#sorry i need to be nice

[lovethistoomuch]

I've been on a bit ob a Russell Crowe movie binge in the past few weeks and since he is almost sixty now, many of the movies I've watched were consequently older movies. and when I watched them, it struck me again, how much hollywood has changed in the last few decades when it comes to depicting men.

take Gladiator for example from the year 2000. Russell Crowe plays basically an action hero in it. he is a big, muscly dude, who is very strong and uses that strength to defeat his enemies. and this is what he looks like:

looks like a strong man, right?

in the same year, Hugh Jackman as Wolverine looked like this in the first X-men movie:

in 2013 the same character played by the same actor looked like this:

it's a bit much, isn't it? I mean, he looks so skinny.

and if we go even further back: look at what the womanizer character Face from the A-team looked like in the 80s show vs the 2010 movie reboot:

maybe the difference isn't that big but it really startled me when I watched that movie for the first time. in my mind there was no reason why Face should be particularly muscular since he is the charming one not the one known for being particularly strong.

if we go even further back, look at the charmin womanizer character Hawkeye in M*A*S*H from the 70's.

I know he's a doctor and there is no reason for him to be ripped but I got the feeling if they did the show now, he would be.

I don't know what my point really is I'm just saying I got a bit nostalgic when watching these men. I cannot be the only one who'd rather see more of this:

than this:

also, as a sidenote: Russell Crowe gained a lot of weight for the nice guys and he is a fucking powerhouse in that film, like, when he punches someone, you really feel it because of the weight that is behind it and the shere mass of his body.

(even if this may look different, he's about to break Ryan Gosling's character's arm. I couldn't find a gif of him punching someone but I swear it looks painfull as hell.)

so, in short: can we get big, heavy action guys back? cause I'm tired of seeing these skinny, despite being muscular dudes who look dehydrated as hell and on steroids.

and can we stop making characters ripped just for the sake of it? cause I'd rather cuddle with a guy looking like Hawkeye than one looking like Face from the new A-team movie.

[inkskinned]

you're grabbing lunch with a nice man and he gives you that strange grimace-smile that's popular right now; an almost sardonic "twist" of his mouth while he looks literally down on you. it looks like he practiced the move as he leans back, arms folded. he just finished reciting the details of NFTs to you and explaining Oppenheimer even though he only watched a youtube about it and hasn't actually seen it. you are at the bottom of your wine glass.

you ask the man across from you if he has siblings, desperately looking for a topic. literally anything else.

he says i don't like small talk. and then he smiles again, watching you.

a few years ago, you probably would have said you're above celebrity gossip, but honestly, you've been kind of enjoying the dumb shit of it these days. with the rest of the earth burning, there's something familiar and banal about dragging ariana grande through the mud. you think about jeanette mccurdy, who has often times gently warned the world she's not as nice as she appears. you liked i'm glad my mom died but it made you cry a lot.

he doesn't like small talk, figure out something to say.

you want to talk about responsibility, and how ariana grande is only like 6 days older than you are - which means she just turned 30 and still dresses and acts like a 13 year old, but like sexy. there's something in there about the whole thing - about insecurity, and never growing up, and being sexualized from a young age.

people have been saying that gay people are groomers. like, that's something that's come back into the public. you have even said yourself that it's just ... easier to date men sometimes. you would identify as whatever the opposite of "heteroflexible" is, but here you are again, across from a man. you like every woman, and 3 people on tv. and not this guy. but you're trying. your mother is worried about you. she thinks it's not okay you're single. and honestly this guy was better before you met, back when you were just texting.

wait, shit. are you doing the same thing as ariana grande? are you looking for male validation in order to appease some internalized promise of heteronormativity? do you conform to the idea that your happiness must result in heterosexuality? do you believe that you can resolve your internal loneliness by being accepted into the patriarchy? is there a reason dating men is easier? why are you so scared of fucking it up with women? why don't you reach out to more of them? you have a good sense of humor and a big ol' brain, you could have done a better job at online dating.

also. jesus christ. why can't you just get a drink with somebody without your internal feminism meter pinging. although - in your favor (and judgement aside) in the case of your ariana grande deposition: you have been in enough therapy you probably wouldn't date anyone who had just broken up with their wife of many years (and who has a young child). you'd be like - maybe take some personal time before you begin this journey. like, grande has been on broadway, you'd think she would have heard of the plot of hamlet.

he leans forward and taps two fingers to the table. "i'm not, like an andrew tate guy," he's saying, "but i do think partnership is about two people knowing their place. i like order."

