#sincerely. we have to let go of it. we have to let feminism as a concept grow and be better

[genericpuff]

All That Glitters is Not Feminism - An Analysis of LO's Brand of "Feminism" and What Remains of its Fanbase (A Prologue)

So I referenced a certain article in a recent reblog/ask response and I just need to talk about it because what the actual fuck-

This has to have been written by either a bot or a hater who's reached peak god tier level at playing the long con sarcasm game because NOTHING about this feels sincere or even factual. Much of it almost has to be read in a mocking tone for it to make any real sense.

It says "Lore Olympus" (literally in quotations) in just about every single paragraph over and over again and every single talking point revolves EXCLUSIVELY around Persephone, which I suppose comes as no surprise considering that seems to be all the comic - and its fanbase - cares about at this point.

I really love (/s) how Persephone's "evolution" is being naive and then 'blossoming' into an independent woman who relies entirely on the rich man who groomed her to solve all her problems.

Also all she's done since becoming Queen of the Underworld is abuse lower class people. That's the stuff feminist dreams are made of <3

While we're talking about the main leads, "poster child" is definitely a word for Hades, I think a more appropriate term would be "literal child". And boy howdy, 'god of consent' sure is a title to give the guy who ripped out a lower class satyr's eyeball and beat him half to death.

This man owns slaves, btw. And both he and his "powerful wife" are equally horrible to lower class people, especially women.

This is hands-down the funniest section of the article and we're only three bullet points in.

Thetis and Persephone have never even so much as spoken one word to each other outside of the courtroom that Thetis technically put her in after plotting against her for an entire season.

Eros is a man. Nothing wrong with that but it comes with the unintentional icky hilarity of implying that because Eros is the gay best friend, that means he's a woman.

They literally don't read this fucking comic-

Everyone always relies on this weird talking point of Demeter not being able to "let Persephone go"... y'all, she just didn't want Persephone to outright move to Olympus, she wanted her to commute. That was it! That was literally the only problem! She wasn't preventing Persephone from pursuing a higher education or telling her she wasn't allowed to work, she literally fucking encouraged it! And with the added later context of Persephone killing a bunch of mortals - and, ironically, the fact that Persephone was assaulted/put in harm's way by TWO SEPARATE MEN in the first two days of her time in Olympus - yeah, I don't blame Demeter for not wanting her daughter to move cold turkey actually LOL

Also hilarious that they claim Rachel has turned "tradition" into "innovation" when the only thing she's managed to do is set back modern feminism in her young adult readers by 80 years and re-establish misogynist brainwashing in her adult ones. Rachel, your fanbase was literally shipping a victim of abuse with her abuser just a few days ago.

oh boy this is uh

this is some cult shit ngl

and the "rewriting the script of Greek mythology" part is VERY concerning knowing what we know about Lore Olympus and who it was written by. This is literally cultural appropriation, full stop, and it exists because Lore Olympus - and works like it, made by people like Rachel - exists.

I can't even commit to the original theory that this was written by a bot because it all feels very pointed and intenetional. This is being written by someone who, at the very least, REALLY sucks at media analysis and writing, because the entire article is just "Lore Olympus, buzzword, Lore Olympus, buzzword, buzzword, Lore Olympus", it's like a white knight incantation for guilty virtue signallers who have zero clue what they're talking about. And at worst, yes, it's appropriation from someone who doesn't mind taking a culture's stories and myths and promoting their erasure by people outside of the culture like Rachel.

And that's it, that's literally the article lmao

*EDIT: There was a section here before addressing the writer of the article from a very opinionated POV that, while isn't unusual for what I do here, did feel necessary to remove after I was contacted by the article writer who addressed the flaws in their original article and is now seeking to correct them with revisions/an article rewrite. So I felt it only fair as a compromise to at least remove that section as it really doesn't have a whole lot to do with this post as a whole and can be removed without entirely ruining the flow of this analysis. If/when that article is rewritten, I'll be revisiting this post and my overall analysis !

And honestly, it's all really telling, because this does accurately reflect the state of the LO fanbase.

Not only do many of the people who defend this comic like it's their job not pick up on the blatant misogynist tones that are going on in its narrative (I can't even call them "undertones" anymore, they're no longer that subtle) but whether or not they even read the comic at all is up for debate with how much stuff they tend to get wrong in their own arguments and justifications. And this is something that's VERY regularly seen in the fanbase discussions, readers will constantly be unaware of things that happened because they skimmed through it at lightning speed just to see if Hades and Persephone kiss and so they can get the top comment on Webtoons so they can be "ahead of the fanbase". It's no wonder that Rachel has gotten used to getting away with retconning things because her fanbase didn't even read what she established the first time.

Rachel's fanbase was literally defending the romance ship of an abuser and his victim on the newest FP episode preview. When that FP episode came out two nights ago and Hera said, point blank, that he didn't love her but abused her, I could only think of that portion of the fanbase who was very audibly simping over Kronos in the IG comment section. Are they actually having their moment of shameful clarity now? Or are they just gonna move the goalposts and pretend that didn't happen?

I don't want to say anything bad about Shelby here because she really seems like she's fighting for her life on this site that she's trying to get off the ground, but a lot of her other articles also come across as very one-note while being peppered with buzzwords that make it seem like what she's talking about is "progressive" when it really isn't. Case in point, Lessons in Chemistry has been commonly criticized for not actually appealing to the demographic that its Mary Sue-ish main character is supposed to represent - women in STEM career fields.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Lore Olympus is not 'feminism', it's white feminism that is designed to appeal to predominantly heterocis white women who think the solution to misogyny is to willingly submit to it and accept the status quo - that it's "empowering" if the woman is smiling and having all her needs paid for by a man. Sure, I can accept that different women will be looking for different relationship dynamics, some women genuinely are happy being in a relationship where they support their husbands first and foremost. But can that truly be called feminism? Or is the real feminism the choices we make along the way that we should be given the freedom to make?

It says a lot about the folks who tend to regularly prop up LO on a pedestal like this as some "revolution in feminism" despite the contrary after spending more than just 30 seconds skimming the attention-grabbing art, and Shelby is just one of many. She's not the worst of the bunch, though.

That goes to someone else who I want to give proper light to in their own essay. Someone who definitely earned a good stern talking-to this past week and has, thankfully, had consequences dished out to her for her horrible actions towards queer POC writers.

If you know, you know. If you don't, buckle up.

[fangsforiris]

Kanato Sakamaki HC’S

Word Count: 10,004 Included Topics: General, Looks, Hair, Body, Skincare, Makeup, Voice, Mentality, Family, Brides/Yui, Academics, Fashion, Magic & Bag.

︵‿୨♡୧‿︵

⇘ : : [General]

🕯️ He has an uncanny interest in death and dead bodies. (Canon fact.)

🕯️ He likes watching Reiji bake. The way he so skillfully moves his fingers, and how he never questions his movements is fascinating.

🕯️ He listens to Melanie Martinez and Malice Mizer.

🕯️ He worked as Karlheinz’s secretary for a few years, starting when he was 13. He stopped when he was 16. 

🕯️ People in the Royal Court really liked him, and Karlheinz liked having a, in his words, ‘pretty thing’ next to him in every meeting. 

🕯️ Cordelia also worked as Karlheinz’s secretary when she first met him, before having an arranged marriage. She was a minor, while he was well into his 20’s. (Canon fact that he groomed her.)

🕯️ Karlheinz definitely forcibly feminizes Kanato. 

🕯️ As in, he definitely enjoys when he cross-dresses. Much to Kanato’s displeasure. 

🕯️→ It’s already established how horrible Karlheinz is, so I wouldn’t put it past him to do something like that. 

🕯️ Kanato sometimes uses his looks to his advantage, such as getting things for free since people assume he’s a girl. Some of the things people bought him for free: drinks, clothing, makeup, jewelry, food, whatever it may be. 

🕯️ Him acting like a deer in the headlights also helps get him out of trouble. 

🕯️ Call it pretty privilege. 

🕯️ Once he and Ayato were trespassing and when an officer came up to them, he used his charms to get them both out of trouble. 

🕯️→ “Oi! You two, hands where I can see them.” The officer blared his flashlight at the two siblings, their eyes squinting from the sudden blindness. Ayato groaned, putting up his hands, “Ugh, what is it?”

🕯️→ Kanato slowly put his hands down, looking at the officer with big doe eyes, batting his eyelids slowly, “Oh! I’m so sorry officer… you see me and my brother got lost! I happened to drop my ring while we were here… and… I couldn’t find it.”

🕯️→ The officer stared at Kanato, his severe demeanour softening as he was temporarily struck by the innocent charm that radiated from him. “Lost, huh?” he mumbled, his voice no longer harsh. “Well, you two ought to have taken greater caution. Trespassing is a serious offense.”

🕯️→ Kanato nodded earnestly, his act of innocence unwavering. “Yes, officer, we understand,” he replied softly, his voice laced with feigned sincerity. “We'll be more careful next time, I promise.”

🕯️→ Ayato rolled his eyes, but remained silent as the officer sighed, shaking his head. “Alright, just make sure you don’t come back here again,” he warned, before turning to leave. “And find that ring quickly. We don’t want anyone else getting into trouble over it.”

🕯️→ As the officer left, Kanato let out a sigh of relief. “That was close.” Ayato turned to face Kanato, a smirk playing on his lips. “Too close, also–”

🕯️→ “Not another word,” Kanato interrupted sharply, shooting Ayato a warning glance. Ayato chuckled, raising his hands in surrender. “Alright then,” he knew better than to push his luck with Kanato when he was in one of his moods.

🕯️ Kanato often wonders about the possibility of going missing. It’s a fantasization of his to see if anyone truly cared about him. He’d also want to know if he’d make it out alive. It’s one of those dark thoughts that come up every once in a while, more so when he’s doing the dishes. 

🕯️ He definitely has one of those girl blogger accounts.

︵‿୨♡୧‿︵

⇘ : : [Looks]

🕯️ Kanato is obsessive about his appearance. 

🕯️ From afar you wouldn’t guess it, but Kanato cares a lot about his image, he wants every single thing about his appearance to be perfect. 

🕯️ He has a set image that he was to adhere to 24/7 and if just one thing is off he’ll spiral. (Think of Reiji with absolutely anything, but multiply it by 100x. It’s that bad.) 

🕯️ Kanato has very soft feminine features. 

🕯️ His obsession started because of his mother, who valued her looks along with his. Also partially influenced by those around him in the Royal Court, who at first glance, would identify the similarities between the two. 

🕯️ In fact, Karlheinz would be skeptical for a bit of Kanato’s true gender, finding it uncanny with the parallels surrounding his first wife and 4th son. He’d treat Kanato as a girl despite knowing later on that he isn’t. 

🕯️ This would partially add to Kanato’s slight (not really slight) insecurity of not being seen as ‘man enough’ or atleast a boy. 

🕯️ Since he looks the most like Cordelia, she would keep him on a strict regime so as to not ‘ruin her name.’ 

🕯️ Kanato’s desired image depicts a doll. He wants so badly to look and feel like a doll. In the sense that it’s hauntingly ethereal, and those who cast their gaze upon him are forced to stop and stare. 

🕯️ Almost like his mother, but part of him knows he doesn’t want anyone to see him in that sort of light. Just in the way that they can’t take their eyes off him, and are filled with envy of how surreal he is. 

🕯️ He wants his very entity to invoke a sense of surrealism. As if he came out of a 1900’s portrait, and just looking at him gives off an ‘out of body’ experience. 

🕯️ He prides himself dearly on his looks, but that also has its limitations. (Semi-canon fact.)

🕯️ Sometimes, he wonders how his life would be if he were to look more like his first cousins-once removed (Shin and Carla) and brothers. Would his mother still take pride in him the same way? 

🕯️ Because of him gaining Cordelia’s features, many upon first meeting assume he’s a girl. He gets upset at this, but other times he’d leave it be and proceed to accept it as a compliment. 

🕯️ He’s also pretty short, especially compared to his brothers, so the shock factor from others when discovering he’s a boy also adds to the whole ‘Kanato Experience.’ 

🕯️ TW!! He is used to being catcalled and harassed because of his looks. These are the moments where he wonders if it’s a curse or a blessing to look so much like his mother. 

🕯️ TW!! Due to this, he understands both perspectives, both men and women, and has slight empathy towards their struggles. (Slight. As this is still Kanato we’re talking about.) 

🕯️ TW!! But he has only felt true fear when he was placed in a situation where he happened to be barricaded and incapable of fighting them off. He wondered how he was so powerless, as his hands shook and his body trembled. How he was so quick to become prey instead of the predator. 

🕯️ TW!! He’s had some close calls of being assaulted, especially with the majority of men who are physically larger and stronger than him, but has been saved by older women and couples. 

🕯️ TW!! After this happens, he is usually filled with feelings of resentment and self-loathing. Such as → ‘Why was I so weak? I am no mortal.’ and ‘If the others saw me, they’d call me pathetic– I was pathetic.’ 

🕯️ TW!! Kanato would rather die or skin himself alive than admit he’d been placed in such a situation far too many times for his liking. With countless close calls at that. He wouldn’t want to be seen as a victim like Laito, and definitely not be doted on with the focus of his weakness being called into question. 

🕯️ Because of this, on his days out into the town/out of the house, he carries pepper spray and a small retractable pink combat knife. Just in case his vampiric strength isn’t enough. 

🕯️ Slight TW!! Kanato has been catcalled by Ayato and Laito, before the former two would realize and profusely apologize for mistaking him for a girl. It was embarrassing when he happened to be at the dessert cafe he particularly enjoys in Vandead Carnival, picking up macaroons for Laito and him, when his two brothers started hitting on him out of nowhere. 

🕯️ Ayato would initially not talk to him for a week, making a point to avoid him in every single room they both happened to enter, before Kanato would throw his Teddy at him. 

🕯️ Laito on the other hand, would laugh it off. But inside he’d somewhat hate himself and think back to the similarities towards Kanato and their mother. It’d make him feel more uncomfortable if anything. 

🕯️ Upon first meeting, the Mukami’s would assume Kanato was a girl as well. They’d find out the hard way when Kanato rejects both Yūma and Kou’s advances and Ayato pipes in to get them away from his brother. 

🕯️→ “Oi! Kanato ain’t a girl, that’s my brother, you half-blooded creeps!” 

🕯️→ “Didn’t you and Laito also mistake him for some chick…?”  Shuu would retort, causing the former to go silent and red, while Laito waves his hands dismissively, giving small uncomfortable chuckles. 

︵‿୨♡୧‿︵

⇘ : : [Hair]

🕯️ He prides himself on his purple hair (Canon fact.) 

🕯️ His hair is kept at a medium length, sometimes reaching his collarbone. 

🕯️ Kanato trims his hair every month. 

🕯️ He has a step by step hair care routine.

🕯️ He washes his hair 1-2 times a week.

🕯️His hair is naturally silky smooth, however it’s more flat in comparison to having volume (smooth > volume, flat > fluffy.) 

🕯️ Shockingly, out of the triplets he has the best hygiene, even going as far to rival Reiji in that department. 

🕯️ He likes to smell like strawberries and vanilla. The light, cute scents that many associate with those girls from shoujo mangas. He absolutely adores it. 

🕯️ He owns high grade shampoo, conditioner, hair masks, hair oils, and even purple shampoo just in case his natural colour lightens even more to his dismay. 

🕯️ He makes sure to wash, shampoo and condition his hair correctly, ensuring that he doesn’t get back acne or neck acne from leaving the product to suck into the skin. 

🕯️ It’s one of his pet peeves to have acne there, and also upsets him greatly when feeling an unnecessary bump on his ‘need to be’ smooth porcelain skin. 

🕯️ Kanato takes an ‘everything shower’ every end of the month, which includes him staying in the shower for 2-3 hours on end, deeply perfecting everything. 

🕯️ This heavily annoys the others, as he tends to take long, hot, excruciating showers which drains the hot water and ups the water bill each month. (To Shuu and Reiji’s dismay.)

🕯️ But make no mistake, Kanato benefits from the hot steam of the shower in comparison to just submerging his entire body in it. If he did, his entire body would be pruned up. Not a good look for his tastes. 

🕯️ His hair used to be darker, a more accurate colour match to Cordelia’s, but overtime due to stress, it lightened. 

🕯️ He prides his hair— and so does his mother. On most nights when she wasn’t dealing with Laito, she’d stay in his room, make Kanato sit in front of his vanity on his chair, and brush his hair. 

🕯️ It was an intimate moment for the two of them where their relationship grew. Oftentimes she’d take solace in these moments and reveal information about herself that no one else would hear. And Kanato would listen. 

🕯️ It was like their own little secret. Their thing that nobody else could take away from them. 

🕯️ This is where Kanato would find his likability to being seen as and called ‘a doll.’ 

🕯️ Cordelia would oftentimes refer to him as her doll or just the nickname ‘doll.’ 

🕯️→ “My little doll, you’re like Mommy when you’re quiet like this.”

🕯️→ “Am I, Mother?”

🕯️→ Cordelia would smile fondly, “Most definitely. You’re lucky to look like me, you know? Who else would dare to pay attention to you or your talents otherwise.”

