straight up committed corporate espionage in s1 by hacking into Merlyn Global. In s2 she blew up a building and it was her idea. We learned in s3 that she wrote the equivalent of a cyber-nuke before she was 19. She stole from her own company in s4, and had to make an impossible choice to save millions of lives (there is a part of me that thinks Lyla arranged for her to be given immunity for Havenrock because the President was aware of the situation, but that’s for the day I actually make notes on the What If Helix/Chase Chose to Out Her as the Person “Responsible” for it). So please, let’s not pretend that Felicity hasn’t been crawling around in the shit since season 1. Nevertheless, the perception of her that Oliver and John have mean that they think she is protected from making those decisions. It’s why Oliver and John were both so out of their element when dealing with her in this episode. (I think I read somewhere that Lyla comparing James to a nuke was her talking about Felicity…..and I just gotta call bull on that. Lyla as a character is not about Subtext, she’s about Text. If something is Relevant to her Cause, she just goes for it. And while I think they’re friends, I have never read Lyla as being super close to Felicity. In part because I think Lyla understands through Waller, just how dangerous Felicity is. And I’m sorry, but reducing everything about Lyla Michaels to her relationship with Oliver and Felicity is lazy and reduces her importance as her own character and within her marriage to John).The thing that I kind of got (happily?) stuck on tonight was an idea that the series of confrontations Felicity had with team leading up to the last one in the bunker felt like they cut all of the ties that were keeping her tethered to Oliver. I know she never expected to sway Lyla, but she expected something like trust from Oliver, if not that then at least an acknowledgement of her position from John. The lack of anything in that moment was the first cut and yet another sign to her that she wasn’t worth it. The conversation in the loft was stunning to me in its honesty. What exactly is she losing if she feels that her soul has already been burned away? There’s nothing left of her but her drive to love and protect Oliver from the monster he helped create (Chase), and the monster he sees in himself.I was texting with a friend of mine (@vivisectyourheart - I drop kicked her into this black hole so that I have someone to text yell at and she finally caught up to watch in real time) and I said “5x19 was like kicking a rock off the edge of the Grand Canyon and waiting to hear it hit the bottom. With them on opposite sides” and I’ve had some time to digest that and sort of shift it a little bit. I think we could say that this whole season has been the two of them standing on opposite sides of a canyon and Oliver is staring at his phone trying to figure out why she hasn’t called him while Felicity is over there kicking rocks over and waiting for Oliver to hear her. They both were trying to communicate but they were expecting each other to be using a different language. So that moment when he says “don’t count on it” was for me the final cord being cut for Felicity. She’s a runner. She’s been a runner since Noah left and she first learned how to change herself to best fit her surroundings (welcome to my Chameleon Felicity™ black hole). She stayed after season 4 because she still felt tied to the people. And in failing to trust and support her, and taking action against her, those ties were gone. Part of me thinks that Felicity didn’t expect to go back to the bunker after that. She’d be able to get the tech and make her move against Chase on her own terms. I get really tired of it, but there are a number of apt parallels with s3 and I think her not going back would have been the same play as Oliver’s stupid plane idea. Flawed from the beginning because it assumed that success would only come by sacrificing herself. Fighting to die as it were. So she leaves Oliver and the team behind and plans to move forward again with Helix only to be left behind and forced to go back to the bunker with all of her defenses down and a half drunk scruffy ex. Again, the honesty and acting choices in that scene did things to me.And that is……pretty much where I run out of steam for tonight. I’ve always got stuff percolating but *beccashrug*

[narcisbolgor-blog]

Attention, Democrats and Donors: Defend Mueller Nowor Kiss Your Country Goodbye

I Google-Newsed defending Robert Mueller just to see what came up and whos been doing it lately. Result? It would appear that the highest-profile defender of the special counsel over the past two weeks or so is not Chuck Schumer or Nancy Pelosi, not Tom Steyer or George Soros. Although it is another George: Conway, as in husband of Kellyanne, arch-conservative, and the man who two decades ago had a hand in introducing America to Monica Lewinsky.

Democrats: Where are you and what on earth are you doing? The attacks on Mueller are relentless and disgusting. Sunday, The Washington Post reported that the Liars Club, from Potus to Rudy to Newt on down, are prepared for war when the time comes that Mueller releases his report. Mueller could produce a video tape of Donald Trump in Red Square in 2016 being handed a briefcase that says Dirtski on Hillary, with Trump saying, Spasibo, thank you, Comrade, for handing me this file on Crooked Hillary right here in broad daylight, and even then the lies wouldnt stop. Theyve been lying already about cold, hard evidence that we actually have in handwhenever any of them bark that Mueller has turned up nothing, theyre just not counting the five guilty pleas, two from former Trump campaign aides, or the 19 indictments returned by a grand jury.