you knew it was going to be hard. being non-straight in any particular way is like, always hard. these days you kind of like answering the question what's your sexuality? with a shrug and a smile - it's fine - is your most common response. like they asked you how your life is going and not to reveal your identity. you like not being straight. you like kissing girls. some days you know you're into men, and sometimes you're sitting across from a man, and you're thinking about the power of compulsory heterosexuality. are you into men, or are you just into the safety that comes from being seen with them? after all, everyone knows you're failing in life unless you have a husband. it almost feels like a gradebook - people see "straight married" as being "all A's", and anything else even vaguely noncompliant as being ... like you dropped out of the school system. you cannot just ignore years of that kind of conditioning, of course you like attention from men.

"so let's talk boundaries." he orders more wine for you, gesturing with one hand like he's rousing an orchestra. sir, this is a fucking chain restaurant. "I am not gonna date someone who still has male friends. also, i don't care about your little friends, i care about me. whatever stupid girls night things - those are lower priority. if i want you there, you're there."

he wasn't like this over text, right? you wouldn't have been even in the building if he was like this. you squint at him. in another version of yourself, you'd be running. you'd just get up and go. that's what happens on the internet - people get annoyed, and they just leave. you are locked in place, almost frozen. you need to go to the bathroom and text someone to call you so you have an excuse, like it's rude to just-leave. like he already kind of owns you. rudeness implies a power paradigm, though. see, even your social anxiety allows the patriarchy to get to you.

you take a sip of the new glass of wine. maybe this will be a funny story. maybe you can write about it on your blog. maybe you can meet ariana grande and ask her if she just maybe needs to take some time to sit and think about her happiness and how she measures her own success.

is this settling down? is this all that's left in your dating pool? just accepting that someone will eventually love you, and you have to stop being picky about who "makes" you a wife?

you look down to your hand, clutching the knife.

[ramvur]

raise crows and they'll gouge your eyes out

[the-kipsabian]

saw a take so fucking rancid on twitter i almost deleted the entire app from my phone jesus fucking christ

first of all ao3 is an archive site. this is like going to the library and saying "oh i dont like this" on every piece of media you find that you dislike and thinking they should be stamped with some sort of a marker just cause you didnt like it

you can always click back and leave. fic writers owe you nothing to explain themselves and their creations. if they have mistagged or miscategorized fics, then i understand, however there are report tools for that instead of yelling at the artist tbh

im not saying free works arent necessarily above criticism. but this is just. fucking wild. its common courtesy to just enjoy stuff (or fucking leave if you dont, the back button is free) and if the artist specifically asks for critiques, then give one - constructive that is, shitting all over someones work is not proper criticism, mind you

i just find it fucking wild people are treating art and archive sites as social media these days like this and everything needs to be policed and ~catered to the algorithm~ like. no. ao3 doesnt have an algorithm. you should be able to fucking tell what you like and what you dont like and steer away from that kind of content and let people fucking be with their art. they dont owe you anything (except trigger warnings i'd argue, but i know some people disagree with that as well for some reason), and imagine how much more energy you'd have if you only engaged with things you liked and spent time looking at instead of going to places where you dont enjoy yourself. let alone spending time telling other people you dont enjoy what they enjoy. what a fucking life

[lazylittledragon]

what do you mean youre technically a detransitioner cause of terf bullshit?

it's a v long story but i detransitioned for a couple of years when i was 16/17, for multiple reasons but mostly because i fell into the blaire white/kalvin garrah chamber of "you have to be This way to be trans otherwise you're not real".

i was already Deeply insecure about myself and my 'passing' and i was led to believe that i couldn't want to wear makeup or skirts, and i couldn't choose not to have bottom surgery, and i couldn't do anything but bind for 12+ hours a day to the point that my ribcage is still misshapen. basically i thought that if i wasn't suffering enough doing 'feminine' things, i couldn't really be trans, so i should just go back to being a girl and suck it up.

the terf bullshit is because i'd seen a lot of terfs/detransitioners talking about the 'dangers' of testosterone and how it would turn me into a horrible ugly evil monster and how there was nothing worse than wanting to be a man. which combined with 'you need to fully medically transition to be valid at all' creates some very dangerous and upsetting feelings to cope with.

it also came from trying really hard to put myself in a little box before i realised that my sexuality/gender are very fluid and it's FINE for me not to have a label and just do whatever i want. when i was 19 or so i went back to using they/them (and eventually he/him) and changed my name again because even though i like doing 'feminine' things, i don't want to be seen as a woman.

tldr: i was conditioned by transphobic/terf rhetorics to think that i was being trans the 'wrong' way so i couldn't be trans at all, so i believed i must actually be a girl if i still wanted to do 'feminine' things. nowadays i am a transmasc who does feminine things because i don't give two shits about what any transmed prick thinks of me anymore.

