#the ramble is strong for this

[alternativesaga]

Penny for ur brainthoughts on elemental? 👀🤲

I opened my laptop for this *cracks knuckles* oKAY I am so sorry for the ramble for what's about to come but honestly the reading is unnecessary I just need to ramble on what I can currently think of atm

I'm ngl, I was really initially hesitant to watch the movie. I didn't even plan to, but a friend suggested it while hanging out and watching a movie sounded nice to pass the time.

And I'm glad I did! The advertisement for it was truly atrocious.

I'm not gonna go into the worldbuilding aspect of Elemental City. It's nice, but honestly it's not what intrigues me about the movie. However, I do enjoy their color schemes especially at night with vivid dark blues and contrasting eccentric warm yellows and reds in Firetown!

My biggest love for this movie is the relationships between family (the dynamic with Ember and her father especially), and love (Ember and Wade). Which--cheesy, yes, but it was more than that! It had aspects of being a descendant of immigrant parents and what that means to the child, and the potential for culture clashes in everyday life, including relationships.

With Ember and her father, all throughout her life she's had this desire to prove herself to her family that she will be what makes them proud. To her, it's taking over her dad's store. It's not about being perfect, she understands her temper, but she needs to be better. And knowing that feeling all her life, that pressure never goes away. She wants to show that she's grateful to whatever they have sacrificed for her. She has to be a good daughter. Or else it'll seem as though everything she and her parents have done will have been for nothing. A failure. And because the pressure has always been there, it's understandable as to why she never fully questioned going out and doing her own thing because she figured there isn't a point in looking for more than what she has now. Growing up in a family with more traditional views, sometimes its encouraged to keep within the limits of what someone is already capable of. Or sometimes its just saying, oh, yes, you can dream, but don't dream too big! Ember didn't even let herself do that because she already sees how tired her father is. Therefore, it's practically the idea of sacrificing her own life to protect what she currently has--her family.

Culture in itself is a huge aspect of the movie. Peter Sohn, the creator of Elemental also supported this as he provided examples of his own life being first-gen from an immigrant family and what his parents had to go through while moving into a new country. And while its different elements of characters between water, fire, earth, and air demonstrates those distinctions to an extent, it's deeper than that. It can affect a person's way of life and their relationships. (I lied I'm going into the worldbuilding a bit) Element City is a great aspect of showing the accessibility available to the fire people. Each element is provided their own accessibilities throughout the city, but there is minimal for fire. So instead, they essentially have their own Firetown in the outskirts of the city. But also, you know, the topics of racism. It's there and apparent in the most simple way that the movie can make it. But ngl the think with what Wade's step-dad/uncle(?) says to Ember about speaking clear? I laughed because that does happen. It shouldn't! But it does! Without getting into too much detail irl I've been in similar situations and I like how the movie just addresses it so randomly.

As for Wade and Ember, upon watching it the first time, the relationship was cute, but wasn't entirely something I really cared about. It was mainly due to how Wade was so--Idk, bubbly that I was initially thinking like--"damn, really? We're sticking with this?" It's honestly not that deep. It bugged me at first, with how he pushed Ember about telling her father about everything. And to encourage her to leave her current life at her job just to follow an internship she just learned about! He, who moves from job to job just because he can, and her, who has worked her whole life--it wasn't just about culture as elements, it's even social class. I understood the apprehension and fear Ember felt and the anger of explaining that that doesn't just happen. It's not something that can be done on a whim. It's not because she didn't want to, but because she couldn't. It's a damn privilege. At the time, it was like "leaving" meant leaving everything behind and essentially betraying her family to do something completely different to what she believed meant going against their dreams. And man, does that hurt. But Wade doesn't understand it. Which--unfortunately/fortunately, it's understandable. It's not something that just comes to be understood, it's just something someone can bear and grow with. Wade was one of the first things outside of Ember's life at home in which she wanted. She wanted the relationship. All her life, she has put up this front to be strong, show resilience, don't let anything hurt you. She's protective of her home, her mother, her father, her life. She's always happy and fiery in her personality until she just blows up because of all that stress and anger that's left to build up and explode! But then here's Wade, some fool, who the first thing he says after she explains her experience at the museum with her father, "You must have been so scared." Not even knowing her, or her life at the time to an extent, does he still manage to try to connect with her. And even after everything and the rejection, he STILL tries to prove to her that he's willing to try to understand. And they made it work even with all the apprehension!

