#they’re just that level of toxic and insensitive and we live for it

[what-is-canon]

THT S6: Beyond fed up with living together again, June and Serena engage in a prank war; Nicole is enlisted as their little helper.

[ikram1909]

something i find very frustrating is how insensitive other blogs on here can be. i saw someone making fun of pedri and gavi’s injuries today to prove that they’re somehow ‘worse’ than jude and it made me quite upset. injuries can be really difficult for players to go through especially young players. but these girls will continue to mock these players for some kind of “gotcha” moment. i hate that this toxic element of football fan culture has snuck its way onto tumblr now :((

There's just something very disgusting and evil spirited about using people's pain against them in any way and especially against athletes whose entire lives revolve around sport and injuries basically put their lives on hold. Like I'm sorry but you ain't winning any arguments by bringing up injuries you just prove yourself to be an asshole and a piece of shit. They're clearly trying to bring the troll culture on twitter here and think anyone will be impressed by their "shady af comebacks 💅" level arguments and we aren't. I've had some of them in my ask box and they're so weird I don't even know how to answer so I just block them. And let's say we humour them and ignore the fact that they're horrible human beings for using injuries as a gotcha moment, how does being injured make a player less good than another? Injuries are unpredictable and could happen to literally anyone at any given moment including their favourite player who literally had to miss the most important game in his club career so far because of an injury and who is literally playing with an injury as we speak. Literally what point are they even trying to make? They're evil AND stupid.

[dylanobrienisbatman]

Omg give us ur rant abt hating d*rklina as a ship.. im petty

Okay Anon, so i saw this the other day and I wasn't in the right headspace to answer but i am now!

So to start off, I am firmly in the ship and let ship category. You like a ship, i don't care. That doesn't mean i won't rag on the ship itself but I don't send hate, I don't really engage with shippers from ships I don't like, and I am liberal with the block button and the blacklist feature. Cultivate your tumblr/online experience, y'all. You don't owe anyone on this hellsite (or any other) a damn thing.

However, I REALLY do hate d*rklina as a ship, and I have a big problem with the way the shippers talk about it, so I hope you were being serious about wanting a rant because here it goes.

As for the ship itself, i feel like the reasons I dislike it are pretty obvious and standard. It's abusive. He is her abuser. He manipulates her. He spends months grooming her and gaslighting her, intentionally trying to get her under his control so that when he literally enslaves her it will go over easier. He never actually loved her, he wanted to use her for her power. It's not complicated, it's not really 'up for debate', that is the way its written, and the author has explained that that was the intended interpretation of her work. I mean he literally sexually assaults her in the second book, and straight up tells her he's going to kill everyone she loves so that she has no choice but to fall to him because she is completely alone in the world. He threatens to skin her alive in the second book when they're on the boat, he has no problem torturing her to get Mal to do what he wants. That's not love. He does not love her. It's pretty black and white, its explicitly written as an abusive relationship. The point was to show how easily powerful men can manipulate and abuse young naive women who don't know any better and try to see the best in people. Alina 'fell' for the version of Darkles Sparkles that he intentionally created to try to control her. Nothing he told her was true, from his backstory, to them both being 'the only one like [each other]' (hello, baghra), to using Genya to convince Alina that Mal had abandoned her, everything he did was manipulation so that he could get her under his control. It is not a romance, it is not 'a ship war', d*rklina is not written as romantic. He is her abuser. Full stop.

There is also the point about him being just a generally horrible person all around. He's not morally grey. He just isn't. He sold an 11 year old into sex slavery, forced her to stay in that situation so he could use her, and then mutilated her when she defied him. He also groomed and abused Zoya, because he saw that she was exceptionally powerful and wanted to use her the way he wanted to use Alina. He enslaved Alina. He blinded and mutilated his own mother. He is a genocidal maniac. He shows no remorse, he doesn't care about anyone but himself and his own power. He is not the type of character that should be romantically shipped with anyone. If you like him, that's absolutely fine! One of my fave characters ever is Kai Parker from TVD. Dude was a straight up psychopath. He tried to kill multiple pairs of toddlers. He brutally murdered his pregnant sister AT HER WEDDING. He is a HORRIBLE person. But I think he's a brilliant character. But do I think he's a good guy, do I want him anywhere near any characters in that show in a romantic way (ehem b*nkai)? Absolutely fucking not. Being a fan of a villain character is fine, but fucking own that shit. Villains can be SUCH good characters, but they're still villains. Erasing the bad they've done so you can justify putting them in situations where they WILL harm the people around them because you can't level with yourself about the bad things they've done doesn't make you 'woke', it just makes you look like you don't understand the media you're consuming.

Which leads me to why I have such a problem with the way D*rklina shippers engage with the ship. They simultaneously wanna say "oh we know it's toxic/bad/abusive/etc., that's why we like it!" and then also they try to claim that it should be endgame, they romanticize scenes where he is abusing her (and by romanticize I mean they literally try to frame his abuse as romantic, not like "oh yeah my ship is interacting!!". those are different things. You can be excited about ship interactions without trying to say that things he is doing to her are actually romantic), they try to argue that he is morally grey/misunderstood/etc., and they straight up try to lie and say he's not her abuser.

If you wanna ship an abusive ship, own it. Be straight up about why you like it. It's okay to be into dark shit, y'all. It does NOT make you a bad person to be into dark shit. But this idea that fiction doesn't impact real life, and that people can't call the ship out for what it is is a problem is a very troubling trend in fandom. Nobody is saying you can't ship it, do what you want. But this idea that these people are 'oppressed' because fans of the show/book continue to point out the facts about the way the story was written and how the relationship is actually presented is fucking insane. Someone saying that D*rklina is abusive is not calling you out, they are stating a fact. It's the story as it was presented. You trying to say it's not makes it look like you have no reading comprehension. And this idea that 'well i'll be on the lookout for evil shadow wizards in real life lol' is such horse shit too. His shadow wizard powers aren't the issue. He is a powerful man who grooms and abuses young women. You're telling me you lived through the Me Too movement and you wanna act like thats not a real threat that young women face every day? You're telling me that you can't see that the actual real life connection you're supposed to be making here? Okay, well you should maybe deal with that and come back to me, because that's an issue.

Fiction is meant to teach us lessons. Darkles is meant to teach us something. He is meant to show us that sometimes, powerful men lie to, manipulate, groom, and abuse young women, and we should be aware of that. The story is about a young woman who is sucked into an abusive situation, and then she breaks free and in the end she is able to defeat her abuser. That is a really powerful story, and one that millions of real life women can relate too. To pretend that that story doesn't have real life connections makes you look insensitive and frankly, kind of cruel.

So basically, in the end, my biggest issue is that D*rklina shippers love to spout this nonsense about 'knowing' it's bad and that he's a villain, and 'that's why they like him', and then turn around and try to say that he's not actually the villain, he's not actually bad, and the things he does to Alina that are abuse are actually romantic and sweet. You wanna ship an abusive ship, you do you, but lets not pretend it's anything other than what it is, but romanticizing and normalizing abuse tactics so you can feel, what? morally superior? Cool? edgy and different? That has real life impacts. You are normalizing abuse. Real people will engage with that rhetoric, and it will make it difficult for them to see abuse when it happens to them or the people around them because they believe its romantic or normal to be treated that way.

You wanna be a villain stan? You wanna ship dark ships? Good on ya, but fucking own your shit, y'all.

[fatehbaz]

agitated, to put it lightly. just read the news that as of 8 April 2020, St. John the Baptist Parish in Louisiana has the highest per-capita death rate from covid/coronavirus of all American counties. and of the 13 Louisiana counties with highest covid death toll, 10 of them sit in the chemical industrial corridor between Baton Rouge and New Orleans. i’m sorry to use what might be an insensitive term: if you’re familiar with Cancer Alley this is probably not at all surprising to you. and the Times-Picayune, among other outlets carrying the story, proclaim, and i quote, “epidemiologists say the cluster of fatalities bears close watching and it’s too early to say what it proves [...]. The simplest explanations, they say, are that South Louisiana has an outsized share of people who are especially susceptible to the coronavirus: people with hyptertension, diabetes, obesity.” the media report, citing doctors, then goes on to suggest that the reason for this death rate is these “co-morbidities” of covid mixed with pre-existing conditions.

“maybe people living in a place literally known colloquially as Cancer Alley are dying because of their high rates of diabetes. people there experience a lot of hyptertension for some magical reason, that could be why they’re susceptible to the virus. really makes you think.”

this is not an honest assessment of the situation. are not the real forces at work here environmental racism, enforced by the state specifically to benefit petrochemical companies, and further systemically enforced by policing, debt, cascading generations of poverty, dispossession, and racialized mass incarceration?

unconscionable, even by American standards, that CDC doctors or media outlets could pretend not to know, to passively and coyly tip-toe around and evade the truth that we all know. to be fair, in 2019 the Times-Picayune did do a major feature on environmental racism in Cancer Alley. and the April 2020 article from Times-Picayune does mention the term Cancer Alley, and offers this statement: “It is a disproportionately black area of the country, and new data are making it clear that the virus is killing black people in greater numbers.” but aren’t we past the point where we merely suggest or imply a connection between Cancer Alley, state complicity in chemical industry expansion, systemic racism, and subsequent vulnerability to pandemic?

we know that the state government has enthusiastically worked in tandem with petrochemical companies to turn Baton Rouge-area black communities into blood sacrifices. for decades. and local sheriffs/c0ps work so hard to keep these victims subjugated. it’s clear as day. so much money and power. billions and billions of dollars in presumptive profit extracted from even single factory. the Louisiana DEQ is simply an informal tool of those chemical companies. in seven parishes in this corridor between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, over 200 separate chemical plants emit toxic chemicals at a scale requiring them to report emissions to EPA.

despite the fact that we can see this happening, in the corridor between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, petrochemical companies have significantly expanded operations in the past few years, receiving huge concessions from the state. since 2015, at least 7 new large-scale petrochemical facilities were approved in this corridor, and at least 5 more major facility projects are awaiting approval. in St. James Parish, where chemical companies already own 14% of the land, a $10 billion plastics facility is expecting to open in 2022, where it will double carcinogenic emissions for the parish. in 2017, the state DEQ was still issuing new permits for individual companies to release over 1500 pounds of mercury into the air each year. even when a local parish administration tries to outflank a factory expansion, chemical companies find ways to weaponize zoning regulations. St. Gabriel Parish is one of the worst affected communities, and it already has levels of carcinogenic air worse than 99% of the US.

in conjunction with the Times-Picayune, pr0public@ published some good maps and statistics in late 2019. by 1993, over 100 pounds of air pollution were released for every person living in Louisiana, and in St. Gabriel: 300 pounds per person. when successfully receiving a permit from the state, chemical companies will often request permission to emit a certain amount of specific individual carcinogenic chemicals, but the state DEQ rarely officially considers the cumulative emissions from a single plant which can often emit multiple carcinogenic chemicals. Kinder M0rg@n just won rights to expand along the city limits of St. Gabriel. the EPA reports that the communities in the US facing by far the highest risk of developing cancer from an airborne source are those living next to a plant in LaPlace, the only facility in the US which releases chloroprene.

environmental racism and its resulting poverty, disenfranchisement, and trauma generally might be occasionally hard to perceive in some cases because of deliberately obscure mechanisms through which Empire tries to dilute its actions and complicity.

but in this case, do we really need the careful measured appraisal of government-employed epidemiologists to be able to see that Cancer Alley kills people?

tired of beating around the bush.

[conduitandconjurer]

how does ur blog personally handle the klaus cult storyline? i saw in ur tags abt how u didn't like it so i was wondering if u were canon divergent about that part of season 2? sorry if this is a weird question lfjdksljfdklsfj

Not even remotely a weird question, and please don’t apologize, Lucky dear <333   Media crit is like My Thing™ so I love this kind of question.

My blog handles the Klaus cult storyline by de-emphasizing it, which is not so much an attempt to duck it entirely as an attempt to encourage others to find it occasionally funny in an ironic sense (more on that later) but mostly to not rely on it as a comedic staple, and even less so as a staple of Klaus’s character.  It’s a symptom not of his growth but of his continued stasis, and probably his biggest stumbling block in the entirety of season two. I don’t go completely canon-divergent and deny that it happened, because I believe there are lessons to learn in the folly of it, and because it reveals character flaws (or perhaps better put, maladaptive coping mechanisms) that Klaus needs to overcome.  

Klaus forming a cult in Season Two is revelatory: revelatory of where Klaus is emotionally himself, and what he needs to change.  It’s uncharacteristic of him, because Klaus is, at heart, beneath the sarcastic bluster and the addiction, a kind and vulnerable person who doesn’t want to control anyone--in fact, I’d argue that, despite his individuality, Klaus is a problematically passive person, who lets himself BE controlled--and cults are ordinarily ways to prey upon and ideologically control socially vulnerable, often young, people, and indoctrinate them in toxic beliefs.  So it’s uncharacteristic,....until you realize that he’s using the cult as one more big way to DEFLECT from his problems, and take the easy out.  Klaus is necessarily weaponizing his queerness and pacifistic tendencies to pad himself with monetary and social support, in the increasingly anti-war, pro-free-love, hippie sixties.  Moreover, he is anesthetizing himself with empty hedonism: this time--instead of with drugs--with the pure, unfettered, casual love of perfect strangers.  

Why (beyond staying alive and safe in a volatile society that is even more homophobic than the 2010s?) Because he thinks the rest of his family didn’t survive the time jump.  The cult signifies an emotional REGRESSION. And why is it ironic? Because in trying to escape his problems, Klaus has circles right back around to them. What is his cult--clawing at him night and day, begging him for words of wisdom, begging for his help, exactly like? The ghosts that haunt him 24/7, knowing only he can see them. The cult  members are displaced and marginalized, desperate for answers, in the same way that ghosts are. And THAT, i will admit, is good writing. THAT is worth not throwing the baby out with the bathwater. 

Is it bad of Klaus to deceive people this way? Yes. Is it irresponsible of the writers to turn a cult storyline into a joke about “haha look at Klaus being eccentric and lazy and conniving again”? Yes.  In fact, the TUA writers have a pattern of irresponsibility and insensitivity when it comes to Klaus as a character. They make a punchline out of his addiction, too. They have characters coded by the narrative as morally superior (Ben, for instance) calling Klaus a loser and a “junkie” (which is a pretty slurry, offensive term for an addict) and shaming him; the writers should not be doing that.  Worse, they equate Klaus’s “usefulness” (read: his intrinsic worth) with his sobriety (he can only conjure when sober, and conjuring is the only “good” thing he can do, which, given t he fact that Reginald raised these kids, isn’t their fault per se, but at some point the writing needs to counter this very wrong-headed, abuse-based rationale, and it hasn’t).  The writers shouldn’t do this, either.  But they do. So am I surprised that the same people who made a punchline out of substance abuse also made a punchline out of cults? No. 