🕯️→ Kanato would turn his head when he noticed his mother stop, the brush still clutched in her hands. He met her eyes, “I am?”

🕯️→ She’d put the brush down on the vanity, motioning towards the mirror where the two saw their reflection. Emerald green and pure lilac glew, its prominent glow reflecting off the mirror in the dark room, causing the latter to blink for good measure. Kanato would focus diligently, watching for what his mother had to say next. “Yes. Would you like to know a secret, doll?”

🕯️→ He’d nod, “You’ve always been my favourite. Your brothers just don’t have what I and everyone else sees in you.” His eyes would sparkle at that comment, leaving Cordelia to play with his hair.

🕯️→ “I’m… Mommy’s favourite?” The woman smiled, moving her hand to caress her son’s face, the looking glass delaying, “You will always be Mommy’s favourite.”

🕯️ He would never tell anyone of those nights, especially her admittance to him being her favourite. It was one of the secrets he’d take to the grave. 

🕯️→ (This reminded me of the audio on TikTok: My father is the worst person in the world; and I’m his favourite daughter.) 

🕯️ After Cordelia died, he’d sometimes hold his hair and play with it the same way she did to remember the fond memories and secrets they’ve shared. 

🕯️ After his makeup routine, he would style his hair accordingly. 

🕯️ He normally lets his hair air dry, mainly to prevent heat damage. 

🕯️ But in the slight occurrence he absolutely has to use a hairdryer, he will. 

🕯️ He always brushes his hair every time before bed, and in the morning. Exactly 12 strokes each time. Don’t ask. He simply thought the number was perfect for his hair and always does the trick every time. 

🕯️ His hair doesn’t usually tangle. 

🕯️ Kanato uses mousse on his hair when he wants the definition of volume. After this, he’d style his side bangs accordingly. 

🕯️ Sometimes he’d clip his side bangs to the side with his cute clips. The girls at school love this. They eat it up every time. Some even ask for hair tips as his hair is always shiny and well kept. 

🕯️ He always has a comb in his bag, just in case if his hair gets messy. He also keeps portable, travel sized, hair care products. 

🕯️ You know those hair gel glue sticks mainly used for fly aways? He 100% uses them and brings them in his small bag everywhere he goes. He can’t stand the fact that if one thing is wrong, it’ll tear him apart. 

🕯️ Kanato absolutely hates frizzy hair. He does everything to prevent it. Another reason why he isn’t as fond of the rain, it messes up his hair. 

︵‿୨♡୧‿︵

⇘ : : [Body]

🕯️ Kanato has a slim body. 

🕯️ Almost like the ballerina type, but more towards the feminine side of things. 

🕯️ He has long legs, with his torso being a bit more shorter than he’d like. All of this adds to the doll vibe he wants, though. 

🕯️ His neck isn’t that long, and his head is an appropriate size (in his opinion.)

🕯️ He’s more bony if anything, due to his unhealthy tendencies. 

🕯️ His ribcage can almost be seen, but that doesn’t stop the fact that his waist is still defined. 

🕯️ Put simply, he has a bony version of an hourglass figure. There’s fat, but it’s heavily set on the ‘almost anorexic’ side of the scale, especially defined by doctors and the countless physicians that have attended him. 

🕯️ When comparing his mother and him, she really shines when comparing their bodies. It’s like that’s the one thing the genes had to dominate. If he were a woman, their bodies would be exactly the same. Only major difference is Kanato lacks the fat on his body. 

🕯️ It freaks him out sometimes with how skin tight his body happens to appear. But that also gratifies him. Knowing that whatever it is he’s doing is working, makes for a great remedy in a psychotic episode. 

🕯️ Kanato really is almost like skin and bones. It does add to the living doll thing, though. 

🕯️ His collarbone is quite defined, along with his broad-set shoulders. 

🕯️ His complexion is quite fair. 

🕯️ He doesn’t have any known birthmarks to him, his skin is like a blank canvas. 

🕯️ His favourite part of his body are his hands and lips. There’s just something about the fragility of the two that intrigue him. 

🕯️ He loves the natural curve of his lips, the way that it can easily be rosier by biting it or putting more product on it. 

🕯️ It’s obsessive the way he tends to his lips. Always subjecting it to lip scrubs, and moistures. He really likes the way they perfect his face. 

🕯️ Kanato’s hands. Where to begin? He likes the way they’re thin and long. Not too long, that would freak him out. But just enough to allow him to examine them in a deeper context. 

🕯️ He does his best to not bruise them as bad, and if he were to, he’d want to have a contrast of red and pink splotches on his knuckles. He absolutely loves the contrast of the fair skin to the bruised bits. That goes for anyone. 

🕯️ His nails are always maintained. Always done. Either professionally or himself, he can’t catch himself falling short of his list of long expectations for himself. 

🕯️ They’re always filed nicely, and he always keeps his cuticles pushed back. 

🕯️ It’s always a medium length, perfect if he needed to open anything, pick a lock, or defend himself. He especially likes when he sees the damage his nails can cause his victims. 

🕯️ What he doesn’t like is cleaning the dried up blood from his nails. He hates the dirt and grime, but alas such pleasures do have consequences. 

🕯️ Speaking of, he normally paints his nails. Like you’ll never see him without painted nails. If they aren’t painted, someone call the ambulance immediately. 

🕯️ Kanato usually paints them sheer colours. Queue the jelly nail polish. He loves the pink ones, and how it delivers contrasts to his sickly pale hands. 

🕯️ He’ll do other colours, and even full ones but you’ll definitely see this boy with his signature pink. 

🕯️ He’ll even go as far as adding glitter. He loves the sparkly look, it reminds him of what he majorly missed out as a child. 

🕯️ Kanato has 2 ear piercings. One on both ears for his central lobe, the other on both ears as a helix.

🕯️ This was because he was pressured by Ayato and Laito to get another piercing and ‘live a little.’ They used it as a bonding exercise. 

🕯️ Kanato likes to act like he hates it, but secretly he enjoys the variety of earring combinations he can experiment with. 

🕯️ He mainly goes for diamond glittery earrings that don’t dangle as much. Mainly studs. However if it was a special event, then he’d have more of a statement earring in.

︵‿୨♡୧‿︵

⇘ : : [Skincare]

🕯️ He has a set skincare routine.

🕯️ He does his skin care every night. He never misses a day. 

🕯️ Kanato has dry skin, but not as sensitive. 

🕯️ He usually uses moisturizers to hydrate his skin, followed by a hydrating serum which is notably his favourite part of his routine. He likes the way he can squeeze the tube connected to the cap of the bottle, how squishy and malleable it is. 

🕯️ Also the way the serum falls on his face, he has no idea why that particularly catches his attention, but he’s fine with it nonetheless. 

🕯️ Kanato despises his eye bags, loathes it even, so you know he’s dead-set on doing everything possible to get rid of them, or atleast make them not as noticeable. They really hinder with the whole ‘doll-look’ he’s trying to viciously obtain. Queue the eye cream and patches. 

🕯️ Shockingly, they do wonders. And anything that isn’t as covered is covered by his makeup routine (mainly his colour correcting concealer and skin-tint light coverage foundation.) 

🕯️ He has very clear skin, and rarely gets acne/pimples. He is only second to having the best skin out of his brothers, the first being Shuu. 

🕯️ The skin care he uses is bought in small quantities, the only thing he regularly buys in bulk are his eye cream and patches. 

🕯️ He always starts his skincare routine by drenching his face in an ice-cold ice bath for 10 minutes, to reduce any puffiness he might have. 

🕯️ Kanato wears contacts most days, only resorting to his glasses if he absolutely has to. His glasses are black cat eye framed. He used to have a rose gold frame but he didn’t like how washed out it made his skin. 

︵‿୨♡୧‿︵

⇘ : : [Makeup]

🕯️ He uses makeup 100% (How else will he keep up his doll-like image?)

🕯️ He never needs to use any high coverage foundation considering that his skin is quite clear. He uses a light coverage skin-tint. 

🕯️ Considering that his complexion is more on the gray-side, he makes it a point to go outside in the sun more often without his umbrella.

🕯️ Because of this, he uses products with shade ranges that keep his very fair skin satiated. 

🕯️ Kanato’s concealer usage mainly goes to colour correcting and removing his eye bags. Everything else is fine in his eyes, it’s just his over dramatic, very dragged out and accentuated eye bags that make his face feel dragged out. 

🕯️ His contouring is quite limited, as he only applies his contour stick to accentuate his jaw, nose, and forehead. He’s satisfied with a softer approach as he prefers softer features in comparison to sharper. 

🕯️ This goes for both himself, and any sacrificial bride/potential love interest he’d set his eyes on. 

🕯️ He uses press powder. Kanato loves dipping his cushion into the powder, pushing and dabbing it onto his face and watching as some of the dust would collect around him in the air. 

🕯️ It’s like those old movies he’d watch with his brothers when they were younger, where the woman would enjoy having their makeup montage. It’s that satisfaction that allows him to revel in his routine. 

🕯️ Once he’s finished with that, his blush takes the center stage. He uses a moderately tinted blush, but uses only a small limited amount so as to not overpower his facial symmetry. It also tends to bring colour to his face and make him feel ‘alive’ so it’s extra important he gets it right. 

🕯️ Kanato also uses the powder blush found in the palettes. 

🕯️ He once tried liquid blush but instantly hated it as he could never get the timing right for how much he needed. Palette is much easier, safer, and plus, he enjoys seeing the product collect on the makeup brush, and tapping it ever so slightly for pan fallout. 

🕯️ His eyes. His absolute favourite part of doing his makeup every single time is the eye makeup. From eyeshadow, to mascara, to the eyeliner. It’s perfection. 

🕯️ He starts with his eyeshadow. He usually uses K-Beauty, considering that the K-Pop idols there have great taste for the glittery glam he’s looking for. It ranges from what he’s feeling, but most of the time you’ll see him with small copious amounts of glitter adorning his eyelids. 

🕯️ And it’s always perfection, seriously, he never misses. It’s often a fan favourite with the girls at school. 

🕯️ Kanato would start with a base colour, blending it with another before adding the small glitter adornments. He usually drifts towards soft pinks, but will use the pastels for blue and purple. 

🕯️ He never uses any of the brighter/riskier colours/shades. He prefers the softer, more pastel colours that add to his appeal. The browns/neutrals are okay too. 

🕯️ Next, his eyeliner. He tends to go for the middle ground. He has great precision, and always hits the mark on the first try. A signature cat-eyeliner is something he’d never dare to leave the house without. 

🕯️ For his lids, he uses liquid liner. For his water line, both top and bottom, a crayon/kajol based mixture. He does this to lessen the load of his already big eyes. 

🕯️ On the top, he strictly uses black. On the bottom? A combination of black and white to obtain his doll look. Near his inner corner close to his nose, he adds more white, then it blends as he reaches a half-way point before he transitions to black. 

🕯️ Admittedly, it was a lot of trial and error but once he got the hang of it, he looked more like a doll than he did bare-faced. 

🕯️ Finally, his mascara. He tends to use a waterproof mascara because of his tantrums. In the past he tried other colours than black, but found that he didn’t like them as much as the effect black had on him. 

🕯️ Also good to note that his eyelashes are long. Like you’d assume he got them done, but then be shocked that it’s all natural. Definitely one of the points many girls are jealous of. 

🕯️ Since his lips aren’t as rosy as he’d like them, he uses lip tints and red-pink lip glosses. Sometimes he’d go the matte look with his lips, others he enjoys the pop of lip gloss. 

🕯️ It’s a pet peeve to have chapped lips. He hates it. Doesn’t matter who has them, it’s hatred all around. Because of this, he keeps extra chapstick (strawberry flavoured, obviously) for his brothers when he sees them. 

🕯️→ “Eh? What’s this, Kanato?”  Laito would ponder, seeing the chapstick being thrust into his hands and a bratty Kanato turning his head away to face the walls of the limo. His arms crossed across his chest as if to prove his point further. 

🕯️→ “Your lips. Fix it.”  Laito would raise an eyebrow, moving his gaze to examine the chapstick. A smirk would grow as he read the label. ‘Strawberry-flavoured.’

🕯️→ “Whatever is the matter with my–”  Kanato would turn his body, glaring at him before moving closer to Laito. “This is the problem. Please, fix it immediately,”  Kanato would retort, pressing a gloved finger to Laito’s chipping lips, hoping to accentuate his dire point. 

🕯️→ “Oh? My, I had no idea you were so bold, Kanato!”  Laito would chuckle, as he watched his younger brother bat his eyes in confusion before a slight blush creeped up on his face. His frustration building too, no doubt. 

🕯️→ “Laito. Now.”  He was now back to his seating, and after a few minutes of uncomfortable silence, Laito would give in. 

🕯️→ He’d take off the cap, take in the potent strawberry scent and apply the chapstick to his lips, instantly hydrating and moistening them. Kanato would look back, huffing contently before a sly remark would slip by Laito’s lips, “Mmm, strawberry! How delightful.” A pause, “Is this your subtle way of admitting you’ve been dreaming about kissing me, dear brother?”

🕯️→ Kanato’s eyes would widen, “Huh? Don’t be absurd.”

🕯️→ “Hm, your loss~”  Laito flicked his tongue, tasting some of the strawberry flavour. 

🕯️ Kanato would then apply his highlighter. Always blended in, mainly on the tip of his nose, cheeks, and inner corners of his eyes. It’s a white iridescent highlighter, but sometimes he’d use a light pink tinted one if he runs out. 

🕯️ His setting spray is light, making it easy for him to not feel as overstimulated. 

🕯️ He always carries the travel sized perfume bottles in his bag so he’ll be well prepared, especially after gym class. He isn’t fond of smelling bad. 

🕯️ Strawberry or vanilla is his go to. But many would report him smelling a fond strawberry, making that his signature scent. 

🕯️ He always cleans his makeup brushes every 2-3 weeks. He hates the idea of any bacteria or dirt ruining his face. 

︵‿୨♡୧‿︵

⇘ : : [Voice]

🕯️ He has a lighter/higher voice compared to the others, which he definitely hates (but sometimes is at peace with.) 

🕯️ It’s the type that can be light and airy, almost like a girl, but have that small bit of depth when frustrated.

🕯️ Make no mistake, it’s higher than most, which causes him to be mistaken for a girl a lot. (That is, without the looks.)

🕯️ Due to his childhood, his vocal chords are most definitely strained. 

🕯️ As in, he’s a few steps away from becoming mute. But this doesn’t stop him from letting one of his soul-crushing screams out. (Which undoubtedly, adds pressure to his throat, which makes it unbearable hot and sometimes itchy.)

🕯️ In fact, he was forced to sing until his vocal chords started to bleed, filling his mouth and throat with his own blood which definitely tore tissues apart. (Canon fact.) 

🕯️ Sometimes his voice gives out, making him choose silence and only stepping in when he thinks he absolutely has to. 

🕯️ Despite what most think, Ayato and Laito do listen to him in hopes of keeping the peace. 

🕯️ They even take his opinion into account because if Kanato is the voice of reason, then there’s definitely something off and they need to reevaluate themselves. 

🕯️ Kanato drinks a lot of herbal teas, it’s normal for Laito or Reiji (mostly Laito) to make him some because of his strained vocal chords. 

🕯️ Kanato prefers lavender and honey teas, always with 2 and a half sugar cubes. Must be hot but never piping hot to the point where he’ll burn his tongue. 

🕯️ He hates burning his tongue while drinking teas. It makes him have somewhat of a lisp and Ayato teases him about not being careful enough. 

🕯️ He will notice if the tea is not exactly to his liking. If not immediately. 

🕯️ Ayato once tried to make him his tea, and before tasting it, he could smell that something was off. He didn’t add the specific ‘half’ of the sugar cube. Kanato was upset and refused to talk to Ayato for a week, while Ayato profusely apologized since he knew it was a very sore subject. 

🕯️→ (Empathetic as always, Ayato.)

🕯️ Kanato and Reiji regularly drink tea together in the living room, or in Reiji’s office. It’s the one time where Reiji notably enjoy’s Kanato’s company as he isn't as psychotic as he normally comes across. He’s tame, relaxed, and soothed. 

🕯️ Reiji unconsciously finds himself comforted and reveals some of his internal turmoil whilst in Kanato’s presence. There’s just something about the gentle, relaxing presence of Kanato that seems to soothe everyone in the room. As if he can control the entire energy and mood of a room whilst he’s in this state. 

🕯️ Since they’re always together, Laito will become his voice (talk for Kanato) when he cannot, especially when he’s nervous to talk to someone new/foreign to him. 

🕯️ Kanato’s vocal range is very versatile. 

🕯️ He can sing in very high tones, accomplishing high notes with a smooth, steady, and clear confidence. 

🕯️ Ever since the accident with his strained vocal chords, he doesn’t sing as much as he used to. 

🕯️ However, if you saw him in his prime, you’d be filled with envy and shock in an instant. 

🕯️ His singing voice was powerful, it could be light, shrill, and gentle, but also accomplish heightened feats. 