While all this is going on, whos out there defending Mueller? George Conway.

So its no wonder that Muellers poll numbers are shaky. One public poll last week actually had Muellers favorability numbers underwater at 32 to 36 percent. An Ipsos poll conducted exclusively for The Daily Beast found slightly better numbers, but not by a lot: This one has 35 favorable and 27 unfavorable. Among Democrats, it was 50-16; among independents, still above water at 35-28; among Republicans 23-42; and among Fox News viewers 17-48 (who are those 17?).

That Post story indicated that there will in fact be two Mueller reports. A first and shorter report will deal with whether Trump obstructed justice. That could come out this year, perhaps before the election. I hope it doesnt. I think anything after July is getting too close to the election. Yes, we have to extend fairness even to these gangsters so that we dont become like them. Besides which, a report released this fall that says Trump obstructed justice will motivate the Kool-Aid Caucus to go vote. (A second, fuller report on the whole Russia shebang sounds like it will drop next year.)

And it seems to me virtually certain the first report will indeed say that Trump obstructed justice, because how could it not? Hes obstructed justice right in front of us. The Lester Holt interview, but so much else. Here are some specifics, from Norm Eisen and two Brookings colleagues; a handy little paper to familiarize yourself with.

Hes obstructed justice right in front of us because he doesnt know or care what obstruction of justice is, because hes ignorant and proudly so. And hes obstructed justice right in front of us because even if he did know, he wouldnt care, because he is a pathological liar.

I did some reading over the weekend about lying. Theres a difference between a pathological liar and a compulsive liar. From an addiction-counseling website: A pathological liar, also known as a sociopath, is quite different from a compulsive liar. The pathological liar will lie for absolutely no reason and do so very convincingly. As clinical psychologist Martha Stout toldInterview Magazine, they often lie just to see if they can trick people. These people are great at lying in all circumstances because they completely lack empathy for others.

Sound like anybody you know?

Trump lies just because he likes lying more than he likes telling the truth; its more fun. Also, he may not even really know hes lyingdebate rages in psychology circles about whether pathological liars are even aware of their own falsehoods.

Also, like of all historys demagogues, he knows it works. I read a bit about all that, too. Researchers call it the illusory truth effectthe natural tendency to believe information after hearing it repeatedly. There have even been studies where subjects know a fact at the beginning but after repeated exposure to a non-fact, they drop their loyalty to the earlier-known fact and accept the non-fact.

For demagogues, it isnt hard or complicated. Just keep lying; evenand especially!after youve been proven a liar. A lot of people will still believe you.

People need to understand this. Even if we get a Mueller report that lays out solid proof of obstruction of justice, Trump and his sycophants will not lay down their arms and say Gee, hes right. They will lie harder and more blatantly and more viciously than ever before. They will go into overdrive trying to destroy Mueller, because destroying Mueller will be all theyll have left.

Who will defend him? I guess the Democrats will when the time comes. But they should be defending him now. And rich liberals should be defending him now. I mentioned Soros and Steyer above because some wealthy liberal or liberals ought to be funding a public service ad campaign running commercials right now in 50 swing congressional districts explaining/reminding people that two former Trump campaign aides have already pleaded guilty and that 19 people or firms are under indictment, and that Ken Starr investigated Bill Clinton for four years before he issued a report while Mueller has been at this barely more than a year. I can guarantee you that if the situation were reversed, a similar conservative enterprise would already exist and be lavishly funded and operating under some Orwellian name like the Emergency Committee for Truth and out there getting talked about and influencing public opinion.

Why dont Democrats and liberals get this? This is literally the future of the republic were talking about here. If Trump can stampede this investigation, and the Republicans in Congress allow him to, and then they (and Russia) steal the next election, this country is done for. Ripping babies out of their mothers arms will look quaint by 2023 if these people arent stopped.

So thats all thats at stake, Democrats and liberal donors. Would you please wake up and fight?

