No but like every time I think about Splinter and what he had to go through just to keep the boys alive, my heart hurts for him so badly. Is he perfect? No not at all, but none of them are and by god does he love his sons.
The fact that all of them are alive, and grew to thrive despite the circumstances surrounding them is a testament of how much Splinter loves his boys. He raised four babies following the most traumatic time of his life, all alone with nothing but the sewers to house them (to hide them.) I feel like he’s not given the credit he deserves for all he’s done.
And I get that it’s easy to hold up his flaws and faults when it comes to parenting, I myself like looking into them because flawed characters are super interesting and said flaws make them more realistic and engaging, but he tries, and again, so many others would have given up on the boys or failed along the way but Splinter didn’t.
He’s their father, for all his faults he did his damndest to make sure they survived.
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people always talk about edwin being an older ghost, and he technically is, but he doesn’t have any more experience being a ghost than charles. he was in hell from to moment he died to the night he met charles. he died at 16 and then did not get a chance to go through any growth or learn anything in hell other than torture—he lost those 70+ years. functionally, neither of their afterlives start until they meet, and they have to (get to) learn how to be ghosts and how to exist in this form on earth together every step of the way. anyway, what are you procrastinating right now? i’m procrastinating an essay that was due 4 days ago AND an essay that’s due tomorrow 🤠
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you know, i kind of wonder if ruby, having grown up with a Black mother and grandmother (and foster siblings??), might have picked up on the racism before the doctor did. cause like, the doctor has been white for, in their perspective, their entire life (what with their memories of being the timeless child and ruth!doctor having been wiped, and i think it's reasonable to assume this is still very very early days for 15). whereas, ruby probably had to have at some point as a child picked up on the fact that people were treating her differently from her family, right?
come to think of it — is ruby actually aware that the doctor didn't realize until the end? like — she doesn't still know about regeneration yet, right? cause if she doesn't, then it would make sense for her to have assumed that 15 did pick up on the microaggressions and just wanted to save these people even with that knowledge. really adds another layer to why this sucks for him
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I'm still thinking about how ashamed I was (and am) with being open about my pain because I am so young. It's so hard to feel worthy of having your pain taken seriously when the people around you insist that young bodies are always in pristine, untouched condition and that you must earn your pain through aging. Never is it considered that young people aren't lying or being a hypochondriac for expressing their pain.
Young people can be in life-altering pain. Young people can have debilitating pain. It doesn't matter what age it happens because pain doesn't discriminate. Complaining about pain and doing things to prevent needless pain aren't something you have to "earn" through aging.
If you want young people to be in less or lesser pain, then encourage them to do whatever they can to minimize it. Don't downplay what they're experiencing. Not everything is a lie, not every experience that is different than yours is exaggeration or deceit.
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i think i’ve learned a lot when it comes to not applying my own values to the media i consume
for my script analysis class yesterday, we discussed two gentleman from verona, and nearly every classmate of mine was up in arms about how sexist the story is.
and i'm not saying it's not, or that it's not infuriating to read. but i'm also not putting my energy into getting upset about something written 500 or so years ago. and i'm not about to put my own beliefs onto these characters that are not me. i'm going to let their choices speak for themselves, and interpret it in the context of the story.
all that said, this now brings me to the point of alastor in episode 5, and how viscerally people are responding to it. those of you up in arms about the choices he’s making, and the violent threat he gave husk, you’re missing the entire point of his character, of this place they’re in, of the story being told. he’s an overlord, and he became an overlord by killing much bigger overlords and broadcasting their deaths over the radio.
HE IS NOT A GOOD PERSON.
if you started this show with the belief that every character working the hotel is a good person, you’re in the wrong place. watch the good place if you’re looking for a good wholesome story about getting dead sinners into heaven, because that’s not what this show is about.
you’re more than welcome to hate him after seeing the way he exerted power over a being whose soul he owns, but you’re doing the media you’re watching a disservice by writing it off so quickly. if you don’t like to be uncomfortable watching media, watch something else. this is an uncomfortable show, it handles uncomfortable topics, and it’s going to be an uncomfortable ride, and if you’re not up for something like that, then you should take a break from it and pick up something else. you don’t have to get online and defend your own ideals while you watch a show that goes against your ideals.