🕯️ He and Shuu did a joint performance at a ball, Shuu played the piano, and Kanato sang whilst sitting atop of the piano. Shuu secretly still has a recording of this performance, unbeknownst to Kanato, and listens to it when he wants to be calmed. 

︵‿୨♡୧‿︵

⇘ : : [Mentality]

IMMENSE TW HERE!! 

🕯️ He has severe attachment issues. 

🕯️ Kanato keeps a large assortment of stuffed toys, each with their own distinct name and personality. He’s afraid that if a person were to leave him, he wouldn’t be able to cope, thus turning to inanimate objects to fill the void.

🕯️ → After all, living people can let you down, but how can inanimate objects do the same? 

🕯️ Hence the wax dolls of all the brides he’s ever claimed. He’d like to make them look beautiful, even in their restless display of a tomb. 

🕯️→ It’s the least he could do after claiming their soul, isn’t it? 

🕯️ He also has abandonment issues which stemmed from his childhood. 

🕯️ He stopped placing faith in his brothers when he slowly watched them drift farther away from him, and closer to each other. 

🕯️ Seemingly, almost everyone in his life who he treasured left him high and dry, so he stays away and chooses not to form any deeper connections due to his fear of being left again. 

🕯️ Sometimes he mourns the person he could’ve been if he hadn’t been a vampire. If he could be considered a ‘morally good’ person, that is. 

🕯️ Kanato also mourns the family he could’ve had, if he were dealt better cards. 

🕯️ Admittedly, the facade that he keeps up is wearing on him. He finds it emotionally draining to always be on edge and be in competition with his brothers. 

🕯️ The hostility that floods the air is always suffocating, but he knows that no one wants to change, so he plays the part of ‘the hysteric’ to the best degree before he entirely burns himself out. 

🕯️ His entire ‘hysteric’ facade is just that. An act. He only does it so he’d have a defining feature for him like his other brothers, and because it made people weary and afraid of him. 

🕯️ It took away all the unwanted attention off him, especially from those with gazes that lingered a bit too long on his body for his comfort. 

🕯️ He’s very insecure of his eyebags, voice, wrists, and shockingly his weight. 

🕯️ TW!! He has self-harmed before for attention, just to be seen by his mother and not be cast aside like Reiji. (Canon fact.) 

🕯️ When his mother found out, she was furious. She complained ruthlessly, making Kanato feel even worse about himself than he did when he started.  

🕯️ He hates his self-harm scars, despite being a vampire with self-healing, they never seemed to go away.

🕯️ TW!! There are light cuts on his wrists, nearing the veins.

🕯️ He never had the courage to cut anywhere else. It scared him, but he’d never admit that. 

🕯️ TW!! Once he cut too deeply, which made the vein burst. He stopped cutting after that, and after his mother scolded him for ‘ruining his body.’ 

🕯️ Ayato and Laito have no idea of his past self-harming tendencies. His half-brothers also don’t. 

🕯️ Laito has theorized that his early comments in their childhood got to Kanato, so he has a lingering feeling that Kanato did call his bluff. (That is, to encourage Kanato to self-harm for said attention.) [Canon fact.]

🕯️ Nonetheless, he always wears long sleeves and translucent gloves which are sheer and skin tight. They cover his scars slightly, however they aren’t the best method of choice.

🕯️ Kanato wouldn’t admit he’s suicidal, however when compairing himself to the others, he doesn’t find a reason as to why he could be deemed as important.

🕯️ He feels constantly pushed away, so if he were to die, he’d be okay and at ease with it. 

🕯️ But he doesn’t go chasing death constantly. He wants to die, but will let it happen when it happens. 

🕯️ Kind of like Shuu in this case. 

🕯️ His voice may fit the doll-like criteria he places upon himself, however it doesn’t stop the fact that he wishes he could’ve been born a bit more masculine like his brothers so he wouldn’t have to resort to this aesthetic he’s plastered upon himself. 

🕯️ That, and paired with the fact that his voice doesn’t make it easier when people would harass him, assuming he’s a girl. 

🕯️ TW!! Kanato has an eating-disorder. 

🕯️ TW!! This was entirely orchestrated by none other than Cordelia herself. Due to her strict standards, and the constant pressure he put on himself to obtain the ‘perfect doll look,’ he started purging. 

🕯️ All of the desserts he eats would be thrown up, allowing him to ensure his body won’t be ‘ruined’ as his mother used to say. 

🕯️ This habit has gotten so bad and risky that Yui has started to notice a pattern, especially when he’d leave their shared Psychology class at a set time every day. Or how he’d barely eat anything at their monthly dinners and during lunch. He even took lengthy pauses for his blood drinking for good measures. 

🕯️ TW!! Kanato would push his fingers down his throat viciously, uncaring of how the medium length nails scratched at his throat, or how blood started to strain his fingertips and fill his windpipe. After all, he’d throw it all up anyways. 

🕯️ → Yūma happened to be in the bathroom one night, washing his hands as he heard the sounds of strained coughs and retching over the toilet bowl. He couldn’t make out the shoes, and whom they belonged to, but he could tell it was bad. 

🕯️→ When the stall door opened, he laid eyes on Kanato, with small tears staining his baked face, he stiffened. He kept washing his hands as Kanato used the faucet next to him, pressing his hand on the soap dispenser. 

🕯️→ “Um.. are you.. ok?”  Yūma would dare, watching as the smaller boy paid him little mind. 

🕯️→ “Yes. I simply ate something bad, that’s all.”  Kanato was quick, almost too quick with his reply. Yūma narrowed his eyes, before flicking his hands, opting to air dry instead. 

🕯️→ He took in Kanato’s figure, and how shaky he happened to be. What’s more, his hazel gaze traced over Kanato’s wrists, and the small, strategic cuts. If it were anything to go by, that wasn’t normal. Living with Azusa taught you that much. 

🕯️→ “Are you sure? Come to think of it, yer’ pretty pale–”  “I am fine.”  Kanato would swiftly cut the taller man off, not wanting to hear anymore of it, as he took out his makeup pouch and proceeded to fix up his appearance. 

🕯️→ Yūma was stunned, not only at the quick defensive position the boy took, but also at a closer glance for how out of shape he was. He was skinny, too skinny. Even by vampiric standards. His wrists were sticks, and his uniform looked a size or two oversized. 

🕯️→ “Look, I know it ain’t none of my business–”  Kanato stopped what he was doing and turned to meet Yūma. Yūma and his pathetic worried gaze. He planned his next words out carefully, “It isn’t, you’re correct about that much. I am fine. I ate too many parfaits, alright? I don’t appreciate the interrogation.” 

🕯️→ Yūma just stared at him blankly, “Yeah. I can’t force you to say anything, can I?”  Kanato would nod, before finishing his makeup and making a bee-line for the door. “But, you can talk to me if somethins’ botherin’ you… you know that.. right?”  

🕯️→ Yūma kept his eyes trained on the door, more importantly, the figure that stopped. A few tense moments of stillness would then pass before Kanato would murmur, “Yeah, of course.”  

🕯️→ Yūma would watch the door open and close, leaving him alone to reflect about what to do with this newfound knowledge. And if Kanato’s response to his aid was honestly sincere. 

🕯️ Kanato’s eye bags have to be one of the biggest things he hates. He wishes it could instantly go away. He gets enough sleep as is (he thinks?) So why won’t they leave? 

🕯️ Kanato definitely has insomnia. Hence the immense annoyance of said eyebags.

🕯️ He’s had it ever since he was a kid and all he wishes is for it to leave so he could at least look half as decent as the rest of his family. 

🕯️ When Yūma teases him by calling him ‘Eye-Bags’ he feels another bit of his self-esteem shatter. He hates it so much, and is one of the leading causes for his self-loathing. 

🕯️ He smokes. He loves the feeling of nicotine and how he makes him feel more alive.

🕯️ He has BPD.

🕯️ He secretly takes meds for them, but once Yui came to the house, Ayato had accidentally thrown them out thinking they were expired muscle relaxer pills which led Kanato to stay unstable and manic.

🕯️ He knows he needs therapy. However he doesn’t know how he could ever bring that up to Reiji. 

︵‿୨♡୧‿︵

⇘ : : [Family]

🕯️ Kanato knows that Laito and Ayato avoid him due to the consistent parallels between him and their mother. 

🕯️ The two think they’ve done a good job at hiding their resentment and slight fear but Kanato can see right through them.

🕯️ Kanato oftentimes mourns the relationship he could’ve had with Ayato and Laito, especially if he wasn’t a carbon copy of their mother.

🕯️ He’d look at old photographs of the three when they were happier and at better terms, then is awakened by the harsh reality that they don’t like him.

🕯️ Oh yeah. They aren’t as fond as Kanato as they’d like to portray. This is mainly because of the similarities between their mother and him. 

🕯️ So everytime Laito pours Kanato a cup of his lavender-honey tea, the latter thinks about how Laito may truly feel to be next to someone who reminds him so much of his trauma.

🕯️ Laito is often uncomfortable with Kanato’s existence. Just because they look alike. If Kanato had the green eyes? Well Laito and Ayato would go into shock. 

🕯️ Ayato only tolerates Kanato because he feels that he has to. Not because he immensely cares as much. (Although, he stays empathetic towards their outcome.)

🕯️ Kanato wishes that he didn’t look like Cordelia on some nights. Especially on the nights where the triplets get into arguments and Ayato ends up saying what they’re all thinking.

🕯️→ “Yeah? Well it ain’t us who looks exactly like our mother! You even act like her too, Kanato.”

🕯️→ The three would all go quiet, with Kanato shaking as he’s registering what Ayato said. He wasn’t his mother. He wasn’t.

🕯️→ “Kanato… I didn’t—”  Ayato choked, “No. You’ve made your point.”  Kanato would leave the room. Leaving a shocked Ayato and silent Laito.

🕯️→ Kanato wouldn’t hear anyone out, and would actively ignore the two before Ayato and Laito trap him on the roof of the school one night during lunch.

🕯️→ “What do you two want?”  Kanato would start, looking at his brothers in annoyance. “We.. we wanted to talk.”  Ayato would chip in, “It’s been a week, Kanato. You cannot seriously expect to win by ignoring us like this, hm?” And Laito would finish. 

🕯️→ “What is there left to say?” Kanato snapped, turning aside to look out at the schoolyard. Ayato let out a softened sigh. “We know we messed up, alright,” he said, his eyes pleading for forgiveness. “But we’re brothers, Kanato.”

🕯️→ Laito’s normally sardonic grin softened as he nodded. With a soft tone, he continued, “We apologize. We went too far.” Emotions seething inside Kanato, his shoulders stiffened. Silence enveloped them, heavy with unspoken tension.

🕯️→ Kanato gave in with a deep breath. He mumbled, “Fine,” his voice barely audible.

🕯️ Subaru once mindlessly let it slip that Kanato deeply resembled his mother while practicing magic. That sent Kanato into a spiral and he stayed up for a week staring at himself through his vanity mirror. 

🕯️ Kanato smokes. Especially with Cordelia. The two would normally go outside in the rose gardens on especially hard days and smoke together. 

🕯️ He started smoking when he was 13, when Cordelia offered him a pack. This is what also strengthened their relationship. 

🕯️ When she died, he started to smoke more. Not because of the guilt or anything, but because he found it to be a remedy for stress. 

🕯️ None of his brothers know that he smokes.

🕯️ He highly values Reiji’s opinion, especially because he’s been there more for him than his own blood brothers have. 

🕯️ He’s slightly jealous of the closer relationship Ayato and Laito have.

🕯️ Cordelia mainly manipulated him a lot. When looking back he wonders how naive he was to believe everything she said. 

🕯️ Karlheinz sometimes mistakes Kanato for Cordelia. Even he isn’t immune to their similarities. 

🕯️ Like when Kanato worked as his secretary, he found himself calling Cordelia’s name instead of Kanato’s, and instantly shutting up after he realizes what he said. This leaves Kanato feeling dumbfounded with the one question resting on his mind, ‘Am I really that similar to her?’ 

🕯️ Kanato would later find out that his mother also worked as his secretary, making the two even more similar than they already appear, much to his dismay. 

🕯️→ “Cordelia, my dear, could you fetch those reports for me?”  Karlheinz's request was gentle, laced with familiarity.

🕯️→ With a stilled hand, Kanato’s breath caught in his throat. Despite a sense of unease, he forced a tight-lipped smile. His voice strained, “Right away, Father.”

🕯️→ Kanato felt the atmosphere change as he made his way to get the reports. He glanced back and saw Karlheinz’s expression go blank as an understanding dawned in his eyes. His brief expression of perplexity as he tried to comprehend his error spoke volumes.

🕯️ Karlheinz wonders if he wants Kanato as an option for the Adam and Eve plan because of Cordelia and Kanato parallels. There’s a small selfish feeling that lingers, making him want to keep Kanato all for himself. 

🕯️ Kanato definitely had to deal with Karlheinz’s weird/creepy advances.  🕯️→ It’s canon that he’s a bit creepy, and definitely messed up, so take that as you’d like.

︵‿୨♡୧‿︵

⇘ : : [Brides/Yui]

🕯️His relationship with any sacrificial bride as of late has been at face value. He knows that the way he treats others, especially as a lesser being, is partially motivated by how others have viewed him his entire life. 

🕯️ Kanato simply doesn’t know how to begin changing for the better, so the cycle continues. He’s in an environment that promotes the very bad behaviours that he’s identified. That is, in everyone (the brothers), and in himself. 

🕯️ There was one sacrificial bride before Yui, perhaps ten years before she arrived, who made him hyper aware of what he and his brothers were doing. 

🕯️ The monsters that they were. 

🕯️ That was the first time he ever thought to reevaluate himself as an individual, especially with the bride who would do everything to make him understand that everyone has at least a little bit of humanity in them. 

🕯️ He’d recall the way his father treated the wives, and the way his mother would treat him. It would send him into a spiral, before opting to lessen the way he reacts. 

🕯️ This unknown bride amongst the thousands that have entered the Sakamaki Mansion would die, however at the hands of Laito. 

🕯️ Now that was a turning point for Kanato. It was shocking how that so easily proved the bride’s point, yet he felt so empty about the whole ordeal. 

🕯️ Kanato vowed to remember that bride, name and all. She is also the centerpiece of his wax doll collection, the one who’s perfect in every way. He owes her that much. 

🕯️ He viewed her as a friend if anything. That is, if mortals and immortals could be friends. 

🕯️ He also vowed to figure out how to turn his life around for the better once given the chance. He often thinks about her, and now with Yui here, he thinks that now is the chance to break the cycle. 

🕯️ He often thinks about her a lot. Like she rests constantly on his mind, almost like a lingering repressed feeling.

🕯️ Kanato doesn’t think he could ever be loved. Like for everything, flaws and all. 

🕯️ So when Yui comes around, talking him about everything he does well and how he has a good side, he has no idea if she’s being genuine or if she wants something from him, and only wants to use him just like everyone else has. 

🕯️ He wants Yui to be happy, in his own way of course. But part of him knows that it’ll never be with him. His obsessive tendencies, especially when it comes to love, is the main driving point which pushes people away. 

🕯️ It’ll take him a bit to understand that fully, but once he comes to that settlement, he’ll be okay with giving Yui to one of his brothers. After all, most of the sacrificial brides choose them anyways, so how would this be any different? 

🕯️ When he finds out Yui has Cordelia’s heart, he almost is hurt. Considering how that’s the woman he shared most of his vulnerability with, and who exploited it. 

🕯️ He wonders if Cordelia can talk to Yui in her mind, or subconscious. Considering that they’re two souls in one body. 

🕯️ The more he thinks about it, the more he’s unsettled by the fact that she, the entire time, has taken a backseat and listened to every confidential conversation like some unauthorized third-party. 

🕯️ When he meets Yui, and hears of her temporary permanence within the house, he instantly thinks back to his redemption that the old bride talked about. 

🕯️ After all, there won’t be any more after Yui, right? This can be his chance to make the change he wants. All he has to do… is not get attached. 

🕯️ This is easier said than done, considering how Yui’s blood is almost irresistible. 

🕯️ During the awakening, when Yui would feel pains, Kanato would as well. Since he has her magic and all. 

🕯️ He’d have migraines that would go on for days on end, and the pain in his chest? Unbearable. 

🕯️ Yui and Kanato would have that one thing in common at least, being remnants of Cordelia.

︵‿୨♡୧‿︵

⇘ : : [Academics]

🕯️ Kanato is much smarter than he appears. He usually plays dumb to ensure that he isn’t found in any trouble.

🕯️ He’s really good at physics and math. Like a prodigy. The only reason why he hides it is because his mother often said if his true IQ was revealed, it’d put him at risk of being seen as competition and potential execution.

🕯️ He is quite good at the sciences, which is often a conversation point whenever he participates in class. 

🕯️ He always makes it a point to participate at least once for every class he attends. Doesn’t matter how, just knowing that he did one thing is all the motivation he needs to continue. 

🕯️ His schedule is as follows: 

🕯️→ Semester 1: Advanced Functions (Math), Psychology, Physics, Chemistry.