Original Article : HERE ; This post was curated & posted using : RealSpecific

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[whining-ego]

Blog update: first post

tw: abuse

music in my earphones is too distracting for me to write the greeting

this blog is deficated to me, wholely, solely, purely to me, my ego, and my whining. and i know it might get negativity. i do. but honestly will i even remember this blog in a week or so

but hey, babbling bout oneself is totes fine, innit? there are ton of blogs out there. nothing special. and i dont claim myself to be neither special nor ordinary. because either option is egoistic as fuck, (only in relation to me dont worry). with this much build-up, take that: i think im mentally ill/neurodivergent, and the diagnoses change day to day, and thats what i base my life on

hooray yer so special!!! congratz!!!

and i dont wanna change. like if i ever got diagnozed with anything, (even not on list), id be 'ooohhhh yuuuhhhh!' and. done. ima not gonna change my life for better. meds? cool. talk therapy? awesome. actually getting up yer ass up? understandable have a nice day

i dont know where it comes frome. perhaps its child abuse i experienced, something along the 'if im sick then people like and care for me' lines, yet honestly i cant remember most of the stuff or i feel great deattachement from the memories. either way, as i said, im not willing to change my lifestyle in any way.

thats why it might hurt people with actual diagnoses. because they struggle day to day to live their lives, theu fight for rights and understandement, then here i am with wild fantasias and 'please be patient im xxx' cap

(to be honest, i really see myself being called out. having drama. and it gets me excited and immersed into these scenarios. what would i answer, how to hide in case of total failure. i crave attention no matter the source apparently)

thats kinda why im making this blog. because i know my friends and relatives have their own problems; my whining is not worth their time. like when two people at the same day cried by my side (both in reality and in the internet) and i felt so. overwhelmed. like dayum bitch how do i comfort them??? never was my strong ability. so wasnt empathy. not tryna be an edgy kiddo here, but yea. egoism.

i wanted to do a listing of different diagnoses ive ever thought of having; most likely it will not be complete, since i dont remember vast majority of anything that was three days before.

currently, most suspicious of: inbetween adhd/autism, additionaly dissociation/depersonalization-derealization (the first one would explain both my childhood and present day, the latter is just something i have started to experience about half a year ago)

honorable mentions: depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, dysthymya, cyclothymia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, obsessive-compulsive personality disorder, antisocial personality disorder, hoarding disorder, panic disorder, hypochondriacal disorder, dyslexia, schizophrenia, maladaptive daydreaming, and so on and so on and so on (like whole dsm list)

forgive me god for spamming in those peoples feed who will be looking for mentions of these above on tumblr

oh and also i want to become deaf. i know well that it would affect greatly my life, to the point i will suffer and suffer greatly, but everybody deserves a small guilty pleasure eh?

at different moment of my life i have immersed in these conditions soooooo much. researching information, projecting those disorders on my favourite characters in all sorts of ways (remember madd?), acting out real situations. it becomes my whole life. and then it shuts down and im not interested anymore. kinda like with everything else interesting, hence adhd.

and this blog will be a place where i can let myself out all i want. be as much of attention whore as i want. talk illogicaly and shitty and whatelse. heck yeah freedom

im not willing to change because i dont see a point. i love my comfort zone (fucking hate this phrase), i love being a stick in everybodys else bikes. and thats not a self-hate talk. i genuinely understand that i lack motivation or interest in changing, therefore i wont. if people leave me i just find different ones

(but i still believe it is not acceptable to talk this egoistically, to act this childlishly, not for me not for me. had really bad times because of this way of thinking)

enjoy this paradize of selfishness and laziness! i love feedback

just dont me dicks youselves

________________________

ive been meaning to write this post since like 3pm and its 11pm now even though everything i had on my mind this whole time was "write this post!!!" but then i decided to reinstall os on my computer and it took three hours and after that i was too exhausted to do anything. so around time i started writing this i was surfing youtube and stuck on one particular video. i found it interesting but at the same time i needed to write! this! post! so i kept nervously watching the red line of time and simultaniouly wanting to turn on some music even though the video had audio and agggrhh. here we go. by the way i started writing This Post with this paragraph, not the main part, despite the fact that i dreamed so much about writing it. yay

[trendingnewsb]

Sympathy for the Incel

If you want to know why young men are broken, ask them.

There is a cultural crisis emboldening the misogyny and violence of the little-known incel movement (an abbreviation for the self-professed involuntary celibate community of men) and which has now been tied to three mass murders: Elliot Rodger, Chris Harper-Mercer and, this week, the alleged Toronto killer Alek Minassian, who is accused of killing 10 and injuring 15 people in one of the most horrific acts of mass violence in Canada in years.

One after another, media outlets are seeking to understand how this could happen while raising the question of how we got here. The Internet is enabling a community of men who want to kill women, read the headline in The Verge. Can the radicalization of incels be stopped? asked the Globe and Mail. But one headline stood out, from The National Post: What should we do about the incels? Maybe help them. Shouting about what horrible women-hating losers they are (which they may be) is not going to prevent one of them from murdering again.

This, in particular, is the question Im concerned with, and why I am attempting to find whatever empathy or compassion might be possible for the disconnected young men flocking to the movement and who might be at a crossroads. One young man stood out in the countless hours I spent listening to podcasts, videos and chat room conversations within the incel community which I have been following for months now: 19-year-old Jack Peterson, a socially awkward Chicagoan who after hours of interviews agreed to reveal his real identity for the first time to The Daily Beast.