In all honesty, a lot of the movie was something really relatable to me, and I see a lot of myself within Ember. Even with the temperament at times haha. I'm also glad to have watched Peter Sohn's explanation of the inspiration for it and his connections to it because he just brings in that perspective and representation of being a person from a family of immigrants and how it event affected his own relationship. I know I could probably say more but I'm just going to leave it as this haha Thanks for coming to my ted talk

[erraticreflections]

[gorgynei]

stereotypical werewolf/vampire duo except its like this

[blushouyo]

EGO DEATH

[galactic-rhea]

The Midi-chlorian essay only a few asked

(or, How Is Anakin Skywalker a walking biological horror)

So I made this post and a few were actually interested, also i needed to write down all of this or I wouldn't be able to sleep.

The way I went just from "hahaha they're just mitochondria before becoming forced symbionts and losing all autonomy" to the Medical Horror that would be Anakin Skywalker .

Let me explain, going from this theory, let me tell you that the average mammal cell can have between 800 to 2000 mitochondria. In Star Wars we're told that the average living being, has 2500 midi-chlorians per cell. The difference isn't that big, so we can assume that mid-chlorians are smaller than our real-life mitochondria, and it would make sense since the mitochondria have the best possible living conditions, whereas midi-chlorians, if they're free-life bacteria (as in, they aren't forced to live in the cells of another being) it would make sense if they're just smaller, let's say, sneaky, to increment their chances at living.

So Midi-chlroains don't just produce ATP, Force sensitives have a minimum of 4000-5000 midi-chlorians per cell. That's...a big number, but not very horrific. See, the amount of mitochondria is related to how much energy the organic tissue requires. The cells of muscular tissue and neurons are the ones with the highest mitochondria count. Also the mitochondria in the neurons are mobile and flexible, because just thinking burns ATP.

We can assume that using The Force burns insane amounts of ATP, so I assume it makes sense for Force Sensitives to have big amounts of Midi-chlorians. But! The problem with this is that we're told that the Midi-chlorians are attracted to the force, not born within it. But any multicelullar organism (with a few exceptions) need the mitochondria. Mitochondria have their own ADN, and they're always inherited from the mother, so we can assume that there's two different types of midi-chlorians: The ones any normal being borns with, and the ones that get attracted because of the baby's force potential. Either that, or both the mithocondria and the midi-chlorians exist simultaneously.

Which means that Jedi (or anyone who wants to know, really) would need to take several blood tests for midi-chlorians count. Because a newborns midi-chlorian count wouldn't be the same through a babie's infancy. UNLESS...The midi-chlorian infection (yes, i'm calling it that) ocurrs already since the pregnancy, if the force is strong enough for a fetus to be a possible force sensitive in the future, then I guess the midi-chlorians would get attracted to the parent during the pregnancy as well.

WHICH BTW, IT FITS WITH PADMÉ BECOMING FORCE SENSITIVE, at least for a while, like the discarded ROTS concepts. But also, would mean, that poor Shmi became a hella strong force-sensitive person as well, at least for a while.

And it would be a biological advantage if we take this route, because it would possibly make the pregnant being stronger and with a higher supply of energy.

It also explains why the jedi would only take a single blood test when the force sensitive is just a baby, because the infection is already settled. It can also be argued, that any baby born with a fairly high amount of midi-chlorians (like the 4000 per cell count minimum) would only increase, if only slightly, as the force sensitive grows because the midi-chlorians will get attracted regardless.

There must be a limit, or more like, a balance, that the midi-chlorian and the force potential of the individual met. As in, there's just enough force within the individual for a certain number of midi-chlorian, and all of this is probably decided already during the fetus formation or very early on the baby's life.

Now, Anakin...would be an abomination. Because his cells are so full of midi-chlorians, that it's scary to think how the cells aren't exploding or downright giving malfunctions to the rest of the cellular organelles.

If we go by the route of "midi-chlorians start infecting the force sensitive host mother during pregnancy" it means there were high chances of a misscarriage or an incompatibility between Shmi and Anakin, because holy cow, Anakin is just too much.

But you know what also, it could potentially mean? That Padmé's pregnancy was a risky one, fron the start -slowly nods-. Luke and Leia's force potential was lower than Anakin's, but there's still a lot to unpack there in terms of compatibility. We are never given the exact count of midichlorian count for the twins, but let's pretend it was low enough for Padmé to not inmediatly have a miscarriage. That, and also, maybe, Padmé isn't strong in the force to manipulate it, but maybe just close enough for the pregnancy to be carried to term, let's say, her midi-chlorian count is 3900, close enough.

Something similar with Shmi, I'm taking for granted that she also had a difficult and risky pregnancy (on top of it being a pregnancy she had no agency). It becomes worse because, unlike the twins, Anakin is just...50% human. The only possible genes Anakin has are from Shmi. So he's probably...genetically, almost a clone of Shmi but with a massive infection of Midi-chlorians (yes, this implies that Anakin has homogametic sex chromosomes, aka XX, there's no other possible explanation because he literally only has Shmi's genes to work with!).

