#topical i know /s

[apolloendymion]

ok my whole fucking life i thought the song was "for longer than forever" and now you're telling me this entire time it's been "FAR longer than forever"??????

[apuff]

thinking about love in danger days

this is part of my conspiracy theory that that album is aroallo, but i've always gotten the sense that romance and romantic attatchment is much less important to danger days than any other mcr record. with bullets&revenge it's quite obvious as the demolition lovers take up like, everything, and the black parade has a heavy focus on a romantic relationship as well. 

while i do think there are lines in it that are romantically coded, there is a definitive lack of emphasis on it- like it's nowhere in the plot at all. 

i do think danger days represents a very familial type of love though. while other albums visit a sense of "i want you, i need you, i miss you, i hate you,", this is more like…"i love you, i want to protect you, i'm sorry"

i find this especially strongly in s/c/a/r/e/c/r/o/w:

"Nevermind about the shape i'm in, I'll keep you safe tonight"

"love, love, love won't stop this bomb"

"run, run, bunny, run"

and other songs: 

"i'll find you when the sun goes black"

"just save yourself and i'll hold them back tonight"

"how long until we find our way in the dark and out of harm"

relevant things i can't cover with just quotes are planetary go, oft-theorized to be about party poison and kobra kid, as brothers, leaving battery city together; sing, about the killjoys' last message to the girl while saving her; goodnite dr. death, phrased as him saying goodnight to children; and summertime, which i can't discern the meaning of but seems more like a family type of love. 

i think it makes sense that danger days is like this, seeing as it features main characters that take care of a child main character as opposed to main characters that love other main characters of the same age/ability. 

another thing i noticed while re-listening to the more sentimental songs for this essay is that there's just a distinctly different vibe to it. So much of it is focused around wanting to protect people, keep them safe and out of danger (<- ha that's the name of the album) and loved. i think this also makes sense, because the killjoys live a very, well, dangerous life without much security, and they'd want to provide what they lack the most. another semi-related thing i noticed is just how much of an emphasis there is on childhood in this album. i feel like there's a vibe of youth or teen-hood throughout the earlier ones, but this is just VERY strongly about kids. again this makes sense cause not only are the killjoys teenagers (a type of kid!) they also have a proper little kid to watch. 

also, i wonder how much of this stuff was due to gerard becoming a parent. just something to think about 

[deus-ex-mona]

scrolled a little too far back on mogetwt and found pure gold:

[fffanii]

09.07.24

hello, you have reached the point in which the queue point has passed the date of ii16 coming out. now you will have to listen to me lose my mind and experience the stages of grief in the tags.

alt ver. ↓

[todayisafridaynight]

theres something really funny about how the other day i was talkin bout majima fans complaining and then like three days ago yokoyama says something and now theyre complaining again

[winepresswrath]

People are so resistant to learning new information about Louis on the learning new things about Louis show. And to be petty for a second it's embarrassingly obvious that it's not even about their attachment to Louis' perspective and the story as it was originally told it's about rejecting any information that doesn't work with their hiatus theories. Louis will be like "shit I remembered that wrong. I have been lying to myself a little because the truth both hurts and fucks with my self image and the story of Us I have been telling myself to cope. And yet I care so profoundly about every detail and especially this specific thing. The truth of this matters to me because her story matters to me. I want you use the more accurate take" and people will be like "wow fake. probably his delicate little mind malfunctioning." Louis will be like "man in retrospect I have made a bunch of shitty choices, and I might have made them under extraordinarily fucked up circumstances but they were still mine. And I find I value being a person who makes active choices and I want to own those choices and after years of lying to myself and being lied to by both my husbands and on a minimum of at least one occasion having my literal memories altered I want to learn to live honestly. For myself. I want to become a person who tells the truth at least to himself." and they will be like "a regression. sad days." girl you just don't like the show it's fine.

[v1model]

merge

[soupmanspeaks]

you ever wonder if the Glamrocks's face tracking acts up when they look at Glamrock-Freddy, like they'll look at his face, and the recognition will register as Freddy, but their systems for whatever reason or another think that there is a face overlapped on Freddy's do you think they see two small squares next to him, at his side, roughly child sized, but no one is physically there.... right...?

[hero-of-leaf-valley]

Kieran does not “deserve” to get Ogerpon. Like… you realize he didn’t love Ogerpon right? Because he didn’t actually know anything about her? He loved the Ogre? That was “so cool and didn’t care what anyone thought about it!”? The Ogre that ended up being nothing like the sweet, scared, lonely, very much wanting to be liked creature we actually met? He didn’t love Ogerpon, and the whole point is that even if he did you don’t get to Deserve a living thing with thoughts and feelings and wants of its own. He didn’t love Ogerpon because Ogerpon wasn’t like the Ogre, but she IS like Kieran, and Kieran didn’t even like himself. He wanted to be like the Ogre, and wanted her to be too.