To be clear, Peterson initially did not want to do any media regarding the group, particularly a profile on what the makings of an incel look like, but after considering my appeal that perhaps others might want to reach out if they could have a better understanding, he agreed.

Born Kalerthon Demetro in the suburbs of Chicago, Peterson (his mothers last name) is a high school dropout who lives with his single mother and whose father left when he was two years old. Peripherally involved in the online incel community for years, Petersons first reaction to the Toronto horror was to record a podcast specifically condemning violence and misogyny and underscoring that for the majority of participants, this is not their reality. For him and many like him, he says, the incel community is a means of supporting one another in a world when it sometimes feels like there is no one else.

To listen to the teenager speak, he does not seem psychopathic. He does not seem like he endorses psychopathy. On the contrary, he seems shy and awkward and lonely and angry. He laughs when other incels make dark jokes about killers, but he does not make them himself. He gets it. They are blowing off steam.

Being an incel is not about violence or misogyny, repeats Peterson, who is the only incel who has been on television doing interviews in recent days since the alleged Toronto killer pointed a finger at the incel movement in a cryptic post on Facebook confirmed earlier this week. Yes, for some guys it is, but not for me. Not for many of us.

The challenge in covering the incel movement is that in many cases the cherry-picked and sensationalist coverage reinforces these mens persecution complexes and drives them further into a pit of rage-fueled nihilism. Attempting to find any kind of compassion is in no way to excuse or normalize the deranged among them. On the other hand, it is to see what options we have left in reaching them at all.

In the groundbreaking book Change or Die, author Alan Deutschman writes, [The sense of self is threatened by any major change in the deep-rooted patterns of how we think, feel, and act, even a tremendously positive change such as leaving behind a life of crime and addiction. A change in progress demands new explanations for a past thats now cast in a darker light.

Essentially, reaching someone entrenched within a near-fanatical belief system is often impossible because the ego will put up a fight to the death in order to not deal with the psychic pain of feeling that everything that has been done up until this point has been done wrong. But it is possible.

In Deutschmans book, spanning extensive research on changing past negative behavior to future positive actions, one case study of a parole officer illuminates how he found the most success in reaching the seemingly unreachable. By realizing that the real reason why people dont change is demoralizationthe overwhelming sense of hopelessness and power he applied the theory that the most he could do is to inspire a new sense of hope and power. Indeed, this officer invited 14 of the most argumentative ex-convicts and spent 90-minute sessions listening to them rather than telling them what to do. The response was extraordinary. The parole officer recounted: In one and a half hours they calmed down. They said, These guys arent against us. Now they come back every week and say, At least Im being listened to. In the last year the difference has been huge. They want to make a change.

In speaking to Peterson on the phone, while a journalist is about as a far away from a parole officer as you can get, its amazing the difference that occurs when I listen to what he has to say about the reality of incel culture versus how he sees the media portraying its members.

In his view, as despicable and morally unfathomable as the psychopathic fringe is, the reality of the wider membership estimated in the tens of thousands of active members is far more complex.

The way Peterson tells itand as is supported by his digital footprint of videos, podcasts and commentsfor him and many others, to be an incel is to seek the camaraderie of a group of male peers who provide an outlet where, for once, they can honestly talk about the increasing fragmentation, disconnection, alienation and ostracization they feel in an always-online world in which, as far as they can see, they are not welcome or wanted.

Peterson compared the mischaracterization of incels to the xenophobic broad brush that takes a minority of radicalized Islamic suicide-bombers and uses it to condemn the vast majority of Muslims. Instead, he said, there is an acceptance that there is a vile minority who distorts the vision of the communitybut that it is not his vision for the group.

Like many in the incel community, Peterson essentially grew up without a strong father figure.

His mother kicked his father out because, in Petersons words, he used to beat the shit out of my mother and she got a restraining order. His father was the same age that he is now when he got his 39-year-old mother pregnant, and hes never met him, but they have spoken on the phone a few times.

I dont really have any feelings about him, Peterson says. He just kind of is.

From an early age, Peterson felt a level of social anxiety that was bearable but distinct. His kindergarten teacher asked him why he did not play with the others. He said, I dont know how.

Things started to change around the third or fourth grade. It was the first time the girls started making fun of him, he says, saying he was creepy and gross and weird.

I didnt understand it, he says. I was told either to act like a man or that girls could do no wrong. And yet I was constantly told that men were the cruel, bad ones. None of it made any sense to me. I was just extremely shy. I didnt talk to them, but the teasing was relentless and made me want to kill myself.