For those reasons, I wish this plot device had never been used (particularly when we talk about squicky things like the sexual flings he’s had with devotees simply because they think he’s some kind of prophet).  I don’t think it’s particularly funny, and I think there would have been other ways to show Klaus diving headfirst into hedonism to avoid mourning his “dead” siblings.  But it happened, and I can’t deny that it’s in-character for a falling-off-the-wagon, emotionally regressing Klaus.  And in its way, it’s a good way to reveal that he isn’t doing any better than he was when he was homeless and strung-out. 

On the other hand, is this a cult on the level of certain religious sects, or Charles Manson?  Of course not.  Klaus doesn’t give a damn if these people exist under his control, agree or disagree with him.  He wouldn’t ask them to do illegal things, or things that cause them emotional or physical pain.  Basically they ride around in a rainbow painted hippie van, travel the world fully funded by a rich elderly lady, probably eat vegan, and live in a gorgeous mansion.  They’re deluded, and that’s wrong, but they’re only deluded about the fact that Klaus is  really not a prophet, and is just spewing nineties song lyrics that haven’t been written yet. In a sense this diminishes the ethical squick, and I can live with it. I still don’t write about it much here, and I continue to decentralize it, because it’s still a dumb insensitive idea about a subject that causes real people real harm. 

[lhs3020b]

Steel Reign

I have some thoughts on the Steel Reign DLC for Fallout 76...

I finished "Steel Reign" earlier. It's the follow-up DLC to "Steel Dawn", but effectively they're halves of the same story. Neither of them stands up on their own. Honestly, they should have been released together.

Now that I've got to the end, I feel ... dissatisfied? It wasn't a terrible ending - it certainly wasn't ME3 levels of badness. What you did in the DLC had some relevance to what happened. However there were also some dropped elements. I let Sheena and Burk go at AMS, for instance - and as far as I know, that was it. Nothing further happened. I also let Tally the Unusually-Sane-Seeming Blood Eagle go at Vault 96; as far as I know, that didn't lead to anything either.

As for the finale, I ended up (very reluctantly) bringing Mad Doctor Guy (whose name I should be able to remember, but weirdly, I can't) in for trial. I got the sense that while the scientists he was working with were a long way from blameless, he was the critical bad influence, and possibly without him they could turn things around and be a force for good. (Also, my character uses, and even knows how to make, mutation serums, so it would be a bit hypocritical to say "no positive mutations for you, ever!") But, I felt discontent with this, and I'm not 100% convinced I made the right choice here. Still, with the Brotherhood basically keeping them under house arrest at Fort Atlas, it's fair to say they haven't gotten away with what they did, and hopefully they can be kept under control. Also, awkwardly, the one who makes the "the universities are gone" comment? She does have a point, however insensitive the phrasing was, especially given the way the Wasteland keeps sprouting new super-science hazards.

(Though, I do find myself wondering, where were these people during the first Scorched plague? If they'd offered their services to the Responders, perhaps they'd have got the vaccine ready in time for it to actually make a difference.)

All of that said, though, I also feel like there was a strong argument for simply gunning the Vault 96 Rusty Hacksaws Crew down. They had after all been involved in something quite horrible. While they agreed to stop doing it, and some of them did express some remorse, a couple of them also seemed to be quite without any hint of a moral conscience. The thing that eventually, decisively tilted me toward letting them live was that gunning down unarmed people was just a bit of an "are we the baddies now?" moment. But, I think you could justify it in this case, and not be 100% egregious.

As for Knight Shin, well, he had a tantrum and ran away. Apparently he's running all the way back to California, where he'll be having a whinge at the Lost Hills BoS Elders. Honestly, by this point I was 100% done with Knight Shin and his toxic mix of arrogance, self-superiority and obvious incompetence. (Throwing himself on the explosives, without even trying to disarm them first? Dumb, dumb, dumb!) Good riddance to him - honestly I hope a Scorchbeast poops on him while he's legging it across Appalachia.

As for Initiate Hewson, I think she’s now my favourite BoS character. She basically reacts to everything the way any of us actually would if we somehow found ourselves there. When she said she needed to go and sit down, I knew exactly how she felt!

The main highlights of Steel Dawn for me were actually the bar trip with Paladin Rahmani - that conversation with her was well-written, and actually humanised her quite nicely. (It also definitively established her as a more sane/pleasant person than Shin.) The sections with Aries through the tunnels were interesting, and I did get a laugh out of how quickly Rahmani's "go in disguise" plan fell apart.

One other bit of the plot nagged me: Marcia. While it was nice that Your Choices Do Matter, and it was nice that being compassionate and reasonable to her was worthwhile, I didn't really like the way that you essentially get forced to make a major decision for her. Personally I think staying with the Crater Raiders wouldn't be sensible - while the Crater crowd aren't Chaotic Evil like the FO3 and 4 Raiders, nonetheless they're still Raiders. But, it should have been Marcia's decision. Part of the whole point of her story was that she was reacting to a lifetime of other people interfering and trying to make decisions for her - which made it ridiculous that you have only two options at the end, and both effectively impose a resolution on her!

That said, when I spoke with her later at Fort Atlas, Marcia seemed a lot happier, so at least it worked out OK in the end.

So, that was Steel Reign. It was OK, I guess? It was nice to have some story content in Fo76 again and to have something to do that's not either chasing Events or remodelling my house, but I don't know? I still felt something was missing, if that makes any sense?

[domreaderrecs]

Oh boy do I have some kink discourse for you. Here’s a wholeass list:

1. A female dominant does not need to be a sadist who is always torturing and abusing their sub. They can be soft and kind and caring.

2. Findom is a valid form of domination and is really a kink, it is not just women faking it to get money.

3. Online domination is possible, although there are more risks involved, it is still a valid form of domination.

4. Submissive black men are allowed to refuse to be called slave and their dom shouldnt be annoyed they can’t used their preferred honorific.

5. Kink and fetishes can be incorporated without the use of the power dynamic found in BDSM.

6. BDSM is still BDSM if the rope is pink and the outfit is white lace instead of red and leather.

7. It should be standard practice for there to be a safe word that means everything is fine so that the Dom can check in on the sub easily without breaking the scene.

8. It is only BDSM when both parties have discussed before hand, otherwise it’s sexual assault (yes that includes Chad who brought out the rope without warning and now Bethany is just going along because she likes him)

9. BDSM has always and will always be driven by the LGBT community.

10. Under 18 year olds do not have a place in the BDSM community. If they wish to learn, then they should do so by finding articles and books, not by asking people involved in the scene.

Yeah that’s about it for now. I’m realizing you probably didn’t want this much but oh well. We’re here now. Let me know what you think!

whewww so much to unpack here lets go its essay time

1. !!!! this is probably one of the most fundamentally misunderstood parts of femdom. it don’t gotta be ball crushing and whipping and calling him a worm all the time, or even at all. this is probably what turns so many women off from trying it or thinking they might be into a more dominant role. gentle femdom is way more palatable for beginners and for me personally, just way more enjoyable (even tho i definitely would wanna make a boy cry from time to time)

2. I used to be one of those people who looked down on findom. I still don’t understand why anyone would be into it tbh but findoms get a lot of shit for no reason... being a sugar baby is so glamorized but if you’re a findom you’re cold, or a bitch, or taking advantage. even though they’re both just people who get money from men who have money to throw at them for sexual favors... but one’s demonized and one’s all the rage... hm i wonder why

3. I have no real/successful experience with this... more on that in number 10

4. 100000%!! the stories i’ve seen from black subs in kink (mostly black women but still) are horrendous. a lot of doms will try to enforce a master/slave relationship, and try to exercise their authority to make subs agree to it. i know it’s a common dynamic, but that shit is wayyyy different to black people... any dom should know that. forcing your sub to do anything is wrong, but especially something so racially, historically, and culturally insensitive. and don’t get me started on the surprise “race play” stories i’ve heard... like i said doing anything without your sub’s consent is wrong but THAT kind of thing requires double consent with a cherry on top. this is part of the reason I’m so scared to enter the kink scene... this shit scares me. thats why the title mistress and master/slave dynamics in general just isn’t for me. it makes me think of my ancestors :/

5. again, 1000% agree. i’ve said this on my blog before, but i’ll say it again. not everything has to be dom/sub stuff. if you wanna peg your bf you don’t have to tie him up and call him names or boss him around, you can just peg him. i feel like ever since FSOG this whole dom/sub thing has grown way out of proportion, but that’s a whole other essay for another day

6. yessss I hate the stereotype of dom outfits as black, latex, leather, way too high to walk in boots... like does it look fire?? yes of course but pink and lace and knee high socks would make a fit that’s just as fire. 

7. this is non-negotiable to me. whenever I hear someone say “I don’t like safe words” or “I/We don’t need a safe word” it’s just a red flag to me. idc what anyone says safe words are mandatory.

8. Yes. I feel like I shouldn’t have to say this but with the rise of the popularity of “rough sex” (again, thanks FSOG) there’s seems to be a rise in people who just assume their partner may be into something, or who just try to experiment on their partner without asking them first. I’ve heard a lot of friends and other girls talk about guys just going straight into choking them, spanking them, and pulling their hair without even asking if they like it (another reason I’m scared to get out there and do stuff, as a person who is very much not a sub or into being treated roughly or tossed around, it’s a big fear of mine). I’ve also seen a lot about girls just randomly trying to finger their boyfriends. If it’s not vanilla, and y’all haven’t discussed it, do not assume it’s on the table. We’ve gotten to a point that kinky stuff is so talked about and normalized (especially with young adults) that people forget it’s actually kinky. 

9. period.

10. okay so story time, around the age of 15/16 is when I started to realize I was into kinky stuff. The preference had kinda always been there, but I couldn’t really place a name to it. I had always felt like an outcast among my peers when it came to the way they would talk about romantic and sexual relationships (I was a year ahead, so all my friends were 1-2 years older than me, so they started to do that stuff earlier than I did) because the things they talked about and liked were way different from the stuff I would think/fantasize about, so I always stayed quiet (teenage girls are very vocal about having choking/daddy kinks but that’s definitely indicative of a much larger problem that i will not get into bc that’s a whole other very very long essay that I will definitely write on here one day but not now). So when I found out what gentle femdom was I felt like I had a community that understood me, and everything just clicked. I would lurk on online communities and I lived for the discourse on there but I could never actively participate because every community had a strict “no minors” policy. They would say exactly what you said, “If minors wish to learn, then they should do so by finding articles and books, not by asking people involved in the scene.” I didn’t want to make anyone catch a case and I didn’t want to get targeted by predators so I tried to follow their advice. i found nothing. There honestly just isn’t that much educational stuff for “kinky teenagers”, or at least none that fit me. There was no femdom oriented stuff. I mean sure there was the standard “consent is important especially in bdsm relationships” but like that didn’t really help me. I had so many questions, that I could never feel comfortable asking my mom or a therapist, and especially not my friends. I didn’t know how to express this part of myself. I couldn’t talk to anyone about it and I couldn’t even watch porn like a normal teenager (we all know the state of femdom porn. its bad) so I was this ball incredible frustration and confusion and i didn’t know what to do with it. So I unfortunately turned to twitter. There I made a little like minded friend. he was also 16 so i thought “this is good, a non adult also kinky teenager who I can relate too. what could go wrong :)”(I’m sure you see where this is going) I was so excited to have a new friend, but ofc, our convos soon took a turn. However, since he was the first person to ever show interest in me, and the only person my age who i could talk to who understood me, i started to catch feelings. But he was a teen just like me, just as horny and confused and sooo immature. He started to pressure me into domming him/becoming his domme, but I refused because I wasn’t ready (i saw on one of those online communities I used to lurk in that its not healthy for your first sexual experience to be bdsm and I took that to heart). he ghosted me. needless to say that “friendship” was toxic. i realized too late that he only saw me as a kink dispenser, and didn’t care about me on a personal level. it also made me realize how not “mature for my age” I was. i say all this to say, NO, teenagers should not be participating in kink. they are not mature enough. however education and resources for them are not where they should be. if we want to discourage them from putting themselves in these situations, we need to better provide them with education and healthy ways to relieve these urges/feelings (i eventually took up writing, it helped me a lot). i feel like had i found a healthier and safer way to express/explore that side of myself, I would’ve never gotten in that situation to begin with. That experience has kinda put me off from dipping my toe into the actual community (well that and the lack of diversity but we’ve already talked about that)

ALSO the amount of very young children i’ve seen in the kink “community” on twitter is alarming... you’re not a little you’re 12

anyways, thanks so much for this essay of an ask and sorry i wrote an essay in response to each one lol but like I said I could discuss kink all day

[beatlejuice64]

Destiel Season 15: A catalog of Supernatural episodes

A catalog of each episode in Supernatural that features scenes related to Destiel. This includes scenes between Dean and Castiel, scenes with other characters that address their relationship with each other, and scenes that allude to Dean’s bisexuality.

Season 15 Summary Analysis

Cas, Dean, and Sam are all grieving Jack’s death, but Cas is reeling much more than the other two. Belphagor’s possession of Jack’s body disturbs Cas more than it does Dean or Sam. Dean’s resentment toward Cas lingers from the previous season, and he is insensitive to Castiel’s acute emotional pain. After finding out the truth about God, Dean has an existential crisis because he’s struggling to feel like their lives have any meaning. Dean repeatedly disregards Castiel’s well-being, and Cas decides to leave after realizing that Dean will not forgive him for what happened to Mary. After spending some time on his own and solving a case by himself, Cas returns to the Winchesters to help fight God with renewed vigor. During a trip to Purgatory, Dean apologizes to Cas for how angry he has been and the two reconcile. Both Cas and Dean’s spirits are lifted when Jack returns, until they find out that Jack will likely have to die to defeat God. As they get closer to defeating God, Dean becomes hyper focused, letting his anger and existential frustration overpower his love for his family, even getting close to killing Sam. Cas confesses his love for Dean, telling him that he’s the “most caring man on Earth.” Dean is devastated by Castiel’s death, but he takes his words to heart and lets go of his anger to embrace a nonviolent solution to defeating Chuck. After Dean dies, he finally feels at peace with himself in heaven. 