[eclown4hire]

Please be a lame old man. Please.

[theloveinc]

OlderDad!Bakugou who gets a haircut and his baby doesn't recognize him and he doesn't want his dad to pick him up 😭😭😭😭😭😭

Bakugou has a cry in the bathroom and you have to spend the rest of the night consoling him.

Also Hiiiiiii, miss u, hope youre gooooood

head in my hands bc of this, just thought abt bakugo growing out his hair a little bit right after baby's birth...takes him months to go and get a real haircut cuz he doesn't wanna burden you more than he already has and by the time he's okay with the thought (but only for "AN HOUR MAX," is what he says), he has a mullet thing going on and all this scruff on his chin🥺🥺🥺

so he gets home with his regular ol' haircut, maybe a little shorter just to account for ... not wanting to go again so soon, and baby's HOLLERING bloody murder as soon as they see him and refusing to be taken out of your arms, doing that thing where they're flipping their face back and forth to dodge a kiss...

it's so tragic bc not even a little cheek nuzzling helps to calm them bc bakugo's CLEAN SHAVEN and smells like aftershave instead of like dad when he tries!!!!!!

and after, you watch him kinda sulk into the bathroom, thinking like aw yeah thats a bummer but also pretty funny, too (esp bc the haircut does look good🫣🤓), AND HE DOESN'T COME OUT FOR LIKE an hour???

....until you finally have to ask him if he's okay in there and you're opening the door to him sitting on the toilet seat, arms crossed and red cheeks a little streaky with tears...

LJFKASDJFADSJK it's the cutest, most sad sight you ever did see!! ofc Bakugo tries to deny it, but the way he tears up again (after you're done assuring him he did nothing wrong) when his baby finally realizes it's him and smiles (and then how he refuses to give them up again until bedtime) has his ass. EXPOSED.

(i love and miss u more than air, earth, water, dirt + HOPE YOU'RE GOOD TOO BESTIE ILY)

[theminecraftbee]

alright, so, one more thing i've been thinking about during all of this, and apologies, because i normally try to keep my blog fairly discourse-free in the grand scheme of things. but.

there are hermitcraft fans who act irritatingly morally superior about this fandom. i think it's out of some impulse to try to distance yourselves from any other mcyt fandom. it needs to stop.

the worst behavior during the polls was from the hermitcraft fans.

period.

there were so many instances of hermitcraft fans accusing the other side of cheating, of hermitcraft fans making attacks on the character of their guy's opponents, i have heard what i HOPE are isolated reports of racism in the grian/quackity fight (it was genuinely impossible to keep up with the blog's notes that round without both going into a death spiral thanks to the horrible behavior of scar fans during techno/scar and also without losing track instantly of where we were due to the frankly insurmountable volume of notes, so i did not see it, but unfortunately i fully believe it). i have seen people receiving awful asks - saw people being accused of 'betraying' the hermitcraft side due to voting for quackity or techno, for example.

and for a fandom that likes to act like it's better than the other guys, well. the dsmp fans were generally very well behaved in comparison. (shoutout, for example, to quackblr - i saw maybe one or two possible instances of bad behavior, but for as intense as you all were, you all were normally mostly just retaliatory towards whatever energy was thrown at you.) it wasn't supposed "outsiders coming in" that was doing this bad behavior, either.

folks, you can't blame the dsmp when the problem is inside the house. you can't blame twitter users when you're doing it here. you can't blame the reddit when you're the ones throwing the first death threats.

get off your high horses. we're all mcyt fans. we're all having the same fun. get off your high horses. you can hardly claim we're entirely all "unproblematic" when keralis accepted a sponsorship from the wizard game and xisuma periodically gets another round of getting shouted down over something he said on xisumasays. get off your high horses. you can't claim we're the accepting, good behavior fandom, unlike those other guys, when you're the ones causing the problems.

now, as always, i'm sure this is a law of large numbers thing to some extent. as technoblade, wise as he is, said: sometimes when you get a large enough group, you're going to have a few serial killers. but for the amount that hermitblr likes to act better than Those Other Minecraft Fandoms, and those Other Fandom Websites, it wasn't those guys that made me cry.