In the seventh grade, Peterson transferred to three different middle schools all in one year as the bullying followed him everywhere. By the time he reached high school, he says, one young woman started taking photos of him and sharing them with other girls who openly laughed in his face about how ugly he was and why they did not want him near them. He did not finish his freshman year at the Chicago Academy for the Arts, but dropped out after the first semester. His mother never knew the extent of the bullying he experienced.

I was just ashamed, he says. How do you talk about that?

The profoundly formative pain of youthful bullying has been around forever. When a classmate taunts you and proclaims your worthlessness to all your peers, if you are a kid, the humiliation of such an experience doesnt feel like its happening in a classroomit can feel like a worldwide-televised death sentence.

Very few kids on the receiving end of the cruelty know how to deal with itbecause of a lack of life experience that is just as undeveloped as their pubescent brains.

But for a kid growing up today, the tool of the Internet levels the game. No longer do you wonder, Will anyone ever love me? Now you can Google it, and find secret places and communities and bodies of knowledge that your parents dont even know exist. This can be exciting, emboldening, a total game-changer.

I remember the first time I found a site that even mentioned the word incel, I was like, Woah, these guys are outcasts, too, he says. I kind of felt like, maybe Im not alone.

At the age of 11, Peterson visited 4chan for the first time, and he saw his rage and loneliness expressed as well as the impotence of such advice as just get over it. He didnt know how to. He didnt have anyone to ask. He just didnt want any more ridicule.

It was kind of crazy to see and read a lot of the stuff I did, Peterson says. But it was also the only place where other guys talked about some of the things I was experiencing. Feeling so alone and rejected by the people around you. I was extremely shy then, and still kind of am, but it makes you feel really fucked up to be told youre a creepy loser by a pretty popular girl when youre just sitting there, saying nothing, doing nothing, wishing you were invisible but instead being the quiet freak with the cystic acne all over his face.

He also received an indoctrination into the culture of these young men who accepted him and what they found acceptableand what he would need to as well if he were to finally fit in somewhere.

To understand the increasingly irony-rich language of the users, its essential to read Angela Nagles book Kill All Normies, which exquisitely captures the critical shift in online perspective and the death of what remained of a mass culture sensibility that happened at exactly the same time Peterson began actively engaging with it.

In her brilliant book documenting the culture wars of the extreme left and the extreme right in recent years, focusing on subcultures including 4chan and incels, Nagle describes the attitude rebellion on the site against the sentimentality and absurd priorities of Western liberal performative politics and the online mass hysteria that often characterized it.

Peterson is one of the best representations of exactly how these culture wars are shaping our young mens identities.

When everything is ironic, nothing is. So they mock it. All of it.

Theres this big hypocrisy in the fact that so many people who say they are all about human rights and empowerment think its actually funny when boys get mocked, he says. I never said a single misogynistic thing growing up. And I was punished. Just because I was weird. I couldnt help it. I honestly wanted to die.

On the contrary, the incel communities he found online seemed different.

When I dropped out of high school, the one place I felt okay about stuff for a little while was when I was online, Peterson tells me. By the time I discovered the incel culture on Reddit, it felt like, Okay, Im not insane. I was reading all these other guys stories about how girls told them they were repulsive. I never identified with the misogyny, but I did identify with the rage at the hypocrisy of just how untouchable women were in society. No matter what, no matter what awful thing a woman did, it was always supposed to be like, Oh yeah, thats female empowerment. But when you have no friends and are getting bullied and humiliated by women constantly and are told to both man up and renounce your masculinity its like the one bright light you see is this community.

By the time he was 16, Peterson finally met in person a young womanfour years older than himwith whom he had been chatting online since he was 12 years old. She did not know what he looked like for some time, and when he finally shared his picture, she told him that she didnt find him attractive. He lost his virginity to her, after which he says she ridiculed his penis size and laughed at him. Later, she sent him copies of messages that she had sent on to other men she was cheating on him with where she explicitly described the sex acts she wanted done to her. (Ive seen corroborating evidence of all of this.)

I was literally cucked, Peterson says. That word doesnt have any meaning anymore, but thats what I was. I still wanted to see her though. She was the only girl who had ever expressed interest in me, even though she tore me down and told me how ugly I was. It was still better than nothing.

According to Peterson, the relationship finally disintegrated when she began choking him and tried to go after him in her car. He ran to a nearby store to get help, and has the actual footage of the security cam showing him flailing against the glass window. The police came, and to cover for the girl, he said that he was suicidal. He spent three days in a mental institution because of it.

This was a turning point for Peterson.