My interpretation: 

Cas is hurt when Dean says that nothing in their lives is real. He tries (and fails) to convince Dean that the relationship they’ve built over time is what they can hold onto as real. Castiel is able to let Dean’s mistreatment slide off his back for a short time, but Cas is deeply wounded when Dean shows that he doesn’t trust Castiel’s judgment. Cas reaches a breaking point that is compounded by Dean’s refusal to acknowledge Castiel’s difficult sacrifice of burning Jack’s body to defeat Belphagor. Because Cas has built up a strong sense of self-worth over the last couple of seasons, he knows he deserves to be treated with respect and is not willing to stay with someone who does not trust him. Dean has developed a habit of taking Cas for granted and treats him poorly without realizing the impact it will have. Dean is surprised when Cas decides to leave, but does not stop him from doing so because he doesn’t believe it’s for good. 

Cas attempts to make a life for himself away from Dean, but he can’t stop thinking about him (spending his time fishing because of what Dean had told him about its “meditative qualities”). When Cas is forced to use Dean’s phone number as a back up for his fake FBI identity, Dean takes the opportunity to warn him about Chuck because he still cares about Castiel’s safety. When Cas returns, he and Dean have difficulty being in each other’s company because they’re both still hurt by each other’s actions. When they are tasked with going to Purgatory, Cas sacrifices himself to save Dean from the Leviathans. Dean is afraid he might lose Cas for good this time and prays to him for forgiveness in an act of true emotional vulnerability. He is relieved to later find Cas alive. Cas forgives Dean’s past behavior and appreciates how hard it was for Dean to open up to him.

When Jack returns, Dean and Cas share a caring look that shows that they both know how much it means to the other that Jack is alive. Cas knows that Dean feels guilt for being so close to killing Jack, and Dean knows how hard Jack’s death was on Cas. In that moment, they are happy for each other even more than they are for themselves. When Cas finds out that Jack is likely to die, he tells Dean immediately, having learned to trust him more. Because Dean keeps the truth from Sam, Sam finds it odd that Cas would leave for no reason. Sam is surprised to hear that it did not start a fight between them again because he sees how close they have grown and how connected they have been. 

When going after Chuck, Sam is only barely able to steer Dean away from the path of violence by appealing to Dean’s love for his brother. Dean is not able to fully step away from his anger until after Castiel tells him what he needs to hear—that he is a caring man who always acts out of love. Because Sam is one of the people that Dean has cared for his entire life, Sam is unable to fully understand the burden Dean feels to protect the world, but Castiel has felt a similar burden of protection over Dean that allows them to connect on another level (to share a more profound bond).

When Castiel says, “The one thing I want. It’s something I know I can’t have,” he is referring to wanting a peaceful life together with Dean. This is impossible because of the constant danger they are in (not because Dean is incapable of reciprocating feelings). Cas and Dean have had a close relationship for years but have never verbally expressed feelings of love to each other. They have never gone to that next level of intimacy because being in constant danger has made them afraid of losing it once they had it. Since Cas knows he will die, he is able to let go of his attachment to being with Dean and fully embody the love he feels without fear of being hurt by it. He doesn’t fear losing Dean because he knows his actions will save Dean. Dean’s response to Castiel’s profession of love is to clam up because he can’t handle the thought of losing Cas.

Hearing how Castiel sees him is what pushes Dean to finally let go of the self hatred and toxic masculinity that he has struggled with his entire life. Hearing that a cosmic being thousands of years old chose to reject Heaven and save humanity out of love for him made a huge impact. Dean has continuously struggled to be truly vulnerable and let Cas into his heart because he never felt worthy of that kind of love. Dean’s intense grief at the loss of his best friend is embedded with regret for not getting a chance to tell him how he feels in return. Right before he dies, Dean tells Sam how much he looked up to him for being his own person and not bending to the will of their father, reminding us of Dean’s lifelong struggle with identity. 

In Heaven we learn from Bobby that Cas helped build the new Heaven, and Dean is pleased to learn that Cas survived. Unfortunately, we don’t actually get to see Cas reunited with Dean on screen, but we can assume that they do see each other again. We can only speculate about what their interaction would be like, but I choose to believe that Dean, having let go of his self-hatred and toxic masculinity to embrace his true identity, is finally able to verbally reciprocate romantic feelings for Cas. Reaching this level of self acceptance is the Heaven Dean “deserves.” Jack’s new Heaven allows Dean and Cas to be happy together for eternity, along with the rest of their found family. 

15.01 Back and to the Future

Dean yells at Cas for ideas, and Cas is frustrated that Dean seems to expect him to solve the problem for them: “Cas, come on, man! Ideas! Can you smite our way outta here?!” “No, you saw them—I would be overwhelmed, Dean.” Cas is adamant that Belphagor leave Jack’s body, but Dean insists that they see if the demon can help them. The lingering tension between Cas and Dean from the previous season causes them to argue about the demon.

When the gang reaches the high school, Dean asks Cas how he his, but then walks away before he can finish a sentence: Are you ok?” “Yes, but...” “Good.” Cas looks completely dejected, and Belphagor recognizes the tension: “Wow. Awkward.”

15.02 Raising Hell

Cas apologizes to Dean about not telling him about Jack, but Dean rejects his effort. Cas explains that he’s angry, too, but he still has hope, and he tries to help Dean see why their lives still matter: “Dean, I recognize that I dropped the puck.” “Ball. It’s, uh, dropped the ball.” “Ball, right. I didn’t tell you about Jack, and then after what happened with your mother...” “Don’t.” “You’re angry.” “Yes, I am angry, at everything, all of it!” “All of it?” “This mess, all the messes. It turns out that we’re just hamsters turning in a wheel our whole lives? What do we have to show for it, huh? Tell me you don’t feel conned. God’s been lying to you, Cas, forever. You bought into the biggest scam in history.” “You don’t think I’m angry? After what Chuck did, after what he took from me? He killed Jack! But that doesn’t mean it was ALL a lie.” “Really?” “Chuck is all-knowing. He knew the truth, he just kept it to himself.” “Well, now that his cover’s blown, everything that we’ve done is for what? Nothing.” “Even if we didn’t know that all of the challenges that we face were born of Chuck’s machinations, how would we describe it all? We’d call it life, because that’s precisely what life is. It’s an obstacle course, and maybe Chuck designed the obstacles, but we ran our own race, we made our own moves, and mostly, we did well with that.” “Did we? I’ll tell ya what we do know. Nothing about our lives is real. Everything that we lost, everything that we are is because of Chuck. So maybe you can stick your head back in the sand, maybe you can pretend that we actually had a choice, but I can’t.” “Dean, you asked what about all of this is real. We are.”

15.03 The Rupture

Dean volunteers Cas to accompany Belphagor to Hell. Cas is taken aback by Dean’s bossiness, but he reluctantly goes along with it: “Yeah, Cas will go. You’ve been to hell before.” “Well, it sounds like I don’t have a choice.” “Good. Great. Go team.”

Belphagor notices the disregard Dean seems to have for Castiel’s safety: “You know, your part in all this is, uh, pretty dangerous. I mean, you could die, get trapped in Hell... Your friends might not ever see you again. Funny, ‘cause, uh, they didn’t seem to think twice about it.”

Belphagor tries again to get under Castiel’s skin by suggesting that Sam and Dean don’t care about him: “You are not growing on anyone. Sam and Dean are just using you. Don’t mistake that for caring about you, because I can assure you, they don’t.” “Wow, you learn that the hard way? What is it, Cas, this, uh, seething animosity?” “You’re wearing Jack, who was like a son to me, like a coat. Every second in your presence is intolerable. It’s an abomination. You’re an abomination.”

Cas attempts to comfort Dean but is met with hostility. Dean blames Cas for Rowena’s death and cuts him to the core by suggesting that their failures are always his fault: “Sorry about Rowena.” “You’re sorry... Why didn’t you just stick to the damn plan?” “Belphagor was lying.” “Belphagor’s a demon.” “He was using us. He wanted to eat every last soul to take over Hell, Earth, and everything.” “Yeah, and we would’ve figured it out! After! With Rowena!” “The plan changed, Dean. Something went wrong. You know this, something always goes wrong.” “Yeah, why does that something always seem to be you?” 

Dean looks away after insulting Cas, and there is an awkward silence. Cas is visibly distraught, but not surprised. He confirms that Dean still blames him for Mary’s death and then leaves: “You used to trust me, give me the benefit of the doubt.” “Now you can barely look at me. My powers are failing, and I’ve tried to talk to you, over and over, and you just don’t wanna hear it. You don’t care. I’m dead to you. You still blame me for Mary.” Dean nods. “Well, I don’t think there’s anything left to say.” “Where you goin’?” “Jack’s dead. Chuck’s gone. You and Sam have each other. I think it’s time for me to move on.”

15.04 Atomic Monsters

Sam teases Dean for calling himself the meat man, and they exchange an awkward look: “You gotta stop calling yourself the ‘meat man.’ It doesn’t mean what you think it means.” “Yeah, it does.”

15.05 Proverbs 17:3

Sam is concerned about Cas and tries to contact him multiple times (unsuccessfully), but Dean doesn’t seem to mind his absence: “That Cas?” “Yeah, straight to voicemail, again.” “Yeah, well, we gave him the heads-up on Chuck and Lilith, so what else are we supposed to do?”

15.06 Golden Time

Cas mentions Dean wistfully to someone during small talk: “I had a friend who always praised fishing for its meditative qualities. Wish I found it more relaxing.”

Sam comments on Dean’s lack of motivation: “You know what, Dean? Ever since God got back, you’ve been acting like there’s nothin’ we can do, like nothin’ matters. But we can do this. Man, this matters.” “And that’s why you’re here to kick it in the ass.”

While on a case, Cas is forced to use the Winchesters’ phone number to back up his fake FBI identity. When the sheriff calls, Dean asks to speak to his agent. Cas groans, not wanting to talk: “Hello.” “Cas, Sam’s been tryin’ to call you.” “I know.” “Did you check his messages?” “Nope.” “Right, smart. Why would you? Look, I don’t know if you care or not, but, uh... God—Chuck—is back on the board, so watch yourself. And check your damn messages.” Cas is visibly agitated when Dean hangs up.

While Cas is helping Melly find her son, she thanks him for helping her and recognizes the frustration he’s feeling as burnout: “I needed to step away.” “Burnout’s a bitch, right?” “Yeah. My colleagues and I, we, uh... I guess you could say we had a falling out with management. Well, and each other.” 15.07 Last CallDean goes off on his own after seeing Sam and Eileen happy together, and Sam calls out his odd behavior: “Just hold on. Slow down.” “No, I’m good. I’m good.” “You’re good? What does that mean, you’re—“ “It means I gotta, I gotta get outta here, okay? I just, I gotta... I’m gonna take a drive, clear my head.” “Alone?” “Yeah, you know, you and Eileen, you guys are having fun. I don’t wanna spoil that, you know?” 

Cas calls Dean and leaves a message, frustrated that he isn’t picking up: “Dean, I need you to call me back. Sam is hurt, and I... WHERE ARE YOU?” 

When Dean returns, he and Cas share an awkward moment, and Cas has difficulty looking Dean in the eye. 

15.08 Our Father, Who Aren’t in Heaven

Cas feels uneasy about visiting hell to speak to Michael, and Dean is condescending toward him, implying that he’s a coward and/or useless: “Cas, if you wanna stay here, why don’t you stay here?” Cas responds by angrily glaring at him. 

Dean cuts his hand to provide blood for a spell, and Cas offers to heal his wound, despite the fact that his powers are waning and it’s difficult for him to use them: “Here, allow me...” “Thanks.”

Rowena recognizes the tension between Dean and Cas, who are avoiding looking at each other. She sees right through their denial and gives them advice, encouraging them to make up: “What am I picking up from you two? A wee tiff? Tell your Auntie Rowena.” “It’s fine. Don’t worry about it.” “Boys... fix it! I don’t have many regrets, but the few I do still haunt me. Making Napoleon so short was just bitchy, telling Mick Jagger he had no future when I dumped him, and, well, everything with dear Fergus. Then one day you die, you go to hell, they make you queen, and... you can’t make it right. So fix it!”

Dean and Cas continue to avoid eye contact while they’re in the kitchen discussing Michael. 

15.09 The Trap

When Dean tries to go after Sam, Cas stops him, surprising Dean with his anger: “Dean, will you stop? Just stop being so stupid.” “What?” In Purgatory, Dean suggests splitting up, but Cas refuses, frustrated. Dean reluctantly agrees.

Cas expresses condolences to Dean after they find out Benny is dead, and it leads to a spat: “Well, this place will bring that out in you. Guilt. It was my fault the Leviathan got out. It was my fault we were here the first time. I carry that guilt every day.” “I know you’re sorry, Cas. About Bel, about Mom.” “I was talking about Jack. I already apologized to you. You just refused to hear it.” “Sorry I brought it up. Maybe if you didn’t just up and leave us.” “You didn’t give me a choice. You couldn’t forgive me, and you couldn’t move on. You were too angry. I left, but you didn’t stop me.”

When the Leviathan capture Cas, Dean is upset and tries to find him. Afraid that he might lose Cas forever, tearfully he apologizes to him through prayer: “Cas, I hope you can hear me... that wherever you are, it’s not too late. I should’ve stopped you. You’re my best friend, but I just let you go. ‘Cause it was easier than admitting I was wrong. I don’t know why I get so angry. I just know... I know that it’s, it has just always been there. And when things go bad, it just... it comes out. And I can’t... I can’t stop it. No matter how... how bad I want to, I just can’t stop it. And... and I... I forgive you. Of course I forgive you. I’m sorry it took me so long... I’m sorry it took me till now to say it. Cas, I’m... I’m so sorry. Man, I hope you can hear me. I hope you can hear me.”

Dean is elated when he finds Cas alive. He pulls Cas in for a tight hug. He tries to apologize again: “Okay, Cas, I need to say something.” “You don’t have to say it. I heard your prayer.”

15.10 The Heroes’ Journey

Dean has a dream sequence in which he tap dances to “Let’s Misbehave” by Cole Porter. He dances with a lamp and blows it a kiss, then dances on top of the map table while enveloped in light. Sam teases Dean about his relationship with Cas as Dean is holding Garth’s son, who is also named Castiel: “This Cas keeps looking at me weird.” “So kinda like the real Cas.”

At the end of the episode, we see Garth dancing with his wife, and Dean says, “You know, I always thought I could be a good dancer if I wanted to be.”