to be clear, the majority of you have been well-behaved. but there's a persistent tendency in this fandom to act strangely morally superior to other fandoms. and, y'all? you aren't.

you just aren't.

and the sooner you acknowledge that, the less likely this is to happen again, because once you admit that yeah, we can be toxic too? that's when you can start actually looking at yourself and trying not to be.

anyway, sorry again to make this post. i don't want to be a downer, hence why, outside of the official mod statements of "chill the fuck out", i didn't make this until now. (it also helps that i wanted to wait until i was no longer furious, upset, and death spiraling.) i have seen a lot of the best of this fandom over the past two weeks! i've just also, unfortunately, seen some of the worst, and feel the need to make this statement because it's just... been eating at me.

i don't want this to continue to be a trend. i think we can do better. do so.

[swagginmun]

Take a little shine

[crybaby-bkg]

Bakugou asks you to join him during one of his photoshoots for a pro hero campaign. he doesn’t understand the point of it, nor why he has to only be in his underwear, but he doesn’t mind it much when he gets to look over to your shy little face.

you’re propped up in a corner on an old couch, laptop perched in your lap, its glare bright despite the way you never really look at it. you’re supposed to be catching up on some work, but you’ve been distracted by the glorious sight that is the love of your life.

when he looks at you, do you duck down, eyes suddenly focused on your screen again. it only makes him smile a little, step away from the assistant of the photographer who comes up to him, calls out your name.

“Huh?” your head whips up with a quickness neither of you expect, goes to show just how invested you really were with your work. but Bakugou only grins at you now, jerking his chin over to you as he grabs the bottle of oil the assistant was trying to pour over him.

“C’mere and gimme a hand, won’t ya?” he asks you, boyish smile gracing his face as he tilts his head at you. immediately, your face warms as you put together the request that’s suddenly dropped in your lap. everyone in the studio looks at you, with both envious and excited gazes, and it only makes you shrink in on yourself.

“I hate you.” you mutter under your breath when you finally rise up from your place on the couch, which he somehow hears. but Bakugou only laughs at you, grabs you by the waist when you’re close enough to kiss you breathless in front of everybody, before he’s handing off the oil to you.

“Such an attention whore,” you whisper when you’re close, the air between the two of you thick. everyone tries to look away, give you guys a bit of privacy, but it’s hard when such a soft and amused look passes over the usually rough and hardened hero’s face.

“Only for your attention.” he grunts back to you, holding his arms out for you to start dripping the oil down his skin. it’s a sensual gesture, the softness between you two sliding into something more, something that you only ever reserve for the bedroom.

you tip the bottle over his shoulders until it drips down his chest, massaging it all in with your hands in crude, circular motions. you can see the way he bites his lip, ignore the way he looks at you down the bridge of his nose lest you two create a scene not meant for the public eye. you gather more oil, warm it between your palms, kneeling in front of him to help massage it into the defined muscles of his stomach.

you ignore the twitch in front of you, swallowing thickly, glancing up to Bakugou who hasn’t taken his eyes off of you yet. you mouth at him to behave, but he only grins, something feral.

“We only need it above the waistband.” the photographer suddenly calls out, snapping you back to attention. you stand on shaky knees, nodding with your eyes casted low, ashamed, that your freak of a man had you doing something so…so—

“Go wait in my dressing room, yeah?” Bakugou asks you, pulling you in close to peck at the corner of your mouth. “Gonna wrap this shit up.” he promises you, and you can only nod silently, mind going a mile a minute. but before you go, you remember to grab the oil. just in case.

[obsob]

here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud!!

✷(print shop)✷

[oatbugs]

last night i got home kind of tipsy and very much in tears and my mother told me the force you exert to keep someone in your life is proportional to the force with which they will leave your life. if you have to fight tooth and claw to keep them, their leaving will be just as hard, just as harsh, and just as definite.

[anemonet]

thinking about portraits of young ladies with their cats. and Also suns robes

[mewkwota]

I Know What You Are... You Are Mega Man!

The differences between each Mega is something I love and appreciate, plus it's also fun to compare them side-by-side for it.

I think it's really amusing how they start with robots that slowly reach near-human traits, and then there's a straight-up human. Albeit, he is merged with a non-human being.

And then there's Volnutt. I know he could probably be narrowed down to an "artificial human", but I like the idea of tying him to his celestial origins as Trigger that are still half a mystery.

Such is my running-joke with him. He is just... Volnutt (currently).

[datura-tea]

don't worry kids, your mother can win this level just like she won the second battle of hoover dam. just watch

[moonpaw]