🕯️→ Semester 2: Advanced English, Japanese, Accounting (Business), Calculus and Vectors (Math). 

🕯️ Kanato has Psychology with Yui and often sits in the middle row, considering how he uses glasses. 

🕯️ Yui finds him much more bearable and engaged when in Psychology. 

🕯️ She even willing wanted to be his partner for a project. He accepted and they got the highest grade in the class. 

🕯️ For all of his classes he tries to sit in the middle row. 

🕯️ Karlheinz forces all the boys to take at least one business course so they’ll be prepared if any of them need to take over the family business. Kanato chose accounting since it’s closest to math and he enjoys it. 

🕯️ Since he took Functions (year 2 math course) during summer school, he is in the 3rd year Advanced Functions course. Reiji, Ruki, Carla and Shuu are in his class. 

🕯️ He once corrected Reiji on an answer while he was writing it on the board, to Reiji’s surprise Kanato was right and the teacher applauded Kanato for spotting his mistake. 

🕯️ Reiji, Ruki, and Carla were shocked to know that Kanato’s test scores were pretty high. He even beat Reiji and Ruki, getting 100%. 

🕯️ Shuu couldn’t care less since he barely shows up. He only shows up for tests, which he aces every time. This always pisses Reiji off. 

🕯️ Reiji and Carla are in his Calculus and Vectors class. 

🕯️ Laito is in his Advanced English class, often times he’ll tease him for working but becomes shocked when looking over at his essay for peer editing. (He barely has any mistakes.)

🕯️ Ayato and Kou are in his Japanese class. It’s especially tiring when he has to deal with the two bickering over Yui. 

🕯️ During lunch, you’ll see him and Subaru eating desserts together. Kanato likes the quiet comfort Subaru offers, and Subaru likes the companionship. 

🕯️ If those two aren’t together then it’s Laito and Kanato, however Laito usually ditches him at school. 

︵‿୨♡୧‿︵

⇘ : : [Fashion]

🕯️ He’s really good at sewing. So good that he’s made his own clothes, and even could start a small business. (Canon fact.) 

🕯️ He has a small business for clothing. He takes commissions and creates magic. This is mainly done online and his website is the cutest. Kanato really cares about the small, little, intricate details. 

🕯️ He’s made clothing items for himself, Reiji, and sometimes anyone else who asks.

🕯️ Just by looking at someone, he can instantly tell what their measurements are.

🕯️ He loves the Victorian Gothic aesthetic/clothing.

🕯️ This boy loves VKEI. The clothing for him is total eye candy. 

🕯️ Kanato also enjoys the ‘dark coquette’ style.

🕯️ He likes ruffles and embroidered cuffs of sleeves, along with pretty brooches that fit his outfits perfectly. 

🕯️ His shoes have a ½ inch booster insole added in. He adores the clack and click in shoes when he walks, it makes him feel important. 

🕯️ His shoes also have a hidden blade inside, making it accessible to him if he needs to protect himself or fight back. 

🕯️ Kanato is obsessed with shiny jewelry. You’d assume he was a crow. 

🕯️ After his mother died, she left most of her jewelry to Kanato. Most days you’ll see him wear her iconic jade brooch. The one that’s shaped like a flower, with 14k gold detailing. It’s one of his most prized possessions. 

🕯️ He especially likes ancient jewels, the ones that carry magical properties. 

🕯️ Sometimes Kanato will cross dress. He does like the fabrics and can tell what instantly suits him. However everytime he does, for whatever reason (if it’s to get something for someone else, or he’s forced,) he feels that small insecurity taunting him that he’s not and never will be ‘man enough.’ 

︵‿୨♡୧‿︵

⇘ : : [Magic]

🕯️ After Cordelia died, all her remaining magic/mana/powers transferred to Kanato, making him like the ‘last living remnant’ of Cordelia (not including the obvious— Yui.)

🕯️ He is really good at using magic, he’s the best out of all his brothers.

🕯️ People usually go to him if they need help with it.

🕯️ He’s memorized countless spell books, even the ones his late mother left him.

🕯️ He has pyrokinesis (Canon fact.) [Fire magic/can control fire.]

🕯️ He can perform soul transfer. (Canon fact.)

🕯️ Kanato loves contacting the other realm (realm of the dead,) he finds it interesting to hear the stories they tell.

🕯️ He has an ‘all seeing eye.’ Basically allows him to see ghosts and the dead.

🕯️ He found this out when he was 5, playing with his dolls and he saw an unknown woman sitting on his bed. She was covered in blood and she had an ax in her skull.

🕯️ This terrified him, but he mustered up the courage to acknowledge her existence.

🕯️ She didn’t say anything, just nodded to his questions. Once he brought this up to his mother but she forced him to never speak of this ability again.

🕯️→ Perhaps she was afraid? Who knows. Definitely not Kanato. 

🕯️ So whenever you see him leaving an extra seat available, another cup of tea, or bowing as a greeting to a seemingly empty space— he’s acknowledging the ghosts that linger in the home.

🕯️ To his surprise, many of the brides linger. He does his best to pay his respects. He at least has some decency to not upset the dead. (Especially since they can pay it back in full.)

🕯️ The main hot spots in the home are near Reiji’s study, the hallway that leads to the grand ballroom, and the torture chamber located far beneath the house. 

🕯️ Once, Reiji realized most of his supplies were misplaced in his laboratory. Turns out it was one of the brides he’d killed years ago who’d done it. Kanato never told him that, and Ayato was blamed and punished. 

🕯️ In his early years, many doctors assumed he had schizophrenia.

🕯️ He was heavily medicated for a while which messed with his cognitive functions.

🕯️ Kanato regularly uses magic, even for the small, simple things. Like turning on lights, closing doors, that stuff. 

🕯️ He feels that his magic is apart of him, so he really values it.

︵‿୨♡୧‿︵

⇘ : : [Bag]

Ever wondered what’s in Kanato’s bag? School Bag? Here you have it.

🕯️ Kanato has two bags. His school bag, and his small purse. (Yes he has a purse. But never call it that, it’s a man-purse. He will get insecure and embarrassed immediately.) 

🕯️ In his school bag all of his binders are colour coded, along with his notes.

🕯️ Everything is perfectly organized, from his notes for each class, to his homework and old tests. 

🕯️ He colour codes his notes for each subject, along with the homework assigned. 

🕯️ He takes pride in his note taking skills, since they’re very aesthetic. 

🕯️ Kanato keeps a reusable water bottle with him. Most are shocked that he even drinks water to begin with, but what they don’t know is how it does wonders for his skin. 

🕯️ He also brings his laptop with him every day to school. Sometimes he’ll forget his charger, but normally his classmates let him borrow theirs. 

🕯️ His hand-writing is sometimes messy but their legible. He’s secretly doing practice to improve his cursive. 

🕯️ His pencil case is filled with those over the top cute supplies. As in, he’ll have a teddy bear eraser, and cute highlights and pencil crayons. 

🕯️ In his school bag he also carries his purse. 

🕯️ His purse consists of his wallet (it’s this cute polar bear), his makeup pouch, his medication (pills), and travel sized combs. 

🕯️ Kanato’s makeup pouch has all of his normal makeup products but condensed to travel size. He loves his perfumes, so it’s always going to be there since he runs out of them quite easily. 

🕯️ As always, the strawberry chapstick is there for himself, his brothers, and anyone else he sees that desperately needs it. Like no joke, he’s a chapstick warrior. He’s like Santa, but for chapstick. No one knows how he has the space for it, but it’s like a never-ending supply. 

🕯️ Kanato also keeps his nail polish in his bag, in a small side component.  

🕯️ Once he started to paint his nails in psychology, and the teacher directed the topic onto the psychological effects of red nail polish. It was interesting and he found himself amused that he could cause such a commotion based on one small thing. 

I hope you stars like some of my personal HC's for Kanato. This took me two days, since I really had to think deeper about how I perceive his character.

Credits to the artist of the Kanato fanart!!

Lmk if you guys would be interested in any other HC's!!

[bohemian-nights]

No this fandom is actually insane

Do people think it’s ok to write “he was teaching her how to bathe”?????? I’m honestly scared to go read the post that they were talking about. The lengths that these people will go to just to prove that dettles never happened

Read at your own risk.

The person who wrote that is actually Black(or so they claim), but is willing to throw Black characters and Black fans under the bus and promote negative stereotypes about us for their mostly (racist) followers in defense of a racist characters desirability.

Sir/ma’am, if you are reading this, get some self respect. I’m actually embarrassed for you cause this shit is actually pathetic. You’re better than this.

Case in point they wrote this crap a while back with 100% sincerity:

(I should also note that I actually had a run in with them about a year and some change ago and they threatened to block me after I asked them if Corlys bathing with Rhaenyra would be normal father daughter figure bonding time so I blocked them first😊).

Like you don’t have to like Dettles, but when you are pushing harmful ideology and stereotypes (Black people are so stupid/dirty that we need the white mans help to civilize us) as a way to discredit them and make those who ship it look like angry Black women jealous of the poor helpless white woman and her stans, you’ve gone too far.

Let’s keep in mind that this poor helpless white woman was actively trying to kill a Black girl for a crime she claims she didn’t commit and that despite claiming that Nettles definitely didn’t sleep with Daemon her stans spazz out everytime you mention her name and actively want her cut from the show.

Or how about the fact that these same stans actively stalk and harass Dettles shippers whose only crime has been pointing out y’all’s bullshit.

Let’s keep in mind all of this shall we:

So who is actually jealous of who here? Who in this scenario wants racial revenge?* Who is the problem in this hellhole of a fandom?

Is it the people merely pointing out Nettles importance to the Dance and Daemon’s arc or the people who hurl racial insults and stereotypes? The people who want her erased from the narrative in its entirety cause she disrupts the status quo?

(The fact that someone would even fix their mouth to say that when Black people have been beaten, raped, enslaved, terrorized, tortured, disenfranchised, abused, subjected, and not even given common decency and respect for centuries by these people. If we wanted racial revenge it damn sure wouldn’t be off the back of a fucking fictional character).

The fact that they can’t see Nettles value and only see her as some irrelevant Black girl and reduce people liking her down to a gotcha/“woke” moment is fandom misogynoir in action.

They forget that she comes from nothing, claims a dragon, has a prince willing to give his life for her(six men or sixty remember that since y’all claim to be capable of reading🙃), survives the Dance and becomes a firewitch worshipped by a group of people, because they don’t want to acknowledge her importance.

It makes them uncomfortable to do so because she doesn’t look like them, but people like I’m not like those other Negros cover up for them so that when they are called out for it they can go see this n-I mean this Black person agrees with me.

Imagine being this butt hurt about a fictional character that you can’t even leave your racism or tap dancing at the door for five seconds.

Nettles doesn’t fit the mold, but that’s the point of her story.

They can recognize maester propaganda and scream about feminism when it comes to their white faves, but when it comes to the Black girl who is actively being stereotyped and maligned for her gender, race, and social standing in the source material they believe it no questions asked?

Again, what does it say about you that you are so willing to believe that a Black girl who was clever enough to claim a wild dragon doesn’t know how to bathe herself? What does it say about you that you think Daemon would never touch her with a ten foot pole just because she’s Black?

What does it say about you don’t want her on the show because of her race? What does it say about you that a fictional character who just so happens to be Black has you worked up into a tizzy.

Y’all claim to be for women(real or fictional), but in reality you only care about the women who look like you and shit on women you see as beneath you. Women who you think are a threat to the status quo. You’re no better than the men who oppress you.

[mitochondriaandbunnies]

Miami Vice S1E21: No One Lives Forever

Sonny's new girlfriend distracts him from his work; Rico hates her.

Where do I fucking start with this one

Okay. Crime. Let's start there.

The actual crime in this episode is so inconsequential that the criminals literally have no motive but "do crime," because that's not what the episode is about. The crime is mere set-dressing for the actual thematic core of the episode, which is "Sonny's Relationships." There will be a number of Sonny's Girlfriends episodes, especially in S3 when they were trying to Heterosexual It Up, but that's not what this one is (and Brenda gets to leave the storyline relatively unharmed, too, whereas the girlfriends in the Sonny's Girlfriends episodes... uhh... don't)

I'm really serious about how stupid the crime part of it is though

Death - the ULtiMat HiGH!

These dudes just drive around Miami jacking cars and shooting up hotdog stands, there is no nuance to it at all. I think this is the least nuanced portrayal of criminals in the entire series.

That's because the nuance is all stored in Tubbs' Roiling Jealousy Over Sonny's New Girlfriend. After we watch the crime idiots jack some cars, we cut to Sonny and Rico talking, and Rico spends about ten sentences complaining about how Sonny has been unavailable recently because of ~Brenda.~ He is so obviously uncool with Brenda that Sonny calls him out on it, asking if he's jealous (the implication being Sonny has misinterpreted the obvious jealousy as Tubbs wanting a Brenda of his own), and Rico, with absolutely not an ounce of sincerity in his voice, backtracks and is like PFFT. No. Falling in love is GREAT

Which like. Is not actually a response to Sonny's question

We meet Brenda canoodling with Sonny, and she asks him why his marriage ended. He dances around the question and asks her in return "who the ugliest guy she ever dated" was. They are very much not on the same page in terms of the seriousness of their relationship. Brenda is asking hard-hitting, "I'm thinking about our future together" questions, and Sonny is asking like... two girls giggling at a sleepover questions.

(I find this super interesting also from a "Sonny is heavily queercoded throughout the series" standpoint-- the "morning after" scene also has Sonny framed very much like women often are in media, waking up in someone else's bed and finding them already up and working out downstairs. Brenda is also significantly wealthier and more successful than he is, and a lot of their love scenes are filmed in a very soft, delicate way that positions them very equally. There's something especially about the scene where they're kissing in the pool, and we see both of their bare backs floating in the sun, that feels almost like we're watching two women. Considering Sonny has another dalliance with a short-haired blonde woman where he's very feminized at the beginning of S2, this feels very purposeful?)

Brenda is played by Kim Griest, who I know best as Kay Gallagher from Wiseguy. This is not what anyone else knows her best as.

Brenda is working out in Sonny's shirt, which she gives back to him all sweaty and gross, and that is the worst crime she commits (but let's be clear: it is a crime. Why would you put on someone else's clothes to work out??)

At the precinct, Gina asks Rico if he thinks the relationship "must be real." She is also clearly jealous, but sad instead of angry, and definitely not remotely aware that Tubbs is jealous. He is uncomfortable talking with her on the subject, makes a somewhat unkind joke at Sonny's expense ("Whatever that means"), and slithers out and away so he doesn't have to keep having this conversation.

"Eye contact is for losers"

Also, Rico and Gina have the theoretical potential to be really wonderful friends and allies as the senior members of the "Sonny uses me as an emotional crutch" club, but the writers never decide to go for that, and instead you get the sense that they just can't ever really be honest with each other and that's a bummer

Sonny and Rico go to make a bust and Sonny calls Brenda mid-mission, which is foolish and supposed to demonstrate how his mind isn't on his work. However, what I'm more interested in is how this phone call with Brenda mirrors two other Important Phone Calls With Women: when Sonny calls Brenda, he's not saying anything of consequence. He's cute and flirty, but that's about it. Then, when he realizes a shooting is going down, he doesn't hang up-- he runs out of the phone booth and quite literally leaves Brenda hanging. She hears gunshots and gets no explanation or closure on what is happening until much later. This is in direct contrast to the pilot, where Sonny's call to Caroline in the middle of the mission is completely vital. utterly heartfelt, and provides extremely needed closure. It is also in contrast to the last phone call he has with Caitlin in Deliver Us From Evil near the end of season four, where Caitlin calls him, tries to tell him something important, and he brushes her off and tells her he'll talk to her later. In all three cases, there's an intersection (and conflict) between his love life and work life: with Caroline he's confirming that even though ultimately he chose work over love, that their love was always real; with Brenda he's briefly choosing her over work and then realizing that's a mistake and ignoring her feelings completely; with Caitlin he seems to have given up on the idea of romance ever being successful and chooses work over her because that's just what he does. Vice states time and time again that there's no fixing the broken justice system from the inside, and that any so-called "good cop" will eventually destroy himself and/or all those around him; Sonny's inability to balance the case and Brenda foreshadows all his other relationships failing as well. Caroline only gets out unscathed because she chooses to divest herself completely from Sonny's world, and Sonny won't find peace until he does the same.

Gina shoots one last shot and Sonny turns her down pretty definitively, and the scene feels frankly like character assassination for Gina. The last time we saw them be at all "couple-y" was way back in episode 8, and even that was already after they'd had more than one "this is a bad idea and we shouldn't be doing it" conversation. Gina asks Sonny if he's "just keeping her around for a pitstop," but the show has not indicated they've been dating for what likely accounts for at least six months (and possibly up to a year) of in-universe time. As a result, her jealousy seems not like it's based in the solid and thoughtful characterization of Gina Calabrese, Vice Detective, but rather in hoary old gender stereotypes: she's a hysterical woman who somehow hasn't realized her relationship (if it ever even was a relationship) has been over for half a year. So when Sonny quietly and sadly responds with "that's not fair" (because if they haven't been dating for 12+ episodes, it's really not fair for her to say that-- she has no control or ownership over his love life at this point), he seems like he's in the right. I am certain this conversation was written by a heterosexual man, and I hate how much Gina's characterization gets worse every time the show decides to create romantic tension between her and Sonny. Gina deserves better, in-universe and out.