But he's Space Jesus, though,so let's pretend that the "no father genes" helped with this and allowed Anakin to grow into a...normal-ish baby despite it all.

Midi-chlorians must be extremelly small, closer to the size of a virus in this case, viruses vary on size and the way they infect the cells is by hijacking the nucleus, which then can produce more viruses instead of its own proteins. This can vary anywhere between a production of 50.000 to 100.000 viruses produced by infected cells.

Which, btw, still fits somewhat with the mitochondria theory, because mitochondrias are believed to have been from a genus of bacteria called Rickettsia, which used to be believed to be the in-between of Viruses and Bacteria due their small size and extreme endosymbiotism.

Still, we aren't even told how many midi-chlorians Anakin had, just that it was over 20.000 and thus the chart couldn't even register it. Even if we're just counting 21.000 midi-chlorians per cell, that's...a lot. Even if the relationship is symbiotic and positive in nature, that's excessive, an infected cell will usually die faster. So Anakin's cellular death must be on record time.

The life span of a cell varies highly depending of the type of cells, white cells can live about 2 days, others about 5, and then there's others that live about 6 years in average.

Forget all of that, Anakin's cells die anywhere between a few hours and a week. Which also means a super fast regeneration and healing (Hey! that tracks, that's how he didn't die even though he should have, on several ocassions).

But that's not the only problem here, the production of energy is strong with this one, too strong. Again this should make the cells burst due too much ATP because of an increase on osmotic pressure. Anakin is producing so much damn ATP (which we can assume it becomes glycogen stored in muscles and fat tissue) his need to be active and just doing something skyrockets, he might as well be the equivalent of being high on meth since birth.

The accelerated cellular formation and death, gives me the horrific idea that Anakin was probably one of these babies that are born premature, but also that he probably was bron with, idk, teeth and already lots of hair. Maybe that's also why he got so tall of all sudden, lots of cellular grow, huh.

Anakin seems to age normally by what are we given by canon. So despite it all, his life-span or aging doesn't seem to be compromised, this is probably because of how strong he is with the Force. In the sense that...he needs the midi-chlorians to handle this much power, but he also needs the force to handle with that many midi-chlorians, otherwise he would have been already born dead.

See, ageing has a lot to do with stem cells. Anakin's stem cells need to be highly prolific and potent to keep cellular division happening at such a high rate, we can infer that any force sensitive has potent stem cells, so the force must inherently affect stem cells. So Anakin's stem cells must be monstruosities in efficiency. If Anakin donated stem cells to someone else, that person would either have a strong inhumne reaction against them or they would get some of the worst cancer ever seen. Again I'm no expert, but the fact Anakin doesn't develop cancer at all as soon as he was born is already impressive. The rate in which Anakin's cells die must be ridiculous, even has a baby, he must have required tons of energy and endure lots of stress which...tracks. The fact he gets electroshocked, burned, gravely wounded or whatever every week or so, must help him to no develop some cancer, which is a bit funny.

But it would also mean he can go long periods of time without eating or resting like...a normal human. Not saying that he doesn't need it, though, but his neural activity and use of the force must be high at all times to burn out that much energy. Theoretically, the production of glycose and glycogen helps him through long periods without sleep or food so he doesn't get long-term damage, or at the very least the ability to keep going, like I said, maybe is like being on drugs all the time; there's still the need to sleep and eat, but he can push his body to keep surviving beyond what's considered normal without having long-term damage. (Don't get happy, this isn't taking into account all of the stuff that happens to him, lol)

The balance between burning too much energy and not burning enough must be insane as well. As Vader, a lot of this probably watered down because all of his energy must be saved for...you know, surviving all the torture. But as a young teen/man amist war? Oh boy.

I'm not an expert, but I'm theorizing that putting Anakin in an induced sleeep must be...fricking hard. Painkillers that work on him? fricking hard. Anesthesia? Probably the same used for big animals, he must be insane and awful for a doctor to work with! Just imagine it, he probably gets injured in such a way that would have anyone else fall unconscious, but Anakin remains awake and with tremendous amounts of adrenaline triggered by a stress response sustented by the extreme amounts of energy that the midichlorians produce.

When it happens in the central nervious system, excess of ATP can produce neuronal dysfunction. In fact, many degenerative mental illnesses have a lot to do with a malfunction of the mitochondrias. There's a corelation also with neurodivergency sometimes, like autism or ADHD. I will leave it there.