He finally aligned himself fully as an incel. He was, in the words of Internet argot, black-pilled.

Anyone who has dabbled in understanding Internet lingo is likely familiar with the term red-pilled (inspired by the film The Matrix, where Neo is offered a blue pill where everything stays status quo or a red pill where the ugly truth is supposedly exposed). Adopted by mens rights activists around 2004, to get red-pilled is to subscribe to the particular ideology that feminism is a cancer and men are the real victims. But what does it mean to get black-pilled, as many refer to this communitys belief system? It sounds as bleak as it is.

Essentially, the philosophy is that everything is broken and the answer lies in refusing to engage in a meaningful or constructive way with society. (The phrase black pill first appeared in 2012 on a blog called Omega Virgin Revolt.) A critical part of being black-pilled is recognizing, with zero sentimentality or euphemism or explaining away, that women do not like genetically inferior men. They now have infinite options in the form of men who are higher status (be it, economic, physical, or intellectual) because of the breakdown in societal monogamy and now high-status men can game apps and use hypergamy (or dating up) to their advantage. (Meaning, a less attractive woman will nowadays reject a less attractive male if she is suddenly able to have meaningless sex with a high status man, who can juggle multiple women. This leaves men who are not as good-looking in the dust.)

Incels theorize that once you are black-pilled, you are finally given the gift of brutally honest Darwinian truth that, essentially, the game is rigged, so why bother? With such entrenchment in the truth of the doctrine comes freedom. No longer do you have to run around in circles. You can accept the world for what it is and settle back into your status on the lower rungs.

If you are red-pilled, you might take this theory of female behavior to use it in manipulative pick-up strategies to try to game women into thinking you are higher status or to find the weakest prey.

If you are an incel and have never had a single successful romantic attempt or only disastrous ones, this type of theorizing provides that wonderful feeling of certainty that comes with confirmation bias and the emancipation from regret of knowing that nothing could have been done anyway. Which is why many incels describe being black-pilled as an awakening from humiliation. Like finally realizing that you have been the subject of a joke that everyone else has been in on the whole time.

For a young man like Peterson, spouting such beliefs, he seems not so much a product of toxic masculinity as a failure of masculinity itself.

No one is teaching these men how to be men. This doesnt mean men in the sense of mens rights activists, but a healthy, balanced (not extremist) definition which includes someone who treats women well but also treats himself well by not being afraid to think for himself with opinions that deviate from the loudest, most hateful elements in the community.

But isnt the worst parts of the incel community hate speech? And shouldnt such hate speech be eradicated?

In Nadine Strossens timely new book Hate, she makes the case for countering bad speech with more speech, and illustrates how in countries where hate speech speech laws have been enacted, support for racist and xenophobic politicians has risen. In Europe, hate speech laws have in fact been used as a means of stifling dissent amongst the disenfranchised.

Equal justice for all depends on full freedom of speech for all, she writes.

Not only that, but as Keith Whittington argues in his new book Speak Freely, offensive speech is crucial to safeguard because of its utility in generating, testing, and communicating ideas.

One of the most brilliant defenses of the subject is Jonathan Rauchs 2013 essay, The Case for Hate Speech in The Atlantic, where he thanks the loudest and most noxious voices he faced along the way in his fight for gay marriage. [W]e won in the realm of ideas, he writes. And our antagonists–people who spouted speech we believed was deeply offensive, from Anita Bryant to Jerry Falwell to, yes, Orson Scott Card–helped us win.

For the incel community, of course, many of the ideas espoused are in defense of their identity as the losers of society, which frees them of the need to take personal responsibility.

I think thats a valid criticism, Peterson says. I get sick of the guys who seem like they just want to keep others down no matter what. Its almost like you are scorned when you experience a little bit of success.

The podcast Peterson recorded after the Toronto attack represents the incel community as not seeming as extreme as a cursory visit to the incel-tracking site We Hunted the Mammoth or the incel-mocking community Incel Tears might lead you to believe. On these sites, in the communitys most chilling screengrabs, posts include suggestions that in order to truly terrorize the women who have rejected incels over the years, perhaps mass acid attacks and rapes could be coordinated in order to inflict the same damage upon women that these young men feel has happened to them.

In contrast, Petersons podcast discussion contains an unusual degree of literacy about sociological phenomena, including the Japanese trend of hikikomori, or isolationism and utter retreat occurring with young men, which many incels predict will spread around the world in due time.

But at its core, it is still a conversation littered with misogyny and resentment.