Then we cut immediately to Brenda asking Sonny if he and Tubbs have "been partners long." This scene alone deserves an essay; the long story short version is that Brenda asks Sonny if being cop partners is like a marriage, whether your partner always comes first (off the job and on), and whether or not he'd ever think of her as "his partner in crime." Sonny, notably, does not answer a single one of these questions directly. He deflects and jokes, hearkening back to her serious question about the dissolution of his marriage and his jokey response about "ugly guys."

This is his face before she asks if "his partner always comes first:"

Aaand this is his face after he processes what she's just asked him:

When he responds to that question with the ambiguous "Well, on the job...," Brenda looks like this:

And then Sonny follows up with saying he doesn't remember the last time he wasn't on the job, which is to say that he implies that yes, Rico does always come first. Like. Damn, Sonny. Maybe... try lying a little?

Izzy claims to be selling "Richard Gere's shoes" and wooden clogs, because why not

Tubbs tells Crockett his mind is elsewhere, and that he should "take a few days" to "get over whatever it is you need to get over," which is among the bitchiest things he says in the entire course of the show. Rico is usually very patient, cool-headed, and compassionate, but every once and a while he says something downright cruel, and when he does it's often with a smile. He strikes me as the sort of person who has learned and chosen to be good to people rather than someone who's nature is to be kind by default. When Sonny, who is a curmudgeon on the surface but fairly soft and naive on the inside, gets mad, he lashes out; when Rico, who is thoughtful and easy-going on the surface but surprisingly unsentimental inside, gets mad, he gets mean.

On the Dance, Brenda tells Sonny she thinks being there with him is paradise; he deflects and talks about smoking. Brenda asks about Sonny's "closeness" with his coworkers again, and he's weird about it; when she clarifies she's talking about "the woman cop" (Gina), Sonny ceases entirely to mince words like he had with Tubbs. The difference is stark; he's willing to explain to Brenda that yes, at once point he and Gina had sex. He's not willing to explain anything about his partnership with Tubbs-- and yet, Brenda talks like she knows Tubbs, and isn't entirely sure who Gina is, so we know he's talked lot more about Rico than Gina.

When Rico and Brenda do meet, Rico immediately tries to tank their relationship by throwing Sonny under the bus. He implies Sonny is an idiot and bad at his job, and basically tells Brenda she'll eventually leave him.

Okay. Brenda committed one more crime. It's this table:

Izzy continues wearing clogs

Tubbs continues being an enormous bitch, telling Sonny Brenda's not his type, and that his type is "the bearded lady at the circus." Jealousy looks really bad on you, Rico my broski. You are being so so mean to the guy you have a super obvious crush on.

He then asks Sonny to go to dinner with him; Sonny says no because he's got a date with Brenda, but they agree to meet at 6am for a stakeout. On their date, Brenda asks Sonny about marriage and he gets extremely uncomfortable and goes to bed alone when she asks about who their friends would be.

Either because a) he did not set an alarm and was relying on Brenda to wake him up on time, in which case he's a fucking idiot, or b) because he did set an alarm and Brenda turned it off, in which case she has no respect for Sonny at all, Sonny misses his 6am meeting with Rico and Rico gets the shit beat out of him.

Castillo puts Sonny on desk duty because Sonny is a fuck-up. He goes on a sad boat ride over which Red 7's Heartbeat plays to a montage of Brenda, beat up Rico, and disapproving Castillo.

On stakeout, Tubbs plays the saxophone (do we ever see him do that again?) and Gina is reading A Man for All Seasons, which I suppose is doing something as a parallel with regards to the moral repercussions of the dissolution of a relationship but I don't frankly feel enlightened enough on the Tudors to expound on that

Sonny breaks up with Brenda; his line is "you're a very special person and you mean a great deal to me," which is about as unromantic as you can get. Brenda calls what they had a "wonderful fantasy;" Sonny says he can't afford fantasies. They leave it vaguely open but absolutely do not continue dating-- we don't ever see Brenda again. (Good for her.)

Returning to the actual crime, the three Death is the Ultimat High idiots roll around in bed with their guns smashing radios, declare themselves out of money, and go off for another hot dog stand murder. They come upon the stakeout with Tubbs and Gina, and Tubbs is chased down and about to be killed when Sonny swoops in heroically at the last minute and saves him. They end the episode walking away with their arms around each other. Because, you know. Partnership marriage something something something.

Hear me out: I am not convinced Sonny is talking about Brenda when he says "he can't afford a fantasy." The one romantic relationship Sonny has in the series that involves grounded, real-life issues, and actually talking through things like an adult is his relationship with Caroline, which he chooses to have healthy closure regarding. Every other romantic relationship Sonny has is, to some extent a fantasy-- he dates a pop star, a surgeon, a madame-- even Gina is a kind of fantasy to Sonny, as a sweet and understanding always-available fallback. He actually can only afford a fantasy-- he's aware, to some extent, that a normal relationship with a normal woman is likely to end the same way it did with Caroline. Considering all of the very pointed parallels between Rico and Brenda, between "partnership" and "relationship," and knowing that we'll learn in the next episode that Sonny watched one of his best friends die because of his sexuality, I don't think it's wildly out there to think that maybe the fantasy Sonny truly can't afford is one where he can make his partner his number one priority, on and off the job, and be happy about it and accept himself for it. He knows he can't afford that particular fantasy because he's literally seen someone pay for it with his life.

Oh god this was so long

And I didn't even talk about the "department softball games" scene or the lyrics to Heartbeat

Help me

[batsarebetterthanpeople]

I just saw Barbie. I'm writing meta about it. This is your spoiler warning. Do not read past this if you don't want to be spoiled. Additionally I'm going to discuss radical feminism and liberal feminism. I am neither I'm a feminist, but as a trans person I find both strains to be inaccessible and I prefer a more intersectional approach, just to state my bias upfront. Additionally I anticipate getting multiple "it's not that deep" comments on this meta. To which I respond that the movie may be deeply unserious at times but it does try to tackle gender which means we should get to talk about it.

I do want to acknowledge that this is the movie of the year, and that it's made by Mattel and Warner Brothers and as such it was literally never going to be based and the best we can hope for is what it was, which is liberal girlboss feminism. The movie was very fun and very good and it did have a surprisingly coherent view of gender and it did some things that I did like when it came to that HOWEVER as a gay transgender man watching the movie it's lack of a queer perspective was very obvious to me and took me out of it occasionally.

So I just want to establish for those who have not seen it but are reading this meta how gender works in this movie. And to recap the movie with a focus on the gender stuff rather than the main Pinocchio plot. The movie starts in Barbie land where Barbies have a good day every day and Kens only have a good day when Barbies smile at them. In Barbie land all the powerful jobs are occupied by Barbies and all the Kens have the nebulous job of "beach" which means that whatever the Barbies decide goes and the Kens are more or less subject to their whims (no word on how the Midges or Skippers or Allen fit into this barbie based higherarchy. One could guess based on a couple of scenes but it's never really lingered on)

Ken(Ryan Gosling)'s world revolves around Barbie(Margot Robbie). Ken(RG) is Barbie's(MR) boyfriend, but Barbie is good friends with Ken(Simu Liu) who she dances with and who is generally less cringefail than Ken(RG). Ken(RG) is frequently jealous of Ken(SL). Ken(RG) is also somewhat taken for granted. Barbie doesn't seem to care that much about him. He tries to kiss barbie, she doesn't reciprocate. Ken tries to hang out with Barbie, she kicks him out because it's girls night, as it is every night. So on and so forth. Barbie is not obligated to care about Ken, but she's clearly not putting in any work into maintaining this creator ordained relationship and it's clearly upsetting to Ken.

Barbie is experiencing some Real Girl tm problems such as flat feet and thoughts of death and weird Barbie who has been played with too much sends her into the real world to fix it. Ken(SL) goads Ken(RG) into going with Barbie into the real world. When Barbie learns Ken is coming her immediate assumption is that he'll slow him down.

When Ken and Barbie enter LA Barbie immediately starts experiencing Misogyny. Ken similarly starts experiencing privileges as a man which he did not have in Barbie land. This is heavy handed. Barbie verbally states that she feels like she's being gawked at in an almost violent way and Ken says he feels admired in a not at all violent way (with the outfit Ken was wearing and how he was still carrying himself with deference to barbie I sincerely doubt he would experience exactly 0 homophobia but it was necessary for him to feel that way in order to make his character arc work so I'll let it slide).

Ken goes for a walk without Barbie while barbie does plot relevant activities. He sees women showing respect to men, he sees a slide show of some kind of male role models. He feels like he can be something in this world. So he goes to a middle school library and picks up some books about patriarchy. He tries to get a job in the real world, it goes poorly, so he decides to go back to Barbie land and establish patriarchy there.

Barbie comes back to Barbie land with a friendly human woman named Gloria who works for Mattel and her MCR listening 12 year old daughter. On the way she tells her new human friend and her daughter that Barbies are in charge in Barbie land and women have all the important jobs. But as they drive into Barbie land they find that Ken has gone full radfem in their absence. He's flipped the Barbie-Ken higherarchy on its head. He's turned the dream house into a man cave. And he's some how convinced the Barbies to behave like sandwich making foot massage providing girlfriends.

And here's where I would like to start doing some meta. What has happened here? Ken is essentially a (less complex than human on account of being a doll) cisgender heterosexual white woman. He is in proximity to the ruling party, Barbie who is like a cishet white man. Ken is not on the margins the way that Allen and Midge are. His occupation is Barbie's boyfriend. Ken got a taste of what it was like when the gendered oppression that he is used to is flipped and he decided that's what he wants. He doesn't much care how the discontinued dolls feel about this, he's not thinking about them, nor is the movie. He doesn't really see a problem with there being a division between Barbies and Kens, he doesn't see a problem with one group being subservient. He just doesn't want to be low on the food chain. Ken is right to want liberation for Kens but he thinks that he can obtain that by taking the jobs away from Barbies and giving them to kens. This is why I said Ken has gone full radfem in Barbie's absence. He hasn't gotten rid of the gender essentialism, he hasn't questioned whether power should be shared between Barbies and Kens. Ken is right to throw Barbies shit out of the dream house and kick her to the curb, she doesn't value him like he deserves from a relationship. He's wrong to try to change the constitution to put Kens in charge and change it to Kenland and force all Barbies into the position that Kens previously occupied. I relate this to radfems because radical feminism relies on bioessentialist assumptions and posits that men are always oppressors by their nature and that women would be better off without them. A lot of what makes terfs angry at trans women is that trans people question whether women and men are so easily separately boxed like this and trans women specifically are seen as male infiltrators. Most of them succumb to becoming transphobes before people but on a base level radical feminism is a reactionary hatred of men that is usually based in genuine hurt. Ken is on some all Barbies are pigs shit here rather than examining society and attempting to make it more equitable. I think he needs to sit down with Magic Earring Ken and talk about gender to gain some perspective.

Both me and the movie agree that Kens knee jerk Ken liberation at the Barbies' expense is wrong. Ken even later acknowledged that he didn't even care about patriarchy he just wanted to feel valued. But where me and the movie start to be at odds is when they do a girl boss style ousting of the Kens. Gloria gives a speech about the female grievance she has from the real world and it somehow works on the Barbies despite the fact that the movie previously established that sexism and all of its intricacies and the feelings it engenders are completely foreign to the Barbies. But the Barbies have always been in charge in Barbie land. They're passingly familiar with real world sexism as an abstract concept that they believe they defeated in the 1960s, but they don't experience it, they live in a everyone is valid girlboss utopia. The only way to become ugly is for someone in the real world to play with you too hard, something they can't control. There's no pressure to be pretty because everyone is already pretty and they compliment each other routinely. Barbie doesn't experience any problems being perfect until Gloria starts drawing her with existential dread, and all of the other Barbies are horrified by it as if they've never heard of such a thing. It's a malady that their dear friend is experiencing not a fact of life like it would have to be for Gloria's message to land.

Then they come up with this plan and they free the Barbies and use romantic jealousy to turn the Kens against each other. My problem with this is that in the established world where Kens are the repressed gender, this is essentially putting a bunch of dolls who's oppression is based in being a romantic object for Barbie into misery business ass situations. We're really weaponizing the Kens' internalized misandry against them and saying girlboss? The Kennish desire for Barbie's validation is being used as a tool to oppress them and the movie just... Doesn't see it despite seeming to having coherent liberal feminist messaging*.

Speaking of Liberal feminist messaging. When the Kens realize they've been turned against each other they link arms and head to where the Barbies are. The Barbies have put their constitution back in place. Ken(RG) realizes he's lost and he runs inside crying and Barbie comes to comfort him. Barbie pays lip service to Ken finding who he is without her and to them being "Barbie" and "Ken" instead of "Barbie and Ken" but then when the Kens band together and ask for a supreme court justice President Barbie gives them a concession of a lower court justice and the Kens have to work their way up, the voice over stating that maybe they'll get to where women are irl in a couple decades, and this is treated as a victory somehow. Like putting the girl boss barbietopia back in place at the expense of the Kens is somehow better than the Kens doing the same but in the opposite direction. This after she apologizes to weird Barbie and offers her a cabinet position, treating the most ostracized barbie as more valuable then any Ken.

The closest the movie ever comes to acknowledgeing a perspective outside of the Barbie/Ken binary is when Allen tries to leave Barbieland during the Ken takeover. Allen seems discontented with both the barbieocracy and the kenocracy and he tries to escape containment when Gloria and her emo daughter are leaving Barbie land. He argues that no one will give a shit about a life-sized Allen in the real world because nobody remembers Allen and then he tries to leave with them. Gloria and her daughter change their minds and go back to help Barbie and Allen's plot line just ends there.

There's all these cameos from background and discontinued Dolls. Skipper who's boobs get bigger, Barbie who's a camera, sugardaddy Ken, and magic earring Ken are all in weird Barbies weird house, Midge has a house near Barbie but is judged by the voiceover for being a pregnant doll and Barbie seems to agree, and Allen is the only one who doesn't have duplicates and is sort of in the background casting doubt, but they never follow through on these dolls place in the higherarchy. Which is fine, this movie is the Barbie movie, it's about stereotypical Barbie becoming a real girl and going to the gynecologist. But I do think that they established some dolls on the margins and then left them there, and as someone on the margins in real life I want to know what's going on with them. Most people going to this movie are gonna be Barbies and Kens so they don't touch on it and I think that's kinda sad, but not every movie has to be for me I guess.

TL;DR: the Barbie movie lacks a queer perspective and has some moments where it's stated gender metaphor falls apart because of its necessarily liberal politics.

All that said. I liked the movie. I'm leveling this criticism because it was better than I expected it to be. I didn't expect to go into the theatre and think about gender like that and I did so it deserves points for that even if I have problems with the execution. I thought it would be a shallow Pinocchio plot but it did something fresh with the doll who wants to be a real girl plot and it was genuinely good cinema in terms of the effects and the music and the visual motifs. It was a fun experience I laughed several times. I would recommend it despite being critical of it.

*coherent in that it is a message that has semi consistent internal logic not in that it's internal logic is correct or sound.