And with all of this...I also conclude that Anakin, on general basis, doesn't like sugary things and doesn't even rationalize why, but is because he has already enough glycose. Having something sugary probably gives him a headache.

God what has Star Wars done to me.

[hotdogmchiggin]

I guess DARE wasn’t a thing in Goron City

[bluepandadraws-log]

Ragapom Nation, how we doin'?

[aethersea]

I do think Blazing Saddles handled its one depiction of native americans very poorly, and the full extent of its representation of chinese workers on the railroad is they were literally just there. not even one single speaking line. unclear if this is worse or better than the redface.

it's fucking phenomenal at lampooning antiblack racism though. extremely blatant, extremely funny satire, which is constantly and loudly saying "racism is the philosophy of the terminally stupid at best and morally depraved at worst, and we should all be pointing and laughing at them 24/7"

plus the main character is a heroic black man who has to navigate a whole lot of bullshit but is constantly smirking at the extraordinarily stupid racists and inviting the audience into the joke. the one heroic white character is a guy who was suicidally depressed until he met the protagonist and they just instantly became buds, and he's firmly in a supporting role the whole time and happy to be there. the protagonist saves the day with the help of his black friends from the railroad, and uses the position of power he was given to uplift not only those friends, but all the railroad workers of other minorities too, in an explicit show of solidarity.

anyone saying "Blazing Saddles is racist" had better be talking about its treatment of non-black minorities. it had better not be such superficial takes as "oh but they say the n-word all the time" or "they have nazis and the kkk in there!" because goddamn if that's the full extent of your critique I very seriously suggest you read up on media analysis. there is too much going over your head, you need to learn to recognize satire.

[iminye]

Sometimes i remember that Círdan is just really fucking ancient and am like actually kinda shocked... like this man has seen almost all of Middle Earth's history, from the shores of Cuiviénen to the second War of the Ring and survived. The only other named elves I can think of right now, who have lived for just as long are Ingwë, Indis and Olwë, but they never returned from Aman. Círdan meanwhile? He just stuck around never having gone to paradise and lived. What a badass. I love him.

[sweetbunpura]

Vil, seeing the picture Cater posted: Rook.

Rook: Oui, Roi du Poison?

Vil: Kindly pick up our Potato.

Rook: Ah, Madam Trickster, of course. *Leaves to go get her*

Yuu, about to head to Ramshackle: I feel a disturbance in the force.

Heartslabyul - Savanaclaw

Dorm Outfit Wars...Pomefiore

Yuu is swiftly picked up by Rook before she even has time to open the door. He carries her bridal style while singing her praises as they head towards Pomefiore. Rook gently places her down and Vil gets to work on her outfit, Yuu just accepts it and can feel the look Epel sends her. Once the outfit and her hair, done by Vil of course, they get to the photoshoot. Photos of her and Epel, with Rook, and ending with Vil. He posts the pictures afterwards.

"A graceful photoshoot starring #Pomefiore and our guest, the beautiful Yuu."

Yuu, laying down on the couch: Vil, noooooo....

Vil, walks past: Potato, yes.

The post has over a million likes, and countless reposts. Cater is crying...

Psst, I got a reference pic this time...

[risestarkiss]

Rise Ramblings #265

Well that explains this:

...and possibly this?

[canisalbus]

hello! i've written a short little machete fic, and i wanted to share it with you as thanks for all the incredible art and generous question-answering you've been doing these last few months. i hope that if you give it a look, you enjoy it. <3 keep up all your amazing work! archiveofourown [.] org / works / 50945128

✦ A Voi ✦

[bluerosefox]

CAT Ghost INSTINCTS

Damian comes back to the manor one day with... a new school acquaintance (coughfriendcough) due to the fact they need to work on a school project together and Danny Fenton was the only one in that class that Damian would tolerate to have as a partner.

Everything about the kid seemed normal, heck very normal if a bit shy... or at least that was until the kid suddenly zero focused on a corner of the room and stared at it non blinking. Then after what felt like hours blinked once and returned to normal, chatting away like nothing happened.

....It also doesn't help that Alfred the cat... did the same thing.. at the same time as Danny.

Yeah something is... off about Damian's new friend.

[reiashiftsrealities]

y’all i’m shifting tonight. i’m shifting to my dr and there’s nothing i can do about it. i’m literally the universe and the universe says i’m shifting. no one and nothing can stop me from shifting tonight. i’m shifting period. the stars are always aligned for me and they’re telling me i’m shifting. i WILL shift to my dr. i HAVE shifted to my dr. nothing in the world can prevent this from happening.

[minimalist-quotes]

I will not cry today I will be strong I will love myself I will continue I will not give up