15.11 The Gamblers

When the Winchesters return home to find that Jack is back, Dean takes Jack’s face in his hand and looks hard at Cas, who gives him a kind smile.

15.12 Galaxy Brain

Dean and Cas share a friendly drink while talking about Jack’s return. 

15.13 Destiny’s Child

Cas displays a deep understanding of Dean’s character while conversing with Jack about Mary’s death: “You know, Dean, he feels things more acutely than any human I’ve ever known, so it’s possible he could work through this. One day he may explode and let it all out, and then breathe deeply and move on.” “How long will that take?” “I don’t know.”

15.15 Gimme Shelter

At a faith-based group gathering, Castiel recounts his experience breaking away from Heaven’s authority: “I do know what blind faith is. I used to just follow orders without question, and I did some pretty terrible things. I would never look beyond The Plan. And then, of course, when it all came crashing down, I found myself lost. I didn’t know what my purpose was anymore. And then one day something changed, something amazing. I... I guess I found a family. And I became a father. And in that, I rediscovered my faith. I rediscovered who I am.” 15.16 Drag Me Away (From You)Sam remarks on how odd it is for Cas to leave for no apparent reason (because Dean did not tell him): “Cas just bailed, I guess. He’s didn’t say anything to you about why he left?” “Not really.” “And you guys didn’t get into a fight or something?” “It’s just Cas being Cas.” “Right.”

15.18 Despair

Cas decides to go with Dean instead of staying with Sam and Jack. When running away from Death, Cas leads a wounded Dean to safety: “I’ve got you.”

When Dean blames himself for the predicament they’re in, Cas realizes that he can save Dean by summoning The Empty, and uses his final moments to tell Dean how he truly sees him: “I always wondered, ever since I took that burden, that curse, I wondered what it could be, what... what my true happiness could even look like. I never found an answer. Because the one thing I want, it’s something I know I can’t have. But I think I know... I think I know now. Happiness isn’t in the having. It’s in just being. It’s in just saying it.” “What’re you talkin’ about, man?” “I know... I know how you see yourself, Dean. You see yourself the same way our enemies see you. You’re destructive and you’re angry and you’re broken. You’re... you’re daddy’s blunt instrument. And you think that hate and anger, that’s... that’s what drives you, that’s who you are. It’s not. And everyone who knows you sees it. Everything you have ever done, the good and the bad, you have done for love. You raised your little brother for love. You fought for this whole world for love. That is who you are. You’re the most caring man on Earth. You are the most selfless, loving human being I will ever know. You know, ever since we met, ever since I pulled you out of Hell, knowing you has changed me. Because you cared, I cared. I cared about you. I cared about Sam, I cared about Jack, but I cared about the whole world because of you. You changed me, Dean.” “Why does this sound like a goodbye?” “Because it is. I love you.” “Don’t do this, Cas. Cas...” “Goodbye, Dean.” “What?”

After Cas is gone, Dean sits on the floor and sobs into his hands, ignoring a call from Sam. 

15.19 Inherit the Earth

Sam and Dean offer to go along with Chuck’s story and kill each other to bring everyone back, and Dean mentions Cas specifically: “I’ll kill Sam. Sam will kill me. We’ll kill each other. Okay? You pick. But first, you gotta put everything back the way it was. The people, the birds, Cas. You gotta bring him back.”

When Lucifer tricks Dean with a fake phone call from Cas, he rushes to the door as fast as he can to let Cas in.  After stripping Chuck of his powers, Chuck assumes they will kill him, but Dean refuses: “Is this where you kill me? I mean, I could never think of an ending where I lose, but this... after everything that I’ve done to you, to die at the hands of Sam Winchester, of Dean Winchester, the ultimate killer. It’s kinda glorious.” “Sorry, Chuck.” “What? What?” “See, that’s not who I am. That’s not who we are.”

15.20 Carry On

Dean asks Sam what’s bothering him after noticing he looks sad: “I’m just... I’m thinkin’ about Cass, you know? Jack. If they could be here.” “Yeah. Yeah, no, I think about ‘em, too. You know what? That pain’s not gonna go away. Right? But if we don’t keep livin’, then all that sacrifice is gonna be for nothin’.”

As Dean is dying, he tells Sam how much he has looked up to him: “I’m so proud of you, Sam. You know that? I’ve always looked up to you. Man, when we were kids, you were so damn smart. You never took any of dad’s crap. I never knew how you did that. And you’re stronger than me. You always have been. ... I love you so much, my baby brother.”

Bobby explains to Dean how Heaven has been improved: “Heaven ain’t just relivin’ your golden oldies anymore. It’s what it always shoulda been—everyone happy, everyone together. ... It ain’t just Heaven, Dean. It’s the Heaven you deserve, and we’ve been waitin’  for ya.” 

When Bobby mentions Cas, Dean is pleasantly surprised. “Jack did all that?” “Well, Cas helped.” Dean smiles, and Bobby raises his eyebrows knowingly. “It’s a big new world out there. You’ll see.” Dean smiles wider.

[bellamygateoldblog]

best and worst relationships?

There’s a lot of varables to consider here, and I’m feeling sick and bored out of my mind, so i’m going the long way round. This is a nightmare to read on mobile, im so sorry.

‘Best’ and ‘Worst’ labels depend on a number of things:

— Story of the pairing

— General intrigue and how enjoyable their dynamic is to watch

— Chemistry of the two (or more) characters

— Presence (or lack of) valuable relationship qualities (is this relationship healthy according to the world it exists in?)

and the importance of each of those differs from person-to-person.

Note: Sticking to popular relationships. I’ve blocked names, but I’m also throwing it under a Read More because it’s long and negative. It’s largely anticlarke because she’s a terrifying character and her mere existence derails most of her dynamics. Ship and like whatever you like, I hate fandom gatekeeping. But you asked so let’s go.

There’s also no order to this. Welcome to chaos land.

Best ‘Best’ List: objectively good relationships

— Linctavia

— Marper 

— Spacekru

— David and Nate Miller

— Raven and Sinclair

Unconditional love, mutual respect and support, found family, would die (and live) for the other. I can’t find fault in them.

Memori

I had a bit more to say about this one because there’s something so highly romantic in two people abandoned by their clan, cast out, finding each other in a literal desert wasteland. Like they’re each other’s oasis. In meeting Emori, Murphy finally found acceptance after spending far too long alone, and being told he was worthless by people who’s approval meant something. And Emori having someone prepared to do whatever it takes to protect her and make her happy is everything I could’ve wanted for her. They’re so deeply in love.

Best List

Becho (pre-season six)

Your local enemies-to-lovers. partnership over co-dependency. Compromise. Affection and emotional support from both sides. Willing to throw themselves right into line-of-fire for the other. A cut ‘i love her’ scene which i’ve personally decided wasn’t cut. I LOVE THEM.

Arguments against:

- ‘killed’ Gina (moreso she aided her death) while acting on orders from her superiors

- ‘killed’ Octavia while acting on orders from her superiors

- killed Ilian/ attempted to help Roan win conclave over Octavia

- almost killed Clarke (season five)

- happened offscreen

Arguments to discredit previous arguments because I’m sick and tired of seeing them in the pro tags:

- Echo was Bellamy’s enemy through those first three listed events. Bellamy had no reason to expect loyalty or respect, or anything else from her. She was always looking out for her people just as Bellamy was his own. That was quite clear.

- In fact she actually tried to help Gina because she was important to Bellamy, apologised that she couldn’t and did save Bellamy’s life despite their enemy status.

- ‘killing’ Octavia was not in cold blood. It was actually an accident.

- This one is nonsense. She wanted to kill Clarke during season five “even though she’s important to Bellamy”…after she just left him to brutally die and held Echo and her family at gunpoint and threatened to kill them. Context matters.

- not a fan of the time jump either, but if you’re able to accept the Madi-Clarke relationship which also developed offscreen, you can deal with this one.

Hard to talk about this one without defending it. Echo deserves better than season six Bellamy, who would abandon her in order to chase a woman he knew for 6-ish months 6 years ago. I say it’s his loss.

Jonty

It was a beautiful relationship and then a beautiful breakdown of one. I really enjoyed their dynamic. About to get controversial and suggest Monty could’ve taken a different approach with Jasper. I’ve never committed genocide and had to learn to live with it while watching my best friend suffer from the decision, but I do have clinical depression and somewhat relate to Jasper. There was this scene, where in the background you see Jasper go to hug Monty goodbye and he avoids it. It was such a small but sad detail. I felt Monty wanted Jasper to deal with his grief in a certain way and got frustrated when he didn’t. Sometimes he could be insensitive and blaming, and i think had there been more communication their friendship could’ve been very healing for the both of them. I think we learn at one point Jasper actually thought Monty was “fine” and didn’t even realise or understand that Monty hurt too. Jasper had this tendancy to only consider his own feelings, and this put a rift between them. Tough love doesn’t work for everyone, and I think Monty’s sometimes cold approach held that rift in place. The simple fact that both sides are so easy to understand and empathise with, and that this gradual undoing of what was once an incredibly strong bond was inevitable, made watching it all wonderfully bittersweet.

Zaven

This was good, but it was so rushed it made me bitter towards them. While it was Raven being thrown with yet another random guy, this did strike me as much more meaningful than her fling with Wick and I think it would’ve been a lovely relationship had it been able to continue. I think this was that love Raven deserved. It’s a damn shame it was used as just another level of torture for her. I think if they had let it develop more naturally and not been so full-on so soon, and of course if the actor hadn’t opted to leave the show, this would’ve been up on my best ‘best’ list.

Dropping this here: being intelligent isn’t actually important when pairing Raven up. Fandom acts like she needs someone “on her level” or “at her speed” (shudders), someone to challenge her, which has always come across as very demeaning of characters with less intellectual capacity, as if they’re less than Raven because of this when they are absolutely not. This mentality also denies Raven of partners that can value her and treat her well just because they aren’t Stephan Hawking. A romance isn’t a competition or a class project. Shaw was good for her, not because of what his brain could do, but because of who he was.

Bellamy and Octavia

This bitch toxic, YEET. I adore it. I really do. It’s such an intriuging and complex dynamic. The poisonous nature of their relationship is neither of their own faults, they’re both a victim of their own circumstances and, in Octavia’s case, a lack of socialisation and, by extension, non-understanding of grey area is also intrinsicaly linked to it. They truely love one another, but aren’t learned in how to show this in healthy ways. Makes that back-and-forth an entertaining watch.

Main grievance:

Beating your brother bloody while he’s chained down and unable to defend himself against you is disturbing and inexcusable in any context, and whether or not you’re grieving is irrelevant.

Neutral List

C//exa

Placing this one here just because i don’t care about this relationship, but did like bits and pieces. I think this one ended before it even started. For me most of it’s appeal is in the gradual moulding of the dynamic and the many phases it went through. I did find intrigue in that journey. However the fact the show reminds me at least a few times a season that Lexa was the one has me digging my heels in. I hate being told what to think.

I don’t really remember it all that well so I don’t necessarily have strong opinions. I know some people do. At this point in the show I was growing more and more annoyed with Clarke, and eventually i went from liking Lexa to being indifferent to her, so a dynamic consisting of them both was the least interesting thing in the world to me by the time it started heating up.

I will say this is probably one of the only significant relationships Clarke has where she doesn’t ultimately have more power than the other half. There isn’t a mechanism there that allows one to use to do harm to the other to advantage themselves; Lexa is the commander, but Clarke is constantly pushing back and Lexa respects and listens to what she has to say. There is literally a shot of Clarke backing the most powerful person on the ground into a table. I think Clarke was a positive influence on Lexa, but during this time Clarke was slipping into worse and worse versions of herself.

Some thoughts:

I found it was innappropriate for Clarke, as a leader of her people who’s primary concern is supposed to be what’s best for them, to have become romantically involved with the commander of the people they hadn’t a stable relationship with, and who ultimately has the power to strip them of all freedoms. It’s so easy for those romantically and sexually charged feelings to cloud and confuse what are extremely important considerations to be made about the people back home. It wasn’t a very responsible relationship.

On the flipside of that, from this relationship Lexa was convinced to grow into peace. Which is quite obviously a positive affect. Though I found it was odd that Clarke, just a random teenage girl from space, would be (successfully) telling the commander how to manage her people when she herself was not at home overseeing the climate of her own. It just has some very weird implications.

Lexa’s betrayal at mount weather, actually a very silly and counter-productive decision, was what forced Clarke to lose her humanity in what was the most traumatic event of her entire life. The fact it was forgiven so easily was hard for me to get over.

M//rphamy

Season five was good for them. It seemed as if they’d grown, were much closer, more respectful, and more affectionate. Then season six happened, and Bellamy was back to treating Murphy like he was beneath everyone. He started again to talk about how therapeutic it would be to hurt him, as he has, physically, many times in the past. Just tearing open old wounds at this point. In season five he reminded Murphy he wasn’t worthless, that he did belong with the group, but in season six he went back on all that, and put Clarke ahead of him at every turn, and prioritied her feelings over his very real pain. They’ve had a complicated history of violence, usually coming from Bellamy’s more hot-headed side.

I put this here because it’s an immensely compelling dynamic. These characters work well together, there’s heaps of chemistry and allure in each of their interactions. It’s just an entertaining time whenever they share scenes. But despite that, I don’t know where I stand with them and I don’t know where they stand with each other as of season six.

Worst List

Be//arke

There is a mess of negative thoughts inspired by this relationship about proportionate to the amount it’s shoved in my face. Clarke is just no good for Bellamy. Is the concise way of putting it.

Here’s a list of some of them which I usually like to bury deep inside my head for sanity purposes:

Ignoring whether or not actions were for the people/the only option and focusing solely on how the relationship is affected by them regardless

- Clarke has a tendancy to view the most important person (pre-season five) in Bellamy’s life as necessary collateral damage. She has brought/almost brought harm to Octavia on multiple occasions, the two most notable being TonDC and the conclave. Both while being on the same side as Bellamy from a political standpoint, and both while his friend who he had reason to expect affirmation, consideration, and loyalty from. Clarke betrays those key values. This happens again in season five when Clarke’s Plan-A solution is to “take her out.”

( this is also what sets her apart from Echo, who was never in the position to make her own choices. Clarke has that agency and control that Echo’s superiors had, but never Echo. )

- and saying that, I think it’s incredibly hard for Clarke to maintain any meaningful relationships being in the position she’s in. How do you have friends when you have to always put them second?

- speaking of the conclave, Clarke held Bellamy at gunpoint in order to prevent him saving his sister’s life. She said she “didn’t pull the trigger” and that was that. All is forgiven. However she did pull the trigger in what was an attempt to scare him into submission so I really don’t even know what to say here. The writers kinda forgot?