[kithj]

wow Bloom by Delilah S. Dawson sucked that was not the right book to choose to get me out of a slump................................................

anyways me being a huge hater under the cut because it's long and also spoilers

i truly don't understand what the author was going for with this. is this satire? subversion? are we supposed to find our main character unlikeable? i'm not sure but i guess i'll be generous and say it was intentional. even so, it was not done in a way that worked for me (none of this worked for me). i feel like this was not the narrative to have an unlikeable mc. this would have been so much better if we actually liked Ro, if she was written with sincerity... a woman experiencing her first crush/relationship on another woman and spiraling slightly into obsession and infatuation only for the other woman to be revealed as a cannibal serial killer... it would have been so good if it was good.

but instead our main character is so pretentious and naive it's genuinely distracting. if this wasn't intentional... oof. there seems to be a mixed consensus on whether it was or not, which is never a good sign either way. we get silly lines from her like "i think i understand why men are such sex pests now" in regard to her newfound attraction to women and weird bioessentialist tangents with women being so soft and nurturing and understanding while men are dull and thoughtless and perverted.

and i do get what the author was going for-- i do agree that there is a difference between dating men and women (though not in the way she seems to think. lol), and for a woman who is new to dating other women, this is a big change and these are all thoughts she may be likely to have. i also think a part of it was that Ro was recovering from being cheated on, and is obviously very vulnerable and purposefully ignoring red flags, (something something we allow ourselves to be hurt for the chance to be loved) but it was just painful to read, even if this was satire. like what was the point? women can be serial killers, too!!! #feminism!!! why make our main character such a fool?

the reveal at the end with Ash is written like a rug pull, this cosmic revelation that Huh! Woman….. bad? but Ro still infantilizes her, with Ro being like "i thought she was Just A Girl doing Just Girly ThingsTM, if she were a man i would have known!!! she’s just so ethereal and beautiful and innocent in her pure white dress!!!" again it just does Not work for me, it is incredibly childish and borderline offensive with the way it's presented, and it does not read like an adult horror novel at all. it's so immature!! you're promised beautiful, lyrical prose and get the main character referencing tumblr gifs and neil gaiman and fucking twilight instead. and i don't know why the author chose (again, if it was intentional) to make Ro so unlikeable to begin with. i had no investment, i felt no sympathy for her, and so the horror fell flat at the end and came way too late to salvage the story.

also this book did a thing i hate which is constant pop culture references and name dropping a bunch of brands, within the first 30 pages on my kindle she had mentioned target (twice), starbucks, disneyland, ikea, instagram, tumblr, etsy, she mentions cottagecore and marvel, and she references a bunch of authors and classic literature which, to be fair, our main character is an english professor so that at least makes sense... but combined with everything else it just made her even more insufferable. i am not against unlikeable main characters at all, but the fact that i (and others) can't actually tell if she was supposed to be unlikeable or not is a problem. she's also not interesting OR entertaining, which your unlikeable character still needs to be to hold our attention.

disappointing! i need to stop reading popular bookstagram horror books i'm let down every time..... but this didn't even work for me as a sapphic dark romance, either, due to the way the main character was handled. i just cannot understand why the author chose to write her that way 😭 apparently this was supposed to be a spin on hannibal (the TV show) but with Women!!! but it is not that at all, at least not successfully. Ro is supposed to be this genius assistant professor (aka Will Graham) and Ash is obviously Hannibal. but Ro is an idiot and does not match Ash's freak. there is no dynamic, it is completely devoid of that back-and-forth that makes Will's and Hannibal's relationship so interesting. Ro should have rivaled Ash, this should have been toxic yuri, freak versus freak, stalker versus serial killer, and both women should have been challenged by the other. this should have been a complex horror novella about sexuality and identity and self-discovery (it's literally called Bloom, for fuck's sake) instead we got... literally nothing...... apparently she was trying to subvert expectations, but she failed at doing that, too. the book was incredibly predictable from just the blurb on the back and it was very obvious where it was going only 5 pages in.

there was so much potential which is what makes it just so disappointing. like, on paper, this is exactly the kind of book i LOVE. but the execution...... the bag was fumbled is all i can say

[autolenaphilia]

I think a lot of progressive social justice people believe terfs are bad, and they’re right about that. But I don’t think they understand what’s the actual problem with their thinking beyond “they are transphobic/transmisogynistic” or how their ideology even means. Which is why the word “terf” is so often misused. Like people think basic feminist analysis like “we live in a patriarchy and misogyny is a serious problem” or “misandry don’t real” is terfy or think that terfery is just “thinking men are bad”. So I’ve seen trans women accused of being terfs for doing basic feminism or making misandry jokes.

That sort of thing is often a form of transmisogynistic bullying, but I think those people do think the problem problem with terfs is that they hate men. But hot take, the real problem is that they hate women.

The central tenet of radfemism is that cis women’s biology is the cause of women’s oppression and patriarchy. It's an explicitly anti-intersectional view, in which misogyny is the primary oppression, as old as humanity, and "the model for other (lesser) forms of oppression". This causes transmisogyny, as radfems argue only cis women are oppressed because of their biology. But it also relies on the just plain misogynistic idea that women are weaker. And it ultimately reifies patriarchy. Radfems believe biological sex is immutable. And if patriarchy is caused by biology and biological sex is immutable, there is no way forward to actually destroy patriarchy. Patriarchy is in this worldview not caused by social, material and political conditions and thus defeatable, since we can change those conditions by feminist struggle, but a biological constant. And if biology is destiny, we are then stuck with patriarchy.

To the extent that radfems were ever sincere in their feminism, this is a theory that leads to a dead end for feminist struggle.

And so the struggle turns against other women. Radfemism today essentially consists of activism whose main goals are fucking over trans women and sex workers. There really is no other way for it to go. They have no strategy for actually fighting against patriarchy, so they put down other women, whether it be trans women, sex workers or even other cis women who disagree with them and who the radfems condemn as brainwashed “handmaidens”. There is also a lot of moralist bullshit over porn and kink. Fighting against the patriarchy is hard, committing misogyny in a patriarchy is easy, and they have chosen the path of less resistance.

Radfems love man-hating rhetoric because it’s performative. Man-hating rhetoric has no practical effects, because misandry is not a systematic form of oppression. Men’s individual misogyny can become part of a systematic oppressive force, misandry can not, it can only remain as words from individual women.

It’s performative even if sincerely felt. I do understand feeling resentment as a woman towards men as a class. I know myself how fear just from being threatened by men easily turns into resentment. But it can’t actually do anything, it’s just letting off steam. It’s especially obvious how performative it is in the phenomenon of heteropessimism, in which there isn’t even any personal change behind the man-hating rhetoric. Heteropessimists are straight women say heterosexuality is bad because men are bad, but they usually don’t quit doing heterosexuality.

Radfems are into it because they don’t do any meaningful practical feminist activism, so performative displays of class resentment against men is what remains to keep up appearances. This class resentment is a replacement for practical action. It’s larping as a feminist. “We don’t do any actual feminist activism, but we say we hate patriarchy and men as a class a lot, so it’s allright.” It’s a form of appearing radical when radfems are actually being a conservative force.

Feminism is in part a struggle for women’s rights. And in the transmisogyny masquerading as feminism that is radfemism, cis women’s privileges over trans women becomes the women’s “sex-based” rights that they are fighting for. It’s fighting to maintain a privileged position in patriarchy, for the right never to see a trans woman in a public space.

And I do mean that they fight from exclusion from public spaces in general. When you can’t safely use public bathrooms, it severely limits your ability to move about in public spaces. A trans woman barred from the women’s bathroom can’t use the men’s, not without immense risk of assault. Trans people are faced with the choice to either remain in their homes or detransition. And that’s the point of bathroom bans, remove us from public spaces. A changing room ban is essentially a ban from doing normal human things like swimming or using a public gym.

Radfems ultimately collaborate with patriarchy in a shared struggle to uphold transmisogyny. They provide a secular, pseudo-progressive and pseudofeminist justification for transmisogyny, and that can be useful in winning over cis people to the struggle against trans rights. That’s why the patriarchy gives them funding and space in the “debate” over trans rights. It’s to provide a “feminist” reason to exclude trans women from womanhood and denying trans people healthcare.

That's why there is a terf-to-fascist pipeline. When someone associate with (and are funded by) reactionaries, their "feminism" is mainly focused on hurting trans women and sex workers and their definition of womanhood rests on biological essentialism and motherhood, it's easy to go from self-proclaimed feminist to outright fascist.

Even the radfem criticism of gender roles can turn into reactionary thinking. Radfem criticism of high heels, porn and make-up and emphasis on biological sex and motherhood is easily compatible with reactionary ideas. A common theme in reactionary thinking is that modern sexualized femininity is degenerate and how women need to return to motherhood and define womanhood through their reproductive/ biological role.

And there has always has been a connection between radfems and the reactionary pedo cult that is catholicism. Janice Raymond was literally a former Sister of Mercy and she was taught by Mary Daly who was a theology professor at a Jesuit college. They brought the transphobia and sex-negativity of catholicism into their "feminism". Raymond is an early example of radfems working with the far-right, as she worked with the Reagan adminstration to deny trans people healthcare. Of course radfems worked with christian conservatives in anti-porn crusades around the same time. The idea of genderism or gender ideology that radfems seems to have started with conservative catholics.

Radfems often justify their actions by arguing the exclusion of trans women from female spaces is just aimed at protecting women from “dangerous men”. So it’s justified as a fight for women’s rights and aimed at “men” in general, but that’s disingenuous. Cis men aren’t hurt by radfem exclusion. They still have bathrooms they can use. They can’t be hurt much by radfem activism because we live in a patriarchy and misandry isn’t real. In fact they benefit from the transmisogyny that radfems spread.

Misgendering trans women as men to exclude them from women’s bathrooms (and by extension from public spaces all together) is part of that disingenuous rhetoric to relabel transmisogyny as feminist struggle. That is the other function their man-hating rhetoric serves. Radfems often claim to hate men, but what they mean by that is often that they hate trans women. When your average radfem's utterances consist of like 95% transmisogyny and what they advocate for only hurts transfems, not cis men, it's hard to interpret their "i hate men" statements any other way.

I think a lot of well meaning progressive people are too willing to take radfems at their word at this. They try to explain radfemism as “women who hate men, think trans women are men and thus hate trans women”. That is an essentially an individual psychological explanation that doesn’t give enough weight to systemic transmisogyny. Even if the psychological explanation is true for many individuals, if an individual radfem sincerely hates everyone amab in general, their individual psychology doesn’t matter much in the larger scheme of things. What they think or believe is not as important as their actions on a systemic level. And we can’t ignore the impact of systemic transmisogyny on their thinking, which we can’t say for misandry.

The transmisognyistic actions of radems ultimately enforce the systemic oppression of transmisogyny whereas misandry has no systematic oppression for them to reinforce. Misandry to the extent it is real is an individual psychological trait, transmisogyny is systemic.

[sourcreammachine]

fuck it, let’s die on this hill

FAIRYTALE OF NEW YORK IS THE ULTIMATE QUEER YULETIDE SONG

the straights have been getting increasingly uncomfortable with it in the last few years. you’re going to see a big resurgence of the censored version this year because Shane MacGowan died last week, but it has been well on the decline - meaning a wide open gulf is forming to allow the cheap, lousy faggots to swoop in and continue colonising it. here’s why we should

firstly it’s an absolute banger. traditional irish music combined with modern drums into a sound that fits the yule aesthetic perfectly whilst bringing drama and emotion. it’s cozied up by the fire, but alive and dramatic

the biggest source of discomfort for most people is that it’s MacGowan and MacColl aggressively arguing at each other, rattling off textbook sexist vitriol. and MacColl calls MacGowan a faggot, with total sincere usage of the slur, hatred and all. putting the slur aside, the nastiness of the song gets people’s ire. it’s a couple having a stereotypical domestic and they seem to kiss and make up in the final act, all unacceptable behaviour forgiven. it’s everything modern straights want to put in the past. so let them. it’s a het couple being toxic, cool. queer celebration has attached the bandwagon to worse things and it’s always taking up the castoffs of heteronormative society. queer love can be made of FONY all the same:

MacGowan’s first verse stings, does it not? sadness, desperation, and longing. in queer society, we have all been MacGowan’s character and we have all been the Old Man, even if it’s not the bottle and the drunk tank. we’re survivors, we’re bloodied and bruised, we refuse to go away no matter how many AIDS-genocides, moral panics, and hate-murders they do to us. there are nights where we think by all mercy we Won’t See Another One, and we turn our face away and Dream About You. there’s always hope. there’s always reasons to continue the fight, and they don’t have to be abstract

when the sobbing’s over, the Pogues immediately come to life for the main body. we go up and down the rollercoaster of emotions while the band keeps playing, while the air is always jubilant. the wonder, the delight, the hope, the madlove, the melodrama, the bile, the hatred. for a song making allusions of broadway, it sounds fresh from broadway - our story is painted through feelings, not words. and when it’s over, MacColl’s character (seems to, judging by the tonal finality of MacGowan’s lines and her participation in the final chorus) forgives her abusive partner and reattaches her hopes to him, her drunkard patriarch. but we’re queer, remember - we’re not celebrating these straggot pieces of shit. we find identity in the feelings. we have all been MacColl’s character, finding wonder and hope and the chance to become who we want to be, and being given false promises by false starts. and if you’ll forgive me for entertaining MacGowan’s character’s bastard misogynist perspective for a second, we’ve all found ourselves having to defend our queer communities, having to stand by our old sluts on junk, even as doing so takes its toll and sometimes feels like a burden. those feelings happen. they are irrational, they are bad, and they happen. and a new day comes and we’re thankful we stood by. it’s a melodramatic broadway banger - we can find meaning in all places, even the ‘b*tch-wife’ slurrings of a misogynist

it’s that power that lets a queer reading of FONY stick the fucking landing. again i repeat myself, from a surface reading the ending is toxic as shit. but queer reading is in the feeling. this lament, this mournful lament, of misplaced hopes, of lost dreams, and a commitment to what we have, and looking forward despite unbearable challenge. you’d scream ‘leave him!’ to every straight MacColl in the world, that’s like, feminism 101 - but queer life is nothing if not complicated. the queer-read MacGowan isn’t a toxic gay lover. he is queer life itself. he took our dreams from us when we first found him, so it may appear. the hatred we feel inside, the emptiness, the pain, it’s all there with the phantasmic joy, the discovery, the love, the everything. and the band always keeps playing. straight MacColls returning to their straight MacGowans is stupid, but we don’t have a choice. our community is everything, our support is everything. it’s rough. it can almost kill you. but would any of us trade it for anything else? we are MacColls and MacGowans all at once - we are the ones with fragile hopes, we are the ones who damage it, and shepherd it still. we’re our own worst enemy and we’re all we have

when Shane MacGowan adapted the original lyrics of a lonely seafarer, he did not turn it into a queer song. in fact, he wrote a character yelling the f-slur. there is not a gramme of queercoding here. but exactly what is the difference between the actual faggots finding commonality in the villain songs penned to mock us, or old broadway songs that have nothing to do with us, and the yuletide song that actively hates us? fucking little, i would argue. queer celebration’s power is its ability to reconstrue. they call us faggot every month of the year with nary a second thought, and we spit it right back at them with reclamation and solidarity. we should do the same in december. we dance to the tune of their bigotry and we sing along at the top of our lungs. they are quietening down out of embarrassment - long may our party reign. FONY, a bigoted song, is a queer anthem because it has been made so. the madness. the love. the sadness. the dreams. that is queerness. and queer revolution is not giving one single, solitary shite about straight people’s discomfort about what the cheap, lousy faggots choose to celebrate. the way the ending instrumental tapers off into beautiful emotion - the straights have abandoned it: that feeling of love, that feeling of joy, that feeling belongs to us now

sing it like you would all queer songs. hold your friends close and celebrate them. love everyone around you. and when the naughty word comes around, scream it

[hard--headed--woman]

you radfems just LOVE making enemies, don't you? "why gay men don't support lesbians? like, whe have always supported gay men" FUCK OFF, you don't support trans women, you don't support women who use makeup and like to be housewives.

fuck your victim complex, you love to be violent and "angry" all the time. it's because of you that people think feminism is bullshit.

gay men make fun of lesbians? then they're assholes, but you dumbasses saying "yeah, fuck gay men, all of them are assholes and don't support us uwu" sound pathetic as well. fuck your bullshit🖕and trans women ARE women

I love how you're saying we love to be angry and violent while you've just wasted some time of your pathetic life to send anon hate to someone you don't even know. Sounds like projection to me, lmao. Trans women are men and there is nothing you can do about it besides crying like the weak crybaby you are and getting mad at women who are braver than you and dare to say it. By the way, try to find some class about reading comprehension near where you live, because if you sincerely think criticize something (like makeup or the housewive lifestyle) means hating on the women who do this thing and not supporting them. And I absolutely never said "fuck gay men, all of them are assholes", lol. How ridiculous can you get ? Are you at your best or can it get worse ? You seem to be a wonderful specimen of stupidity so I bet it ca. And, oh, let me tell you something, if that's not too complicated for your little brain - people think feminism is bullshit because they are misogynistic assholes, just like you are, not because of us. Politics aren't your thing, right ? It shows. Stop trying to talk about it with adults, my dear. Now you should go the only thing you're probably good at (besides crying), aka fucking yourself. You should be honored I even took the time to reply to your bullshit.

[lucifersimp333]

●MC with PCOS or Hormonal Imbalance●

Scenario: You are a MC with female anatomy who suffers from PCOS or a hormone imbalance. You have abnormal periods, painful cramps, and grow some facial hair. Here is how the brothers would respond!

TW: Facial hair on femine face, hormone imbalances, weight gain, food restriction

LuciferXmc, AsmoXmc, BeelXmc

As someone with hypothyroidism, I feel us hormonal imbalanced people need to be represented! We are beautiful,strong, and worthy of love! If you ever want to vent about the struggles of PCOS, hypo or hyperthyroidism, or any hormonal imbalance you may be struggling with I am all ears! Xoxo

ASMO

Went to go touch your face out of endearment, trying to give you a quick little kiss. You suddenly pulled your face away from his hands, you get embarrassed from people touching your face in fear they could feel some stubble.

He automatically looks so sad, how could you pull away from him? " Sweetiiiiieeee.... why did you pull away from me? Did I do something wrong baby?"

You admit that you don't like anyone touching your face because you're embarrassed about your facial stubble. You then explain you have PCOS and the struggles that come with it. He holds both of your hands and places them in his lap and rests his forehead on yours.

" My sweet darling.... You are absolutely beautiful in my eyes. I wouldn't want you any other way. I'm here to support you whenever you need."

