#time well spent

[etakeh]

In case you think the writers on strike aren't making good use of their time, think no more!

Only click the read more if you're fully prepared. I'm taking no responsibility past this point.

Help a guy out. He's stuck. Who's got 18 brothers who all wanna cook. (source)

[jccatstudios]

Spreading the word about SoC on every campus whiteboard I see

[acronym49]

Distinguished chaos ♡

Characters (Dr. Stone up front, Robbie in the background) are both by @clownsuu

[felixeis003]

Added some details and changed some things, added the introduction to Matthew Stover's rots in aurebesh in the background ;))

[taffywabbit]

attacka you

[kawakona]

[wavy-arms]

"You shouldn't ship them! They see each other as siblings!!"

I've seen people say this about Rengoku and Mitsuri again and again, very often as a way to shut down others who are having fun with the Renmitsu ship. Not only is it annoying to constantly run into this from people who don't really know what they're talking about, but it's also inaccurate and way oversimplifies their cute dynamic! Let's dig deeper.

For a moment, let's also just forget about the above panel where she is very obviously all 🥰 at him and, instead, let's go straight to the source: what the Pillars all think about each other in the official guidebook. Better yet, let's look at it in the original Japanese!

Now, I am still a student of Japanese. I am by no means fluent, so if I make any mistakes, please feel free to let me know! I'm always looking to learn something new.

First, from Rengoku:

才能が凄い！技の独創性も凄い！可愛い後輩！

Sainō ga sugoi! Waza no dokusō-sei mo sugoi! Kawaii kōhai!

In the first two sentences, he's praising her big time! "Her talent is amazing! The creativity/ingenuity of her technique is also amazing!" In the last sentence, he calls her a cute kōhai. If you're familiar with the term senpai, then kōhai is the alternative. It's just a term to refer to a junior coworker or classmate. Mitsuri joins the Demon Slayer Corps. after him, and he was her mentor before he became the Flame Hashira. (However, in the Rengoku gaiden, he tells her that they are no longer master & student, but instead equal peers. Overall, he clearly thinks she's very skilled and also cute.

Next, from Mitsuri:

かっこいいお兄様！一緒に修行して楽しかった。可愛がってもらった！

Kakkoii onii-sama! Issho ni shugyō shite tanoshikatta. Kawaigatte moratta!

The first sentence, translated literally, just says "Cool big brother!" Now, one thing that makes Japanese both fun and difficult is that speakers often rely on context and omit entire parts of the sentence that an English speaker would normally use. In this case, in English, you wouldn't just say "Cool big brother!" You might say something like "He's like a cool big brother to me" or "I view him as a cool big brother figure." In this case, we don't have that. What we do have, however, is cultural context! In Japanese culture, familial terms are often used as terms of endearment or respect with people close to the speaker or even politely with strangers. So it would be normal to call an older male "big brother" even if they weren't actually your brother. (Kind of similarly, if you're at all familiar with Korean culture, girls often call their own boyfriends 오빠 (obba), which means — you guessed it — "older brother.") Here, Mitsuri refers to Rengoku as onii-sama, and that last part is important! The -sama suffix is super polite and formal, and long story short, you wouldn't normally refer to someone in your own in-group (family, circle of friends, etc.) with such a formal, respectful title. It is, however, a term you might use to refer to someone else's brother. So there's a very good chance that she's not saying "he's my cool older brother" but instead "he's a cool older brother!" And he is! He's an amazing older brother to Senjurō, and Mitsuri knows this. [UPDATE: I've spoken with a couple people who know way more about the Japanese language than me and, apparently, in this context onii-sama literally just means "guy." 🤣 She's literally just saying "He's a cool guy!"]

[UPDATE #2: I've also recently learned that kakkoii doesn't really mean "cool," but is instead a compliment specifically to men that means something more like, "good-looking, handsome, or cool in a manly way." INTERESTING. 👀]

In the next sentence, she says, "It was fun training together!" Pretty straightforward. The last sentence is very, very interesting, because at a cursory translation, Google would tell you that it just straight-up means, "I was loved!" Sounds intense, but that's not really accurate. Let's break it down. Kawaigatte moratta! Kawaigatte, if I'm not mistaken, is an inflection of the transitive verb kawaigaru, which Jisho translates as "to be affectionate to; to treat tenderly; to dote on; to show one's love (for); to cherish." Other translations usually say something like, "He really doted on me." But essentially she’s saying, "He treated me with tenderness/affection" or, "He made me feel loved/cherished." 💖

So there you go! Not that a fan ship like Renmitsu even needs this kind of validation anyway, but it might be nice to have something you can keep in your back pocket for the next time someone is being annoying about it. There's enough here to show that they really have a lot of affection for each other. They're so adorable~!

(Side note: there are other examples of Mitsuri's attraction to him in the gaiden [pictured above] and in at least one of the light novels. I might write about that, too.)