- they aren’t equal. They haven’t been co-leaders since season one. He was demoted almost immediately to second-in-command beneath Clarke. Clarke is the leader, the literal head. She makes the choices while Bellamy gets her out of the trouble she usually gets herself into, risking himself and others in the process. It’s a racist trope. It’s the ‘white princess and her brown knight.’ She has agency and power and he’s her loyal soldier, subordinate. Inequality isn’t inherently a bad thing but this power imbalance between them is utilised in harmful ways.

- speaking of “the good knight by his queen’s side,” this comes across as codependency. Clarke relies on Bellamy’s support, validation and loyalty, while ‘the heart needs the head to tell it to beat.’ That’s paraphrased from season six, that’s an actual line in the show. Bellamy needs her to guide him, to “keep [him] centred,” that’s another line from the show. That’s still not enough? He literally tells us in season six that he needs her, and has needed her in the past if his psychosis episode is anything to go by. He has impeccably low self esteem and views himself less than. I mean if you need further convincing of they’re inequality, just look to their places on the ark which are quickly reinstated once it reaches the ground. Clarke is upper class, she’s later the daughter of the chancellor, she comes from a loving family, from one of (if not, the) more well-off stations, she’s educated and she has passions, but Bellamy? From the poorest ark station, raised by an emotionally abusive mother, a janitor, his whole motivation his entire life has been to love and protect Octavia. I think a lot of this devotion he has for her comes from a place of idolisation, of seeing something in her he wants for himself.

- now this ugly trope could also come from an absense of Octavia. The moment they get to the ground Octavia is on a journey of self-discovery. And eventually, she becomes her own protector, and she finds a home in Lincoln. So naturally Bellamy looks for the closest relationship he can find that resembles that old one. It’s Bellamy and Clarke. Now, instead of Octavia, he’s driven by and found purpose in protecting Clarke. In fact, the Clarke-Bellamy dynamic has so many similarities to the Octavia-Bellamy one I can absolutely see the sibling like quality to Be//arke.

- Clarke abandons Bellamy after mount weather. She leaves because she can’t bare the reminder of “what [she] did to get them here.” So she leaves and instead Bellamy is the one forced to see the faces of the 48 every day, reminding him of what he did to get them there. Clarke comes across as completely oblivious in this entire situation. Bellamy and Monty are both written using the word “we” to refer to the mount weather genocide, but Clarke? It’s “I” and “me” every time. It’s as if she truely believes she’s the only one suffering from it, she’s bearing it so they don’t have to, except that isn’t true at all and that fact is so painfully clear. Later she tells him she knew she could leave because the people had him, but who did Bellamy have? He dealt with that weight and that grief alone because the only other person who could possibly understand, the one who pulled the lever with him, ran away. After she had convinced him not to in season one. She then comes back informing him she’d been acting on behalf of her people in Polis, without the people’s own knowledge or consent, but i digress, and he’d just ruined everything. So much for co-leaders. And he blows up at her, and we see how badly this action hurt him.

- In season five she leaves him to die out of spite and took her daughter to the people he saved her from at the beginning of the season. It could’ve been avoided, but she decided to punish him. That’s all it was. Don’t give me none of that “I had to!!!” she screams in season six to mindspace!Octavia. Bellamy was forced into role of father at just 6 years old and has proved time and time again he was prepared to risk it all in order to protect his child, there was nobody more equipped to handle Madi than him and her yelling in his face that he couldn’t understand was perhaps the biggest betrayal of them all.

- In season five she tortured and almost murdered his entire family. After switching sides again at the end of the season, all this pain inflicted was meaningless. You can talk all you want at me about Clarke’s *reasons* but all she did was take the path of most destruction towards the same end-point. It was just unnecessary violence caused because she had this desperation to take the wheel.

- all of this works because the writing is always in Clarke’s favour. The show is framed in a way that makes Clarke sympathetic, emphasises how much causing others pain hurts her, and that means that she’s never held to any of these actions, she might get a stern talking to but she’s forgiven insanely easily and allowed to go on with no actual change.

Pr//ncess M//chanic

Unfortunately, from what i’ve gathered, there’s a lot of racism in this one just as there is in Be//arke. I mean the entire nature of the relationship relies on the elevation of Clarke and the narrative power to demote Raven to ‘second best’ and prop over and over again. Raven, a girl who works her ass off to make most of the victories in the show possible, actually spoke the words “she saved us again” after launching a pod from an exploding planet into space and fixing the ark while space walking. It’s mindblowing. Raven’s (and others’) successes are handed to Clarke on a silver platter and we’re just meant to eat that up and blindly accept that Clarke is our one true saviour. I’m not going into this because it makes me feel sick and Raven deserved better.

Unrelated thoughts:

I don’t see their relationship as friendly at all post-season two. I got the impression Raven actually didn’t like Clarke, but it was all very complicated.

I also think it’s terribly convinient Raven never found out the true nature of Clarke’s relationship with Lexa because I don’t believe she would’ve ever been okay about Clarke again if she had (if the writers were going for realistic).

Madi/Clarke/Abby

Clarke strapped a torture device around her daughter’s neck for means of control and activated it under the guise of protection and that isn’t okay in any world or any context. Madi is a little girl who is dependant on Clarke and Clarke betrayed that trust. Those shock collars were used on her early in the season, she experienced the torture herself and still used it on her child. A lot of Clarke’s more unfavourable and/or unhealthy behaviours and characteristic are also present in Abby, which leads me to believe those are a product of her upbringing. Like mother like daughter, Abby also electrocuted Raven. Abby and Clarke have this strange rival-like relationship and I find it particularly cold, maybe because they’re so similar.

Abby and Raven

Abby has physically harmed Raven more than once. Out of anger and spite, or out of desperation. People hurting each other on this show is pretty standard and while this isn’t as overwhelming a mistreatment compared to others, her hitting Raven while she was acting chancellor was a pretty gross abuse of power. Its a visual display, with Abby’s imposing figure looming over a sitting and emotionally vulnerable Raven. We’re supposed to view this, i think, as mother-daughter. Abby says very early season one that Raven reminds her of Clarke, but she’s never shown treating Clarke in the way she does Raven. I liked the relationship during season one. From then and with Abby’s slow descent into villainy, not so much.

Ontari and Murphy

*She raped him. Next.

Cl//phy

Clarke is a cause/reason, whether direct or indirect, of a huge chunk of Murphy’s suffering, all of which she’s never been held accountable for due to Murphy’s position as undesirable. I, along with Murphy, had to be told she cares about him in season six because her otherwise complete disregard for his life has been pretty apparent.

Notable mention:

Chaining up him and Emori like dogs and promising to sacrifice the woman he loves, against her will, for the greater good after he saved her life. He has to beg her, plead with her and her almighty god complex, and it’s all quite uncomfortable and eery. (She later draws a picture of this event in her sketchbook which is…kinda weird.) And, in true Clarke fashion, she refuses to accept responsibility for this action and hides behind the same old trend of gaslighting and screaming “i had to!!!” I can’t root for a friendship between these two no matter how fun their back-and-forth can be. Especially since I can’t recall a single time they’ve shared a nice moment. Oh, and here’s a post about why Clarke and Murphy will never bond over isolation and survival.

*The clashing of Ontari and Murphy’s personalities was hilarious and I enjoyed watching them on screen together.

[channelmono]

A lengthy, LENGTHY post on keeping yourself mentally safe AND politically active during this time of racial/political unrest

I wasn’t expecting the need to do another writeup again, but here we are, haha Taking this break day to discuss the NEW giant elephant in the room: the US has flared up in a gigantic racial conflict again after the high-profile death of another black American at the hands of the police. There’s no beating around the bush since everyone’s already talking about it, and if you haven’t heard about it til now (which hey, my analytics say some of you are pretty young, so I wouldn’t blame you), it’s been a greatly aggressive mess that everyone is feeling the pressure of getting involved in. Now, I usually don’t like getting publicly political, but that doesn’t mean that I as a creator am not a political person. Far from it; the moral matters of how people should be treated, what constitutes as “justice” and what to do when “injustice” is committed, are all very important subjects that we eventually learn to form our opinions on through life experience and interacting with the world, and will always remain relevant due to how we exist in the world under governments and cultures. It’s dishonest to say we have no belief in stuff like that, and ultimately unhelpful to deny our say in it. Politics are very important, and they matter. But I’m not here to get into a full filibuster about why you should support Black Lives Matter and be informed of the protests going on and what motivates them. The thing is that I trust all you lovely monitors and have the faith that we’re generally on board with at least adjacent beliefs in how the world should work -- the life of innocent people matters, racism and other forms of hatred are bad, killing people is bad, the misuse of authoritative power is unjust, etc. If someone asks me to explain in a multi-paragraph spiel why I believe people should believe these things since they think otherwise… I’ll kindly tell them “no”. Instead, similarly to my COVID-19 writeup, I just want to talk about some tips to help deal with the day-to-day of this ongoing conflict; not necessarily discuss politics in deep detail, but rather the handling of politics in your everyday life, especially during times of controversy. This is a VERY rough time for many people, online and off, and I think it’s as important to keep yourself healthy during this time of extreme tension as much as it is to stay strong regarding the conflict in which we are all in one way or another embroiled in. This writeup might be a little cluttered and clunky since many of these points are greatly interconnected, but just bear with me through this, and I hope the points I make will make sense in the end.