He places both his hands on each of your ears, brings your head to his lips to gift you a soft kiss on your head. He wipes a little tear off you cheek and smiles gently at you."May I touch your beautiful face, my love?"

With your permission you allow him to touch your face. He doesn't go overboard , just places a soft hand on your cheek and smiles at you so lovingly. He looks deeply in to your eyes and gives you such a sincere, soft smile. " You are so beautiful, thank you for letting me touch yout face."

He takes his hands off your cheeks and looks at you for a minuet. " Don't tell anyone, but I actually have an insecurity as well."

Your eyes widen. What? Someone as beautiful as this demon, has an insecurity?

He pulls his sleeves up to show his arms. "Sometimes I think my arms look like noodles. Just so....thin! I try to lift weights with Beel from time to time, but I'm always so afraid to chip my nail polish!" He says with a slightly chuckle. " I guess I'll always have noodles for arms."

You smile at him. It was unlike him to share an insecurity and you really appreciate him being so honest with you to make you feel better. You both hug each other for a while, just enjoying each other's vulnerability.

If you're okay with it, he'll help you wax your lip and chin, following by using the best creams he has to take care of your beautiful skin. When you have painful cramps, hell hold you in his lap with a warm compress on your pelvis. He'll set reminders o his phone to make sure you take your hormonal medication so you don't ever forget.

Makes it a point to call you beautiful all the time ( like he didn't already). He doesn't do this out of pity, but because he genuinely believes you are so gorgeous. He doesnt want you to EVER think you are anything other than beautiful.

Beel

You were chowing down on some nachos with Beel when he noticed you were eating less than usual. Why are you counting chips? Why are you taking the most dry, naked chips out of the plate of nachos?

"Mc, why aren't you eating much? I know you didn't eat lunch today. Are you not feeling well?" He looks at you concerned. He places the back of his palm to your forehead, checking to see if you have a fever in fear you're not feeling well.

You mention that it's easy for you to gain weight due to your hormone imbalance. You gained a few pounds during the week and you don't want to gain anymore. You confide in him that you have always been insecure about your weight so you really try to watch what you eat sometimes. Just talking about this is making your eyes well up. You never really spoke about this to anyone and it's making you emotional l.

This demon is looking like a sad puppy. How could MC be insecure? They're stunning! Beel abruptly stands up, picks you up like nothing, holds you bridal style and looks you dead in the eyes after wiping away a teat off your face.

" I don't like..... I don't like that you feel like you have to restrict yourself just to feel pretty. You.... you are pretty..... the prettiest thing I've ever seen..."

He is hesitant at first, but while holding you bridal style he kisses you. It's the softest, most passionate kiss you've ever experienced.

He sits back in his chair and places you on his lap. You're both facing forward and he rests his head on your shoulder, rubbing your tummy softly. " I love your tummy, MC. I think it's so yummy! You know.... if I wasn't a demon, I would have a HUGE tummy!"

You giggle at his little joke knowing that what he said was true. He smiles after hearing you giggle, relieved he could make you feel at least a little better.

When he notices you staring at the mirror analyzing your body a little too long, hell go as far as to take the mirror away from you. He NEVER wants you to think low of yourself.

He makes sure you never skip a meal ever again. Even if that means he has to go hungry for a little bit, he'll make sure you eat first.

On really bad days when you imbalance is really fucking with you to the point you feel icky, hell sit you on his lap and rub your tummy. He'll give you every ounce of love that demon has in his body just so you feel loved and beautiful.

Lucifer

He was discussing the next vacation day with you and the brothers at the dinner table, deciding where you will all go. The brothers all agreed to go to the beach! Lucifed noticed you were awfully quiet on the subject, having a hint of nervousness in your face.

Once dinner was done, he walked beside you and rest his hand on your shoulder and bent his head down to your ear. " Come to my study in 10 minuets. I want to discuss something with you."

10 minuets later you are in his study sitting in the chair across the desk. He is doing his usual paperwork while speaking to you. " You didn't seem to be to pleased on the fact we're going to the beach next week. Is there a reason why, MC?"

You fiddle with hem of your shirt " I just..... I have a hormone imbalance which makes me a little more.....plump.... than a lot of woman. I don't feel confident in a swimsuit. I..... I also feel more comfortable wearing makeup to hide....." You get nervous and trail off in to silence. You can feel your eyes welling up.

As soon as you said you didn't feel confident he stopped writing and had all his attention on you. His gaze was soft, yet sadden. He felt his heart shatter in to a million pieces seeing your eyes get glassy.

" To hide what, MC?" His voice is gentle, but he wants you to release what you have pent up.

" I... grow a little facial hair which sometimes causes breakouts... so I hide it with makeup. Y-you can't wear makeup at the beach....." You quickly wipe a tear away from your cheek.

"Mc, look at me." He leans over the table and uses one finger to lift your chin up so you can look at him.

" I understand you may not be happy with how you look at times. But I assure you, there is nothing to be insecure about." He let's his word sink in for a moment before taking your hands and guiding you to his side of the table. He has you sit in his lap.

You lays your head on his chest and wraps his arms around you. " In all of the realms I've lived in, out of all the angels, devils, and humans I've seen.... you are by far the most beautiful being I have laid my eyes upon." He's stroking your hair out of your face and wipes away a stray tear. He lifts your head up to his and kisses you lovingly.

" I don't ever want you to hide who you are naturally. I promise with or without makeup, in or out of a bathingsuit I will find you breathtaking."

He goes with you to shop for a bathsuit you feel comfortable in, being so supportive the whole time. When he finally sees your face without makeup, he has the biggest grin on his face. You are beautiful, just like he knew you would be.

He never comments on noticeable facial stubble. It doesn't bother him one bit, and still finds you as irresistible as ever.

Makes it a point to compliment you on days where you finally decided you didn't need to wear makeup. His hear explodes with joy knowing that you are starting to feel as beautiful as he sees you. He is so proud.

[thesafecafe]

Good Girl: Feb Filth Fest Day 4

CW + Disclaimer: 18+, MDNI, pwp, fem! reader, sub! San, dom! reader, feminization, (baby girl, pretty girl, pillow princess), husband! San, CEO! reader, non idol au, San in a skirt, hand-job, edging, riding, begging, light degradation, (bitch, slut), public/semi public sex, unprotected sex, (wrap it up in these streets now y’all!), cum play (?). smut under the cut, enjoy! (yeah ik it’s late, shh). Disclaimer: I do not believe the members of Ateez would act like this in real life, nor is this meant to be a reflection/guide to their personalities. It is a fictional depiction for entertainment purposes,

Words: 924

“Shh, there, there, pretty girl. We wouldn’t want anyone to hear us right?” San whimpered, struggling to stay quiet as your hand worked under his skirt. He had dressed to get your attention today, and he did, but not in the way he expected. He’d dressed in his favorite pink and white striped skirt, a black crop top with a mesh shirt, and black platforms. Your husband surely knew how to rile you up, which is how he ended up in a hall closet in the building you worked in.

You had edged him a good three times now, and he was more sensitive than he’d like to be, especially since it was cold. He hadn’t bothered to tell you he was coming, so he would have to wait to be in your warm, comfortable office. It would serve him right too. Showing up to your job looking like an absolute whore. “You’re so lucky, y’know? You’re lucky it was only Mindy in the office today, and you got off easy because she was sleeping. But just how many people saw you in this outfit before you got here, huh? I’ll bet all the security guards saw you prancing around like a slut when you came in.”

You sped up, bringing San close once more, only to deny him a fourth time. You knew he wouldn’t last much longer, as he practically sobbed from being edged for so long. “Aww, what’s the matter baby girl?” You teased, resuming your agonizing pace on his shaft, your hand moving slowly up and down. “Please, mistress, please, ’m sorry. I’ll be good for you, I promise. I just wanted your attention. No one else’s. I promise.” San pleaded desperately. He looked at you, his eyes full of tears, lust, and sincerity. And how could you deny him when he begged you so sweetly? Speeding up your hand once more, you placed your other hand  on the curve of his ass, squeezing it. “You wanna cum so bad huh? Then cum for me, pretty girl, show me how good I make you feel.” He cried out, his orgasm hitting him almost instantly. San swore he could see stars before he began to come down from his high. 

When he finally calmed down, he realized what a mess he made. He’d gotten his mess all over your hand and wrist, and some of it was dripping down his thighs. He realized that you were spreading the milky white substance back onto his thighs, smearing it further down than his skirt could hide. When you were done, you straightened up, smiling at San’s confused face, your hand sliding back under his skirt. San hissed when you gripped him again, pulling him closer to you. “Let’s go sweetie. I can’t walk out with my hand showing, so it’ll have to stay where it is for now. Oh and keep your hands to yourself on the way.” San was still mildly confused, before realizing you were pulling him to the door. His cheeks turned red, and he almost moved your hand off of him before remembering your orders. 

He watched as you peeked your head out, quickly surveying the hall, before pushing the door open, and gently pulling him behind you. San felt exposed in a way that was new to him, and he wasn’t shy by any means, but this was a new level of vulnerability. The angle you held him at was sure to get him hard again before you got to your office, and then he’d truly be exposed, as he didn’t bring underwear either. The thought made him blush more, and he almost stumbled before noticing that you weren’t in the quiet, dark hallway anymore. You had reached the main work floor, and had stopped to check where your intern was. The both of you sighed in relief when you spotted her asleep in her cubicle. 

Seeing that the coast was clear, you jerked San quickly behind you once more. He scrambled to keep up with you, trying not to make any noise at the sudden movement. You finally reached your office, escorting San inside, and locking the door. You finally let go of him to close your curtains. When you turned back to your husband, still standing where you left him, you pushed him back onto your couch. “Hmm, what should I do with you first?” San watched with bated breath as you stepped out of your bottoms, his mouth watering at the sight of your glistening folds. He wanted to taste you, it was clear. “Aww baby, you wanna eat me?” San nodded eagerly, tongue already out when you walked to him. You pushed his head down, allowing him to lick at your slit a few times before pulling him back up by his hair. “I think that can be arranged later.”

You pushed him down further onto the couch, until he laid down. Spreading his legs and flipping up his skirt, you sank yourself down onto his length, moaning at the stretch. Adjusting so you were fully on top of him, you began bouncing your hips on him, causing him to groan. “I’m going to fuck you until I feel like it, and you’re going to take it like the good little bitch you are, aren’t you? Take all of it, little pillow princess.” San threw his head back, your words almost enough to have him lose himself once again. He didn’t have any problem with your plans. He was your good girl after all.

__________

Tags: @minhyuuk, @hwalysm, @atinyszn, @hijeongguk, @mintmoose64, @k-drizzle, @treasure-hwa

[fangirleaconmigo]

I am feeling all kinds of stuff tonight. So I'm taking a break from my regularly scheduled fandom programming and bringing you this, my post ,as a feminist, about trans rights. I feel like with all the shit going on right now, it's good to let people know where you stand, damn the consequences.

Alright.

Those of you who follow me know that I lost a dear friend to suicide a few weeks ago. She was a caring, kind human being, and a butch lesbian woman.

I was just sitting here tonight going through all of the facebook posts she ever tagged me in, just crying again and missing her. And I came across one very very long post she made a few years ago that I had completely forgotten about.

One day in 2017 she poured out her heart about being kicked out of a women's restroom at the Y again. She was very tall and athletic and had short hair, and this was not the first time it had happened to her.

Her post is lengthy and the heartbreak she felt being rejected from womanhood for her 'unfeminine' appearance is so visceral and so painful. She had experienced an intense amount of violent gender based and homophobic abuse in her life. She felt a deep, deep connection with her womanhood and with other women.

If you've read my other posts about her, you know that she liked to call her woman friends "warrior women" and have "yaya sisterhood" bonfire parties at her house. She always built us up. She gave a shit about other women, so sincerely.

So to see her pain again about this, about the way that she was constantly being 'defined out of' woman hood and treated as a predator made me enraged all over again.

I don't get involved in arguments online if I can at all help it (you all have noticed that I'm sure, I'm here to have a good time). But please let me share something personal here for a moment. If you follow me and were ever curious about where I stand, (being a feminist online during these horrible times) here it is.

Transphobia. Hurts. All. Women. Transphobia. Is. Not. Feminism. Transphobia is hate.

Mari is not the only butch friend I have who has been treated like a predator, kicked out of bathrooms, and been treated as an outsider to woman hood for visibly 'failing' a visual femininity test. It is such a stab to the gut to be rejected by your own people.

Yes, she was a cis woman. But she was still rejected by those who define women down to 'femininity' and 'clocking' as a woman, and being small and dainty and shit. She suffered from that. We all fucking suffer from that. I have another butch queer friend who this happens to. She gets kicked out of bathrooms. It's never happened when I'm there, which is probably better for everyone, because I get so enraged on her behalf just hearing about it. I'm a deeply nonviolent person but in person, I don't know what I'd do.

So let us be clear. All of the anti-trans bullshit going on, all the transphobia going absolutely bonkers online right now, makes literally all of this even worse and more hostile for women. All women.

For as long as we require women to 'clock' as uber feminine, for as long as we police women's genitalia when they walk into a restroom, for as long as we make queer women feel like predators for not conforming to social pressures of femininity, WE WILL BE ABUSING OURSELVES. WE WILL BE POISONING OURSELVES TO FIT IN WITH THE CONSERVATIVE, TRADITIONAL, HOMOPHOBIC MAINSTREAM WHO FUCKING HATES US.

Let me say that again, so this is clear. THEY FUCKING HATE US.

I don't give a shit what they say about feminism. "Oh, we are here to protect you from trans women"

Shut the ENTIRE fuck up. Just stop. I've lived on this earth as a woman for 46 goddamned years. You cannot pee on my leg and tell me it's goddamned raining.

Every time I've been politically disenfranchised, oppressed, underestimated, exploited, IT HAS BEEN BY THE RIGHT WING POLITICAL ESTABLISHMENT. IT HAS BEEN BY MISOGYNISTIC CISHET MEN AND THEIR HELPMATES, USUALLY CISHET UPPER CLASS WHITE CHRISTIAN WOMEN.

The thing that oppresses women are the systems and cultures of misogyny. Are you telling me trans women built those? lmaooooooooooooo get the entire fuck out.

They always say...oh, trans women can't be women because of the 'female experience'. So let this experienced female tell you that I fucking see you. I see you lying through your teeth about suddenly giving a shit about us.

I see you.

Young cis women, budding feminists. Do not let these people tell you that it's feminist to reject trans women. Do not let them say it's feminist to lament trans men and the 'loss' that purportedly represents to womanhood. Fuck that. It isn't feminism. It regressive. It's bigotry.

Do you not see how, every fucking time they talk about trans women they bring up rape?

Why? Ask yourself why?

Are trans women more likely to rape? No. Statistically, factually, they are most likely to be raped.

Is there some fuckn loophole somewhere that says trans women can legally rape people? And we gotta do something about that?

NO! In fact, in the US, it's functionally legal to assault and even kill trans women. These dudes are always fucking getting away with it, they just have to claim they were 'surprised' or some shit.

So then why do they always bring up rape?

Because they are trying to create an association between trans women and predatory behavior. To vilify them. As a Mexican American woman let me tell you that this is EXACTLY like when Trump brought up Mexican people EVERY FUCKN TIME he immediately brought up rape and drugs.

It's creating a connection in the minds of your audience. It is a process of hate. It is a process of dehumanization. And what does it directly precede? An oppressive action. They do it when they want to persecute a group of people and they don't want anyone to stop them.

It's hate and it should chill you to your core. They are out there killing these women! They are abusing and killing trans women, and trying to make you hate them so they can accrue even more clout and power. If you claim to be a decent human being, I'm gonna need you to give a fuck about that.

Then they act like they do it out of feminism.

They say...oh, we support women being 'unfeminine'. Trans men, for example, should just be butches and not trans their genders...

Oh fuck you. I was there. I was called every name in the book for not being feminine enough. It was right wingers who told me I should have been born a man. That I needed to change. To conform.

And now these same people are saying...oh we're on your side. We think we should get rid of gender stereotypes, not have all this trans-ness going.

Fuck you, you don't care about gender stereotypes.

Kids, never, ever, ever, ever trust someone who allies with alt right, far right, homophobic conservatives. They don't care about you. They aren't feminist.

Every election period I am reminded of who my sisters are. My cishet so called sisters who vote right wing with their husbands and ally with their whiteness and their class are not my fucking sisters. (I'm American, but I know this isn't unique to us)

If you support autonomy for women, and I mean ALL women, then you are my sister (or brother, or sibling, I claim you, I fuck with you is what I'm saying). If you lift up other women, the way my friend Mari did, then I claim you.

But if you claim to believe in improving the lives of all women, then that simply must include trans women.

Your so called feminism simply cannot include mocking women for looking masculine. It simply cannot include defining women by their genitalia. It simply cannot include policing women's genitalia or child rearing capacity.

They say...oh define women. Give us a definition then. You lose because you can't define women.

Fuck you.