[kissoflightning]

[oswlld]

i’m having normal feelings about her on this fine wednesday

[strqyr]

i tried figuring out some ages. the end result:

hell if i know how old hazel is, could be younger than tai / qrow, could be older (he definitely looks older)

tai and qrow hold the secret to aging well, apparently

like damn.

[maxsix]

[moonmotherhomestead]

the good book 📖🕊️✨

[lemonbronze]

couldn’t decide what Robin was pointing out—

“Big daiquiris with umbrellas in them!”

“Pride merch!”

“Face painting!”

“Birds!!”

—regardless, they’re husbands on vacay

[itsrainingfeathers]

Pretty sure this has been done many times before but eh whatever

[bisexualbard-writes]

want and need anniversary post is going up tomorrow or Wednesday instead thanks to a surprise three hour nap 😴

[contentment-of-cats]

On bed rotting, a day of rest, and an anniversary.

I can't remember the last time I voluntarily spent the day in bed. My grandmother, born in 1906 spoke of 'taking to bed' - something the energetic but sickly child I was could not understand unless one was ill. As I grew older, weekends became productive time - to study, do homework, write papers, maintain my living space, run errands. The cup of life ran over and drowned the calendar. No rest, or precious little of it even as my body began to fail under a diagnosis of fibromyalgia in 2007. I'd had viral meningitis in 2004, and my immune system never turned off.

Then there came the time when all I could do was rest, but it was miserable instead of restorative. Sickness, growing debility that I tried to deny and rationalize and bring to a doctor. Then hospitalization, tests and scans, diagnosis, preparation, and Stage 4a aggressive treatment. I came home and would sleep until I had to wake up and take Zofran, or in the really bad cases Ativan, or Clonazipine in order not to vomit myself into dehydration. After surgery, nothing but bed. Unable to lift anything heavier than a gallon of milk from November to April.

Today is second Monday in November, the anniversary of my big surgery, the removal of six feet of colon and intestines followed by a resection that literally gave me a new asshole. They removed my uterus and ovaries where the cancer had begun to spread. They re-sectioned my left ureter and bladder because the cancer was spreading there, too. They placed a uretal stent while I healed. I had an ileostomy done so my stitched-together innards could close. Finally, they removed 22 lymph nodes of which seven were found to be precancerous or cancerous. They say you forget the pain, and to an extent that is true. You forget the physical sensation, but you never forget waking up screaming, passing out, waking up again, and begging to die.

I know what a ten on the pain scale is like now. It's been revised up and up. Just when I thought I knew ten, I found out differently. My torso is marked by scars that look as if they were drawn in black Sharpie. I'm in remission, and far from wanting to be the busy, productive person I used to be, I find that I don't want to be anything. With my mother's death in the spring, the burden of daughterhood to a cluster b disordered woman, of shepherding her through dementia as I shepherded myself through cancer was lifted. I grieved the mother I wished for and she could sometimes be, but I was relieved that this stranger who came to wear my mother's body was finally gone. She could rest, and now so can I now that her energy has returned to the universe.

I am still working, but I am selfish now. My weekends are just for me. Despite being in remission, I don't know how many more I will have. That makes them precious. I cook, make jewelry, and 'watch telly' as Gran used to say. It was while I was rotting in bed on Sunday - my pre-Recession habit revived - that I came upon this interview in the Washington Post. Susan Gubar was a formative writer of my teen years, a time when the ERA failed because the male-dominated worldview (with a pushback spearheaded by 'traditional' women) didn't think we needed more rights than we already had, if anything they thought we had too many.

The Madwoman in the Attic, For Adult Users Only: The Dilemma of Violent Pornography, No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century : The War of the Words all ended up in my mother's shelves - she laid claim to my library when I moved out. With her death, I now get them back, plus more. My ten boxes of books donated in the first spate of Swedish Death Cleaning are nothing compared to my mother's hoard of books over her 80+ years of life. On top of that there are the books that she borrowed from me, that somehow also became hers.

Susan Gubar is a cancer patient in remission, and I have downloaded her two books on cancer and survivorship. Memoir of a Debulked Woman: Enduring Ovarian Cancer, and Reading and Writing Cancer: How Words Heal. I plan to rot in bed this pre-Thanksgiving weekend, and read. Also of note, her recent book Still Mad: American Women Writers and the Feminist Imagination. I'm delighted to find her all over again, a writer whose 1979 work spoke to me as much as Virginia Woolf's 'A Room of One's Own.'

Hey. Mom had my copy of that, too, dangit.

Perhaps I can get my library back. A snapshot of myself circa 1991. I know she borrowed my Bell Hooks and Audre Lorde. Angela Davis was someone Mom knew somehow and bought her books on principle. I read a lot of Second and Third Wave feminism, queer theory, psychology, sci-fi, fantasy, and comic books. My first copy of 'Our Bodies: Ourselves' - Mom had to buy that one for me, the bookstore owner refused to sell it to me despite my being female I was not a woman. My old D&D guides.

Perhaps my remission Sundays need to be spent rotting in bed, rediscovering the voracious reader I was all those years, before the busy-ness of life nibbled my time away.

It's a resolution, voted, and carried.