At one point, someone says that women use men like emotional tampons. Another brings up the possibility of mandated girlfriends (or state-sanctioned rape, as shown on the new season of The Handmaids Tale). A joke is made that the best-case scenario is when incels go ER (or Elliot Rodger). There is discussion about the evolutionary benefits of sexual violence, which harkens Rodgers infamously deranged advocacy of a program where men could kill all women because if women were able to choose their own mates, their inferior brains would devolve humanity completely. Someone laughs about the idea of blackmailing women into having sex with them by threatening to post nude photos online. Peterson himself brings up the idea of access to assisted suicide for incels to prevent future attacks, and he suggests that talking to those who wonder about incel culture might help with improving our image, especially if you attach a face to the incel phenomenon, I think that that makes it more sympathetic.

Peterson clarifies to me: He was not suggesting it be him.

I meant someone else, but then it turned out, I guess I was the only person dumb enough to show my face in videos I made online, he says. So here we are.

When I ask him about the references in the podcast to Rodger, he responds, That guy was fucking nuts. I dont really joke about going ER, but I dont tell the guys who make those jokes not to do it because I know theyre being sarcastic. All this shocking stuff is often just the guys trolling. I would argue that I dont think anybody is going to be stupid enough to believe that sanctioned rape is being talked about as an actual suggestion. Sometimes the most ridiculous shit makes me laugh, even though I dont condone it. So if I do laugh at some of this stuff its probably me laughing at something because its fucking stupid.

The psychopaths are the problem, not the incels, he says.

If someone is going to carry out an attack like this theyre gonna have to be severely mentally ill to be capable of that, he says. Making jokes or being active in the incel community doesnt cause it. Being mentally ill does.

But what about when jokes arent just jokes?

I mention how last year when the Nazi website The Daily Stormers guidebook was leaked online, it contained the message: The unindoctrinated should not be able to tell if we are joking or not. So what about when such humor is actually a means of subversive propaganda?

I can see that, Peterson acknowledges. I mean, Ive had guys tell me some really fucked-up shit, and Ive told them, you know, get some help because I dont want you to hurt anyone. But I do think that making dark jokes for people who arent mentally ill helps keep a lot of us from going crazy.

And how exactly does he feel about the disparagement of women in saying that they use men as emotional tampons? Men do the same fucking thing, Peterson says. Thats not a one-sided thing. Men can use women emotionally, too.

And what of the suicide idea?

What it really comes down to is that Id rather these mass shooters and attackers just kill themselves than kill 10 or more innocent people. So maybe if it was easier to commit suicide wed see less of these attacks. Im not condoning suicide but I prefer that to innocent people dying.

On the incels.me forum, a stated list of rules for participation include guidelines that are stricter than most elite private clubs in America.

No women allowed. No exception.

Yes, this means that a forum dedicated to decrying success with women has as one of its primary rules a focus on enforced isolation. Other rules also brutally shut out any chance to provide advice or mentorship to other young men.

A few months ago, when Peterson was using the forum, he suddenly found that he was banned from having certain privileges in the chatrooms. Even the incels, it seemed, were rejecting him.

In response, he filmed and put on his YouTube one of the most astonishing, hyper-granular deconstructions of modern Internet life Ive ever seen.

It is bizarro land for anyone not deep in the world of Internet language.

To create the video, he spent three days nonstop (two days spent up for 24 hours straight in between passing out) to create a meticulous 30-minute PowerPoint video that he filmed objecting to the ban and making his case that he in fact was a genuine incel using a barrage of evidence and minutiae and dictionary definitions and failures of logic to try to break down the bullying he felt he experienced on the forum.

And, if you want to get brutal about the absurdity of the exercise (and the insanity such subcultures can create amongst its members), to prove exactly why he was just as reprehensible to society as the rest of the incels.

It was pretty ridiculous, he says in retrospect. Its like American Vandal, Netflixs mockumentary on super-deep-dive crime docs, except with the heartbreaking element of seeing how brainwashed a young man is into trying to obtain peer approval.

At one point in the video, he even includes a diagnosis that he is paranoid schizophrenic as evidence that he ought to qualify as an incel because of this mental illness. The reality is that after he was given that diagnosis, another psychologist said he was not. Instead, the doctor told him (and is evidenced in the video), he was making himself sick with his own thoughts.

All of this humiliation is laid out for his fellow community of incels to seeand all of it to get back into good standing in the incel community. Thats how bad isolated young men want status and the reassurance of having a community to call their own. Even when the group identity is in how perversely low and entrenched their status really is.

Is it any wonder that these boys need a father figure?

Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson (no relation to Jack) has been known to be moved to tears in interviews when discussing the crisis of alienation he sees amongst young men today and the need to provide them with tools that will reach them.