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ngl it makes me want to die a little bit that it's so often trans people who feel that sex is mutable but oppression is always-forever based on asab in ways that allow them to demand that information from other trans people. like it feels fucking bad. it feels bad when it's people holding up someone who posts a lot of selfies as transition goals to a degree they have to clarify what they have or haven't done or what "direction" they're going in, it feels worse when people are out there like "caster semenya is not tma" or whatever the fuck. i am, as always, not a trans woman, but here's a sentiment echoed by many of the trans women around me who log the fuck off, quoted directly from one: "people who draw a clear line where they say that semenya or khelif are tme and then call me tma are just calling me male at this point".
like i get it. i really do. we seek community and shared experiences, and we feel betrayed when people have less in common with us than we thought they did. [*more on this later.] but that's not those people's faults and my god in the case i'm seeing play out on twitter rn this poor person did absolutely nothing to intentionally mislead people, just posted pictures of their actual kid self. who looks a lot like i did, because shockingly enough "we can always tell" doesn't fucking work for trans people either!
on the one hand i move in intersex circles which are unapologetically welcoming in cis "dyadic" people with pcos, because it serves nobody to draw a clear line where mutilation or genetics or some ineffable childhood suffering are what make somebody intersex, especially when most of us (esp in places like nz) have never been karyotyped and are being treated for symptoms without a pinned-down cause anyway. the more of us there are the stronger we are, the more pressure we can exert on a medical profession which doesn't like to consider how common outliers are, how uneasy sex is at all. and then on the other hand there's dyadic trans people on the internet who've yelled me out of spaces because a couple of traumatised incarcerated trans women i worked with as a prison abolitionist assumed i was also a trans woman and i didn't immediately tell them my entire csa-involved history of being sexed in varying ways as an infant and child and/or exactly how big my phallus was at birth or where in my junk config my urethra lives so they could decide i was tme or whatever.
returning to the * for a related but not identical thought: i think presuming shared experiences leads to some fucked shit in general! "oh we all had a radfem phase" or "oh we all were channers" no we fucking weren't and it's particularly obnoxious when me & mine are trying to build trans community locally to organise and resist the growing wave of far-right backlash against our existence, and there's just white people in there on a spectrum from "straight up being antisemitic and trying to get the n-word pass" through "handwringing about how they need to make space for people who aren't politically correct" to "handwringing about how brown people are right to be mad at them but doing shit fuckall". and then the other fucking brown people in the space are on some identity politics shit where they're like "trans joy inherently excludes those of us who could get deported" or "big city white queers are killing us by being visible instead of going stealth bc it stirs up the discourse" or whatever the fuck i've heard pulled out this year. there's a bunch of reasons i primarily organise outside of trans spaces and that's one of them. i've never felt more alone in spaces where people claim we're all the same than being left as the brownest moderator or organiser in a space full of people to whom "this is a safe trans space" apparently means they get to abdicate all other responsibilities not to lapse into presumed shared patterns that are fucking racist or otherwise alienating. i've never felt more alone than surrounded by exclusively trans people who sort people into boxes and assume everyone in those boxes has the transition goals they have. like i was on cypro until it disagreed with me to the point of endocrine crisis and now i'm on t and at both those points people were so fucking presumptive or entitled to my reasons or journey or personal relationship w my body
literally just submitted on (and was invited to consult on) the nz law commission's review of the human rights act and like. it's straight up fucked how many nz trans people fully do not comprehend that any "sex assigned at birth" type definitions fundamentally exclude migrants who have no way of proving it and many intersex people who happen to have been reassigned later or many times or never assigned at all as a baby. we can't make law with this shit and that's why we have to have symmetrical protections for all genders/sexes/expressions/presentations, bc naming and defining a protected class here often leaves the people who already are left out from those shared experiences of marginalisation out in the cold when they face violence
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i love and miss baldurs gate so much but every time i remember how the fandom and writing team treats wyll i simply dont want to think about it anymore. like i shouldnt be surprised because this is a dnd video game but it's crazy how far people are willing to go to pretend all of it is not racism. wyll is too boring and yet halsin (who is even more boring mind you) gets more attention then him in fan content, same with rolan and dammon and all other side characters in the game. he's never in anything promotional and it's pretty clear at this point the writers are Not Going to fix it. i love wyll so much i literally want to eat him alive but the wave of frustration i experience every Single Time i think of bg3 does not feel good
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