=========================== 1) JUSTICE IS THE BOTTOM LINE =========================== Let me establish something as clear as I possibly can right off the bat: The ultimate goal of rebellion (especially this one based in activism towards the better treatment of black lives) should not be to create stress to psychologically destroy everyone in the vicinity, but to inspire change for the better. The systemic allowing of authorities to misuse their power for hateful purposes should not merely be a seen as an excuse to get angry at the world, but an injustice that must be corrected, and the bottom line of protest is not merely agitation, but actual change. I feel like this should ultimately be pretty obvious for a lot of people, but because change is a very difficult thing in general and because the protests have provoked turbulent response, it’s very easy to lose sight of what we’re actually doing and why, especially for the young adults whose first exposure to complex and nuanced politics is through times like this. Make no mistake, at the end of the day, getting justice for George Floyd and the countless other African-Americans lost to police brutality is the goal. So… why is this controversial? Well, because... =========================== 2) POLITICS ARE COMPLICATED (AND WHY WE MUST BE CAREFUL AND PATIENT WITH IT) =========================== Kind of an obvious statement, but politics are VERY complicated, often to the degree that they can be extremely overwhelming, especially to the young and inexperienced. So I want to start by just making some sense out of the chaos to make what we’re all dealing with more digestible for later. There’s a lot of ways politics can be controversial that I feel should be obvious on a fundamental level of “not agreeing”, but the facet I want to focus on is the fact that in discussion about what’s “morally correct”, morals are not synonymous with the rhetoric and methods with which they’re presented. Often times, people who agree on the same target goal will disagree on the actual means of getting to that goal. We’ve all been in the situation where we got angry at someone for saying something in a really bad way, and frustrated because we also thought “...they still have a good point,” but the delivery made both of us look bad. This is everywhere in politics, and is also just a fact of life and humanity; everyone will have their own opinions on what to do and why to do it, and they may not all be completely the same. That doesn’t mean that people who you don’t 100% agree with are definitively less worthy of being on your side, nor does it mean that people you don’t 100% DISAGREE with are suddenly worth your time. The point is that nuance should be expected… and that’s not unforgivable, contrary to what some people might want you to believe. There’s a frustrating narrative that’s sadly common (or at the very least, disproportionately vocal) within activist movements which social media isn’t helping with, and it’s the classic “you’re either with us or against us” philosophy. Again, this can manifest in many ways, but the prevailing modern take is the oft-unspoken assumption that anyone that doesn’t immediately qualify as an ally must be considered an enemy, ignorant, and/or at the very least worth showing contempt to unless they do something that suddenly makes them qualify as an ally. In other words, assuming the worst of people until proven otherwise. I’ll go into more detail about this further down, but simply put, I do not agree with this approach at all because it inherently roots itself in the presumption that personal philosophies are set in stone, and that it requires a Herculean amount of effort on the other party to change for you. Yes, YOU, the absolute moral victor who not only never needs to change or rethink anything by virtue of being the victor, but also gets to choose what counts as acceptable in the first place. This is not to say that activism is inherently dishonest or bad, merely that again, politics are complicated. This current Black Lives Matter boom and the various responses to it are very complicated, and despite this movement being a thing for a while now, not everyone is an expert on everything that happens and why, especially as it continues to develop. The most egregiously unhelpful part of the “people who are ignorant are enemies” assumption is that it forgets not only that ignorance is the default state everyone born into this world starts as, but also that everyone is perpetually still learning, and no matter what, it’s always possible to change your mind, whether you're 15 or 50. In turn, this implicitly encourages the rejects people who DO want to be accepted as an ally to a cause they ultimately believe in to rush into action just to stop being antagonized for not “getting it.” For your own safety: DO NOT RUSH INTO POLITICS, especially since the current-day responses to some of this conflict can get dangerous. It’s not even a case of getting peer-pressured to getting into a live protest only to do something that gets you shot at with rubber bullets -- you could end up saying something you didn’t realize was insensitive until it was too late, you could mistakenly contribute to a false charity fund or untrustworthy organization merely posing as an activist group, or basically anything that only affirms peoples’ perception of you as ignorant. Please, take your time. As sucky as it is to deal with peer pressure from the toxic people on your side, also remember that you’re not alone. Not just in the sense that there are people who want to understand and become better and more informed like you, but also that there are people who are on your side who WANT you to become better and more informed and will understand if it doesn’t come immediately. Being able to safely say you holistically “understand” is a process that requires a lot of time and thought ruminating about your morals and your place in the world (like, to adulthood at the least, basically), and I can say for sure that many people involved in these activist movements have grown up still understanding that. Also (and this is just a thing on life in general), don’t let mistakes damn you. While everyone should strive to do their best, especially regarding matters as critical and controversial as racial inequity in the justice system, mistakes should not be completely inescapable dead-ends, nor should they be seen as such. Every misstep is a hidden lesson. Did you fall into the trap of misinformation? Give yourself new perspective of what misinformation looks like to avoid it in the future. Did you realize that you’re being strung along in potentially negative action you don’t understand? When you’re skeptical, do your research. Did you end up in a confused place because the causes you followed have come into conflict? Give the time to reassess what you fundamentally believe in and why. In short, Be patient with what the world throws at you. Your friends and allies will love you more for being careful and smart than merely being the first to say something. =========================== 3) REMEMBER TO BE PATIENT WITH YOURSELF TOO =========================== Now I realize that the suggestions I just shared in that last section might read off as being easier said than done, which... yknow, it is. Again, change is difficult not just on a system level, but on an individual, personal level, even when they have to do with the same thing. But now with all that backdrop out of the way, let’s talk directly on mental health. Again. I’ve already discussed my thoughts and tips on keeping your mind healthy in the context of the COVID-19 lockdown (which still is important since the pandemic is still going on, LINK: https://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1sr7go6 ), and most of the stuff mentioned are still applicable to this new climate that I generally recommend still being practiced on a personal, self-care level: understand that even at the darkest, there will be dawn, keep yourself stimulated with regular activity, and be sure you get plenty of healthy sleep so you don’t spend your waking days tired and unable to lift yourself up. Of course, this is a new situation where the priorities are a lot different, namely that rather than merely keeping your sanity during a very passive time, this new situation is about social interaction, participation, and in general being active in big, drastic ways. That said, I don’t believe the fields are mutually exclusive -- I believe you can act for the greater good while preserving your own health, despite what some might be saying. Going back to that bit of internal gatekeeping of “you’re seen as an enemy until proven otherwise,” another part of what makes this thinking ultimately harmful is that the “line” which “separates” ally and enemy can be incredibly hazy and effectively whatever it wants, with the biggest narrative as of writing being that “silence means you’re complicit in allowing evil, and that if you don’t ever speak up, you’re a bad person.” Now there’s a lot to unpack from this, because this is a case where there is a good point, but it’s buried in vitriol. There ARE valid reasons for why someone would stay quiet, namely that not everyone has the same emotional/psychological bandwidth. Maybe people are having breakdowns because everything in the world angrily and violently collapsed onto them at once. Maybe they had burnout because the exposure dulled them of their usual ability to care. Heck, maybe there’s a way more corporeal issue in that they’re afraid for their own safety because of what they do or don’t say and are afraid of the consequences being literally dangerous, like they might lose their job or are gonna get targeted IRL. But does that constitute a free pass to sit this entire movement out? Well, as nice as it would be, the answer is “no”. Once again, the point of this movement is achieving justice, which I believe is a very worthy cause to take part in should we have the ability to, and I’ll be sharing stuff further down for those who can (and I believe most of you can). But the important thing to know now is that we and our brethren are not completely equal in terms of how smart, vocal, durable, or ultimately able we are, and that's FINE. I want you to know that just because you might not be as big in that regard as your peers, that doesn’t instantly make you “less” of a good person who can do great things, and I don’t think it’s at all wise to see action in a "flawless", black/white way. We all matter. And now is a time to do our best to stand united with our friends to affirm that black lives matter. Now, before I share in tips on how to go about being an active participant, since you’re here reading this huge-ass essay, this is a good time to reflect on where you stand from a mental health perspective, which is just as important and should be regularly checked upon as brushing your teeth. In addition to more visceral emotional reactions like secondhand trauma, other things like burnout and depression don’t just suddenly APPEAR. They creep up on you over time through prolonged stress, and they should be identified before they become a really crippling problem. No matter how passionate you are about advocacy and how much you believe in yourself, recognize that we are all still human, and that there are times that we need to stop, relax, and breathe. (like, literally! Take slow, deep breaths!) Ask yourself: are you physically feeling fatigued? How often? Is your overall morale good? What is your frequency of good to bad days, and is there any correlation you can find that dictates when they occur? Do you get instantly anxious and depressed when receiving certain stimuli like bad news? What about “good” stimuli like being empathetic or compassionate? Give yourself a patient, honest answer: how “well” do you feel? Like from my COVID-19 post, I want to remind that I am not a doctor who can necessarily prescribe things like therapy or give definitive treatment for every individual who reads this based on how they’re doing, and these suggestions are more stuff that I believe will help cope and take care of yourself just from experience. With that being said: • If you are feeling constantly exhausted, finding yourself unable to consciously self-care or work, I cannot recommend a healthy, regular sleep schedule enough. Do your best to be honestly consistent about it, your body and mind will thank you so much for good rest! • If triggering topics are festering in your head, learn how to practice meditation and grounding techniques. Meditating and grounding can be regularly used to help sway your mind away from the harsh topics your mind may wander into and fixate on in any given moment, and can be very helpful in allowing yourself to clear your mind from stress, as well as to refocus on what you’re really experiencing in the present. There are so many ways to approach these forms of treatment to try out, but just some online resources to get started: https://www.theawakenetwork.com/free-online-meditation-resources-for-the-time-of-social-distancing/ --- https://www.healthline.com/health/grounding-techniques • If the constant exposure to these ongoing, intense news and their discussions are becoming too much for you, it is completely within your right to turn off your social media, news, and halt your advocacy in general for a bit. Again, these are important, crucial topics which we ultimately fight for because we believe that things should be better, but if you start to feel legitimately traumatized and unable to properly handle new information to work, you don’t need to continue exposing yourself to it. Give yourself a break from it, you can join back any time once you feel strong again. • Stay connected to the people you trust. I firmly believe that empathy and friendship are more powerful than any kind of indirect threat like peer pressure in helping you stay productive while happy. You were probably already doing this because of the COVID-19 stuff, but now is especially a good time to come together with your friends and loved ones. No matter what, we all need our safety, reassurance, and love, and while we may not always be able to unload all our grievances onto each other (everyone has a right to their own mind they should take care of), there is nothing to be ashamed of in seeking out solidarity. That is a big thing with a movement like this, after all! • If you really believe you need professional help for constant distress, then genuinely good professional help is out there. If you have concern in finding proper mental health treatment (especially for black people), programs out there specifically with it in mind. https://twitter.com/mayarichardsun/status/1265676677549559809 One last point: it’s also important to understand that coping isn’t exactly the same thing as “self care”. We all have an obligation to act in ways that can in one way or another be seen as stressful, but also understand that not all methods to cope with it are equally healthy. What I suggested are very low-maintenance, low financial cost techniques, but there are other techniques like spending cash on clothes or (for some of us), binging on alcohol or other substances. Techniques like that aren’t strictly invalid as coping tools in moderation, but understand that ultimately, self-care is a form of reducing the harm you receive, and it isn’t necessary to cut into your finances or physical health just to not feel bad. Be safe about how you cope! =========================== 4) READY? GET SET. GO! =========================== There are so many ways that you can help with the Black Lives Matter movement that honestly, I’m kinda nervous about going in great detail about all of them since I feel like I might misword stuff that explains themselves very well already, haha. But here is a big, constantly-updating resource that I currently trust and follow: https://blacklivesmatters.carrd.co This Carrd page by @dehyedration is a very extensive page on “Ways You Can Help”, with links of direct support and additional educational guides for those who wish to be further educated (which should be all of us!). Included are: • Petitions to sign for justice not just for George Floyd, but other victims felled to police brutality (very low-cost and contains details for international). • Text/call contact info towards local govt. representatives who can bring George Floyd and others to justice. • Links to donation funds towards the victims, the protesters, to black-owned businesses, and other charity institutions (includes a segment for international links!). • Guides for live protesters, compiling resources for understanding your legal rights, links for assistance (including access to pro-bono lawyers), and tutorials on how to stay safe and treat injuries should things get hairy. • Additional resources on educating yourself on the topics of Black Lives Matter’s rhetoric and goals, the issues of systemic racism at large, debunking of common misinformation and outright hoaxes, and more! There are MANY way to contribute to the cause right now, and a surprising amount of it you can do in virtually no time. Signing the petitions alone can be all done in 5-10 minutes (give or take, given how many tabs you can open and keep track of at any certain time haha), and even if you can’t donate, there are so many ways to you express your support without needing to have to deal with pointless fights against Twitter trolls. Once again, I firmly believe that contributing to and being aware of a powerful, meaningful cause and keeping your sanity are not mutually exclusive. We can act for the greater good, and we can be healthy about it, so long as we remember to be patient with the world as much as we should be patient with ourselves, and together, we can do amazing things. And one final reminder: just because this is an important subject we should all do our part to get involved in this, that doesn’t mean you must sacrifice everything else in your life right now. As important as the discussion is and as critical a time it is for it to be visible, that doesn’t mean that you should be completely engulfed in it. You can still enjoy what makes you happy, healthy, and motivated enough to take part in this movement. To paraphrase many a wise men: take it, but you can take it easy! I’ll be leaving you with a link to a Twitter thread I found of a bunch of nice news regarding the ongoing protests, which contrary to what a lot of the media might say, is not all looting, fires, and tear gas. The people out there ARE there as a show of solidarity as much as much as support, and it's genuinely beautiful. https://twitter.com/tomakeupwityou/status/1266947871686959106 Stay safe, and stay healthy out there, lovely monitors! (and keep washing your hands!) 🖤🖤🖤

[lexosaurus]

Do you ever feel lonely being asexual? I feel like none of my friends understand what it's like and it's so isolating and terrifying and I feel do broken. Have you ever felt this way? How do you handle it? Sorry if this is too personal.

Hey anon! I hope you’re okay! I also hope you’re ready for a long post because that’s what this turned out to be!

Firstly, you are NOT alone. I think every ace feels this way at somepoint or another. It’s super common, especially since there really aren’t many out-aces, there’s virtually no actually helpful resources out there for aces, and most people legit have never heard of asexuality or believe it to be something that can be cured either through sexual acts or medication. The fact of the matter is, that being asexual is very much an isolating experience and it can be really really hard to become comfortable with.

For me, I grew up in a conservative town in a liberal state. So while no one was outwardly aggressive towards lgbt people which gave me a false sense of security, coming out was ROUGH. I lost all of my friends to the point where in highschool I wasn’t allowed in a party that everyone else in my grade went to, I got in a massive fight with my mom and ended up having to move out for a few weeks (don’t worry, we’re super close now), and I ended up going back in the closet which only ended up with me being coerced into having sex a bunch until I finally reached my breaking point. I realized I had to figure this out or I was gonna lose it.

Moving away from that environment was probably one of the main ways that I was able to start feeling okay. I moved to a nearby city, dropped all my old friends, made new ones, joined new activities, etc etc. I made sure my new friends knew I was ace pretty much right away, but I didn’t really talk about it past the casual, “Yeah, I’m asexual. I’ll date anyone but I won’t have sex with anyone. It hurts my body and I don’t like it.” and then that was it. I mean, I answered the inevitable questions that followed as if no, they weren’t dumb questions or invasive, even if maybe deep down I thought they were. But other than that it was just a casual mention, made sure they were chill with it, and then moved on.

And knowing that my friends were totally 100% okay with me being ace was like the best thing ever. They don’t UNDERSTAND being asexual on a deep level, (not even now after 3 years of living together), but I don’t understand how their sexualities function on that deep level either. It’s a two way street. And sometimes with people I’ll even ask them, “Okay but how do you KNOW that you like like someone like that?” and then they’ll have to take a step back and be like, “Oh shit, I guess it’s just innate. Oh damn I’ve never thought about this. Huh. Wtf.” You know, just showing curiosity in their feelings and showing that it’s okay to ask “obvious” questions really does a lot.

But tbh, my friends and I now will talk music or memes way before we’ll talk lgbt stuff. And half my friends are lgbt too. I just chose new friends who I connected and related to on deep levels that had nothing to do with sexuality at all.

The second big thing I did, and this is gonna sound counter-productive, was I unfollowed every ace-centered blog on Tumblr. No joke. I went through my followers and unfollowed EVERY. SINGLE. ONE. I found that a lot of ace blogs, even ace-positive blogs, made me feel good for a second when I saw those ace-positive posts, but in the long run they ended up being really detrimental. Thinking about asexuality like something that needs constant validation is not healthy, no matter how positively it’s presented.

I was in a place where being asexual wasn’t normal in my head and I needed to normalize it, not validate it. Because validating asexuality comes AFTER normalizing it, not the other way around. So I needed to not constantly think about it or read about it or see it all the time. I needed to just watch it casually in modern media (aka watch Bojack Horseman and Saiki K on Netflix), talk about it with REAL PEOPLE irl in casual conversation occasionally, and just in general start looking at it like something as normal and mundane as my brown hair or dark eyes. Asexuality isn’t special, it’s not cool, it’s not sad either, it’s just another normal thing that contributes to me as a person.

So now when a follower reblogs an ace-positive post, I feel good. Like truly good. Not that fleeting good that will disappear in 30 secs and remind me that “oh yeah, there are a lot of people out there that hate aces.” I just get an occasional reminder that, “Oh yeah! I’m ace! Nice! I’m dope af!” 

But being asexual isn’t like in my “top 5 qualities” list. I don’t write my bios and put my asexuality at the top of my “about me.” In fact, I don’t even think i wrote that im asexual in my about me on tumblr lol. It’s not that I don’t like asexuality, it’s just so normal to me I’m just kinda like “oh yeah im ace. i have dark eyes. and 10 fingers. surprise! Okay now back to the good stuff…”

Also, a bit of a sidetrack, but that “everyone’s valid” culture on tumblr is actually super toxic and not good. And so getting away from that is v helpful to your mental health.

The last thing that I did that helped me a lot was actually a bit of a coincidence but I met a girl irl who was my coworker who happened to be asexual too. We worked together for like a year, we totally vibed and started hanging out together a ton, and then one day out of the blue she was like “yeah I’m pretty sure I’m ace too.” It was super dope and just having that one person that I could relate to like that who I also truly enjoyed hanging out with was like a breath of fresh air.

Finding a fellow ace irl that you vibe with can be tough. She wasn’t the first ace that I’d met, but I tend to be a rather blunt person and the previous aces I’d met were all through my school’s lgbt club and they tended to be,,,sensitive,,,(told me i was ableist because I talk loudly and my loud voice was insensitive to their sensory disorders like bitch i’ve got hearing problems i can’t solve but you CAN buy earplugs so lol thank u next byeee),,,BUT I DIGRESS, chill aces are hard to find but finding that one person is so nice. But I should say I was pretty much comfortable with being ace at that point. That was kind of the cherry on top. So if this isn’t available to you, which it doesn’t sound like it is, that’s okay. There are other things you can do in the meantime.

Also, I do have to add that much of the phandom happens to be asexual. Idk how that happened but it did.  So if you ever wanna talk ace-things, I’m sure so many people on here would be DOWN to talk ace stuff. I’ve done it before, it’s fun. They’re all rlly nice.