As he told Tim Lott of The Spectator late last year about his 90 percent male audience, Im telling them something they desperately need to hearthat there are important things that need to be fixed up. Im saying, You guys really need to get your act together and you need to bear some responsibility and grow the hell up. The lack of an identifiable and compelling path forward and the denialism these kids are being fed on a daily basis is undoubtedly destroying them and that is especially true of the young men.

Lott then observes the author of The 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos displaying a level of vulnerability on the subject that is striking.

At this point, to my astonishment, Peterson begins to weep. He talks through his tears for the next several minutes. Every time I talk about this, it breaks me up, he says. The message Ive been delivering is, Find the heaviest weight you can and pick it up. And that will make you strong. Youre not who you could be. And who you could be is worthwhile.

As psychologist William Pollack articulates in the documentary The Mask You Live In about the boy code that warps masculinity from an early age: The way that boys are brought up makes them hide all of their natural, vulnerable, empathic feelings behind a mask of masculinity When theyre most in pain, they cant reach out and ask for help because theyre not allowed to or they wont be a real boy.

In fact, boys express depression in a completely opposite way than girls. They act out. But most people see it as a conduct disorder or just a bad kid.

After the Parkland high school shooting in March, one of the foremost activists in trying to address the crisis of reaching out to troubled young men before they become killers met with President Donald Trump to say his piece. Every single one of these school shootings has been from young men who are disconnected, said Darrell Scott, the father of the first student murdered at Columbine High School almost 20 years ago. In response, he founded Rachels Challenge to intervene with action rather than yet another toothless spectacle of condemnation of the empirically condemnable violence itself.

In a tweet rant posted during this same time by Martin Daubney, the editor of the English lad magazine Loaded, he articulated a similarly jarring portrait of collective angst from young men who feel callously tossed aside and branded as innately wrong, which only serves to compound the sense of victimization even further.

Im mindful of a seminal TEDTalk by Warren Farrell, author of The Boy Crisis, Daubney wrote. He looks at school shootings, and says: Boys who hurt, hurt us…They say todays boys feel part of some grand problem. You could frame it as #ToxicMasculinity: the notion that all males are to blame for the actions of a minority of damaged individuals. This is identity politics at its most destructive. Because we live in a world where every male indiscretion is used to attack all males. Im saying this: many boys are switching off. Were losing them.

How does an incel feel about all of this concernextended within the realm of ideas and intellectualism?

Itd be nice, Jack Peterson says, if he just had someone else to talk to about it.

I like Jordan Peterson a lot, he admits in a tone that sounds more upbeat than the rest of our conversation. I was going to go see him with another incel but that guy ended up not being able to go. But I bought a VIP ticket so I get to meet him next week.

In the wake of the Toronto attack, Peterson is unique in that unlike many in the incel community who have scrubbed their social or taken down their WordPress blogs that chronicled their life, he decided to see what happened when he went on TV to talk about his life in this widely reviled community now most associated with mass murder.

The decision to do so was gutsy. Especially considering the against-the-agenda talking points he is now presenting in condemning misogyny and violence.

The reaction he has received from other incels has been negative. And the public certainly doesnt like anyone who might be an incel.

Its an unwinnable place to be for someone who might still have a chance of climbing out of the twisted, self-fulfilling prophecy gutter that such dangerous places can become for young men who dont think they have anywhere else to go.

But Peterson doesnt regret doing the media and putting his face out there.

Instead, he speaks with an inverse of the perverted sadism of the Toronto attacker. It is a nihilism of potential that is in stark contrast to the nihilism of murderous revenge.

As he describes the decision, you can almost hear an epiphany clicking: When you dont care when you have nothing else to lose, it can be used for good or evil.

I dont know why I said yes to identifying myself as an incel, he says, mulling it over. I just felt like, you know What do I have to lose?

Of course, within the incel community itself, the answer is clear.

He could very well lose his status as an incel.

They called him all the predictable names. He was a cuck. He was a status-seeker. He was an opportunist. He was a number of slurs that are not fit to print. But for an incel, the worst insult he received of all was that he was a fake.

And, this being incel-world, the name he was called was targeted and precise.

You see, for incels, each man within the community self-identifies with how they qualify for their incel status. For instance, mentalcels achieve their status as a result of mental illness. A braincel is that way because of intelligence. A truecel has never had sex, a relationship, any kind of success at all.

Thus Peterson was called a fakecel. No, Peterson says, thats wrong. He definitely still is an incel. He is a part of the group. Where then does he now belong?

Peterson is quiet as he considers the answer.

I think something where I can help people, he says. I like talking about the positive stuff more, even if its frowned upon.

He considers a while longer.

I dont know, he considers, maybe Im a hopecel.

Read more: https://www.thedailybeast.com/sympathy-for-the-incel

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