I don't need to define women. I just need to love women, to be in solidarity with women. And I do. I support us. I volunteer for Planned Parenthood. I give money to pro-choice women who run for office. (again, women who support women) My home stays open to women leaving abusive relationships. I've housed at least five women over the past five years. I don't talk about it online because that's not why I do it. I do it because we need to stick together. So that's what I do. I march. I care. I give a shit.

And I appreciate anyone who stands with us of any gender you've got. Men? Awesome, stand right here. You've got a new gender? Fucking awesome. Stand right here. Hold this sign.

And as for trans women?

They are trying to legislate trans women's rights to medical procedures, to access to their own bodies.

I know what that's like.

They want to humiliate trans women for not meeting this high standard of 'feminine'

Shit, I know that what that's like too.

They want to define trans women by their internal organs and demean them for not functioning as a womb?

Me too, sister.

The thing is, I believe in trans women. In all trans people. Do you seriously fucking think that seven billion unruly human goddamn beings can (or should) neatly fit into ONE OF TWO FUCKING BOXES AND STAY THERE OBEDIENTLY NO MATTER WHAT THEIR OWN COMFORT AND HAPPINESS DICTATES? That's the most implausible, deranged thing I've ever heard.

Gender and social roles exist to serve humans. NOT the other way around.

I will always believe this. Human well-being first. Human dignity first. Social roles if they help, if they fit, if people like them. If not, chuck em.

So, yeah. I know this is a fandom blog. But I'm sitting here reading my friend's pain posthumously and I'm so angry. I'm just so angry.

How do I wrap this up? I don't know. I don't know everything. I'm not an expert or a scientist. I'm an Old and I have to google half the words I see online that people use when they talk about their gender or sexual orientation. (I've learned a lot these past few years on here!) So I'm not the expert. I don't understand it all. (who does??? LITerally NO ONE). I've made mistakes, I'll keep making mistakes. Unproblematic? I don't know her. No one does. Our asses are all problematic.

I just know that I give a shit about people, that I care about my fellow women, and that is literally all you have to do. And anyone who harasses, abuses, or just makes their lives miserable in general is on my shit list.

So yeah. Trans rights, folks. And feminists? If your feminism includes genitalia checks, it's not feminism it's fucking bigotry.

Thanks for reading x

[kerubimcrepin]

Episode 39 - The Love Killer

AKA the yandere dogboy episode. Yippie!

I CAN'T DO THIS ANYMORE. To bring back the meme:

God won't let me die...

The translation is not finished because I do not give a fuck, but here is where I stopped. I doubt anyone else will give a fuck either, considering it's just a keysmash.

He's never beating those japanese-coded allegations.

Silly aprons are a family tradition.

I wonder if this is where Kerubim lived considering he, like... didn't have a house. Or a family.

Oh my god, the shitty magical merchant guy had a shitty magical merchant mom.

I see claws on a catboy and my brain turns off. Kill me.

You can't be talking like that, Ouginak baby. Btw the can says "fish".

KERUBIM LIKES TO COOK. SEE? I TOLD YOU. I TOLD YOU. He's an Amaknean boy, like Yugo. And he's cooking crepes!

Though, he's... bad at it.

Presented without commentary.

Do not be making that face while in the same litter box as Keke, oh god.

Ecaflips use litterboxes confirmed.

UNDERAGE DRINKING REAL.

I bet Kerubim is the one who buys bamboo milk for the gang. He can probably pass for a very short ecaflip man, instead of a teenage boy.

People reading my blog talking about it be like: this is scary, downright creepy.

Also, whatever I imagine happened between Kerubim and Atcham is also scary. Even downright creepy.

The Astrubian lake tower, my beloved.

Somehow, despite being a boy, Kerubim has managed to have two evil adolescent girl friendships that end in your friend (who is a tar pit) sending you messages saying that she will "kill you with a knife" the next time she sees you at school. (One with Patafiks, and another with his literal brother.) This too, is feminism.

I like to think that while in the orphanage, he had to break up like this with Atcham too. Like "I know we're brothers, but um. uh. I don't want to be seen with you anymore. I mean—— you get beat up constantly, and people hate you, and then they hate me when you're nearby. Which is a bummer. Also you threaten everyone too much after they beat you up, and it's stressful. And I can't take it anymore... We can still be friends though,, haha."

I like to think Atcham's response was "I AM GOING TO KILL MYSSSELF AND IT WILL BE YOUR FAULT." or something. I like to imagine he had that ~mentally ill child~ style flair for the dramatic at that age. I like to think they were both awful to one another.

Another thing I like to think to myself, is that Atcham got kicked from the orphanage and ended up in Brakmar, and the reason he got kicked out is stabbing someone. Perhaps Keke, during some argument, — or perhaps someone else, in retaliation to whatever bullying he was going through. And that Kerubim was scared shitless of him by the end.

I just think it's a fun thought.

Basically, if that Ruby girl, Patafiks, and Atcham smoked weed together in a Bad Mentally Ill Bitches Obsessed With Revenge Club, Pangaea would reform.

Since this is already an Atcham headcanon heavy blogpost, I will say, I think using The Love Killer on Atcham would have fixed his every single problem.

Sadly, Kerubim has spent his entire life under the impression that Atcham actually hates him, whereas in actuality, whatever the fuck is happening, is 20 times funnier.

After a single minute of prodding by Joris he switches to therapyspeak and goes "well i need SOMEONE to be mad at. it's like a coping mechanism. if i need to be mad at something, it might as well be kerubim. because he's there. 😥"

It's interesting that with Patafiks and his ecaflip friends it took a second for them to hate him enough to cut all ties.

It's also interesting that this doesn't happen to Simone: Julie and her were on a bad date, but they were on it for a long time. And, Kerubim and Joris were haters for her, but all they could manage is some cleaning complaints.

Basically: Perhaps it can't ruin bonds that are very deep or genuine as fast? An enchantment meant to test the sincerity of a bond, gone awry? Or maybe I'm reading too much into this.

Flash frame!

As I've said in the previous blogposts: I really do think that Kerubim has a crush on Simone. Not in any creepy way — she's just the type of woman he's always liked, — headstrong and stylish, like Lou!

It's very cute. I am a big fan of friendships with one-sided crushes in media, especially when it's not awkward, or pointed out often, (the only exception being Dipper's whole Wendy-shtick in Gravity Falls. I think it was a pretty cool portrayal of the concept, despite being awkward), — because that's a very human thing that we can't really control, y'know?

It makes their friendship much more wholesome to me, personally.

Man. I love this show. And this silly old man. Even though he did fuck up superbly with the whole raising Joris thing.

[aseriesofunfortunatejan]

Thank you for giving my old Mahiru post some love again. I remember this one! And honestly I thought it had more notes than it did. (Proof that tumblr overwhelms you with the notes on your posts.)

I don't hold it (the post) in such high regard today. I think it's pretty plain, but maybe that's because I take this point of view for granted. I think the meat of it is exploring how Mahiru put trust in Fuyuhiko in that moment... Especially as a girl who repeated that she couldn't trust men to do shit... And how brave it made her look. In the heart of action, and possibly because she was faced with her own mistakes, Mahiru's convictions led her to not only put on a brave face but also to believe in Fuyuhiko.

I like that Mahiru is a character who doesn't shy away from telling others the truth to their faces. It's a realistic trait that a lot of people will read as being aggressive, confrontational and such, but from Mahiru's point of view comes from a place of believing in others. I believe that if I tell you the truth you can learn from it and change. I believe in you enough to face you, and not to abandon you.

One main aspect I'd correct about this original post is my misremembering that the very sweet, much softer aspects of Mahiru's personality aren't shown in DR2. It's true that she was more of a softie in DR3, which can be explained not just by the story not having too much time for her, but also by the different setting that led her to behave in different ways. Meeting new people in a life or death situation doesn't exactly put the same pressure on you as... high-school. However, I think it's very obvious that Mahiru is presented with this "tsundere" aspect - a very surface level iteration of the trope, which contrary to what a lot of Danganronpa does, does not exaggerate her traits and instead portrays a fairly realistic teenage girl who doesn't want to admit her feelings. One of the arguments I've had about Mahiru that I feel the strongest about is one in which I had to point out that Mahiru's teenage girl experience is very relatable to people who have been teenage girls in the past - from not wanting to admit when you have positive feelings, to feeling pressured to be more responsible and mature by the men raising you, which both go hand in hand. And within this portrayal, Mahiru is presented as particularly soft. She has a strong sense of needing to be helpful, she blushes easily, she's passionate about seeing people's smiles and once you get her to lower her shield, she's a very sincere individual. The exploration of her sincere wants possibly makes her look like even more of a softie than she was in DR3.

(Ooooh noooo this is turning into another long pooost, from my cellular telephooooooone)

Ultimately, I'm just trying to comment on that old post I wrote. So I'll point out that if I sat down to actively write about Mahiru nowadays, I would most likely shift most of my focus to the unfortunately very common perception that "she hates men soooo bad". It's one of those takes that feel like a direct attack to my person - contrary to any random disagreement or misconception of a fictional character, which doesn't affect me personally - because it takes a very realistic depiction of something teenage girls are put through and insults them for it. Not just that, it also uses those feelings as an excuse to argue against feminism, with the usual "feminists hate men" argument. I don't think it's fine that I have to sit here and randomly see some new user on a Discord server tell me that this experience that comes directly from the misogyny we endure is instead women being the sexist ones! And how many times will this user soon reveal that "actually I never did Mahiru's FTEs. I didn't even know she talked about her dad." "Actually I just saw a Let's Play in 2015 and haven't seen the game since." Not playing the game fully is not a moral failing, but I think there is a lot to say about how this reputation was put on Mahiru's back and how willing so many people were to accept it.

I'll make a quick mention of it, since I recently replayed the game... Mahiru never hates men. Like that's straight up not a thing. (I'd bring up "Were you thinking of Tenko?" as a joke but the same people that argue the way I mentioned above will say she is in fact WORSE than Tenko in that regard. Huh?) Mahiru calls out the guys' bullshit to their face and has little patience for it - this has nothing to do with hating men and is in fact just a result of being more emotionally mature. So like, she's literally right for it. The more negative thing she actually does is assume that men can't take care of themselves. She is to some extent proven right when she notes that Hajime, for example, doesn't have the habit of looking after his clothes - but Hajime, being a resident Decent Person, defends his position that he can take care of it himself. In saying that, not only does he defend his own ability to be responsible, but he also doesn't put that burden on Mahiru. Although Hajime is like that, Mahiru explains that she is used to having to look after her irresponsible father. The one man who raised her. Her reference for what men are like. This man is a useless bum, so when she meets other men, she expects the same (and puts the burden of responsibility on her own shoulders! She's literally so nice about it!) - this is NORMAL. This HAPPENS. Please please please extend some patience towards teenage girls for once in your life. This is literally her dad's fault. She will learn. She does learn. She just needs some time to adapt. We've all had misconceptions based on the way we were raised as teenagers. She is a growing girl, and this is a common result of the way girls are mistreated. The narrative that Mahiru hates men is actively a label the patriarchy needs to put on these representations of girls to ensure that it keeps power over them - and so many people, regardless of gender, are playing right into it.

And if you want to say that it's not that deep, you're right! This is extremely surface level. Mahiru's real personality is extremely easy to find out about, and the treatment of any woman who calls men out as a man-hater is extremely common. None of this is deep because it was bound to happen. But the second someone tries to explain it, you assume they're making things too deep, because you're facing the deep-seated things YOU have to unlearn.

Anyway BONK amirite

[bookofmirth]

I recently read a comment where an El/riel said that Az could never end up with Gwyn just because she is an “irrelevant nobody”, while he in one of “the main and most important characters”. And they go on saying things like “she is unworthy of him”, “he deserves someone insanely great” and bla bla bla…

Beside the fact that the whole post sounded pretty, uhm… aggressive and anti-feminist I guess? It made me realise that maybe some people ship Elucien or El/riel because being Elain’s partner means… more “screen time”?

We know that the ACOTAR series follows the journey of the Archeron sisters, and the only one left is Elain, whose journey basically still have to begin and find a properly conclusion. So, it’s logically implied that, as Nesta’s book became a Nessian book, Elain’s one will also become her LI’s ones (but SJM looooves feminism, at least as Rhysand does ;) ).

Sincerely, I’m pretty sure that, deep down in our unconscious, this is the reason why we all stan a ship or another, and I know it’s kinda a cynical though and not so feminist, since it implies Elain being a sort of “prize” for more screen time and more fangirl internal screams (yeah, because we all are fangirl who just want more hot-fae material at the end ahahah).

The point is, if only we were a little more conscious of it, we could understand each other better and, in an idillic word, maybe stop writing insults each other for supporting a ship we don’t like. We are all on the same boat, thirsty for our best men in fictional books, so there’s no point on being mean or writing a poem about how a character sucks for this or that reason, especially if it could only hurt someone else who feels a strong connection with that character…

Sorry for this looong rant ahaha, but I really like your blog. In your post you’re always polite so I though you where the right one to share my cynical vision of the ship war with. 😊

Hello! Just to be clear, the main reason I am posting this is because you were talking about the fandom in general, rather than being a butt about anyone in particular (other than whoever posted about Gwyn being a nobody, RIP because sjm is going to do what she wants with whatever character she wants. Chaol was just an annoying ass royal guard at first, too.)

I do agree with you about screen time. And that yeah, when we get Elain's book, it will not just be hers but also her love interest's book. I kept insisting on calling acosf the Nesta book before it came out, but... idk, I could go either way. We definitely didn't learn as much about Cassian as I think people had hoped to, but Nesta's issues were at the forefront and more pressing, anyway. The narration did follow Cassian at times, and we got to know some of his inner thoughts. So yeah, I assume that whenever we get Elain's book (and whoever else's we are going to get) then the narration will likely follow her love interest and we will get his (let's be real, it won't be a her) inner thoughts, and probably learn a bit more about him.

(This has made me start thinking about perspective and how people are struggling to understand the difference between first and third person and being unreliable, hang on let me grab a drink 😭)

And I definitely agree that if we could just accept that we are generally here for the same reason - obsessed over acotar - then maybe we might possibly, potentially, not be at each other's throats all the time? People just gotta make this their whole personality though, like if someone on the internet, who they will never meet irl and who otherwise has absolutely no bearing on their lives, disagrees with them, then *pearl clutch* omfg call the police their whole identity has now been put into question.

Calm. Down.

The most annoying thing about all of it to me is that it's all over MEN. People shit on Elain and Gwyn for a DUDE. And maybe it's not because of the ship war but people also shit on Mor for a DUDE. How about we just don't?

I'll be out here, doing my level best to tip the scales all by my lonesome by shitting on the dudes for the sake of Elain, and Gwyn, and Mor :)

Okay but back to your point, that people are actually invested in whoever the secondary character is going to be, I can see that. I've seen plenty of people say they don't like Elain, but will read elucien/elriel. It makes me sad tbh. I always see one of sjm's strengths - or at least one of the things I enjoy the most - being that she centers women in her stories. I used to assume that that's something that other readers enjoyed as well, but I guess not. People can like what they want for whatever reasons they want, but some of these discussions make it very, very clear how they feel about women, queer people, and people of color! Even if they won't say it out loud.

[narutocharacterpolls]

GOSH I'm seeing all the stuff that went down my jaw dropped. People can't just enjoy their fav characters without going for others' necks it's genuinely scary. I gotta say too, it's something I've been noticing a lot since the last and this actual poll, some people been using and abusing the "FEMINISM!!1!" card for the female characters and completely ignoring the point of the poll. You're not supposed to vote for a character because she's a woman, you gotta vote because she's good, she's reliable, she's strong etc. Sincerely it gotten tiring and it feels empty now. I'm not gonna vote for a female character that barely did anything in the series or that has little to zero positive traits because not doing so makes me a "mysoginist!!!! >:(" (not specifically referring to Ino) Seriously, these "fans" really need to drop this fake activism and go outside, take a long, deep breath and think about how they send anon hate for someone on the internet for wanting their favorite character to win in a poll FOR FUN against a character that happens to be a girl. Smh sorry for the long ask, I hope you're okay and I hope these people won't bother you again! :(

I know these things can get really passionate (I mean… Look at how I was with Yahiko LOL) but they’re truly not something to take seriously or get that angry over that you send hate directly to the poll runner. It’s not like I’m that Narutotop99 official poll or anything LOL this is all just for funnnnn you guys are not getting a short story or a Kishimoto drawing out of this. I know I said this already but this is tumblr dot com. Let that sink in lol. I completely understand and also have the anger behind Kishimoto’s work being misogynistic, and in turn having the women be under appreciated in the fanbase, but it’s something we all know would affect how characters are voted for. Anyways, just to be clear I’ve said it before but I’ll repeat it: I have NOTHING against Ino, I genuinely rather enjoy her! It’s just I like Yahiko more lol! Since he’s an extremely minor character I let myself publicly root for him here. I’m sorry if that was unfair to anyone, it wasn’t ever anything against Ino, it was just because it was Yahiko. I’m totally okay, I appreciate your concern ❤️ I blocked the anons that sent me hate so although they can still view this blog they won’t be able to send me anons anymore :)