So yeah that was pretty much how I got from a place where I was so defeated about being ace from pretty much everyone around me to now I’m totally comfortable and normal with it to the point where I have turned several homophobes into lgbt-supporters because “fuck, Lexx is so chill and we vibe so hard but she’s lgbt??? i really like her as a person but she’s bi and ace??? hhhhhh,..,,,,i guess lgbt people are cool idk man ya wow ok.” (Legit one of these homophobes sent me screenshots a few months back where some kid was calling me a slur like on instagram or something and he was like “What, you mad cuz she won’t sleep with you? Get a life.” it was sweet 😊)

[tremendouspeachduck]

Psychopaths walk among us. Here's how to resist their evilness.

How do the Dems try to manipulate?

The psychopath patient believes military is nothing more than a strong-arm to subjugate other countries or peoples.  They don’t get that we defend what we’re proud of.

Our country cheered yet another stellar jobs report released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And unlike the sluggish expansion of the Obama years, the lion’s share of this labor market strength benefits middle-income and previously ignored workers. For example, non-managerial wages accelerated at a 12-month rate of 2.7 percent, the highest in a decade. The jobless rate for non-college graduates fell to the lowest level since 2001. Even for those who did not complete high school, good news abounds, as the jobless rate for that working-class, underdog population has now been below 6 percent for the each of the past five months… .

They use ways to convince.  "Gaslighting is a manipulative tactic that can be described in different variations of three words: 'That didn't happen,' 'You imagined it,' and 'Are you crazy?'" Therapist explains. "Gaslighting is perhaps one of the most insidious manipulative tactics out there because it works to distort and erode your sense of reality; it eats away at your ability to trust yourself and inevitably disables you from feeling justified in calling out abuse and mistreatment."

How can you fight back? "Ground yourself in your own reality--sometimes writing things down as they happened, telling a friend, or reiterating your experience to a support network can help to counteract the gaslighting effect,"

The psychopath patient believes military costs too much money.  How can they put a price on reforms?

With Pres. Trump all the minorities are gaining.   These reforms represent a particularly powerful tailwind for Hispanics, statistically by far the most entrepreneurial demographic in America. Speaking of Hispanics, the labor market news for them has been stellar. In U.S. history, there are only eight months where Hispanics report a jobless rate below 5 percent, and an incredible seven of those eight months have been in the last year alone under Trump’s growth agenda. The news is similarly strong for blacks, where the gap between black and white unemployment shrank to the smallest disparity on record. If President Trump is a racist, as his media critics constantly (and unfairly) allege, then he is remarkably bad at it!

They use ways to convince.  You know when toxic people claim all the nastiness that surrounds them is not their fault, but yours? That's called projection. We all do it a little, but the narcissist and psychopath do it a lot. "Projection is a defense mechanism used to displace responsibility of one's negative behavior and traits by attributing them to someone else," notes the therapist.

The solution? "Don't 'project' your own sense of compassion or empathy onto a toxic person and don't own any of the toxic person's projections either," The therapist recommends. "Projecting our own conscience and value system onto others has the potential consequence of being met with further exploitation."

The psychopath patient has conspiracy beliefs.  Example.  It can be said that a co-worker sometimes fails to consider the long-term ramifications of certain financial decisions. The office psychopath claims you called him "a loose cannon." You noted the deal could possibly go south if X, Y, and Z conditions occur. Your narcissistic colleague tells the boss you said the deal is "a disaster."

What's going on? It's not just that your nemesis didn't understand what you said. It's that he or she had no interest in understanding.

"The malignant narcissist isn’t always an intellectual mastermind--many of them are intellectually lazy. Rather than taking the time to carefully consider a different perspective, they generalize anything and everything you say, making blanket statements that don't acknowledge the nuances in your argument or take into account the multiple perspectives you've paid homage to," The therapist says, summing up this behavior.

To counter it, "hold onto your truth and resist generalizing statements by realizing that they are in fact forms of black and white illogical thinking."

The psychopath and Dems want to take it all away with tax hikes.  But Pres. Trump keeps delivering in spite of not one media good report.

The psychopath patient doesn't like the military since it acts as an arm of the U.S. government in other countries where the immediate benefit to the U.S. is not always evident.  They believe the military needs to stay at home and let the other countries deal with their own problems.

"The abusive narcissist and sociopath employ a logical fallacy known as 'moving the goalposts' in order to ensure that they have every reason to be perpetually dissatisfied with you. This is when, even after you've provided all the evidence in the world to validate your argument or taken an action to meet their request, they set up another expectation of you or demand more proof," says the therapist.

Don't play that game. "Validate and approve of yourself. Know that you are enough and you don't have to be made to feel constantly deficient or unworthy in some way," The therapist advises.

The DEMS want all nations to stand down - to let the UN run the world - this can never happen, right?

Healing Horses

The psychopath patient sees the armed forces as destroying the environment with pollution, chemicals and products of the nuclear age.

Switching conversational topics sounds innocent enough, but in the hands of a master manipulator, a change of subject becomes a means to avoid accountability. "The narcissist doesn't want you to be on the topic of holding them accountable for anything, so they will reroute discussions to benefit them," the therapist notes.

This sort of thing can go on forever if you let it, making it impossible to actually engage on the relevant issue. Try "the "broken record method" to fight back: "Continue stating the facts without giving in to their distractions. Redirect their redirection by saying, 'That's not what I am talking about. Let's stay focused on the real issue.' If they're not interested, disengage and spend your energy on something more constructive."

The psychopath patient sees the armed forces as those types that have joined the military, but have become disenchanted for some reason or another.  They may not have gotten the position or training they wanted, didn't like the structured environment or got into trouble.  These are the men and women who lived it for awhile, but couldn't adapt, so they become fanatically anti military.

There are other ways a psychopath can manipulate:

Smear - "When toxic types can't control the way you see yourself, they start to control how others see you; they play the martyr while you're labeled the toxic one. A smear campaign is a preemptive strike to sabotage your reputation and slander your name," the therapist explains.

Sometimes true evil geniuses will even divide and conquer, pitting two people or groups against each other. Don't let them succeed. "Document any form of harassment," the therapist advises, and make sure not to rise to the bait and let the person's horribleness provoke you into behaving in just the sort of negative ways they've falsely attributed to you.

Devalue - Beware when a colleague seems to love you while aggressively denigrating the last person who held your position. "Narcissistic abusers do this all the time--they devalue their exes to their new partners, and eventually the new partner starts to receive the same sort of mistreatment as the narcissist's ex-partner," the therapist says. But this dynamic can happen in the professional realm as well as the personal one.

Simple awareness of the phenomenon is the first step to countering it. "Be wary of the fact that how a person treats or speaks about someone else could potentially translate into the way they will treat you in the future," the therapist cautions.

mean jokes- The problem isn't your sense of humor, it's the hidden intention of that cutting joke. "The covert narcissist enjoys making malicious remarks at your expense. These are usually dressed up as 'just jokes' so that they can get away with saying appalling things while still maintaining an innocent, cool demeanor. Yet any time you are outraged at an insensitive, harsh remark, you are accused of having no sense of humor," the therapist says.

Don't let the office abuser gaslight you into thinking it was all innocent fun--it wasn't.

Triangulation - One of the smartest ways truly toxic people distract you from their nastiness is by focusing your attention on the supposed threat of another person. This is called triangulation. "The narcissist loves to 'report back' falsehoods about what others say about you," the therapist warns. To resist the tactic, realize that the third party in the drama is being manipulated as well--he or she is another victim, not your enemy.

You can also try "reverse triangulation," or "gaining support from a third party that is not under the narcissist's influence."

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[finsterhund]

I still haven’t even begun to process this. I don’t know where to start.

This is the reality for kids like us, and the fact that I’m not dead just meant it was more likely that I’d outlive one of my other friends. But still, it just doesn’t feel real.

My friendship with Brooke developed in the wake of my grade 3 teacher’s suicide. In grade 4. We were both children with broken pasts, and there was a deep comradery in our shared experiences. The area was affluent, and the other kids just grew up different. Mental health was not something anybody cared about. We just hid these things. People were “fine” until they were dead. She was the only person I knew who was also self harmed and was suicidal for a long time, and we confided in one another about these things. Society was failing us, but we had each other.

This was right before the social media boom, and the internet was a more personal place. Our personal websites were filled with 100x100 animated icons, blinkies, gifs, and autoplaying music. We were the epitome of “teh random sporks and penguins of doom.” I guess the term is “baby emos.” Our friendship was forged in micropets, spiked collars, coverse hightops, badly applied black eyeliner, buttons, intentionally distressed clothes, and random safety pins everywhere for no reason. Our anthems were Greenday and MCR. With messages that hit home. We embraced counterculture, gluing our fractured lives together with spikes and black, clashing with the homogenized “family values” suburbia that had beat us down. I didn’t understand most of everything, but it felt good to be known, represented, and a part of something. We were activists for things we cared about. Animal welfare, human rights, the environment. Brooke, me, and my other best friend (shout out if you’re reading this) were inseparable for these few years. We were loud and aggressive and stood up for what we believed in. It was the first real time I felt I had power and autonomy. You’d be surprised just how powerful it is to do something as simple as scribbling a badly drawn lopsided pentagram on something that’s probably considered public property when you’ve been the property of your parents’ faith your whole life.

My first pair of converse I got because Brooke outgrew them. I couldn’t have afforded them otherwise. I can remember regularly going over to her house and we’d listen to music and talk about Invader Zim and shit. She had two rats and we let them run around her room and climb on everything. I still have the penguin hot water bottle sleeve she gave me for my birthday that year. She drew Red Spot on the card and I desperately hope that’s stashed away in a safe place too. This was such a rocky point in my life and in spite of it we found solace and strength. I remember her birthday cake was in the shape of a high top sneaker. No joke. Her mom was good. I remember staying over there and trusting her. 

But as with pretty much every friend I had, she grew and I didn’t. After a couple years we drifted. She got into groups that were more hostile, and even if just as counterculture, they were teens. And I was stuck, and I was still really hostile trying to fight out having my own identity. I didn’t get along well with others and that only got worse as they matured and I didn’t. We were in completely different circles. I wish we would have stayed friends. More than anything. Especially in hindsight knowing what happened. I know that could have just as easily have been me, in another circumstance. It’s so easy to fall to that kind of escapism. Kids like us are straight up predestined to it seems. I retreated badly these years, and we didn’t keep in contact. The sites we used went down, lost to the void and we moved on to other things.

I was told about her death so nonchalantly by my birth mother. Just as if it’s something that wouldn’t take me down. She was all “Oh remember Brooke? She OD’d” and I asked, “she recovered right?” and she was all “no she’s gone.” and just how easily someone can say that, when a child is dead. Someone I confided in, cried with, fought alongside in this fucked up world. Someone who cared about me. Someone I cared about. I get that my birth mom is extremely insensitive and doesn’t realize that I’m extremely sensitive because I deliberately shut myself off from her so she doesn’t hurt me, but still. This was somebody’s baby. Just because society sees us as throwaways doesn’t mean you can dismiss the loss of life like that. I hope she just didn’t understand the level of insensitivity. I need to keep reminding myself that she has mentally slipped due to the abuse, just same as me. But I would have liked to have had some emotional support after hearing that.

I just feel so much guilt. How I should have been a better friend, should have regained contact with her, should have known. I managed to escape that death pit. I had a friend who took me in, away from that toxic awful town. But she didn’t. She fell prey to a deadly cycle trying to escape it.

It’s just so normalized that we never know what somebody is going through until they’re gone. And then there’s nothing you can do to make it up to them, to bring them back, to fix things. That’s it. They’re gone. Forever. And people just move on and forget. And talk about it in the same way you mention the weed dispensary opening up in the mall. We’re a statistic. Something to momentarily feel bad about before you go on living your regular neurotypical middle class life. When we do slip into addiction we’re demonized, accused of doing it recreationally and for fun, not because of the illnesses that plague our minds. People would rather lock you up than help you get better.

Her best friend (who I was also friends with back then) had the same thing happen MONTHS before. We weren’t as close so my memories are looser, but just imagine how much pain. I just. I hate this world.

It’s just so hard not to resent this world. Nothing about this could be considered fair. Brooke had passions and could have changed the world. And just like that, it’s all gone.

I’m sorry. I’m sorry for not being there. I hope wherever you are that you’re at peace. That you’re not hurting anymore.

[pass-the-bechdel]

Buffy S2E5 ‘Reptile Boy’

Does it pass the Bechdel Test?  

Yes, twice, and with more than two characters at once.

How many female characters (with names and lines) are there?          

4 (44%)

How many male characters (with names and lines) are there?

5

Positive Content Rating:

Three.

General Episode Quality:

Eh

MORE INFO (and potential spoilers) UNDER THE CUT:

Passing the Bechdel:

Willow and Buffy pass super quick. Buffy, Cordelia, and Callie pass together in the dungeon.

Female Characters:

Buffy Summers

Willow

Cordelia

Callie

Male Characters:

Xander

Giles

Richard

Tom

Angel

Other Notes:

Xander’s insults towards Cordelia are sexist and hers towards him are classist, but that’s what we get with these characters, I guess.

Giles seems to be under the impression that he’s the boss of Buffy when she’s the super powered one. This is a theme that’s explored a few different times throughout the series: the watchers/watchers council (mostly men) assuming they have the control over the female slayer. At this point, though, it’s not really doing it for me. We’re not really expanding on any of the points made in S1, and the promise of character growth from Giles I felt at the end of ‘Never kill a guy on the first date’ was pretty much erased.

The whole scene outside of the school is so skeevy and for the life of me I can’t tell if it was supposed to make me feel sick. Where are the teachers? Why isn’t Willow jumping in? Why is godamn Xander the only one who’s concerned about these college guys talking to Buffy? And even then it’s obvious that it’s only because he has a crush on her and considers her his- he doesn’t show the same concern for Cordelia.

Angel pointing out the age gap and telling Buffy that she’s too young to make an informed decision about a relationship like that is so close to hitting the point.

Not sure how to word it, but I don’t like everyone portraying Cordelia as “vain” and “shallow” for making sure she marries someone wealthy. She knows that guys are only into her because she’s pretty, so she’s not any worse than them. Does that make sense?

I get that forcing Xander to dress up like a woman is right on the nose for frat boy antics. Still feels like the show is saying being a woman is demeaning.

Of course Angel’s first question is whether Buffy is with a guy, not whether she’s in danger.

Cool, so first Buffy is almost raped, then she’s chained up and slapped around. Great.

Why isn’t Buffy able to rip out those chains right away, when we know she’s pretty frickin strong? that’s insulting both to her as a character and to us as viewers.

Not a representation thing, but it’s worth noting that Buffy was clearly wearing heels when she arrived at the party and in the dungeon she’s wearing flats.

Aaaaaand they go back on Angel’s earlier statements about Buffy being too young for him after Willow yells at him. Because we were supposed to believe that he was wrong for acknowledging the intrinsic power imbalance and not treating Buffy (a teenager) like an adult?

The good: acknowledging the problems with frat houses and toxic masculinity and the dangers they pose towards women, showing some of the tricks older men will use: acting charming, making a girl feel like she’s older than she is, pretending to step in on her behalf against a friend.

The bad: not addressing that pretty much everyone in Buffy and Cordelia’s lives failed them in this episode. Willow and Xander covered for them when they shouldn’t have. Giles was more concerned about Buffy’s slaying than her well being. No adult kicked these college kids off of the high school campus. The thing is even if the frat boys hadn’t been murderers, they were still in their 20s and Buffy and Cordelia are 16 and people should definitely have addressed that they were being preyed upon. (Because Sarah Michelle Gellar and Charisma Carpenter are obviously older this doesn’t look as repulsive as it is once you think about it). Also, this is another example of women being chained up and victimized because they’re women. Soooo... fun.

Editor’s Note: the thing that bothers me particularly about this episode is that it uses a string of very real problems (older men preying on younger women and girls to lure them into unsafe situations, spiked drinks, rape in general but particularly rape at parties and/or frat-house gang-rape, etc) as a big fake-out for the sacrifices to their snake overlord. The idea that they played the scenario dead-straight, all the way up to Buffy passed out on a bed being fondled by a man, just to go ‘HA! You thought this was abut rape but really it’s about human sacrifices to a snake god! Fooled you!’ is just really gross and insensitive to the reality that they are toying with for laughs with this set-up. It’s aaalmost like they might have thought they were writing some kind of exploration of this aspect of rape culture, but if that was the intention, they failed utterly on delivery. This feels more like exploitation than exploration (not least because it ultimately doesn’t have anything to say about the subject on an exploratory level).

[37h4n0l]

About chapter 21

I decided to put together a little thing on the questions that went unanswered. ‘Little’ being a figure of speech considering it’s gonna be long. Enjoy.

[SPOILERS FOR CHAPTER 21 AND 22 INCLUDED]

Why does Bum feel so sick in the car?

I’ve seen people suggest that it’s because he’s been locked up for too long and he’s not used to going outside; I wouldn’t say that’s the case. The entire purpose of the prologue at the police station is to let us know that 3 days have passed since the Jieun incident, so Bum has actually left the house not too long ago. The reason is more likely his unsettlement over having murdered someone - the panel where he gets shocked at hearing the police car’s sirens also demonstrates this. 

He hasn’t come to terms with being a murderer, the realization hasn’t hit him yet; that’s why he asks if Jieun is really dead several times.

Why are the apples so red and why is Sangwoo the only one enjoying them while both Bum and the old lady seem to be bewildered by their taste?

This comes down to the rat poison theory that’s been floating around in the fandom since the soup scene. The same toxic substance that is found in rat poison (arsenic trioxide) is also used as an insecticide for various plants including tobacco (which is how ends up in cigarettes) and apple trees. Due to his smoking habits, Sangwoo appears to be immune/insensitive and the bitter taste of the apples doesn’t register to him. They are probably cultivated in very artificial circumstances and are mildly unhealthy.

Is there something else about the apples? Why do they keep reappearing throughout the chapter? Why is there such a long dialogue about them?

They are symbolic. Now, think of something else that has been ‘offered’ by Sangwoo to Bum, seems like an unnatural thing to everyone but Sangwoo and that he enjoys greatly. The apples equate to killing on a metaphorical level and their shockingly red colour and the emphasis on it serves to highlight its resemblance to blood. 

Looking at red things makes the human heartbeat quicken because it registers as danger, such is the extent of this biological association. As for this line;

It could be a reference to either Jieun’s age or the ‘freshness’ of the murder that has just occurred. 

Why does Sangwoo freak out so much when he accidentally bites his own lip?

The technical explanation would be the fact that, since they’re carrying a corpse in the car, he’d rather not have anything suspicious about him at all, including blood droplets on his clothing. It’s also possible Sangwoo has an aversion to his own blood, but this is merely a hypothesis. If we take what I said about apples before and consider the symbolic meaning, it’s clear that him biting himself while eating an apple translates to hurting himself/getting into trouble due to the murders. Even more so does the collision with the deer - I might be wrong on this, but the events in those few panels look like vague foreshadowing to me. Sangwoo kills people, then he manages to bring harm to himself and it all crumbles down in one big negative event. 

Aren’t we going to mention the flashback scene? What was that?

I will go into wild speculation territory with this one. The first thing we need to establish is that Sangwoo’s mom was occupying the passenger’s seat in the flashback. See: the car window directly on her right side here...

...And her handing the apple to Sangwoo by reaching out to the left.

This means Sangwoo was already old enough to drive. 

And about this line...

Doesn’t this seem off to you? First off, two parents and a son that is old enough to drive (so at least 18, which is the minimum driving age in Korea) don’t usually go on heartfelt hiking trips. Even if they do, it’s a bit odd to have the son drive and the father lie in the back. I wouldn’t say it’s a far-fetched to assume that Sangwoo’s father was ‘lying down in the back’ because he was, well, dead. It would also go along with Sangwoo’s obsession with creating parallelisms between his life with Bum and his childhood memories. He put his mom’s clothes on Bum, he made him hand him an apple, and all the while, they were carrying a corpse - the burying of which was the purpose of the trip in the first place (as it’s confirmed in the next chapter with Jieun). 

Also, see this?

Makes more sense now, doesn’t it?

Sangwoo’s mom was excited? What does this imply?

Firstly, that she isn’t bothered by her husband’s death all that much. Put this together with how we saw the father acting abusive and tyrannical in earlier flashbacks, and it would make sense if Sangwoo’s mom was either outright the one who killed him or, better yet, the one who purposely got him killed, most likely by her son. A woman who’s living under her husband’s rule isn’t physically (or psychologically) capable of overpowering him, otherwise she wouldn’t be there in the first place, but an 18+ year old Sangwoo with his robust constitution cuts it for the job. Sangwoo’s mom coercing him into murdering his father would also make sense if we follow the thread of parallels, with Sangwoo then forcing Bum to kill Jieun by exploiting his feelings of anger and jealousy in the same way that the mother probably did with her son. 

Can we go further on said thread? If we do, Sangwoo’s frequent mentions of Bum being a murderer and him being completely stuck on the subject can be perceived as a little vindictive slip, him venting his frustrations against his mother who probably levelled the same accusations at him after he killed his father. Sangwoo could’ve been called a murderer by her - a way of suppressing her own sense of guilt - who was a person he loved more than anyone. It hurt him and it made him incredibly angry, and that lead him to subsequently strangle his mother (like we’ve seen in the chapters before) since he couldn’t take it anymore. This burst of uncontrolled infantile rage, however, didn’t satisfy him; all he got out of it was 1) having lost someone he cared for 2) making mommy into yet another victim and digging himself deeper into the ‘murderer’ hole. In my view, it’s been a vicious circle since then with Sangwoo killing his mother over and over again through his earlier victims and then realizing that it still wasn’t enough as a revenge. 

In the end, if this is true, Sangwoo is desperately seeking a way to alleviate a terrible crime he committed either not by his own will or in a not completely lucid and reasonable state. He wants his mother to feel the guilt as well, to finally take over the burden that has been growing heavier and heavier with every dead girl in the basement. Sangwoo’s victims probably didn’t have enough feelings for him to be able to kill for his sake, but now, for the first time, he has Bum who actually did it. He was fit to be made into a murderer and thus might be the one who puts an end to the mommy issues. 

If they don’t end up both in jail before it, that is.

[eeveelutionsforequality]

So everybody is politicizing everything and then berating everyone else for politicizing everything, but also berating everyone who's not doing/saying anything, but also berating anybody who is doing/saying anything by finding a way to make it the wrong thing. Comments sections are exhausting, news articles are exhausting, chatting with friends is becoming exhausting, tumblr is exhausting - everyone is at everyone else's throat.

Some people care but can't afford to donate and/or haven't found/decided where to donate to yet, some people donate, some people care by talking about what they think is the underlying cause, some people think that there's a different underlying cause, some people cope with humour or by avoiding things 'cause they don't have the mental capacity left to care about every single tragedy, given that pain and suffering are shoved down our throats 24/7 and everybody is telling us to care with all of our hearts about everything. We're all dealing with this in our own way, but so many people are redirecting their anger about the event at those who are dealing with it in a different way to them.

Politicizing these things pisses me off because I do believe that those involved, the families and friends, and frankly everyone else on Earth, deserves a little period to mourn, mull things over, decide how they think, distract themselves, etc, instead of diving into the conversation while still emotional, instead of keeping it on everybody's mind 24/7, instead of attaching someone's name to a message while their corpse is still warm. But honestly, I understand on some level why these people are politicizing it... it's because they care and they want to stop it happening again, not because they want to use the victims to forward their own narrative, but because they think their narrative is the way to make these people the last victims. So while I may disagree with their points, their methods, their timing, I try not to take the moral high ground or attribute malicious intent to them.

If somebody can't donate, can't do activism or doesn't want to talk about it, because they aren't able to for their mental health, physical health or financial well-being, they aren't obliged to put themselves at risk for strangers - in fact, even if they just don't want to do those things, that's within their rights. People have a limited amount of concentration, time, money, stamina... sometimes we have to put ourselves first, especially after an incident that involves strangers and that we can't change or prevent now. As for the jokes, yeah they can be insulting, but it's just some people's way of coping and their sense of humour, just unfollow them or politely tell them that you think it's insensitive - telling them that they deserve to die, well... how can you act like you care about strangers' deaths, how can you act like death disturbs you so much, while wishing death upon someone else? It's hypocritical.

Just... idk, everyone seems to be trying to put down everyone else's reactions, instead of thinking "Okay, why are they saying this/acting this way?"

Some people are going "My thoughts are with the Muslims who'll be victims of Islamophobia because of this", and initially it comes across as erasing the victims in favour of victimising themselves, but... I mean, if you're a Muslim and you see people, whether intentionally or otherwise, blaming Islam and Muslims for this, of course you're going to want to tell people not to blame all Muslims. You want to protect people, and you want to spread your own opinion of how the world works, and you want people to know that you and people like you don't support this and aren't like the man who did it - especially if people are claiming otherwise. They have a reason for saying what they're saying, even if it comes across as insensitive to you.

The people implying that all Muslims/Islam are to blame are sometimes doing so unintentionally through poor wording... because they're emotional. There are dead children. They're afraid and they're just desperate for any way to stop this. Sometimes they're doing it because their ideology and other people have told them that this is how the world works, that these people do these terrible things, and they just want to stop the terrible things from happening. They have a reason for saying what they're saying, again, even if it comes across as insensitive.

There are people saying that it's because of "toxic masculinity" and "an attack on women" - again, their ideology has left them thinking that it genuinely is, that this is how the world works, and they're trying to prevent it from happening again. They have a reason for saying what they're saying, even if it comes across as insensitive.

Ultimately, none of these people are going to be swayed away from how they're reacting, how they view this, who they attribute blame to, by you going "Stop politicizing this!" or "You're an idiot!" You need to understand where they're coming from and that they are - in their eyes - caring and trying to help, otherwise they're going to shrug off any criticism you have as you just not understanding the context that they see. You need to convince them that the context they're seeing it in isn't the only context, that maybe the world doesn't work that way, that maybe there's a better way to react - but you can't do that by berating them or degrading them, you have to communicate with them.

Everybody needs to stop yelling at each other, to stop using the fact that you think your way of dealing/caring is the right way to insult the other ways, and instead try to explain effectively why your way is good, why your context is right, and be open to at least listening to and understanding the reasoning for other contexts and opinions, even if you don't agree with those. Ultimately, debates aren't won by insulting the other side, they're won by convincing people of your side, by listening and discussing, not by parroting soundbites and catchphrases - well, maybe they can be won by sticking your fingers in your ears and yelling "lalala", but they can't be productive.

Kids are dead. People are dead. People are in hospital. People are scared. The world is becoming a darker place each day, and technology is letting billions of glorified monkeys get exposed to horrors that our brains are still learning to comprehend... all while we battle with finally getting enough intelligence to understand what we are and questioning why, only to be met with the answer that there is no why following every experiment we try, that one day it will all end for us and we will cease to exist. The goop in our head isn't designed to care about seven billion people, it was meant to just try to survive, and now we can do that relatively easily and we've started to realize that there's no reason for us to. It's fucking dark in the world right now, okay? And in the face of all of this, we've all started coming up with our own thoughts and opinions about how to make the world good and kind, how to make everyone happy - that's what we all want, we all share that goal, we just disagree on the methods to get there. Some people think religion, some people think feminism, some people think anarchy, some people think communism, we're all just trying to create a utopia, to find that meaning and reason... and we're all getting set in our ways, in our "this is what is causing the badness and this is how we fix it", and finding enemies to fight and people to convert. Maybe, just maybe, someone other than you has a little nugget of brilliance in their plan that might work, but you won't find it unless you talk to them with an open mind. Just remember that we all want to live in a world that works, we just disagree sometimes on what the best kind of world is, on how we make that world, and on what's causing the problems that need to stop - people usually do activism because they want to make things right, so when you view everyone who opposes you as evil and stupid, you're not understanding who they are or why they're saying what they say.

If you ask me, kindness starts at the individual level and then works its way up. Take time to think about your words and the context of them - make the jokes amongst friends who'll get it, not in front of those who are uncomfortable with it. Donate if you can and, to those of you who've got even more extra money, please try to donate enough to make up for those who can't afford to. Please up the police presence at other upcoming events like Pride, to keep those most at risk of hatred safe. Please don't hate a whole demographic based on the actions of a few - whether that's Muslims, men, the mentally ill, or anyone. Please don't undermine people's legitimate fears about future attacks by saying "We just need to live with it" or "It's not as bad as [cancer/shootings/suicide/etc]", and instead work together to have a conversation about how to prevent these things, so that we can all see different outlooks and perspectives, so that we can find the combination that genuinely works. And above all, tell everyone you know that you love and value them, enjoy the little things, have a chocolate bar, cuddle a dog, and try to live as happily as you can - don't dwell on the terrible news or on internet fights, because we all die one day, you have a limited time to be happy so do everything you can to make the most of what you have.

~ Vape