[individuating]

umineko project / witch hunt / steam release translations of the red text at the end of episode 4

[mylonelydreaming]

People here on Tumblr are so scared to acknowledge that people do in fact get pregnant in their 20's and that it isn't inherently always a bad thing

[aroanthy]

hi!! i know u talk a lot about aromanticism a lot on here, but i don’t think i’ve ever seen u talk about aromantic anthy. would u mind discussing/elaborating on it or linking to a post where u do because i’m very curious!!

i got a similar ask half a year ago or something ridiculous like that on my main blog, but i’d like to really do justice to my url right now and explain it in more concrete terms.

i will say, it’s important to bear in mind that this reading of anthy’s character is very much informed by my own experiences, and a lot of those experiences are ones im not keen to talk in depth about. but you know. let’s make some nebulous gestures towards ideas of being traumatised, being autistic, struggling to meaningfully connect with others and honestly not really wanting to do such because of how they treat you.

like ive previously said, an aromantic perspective on the world would, i think, really benefit anthy. when youve lived your whole life experiencing violence at the hands of these patriarchal structures, of which romance is absolutely one, it’s kinda like. damn. im uncomfortable buying into those ideas.

anthy also has this lovely line in ep 19 where she says to utena ‘romance either happens or it doesn’t’ and it’s just sooooooo. so very interesting to me, actually, that anthy would say something so black and white about ‘romance’, a topic that anthy knows better than a lot of rgu characters is hopelessly confused and arbitrary and often enabling violence. and utena (fellow aromantic gaybo) says 'yeah, i know, but...'. these simplifications, these elisions. what is and isn't articulated. but what? maybe things are much more complicated than we'd like to think.

anyway enough of that tangent. one thing i as a trans and aromantic person always return to when discussing trans and aromantic readings of characters/texts more broadly is that there's no singular piece of evidence that can really cement these readings as Undeniable. it's like. okay. there's a critique of romance as a patriarchal structure in revolutionary girl utena. there's an ambiguity about anthy's feelings towards characters like utena, where there is clearly a queer connection but it takes shape in unconventional and complex ways. me, i'm aromantic, i see all of these pieces and i go oh well that's because she's an aromantic lesbian. you know, there's plenty of little moments i can evidence but those moments can be used to argue for an alloromantic lesbian anthy too. romance is a very arbitrary thing and i think everyone should take their own approach to it unapologetically. of course, mine is that it's hellish and i want nothing to do with it, but im just one guy. and im okay with that. i feel strongly about this reading and it is personal, and id be dishonest to say otherwise, but i do also find that it's well-evidenced in the text. as one of my lecturers once said, don't worry about authorial intent, it isn't real <3

[pynkhues]

So I know people tend to have lots and lots of opinion about dog pound but more often then not, I’ve seen a tendency for folks to give Roman’s recollection of the game (that dog pound was bulling/abusive/messed up in some way shape or form) the most weight…and this candidly baffles me for a bunch of reasons. I know the actor's opinions don't need to be given weight, but I see tons of weight given to actor interviews for Succession in other contexts and both Jeremy and Kieran (per an interview with Kieran around S3) signed on to the read that dog pound wasn’t traumatizing but was instead a rewritten memory because Roman generally felt like a victim and I tend to agree with that read. It also kind of fits in more with the dynamic we generally see Kendall and Roman have throughout the show and especially in Seasons 1-3. Add to this that Roman was around 4 when this took place if we're taking his word for it (making Kendall under 10 and Connor early 20’s-ish?) and again I’m wondering why his memory is given so much more weight than Connors.  Do you have any view or thoughts as to why Roman is treated as the more reliable narrator when it comes to dog pound and more broadly how do you tend to think about the siblings various contradictory childhood memories?  

It's an interesting one, isn't it?

I agree with you (and the actors, haha), that I think the dog pound wasn't traumatising or that it even really meant anything at the time they were playing it. It's just a children's game that took on a different meaning in their adulthood as Roman and Kendall's particular dynamic crystalised. I talked about it a little bit in this post about games on the show if you're interested in reading more about that in particular!

I do think the context of Roman bringing up the dog pound game when he did is also important and not talked about as much as it should be. After all, Kendall's kind of seen to have the more defined arc over these episodes between the failed coup, his relapse, then the upswing of him getting in bed with the enemy (Sandy and Stewy).

Roman though has a really complicated arc too - it's his inability to stand with Kendall which makes the coup fail, and his elevation as prized son in Austerlitz is undermined by what I tend to interpret as a mix of guilt and shame first over letting Kendall down and then over his relapse, which bleeds into a degree of protectiveness which we don't usually see from him, both in that episode and in the next (it's an underrated moment, but Roman offering to make everyone stop doing drugs at the party before they go in in 1.08 is very special to me).

But there's a shift then in 1.08 which is triggered by Stewy pretty blatantly cutting him out of something and folding Kendall back in. It's this teetering new power dynamic where any guilt he felt is swallowed up by the realisation he doesn't want to lose this new station as the dog at their father's side, and I think he uses this distorted memory from childhood to justify his anger and try to reinforce this position. Kendall thought Roman was the weak dog once, but he's not, Kendall is. Kendall's the one out, Kendall's the weird one, Kendall is, as Shiv aptly put it in 1.01, not emotionally strong and has addiction issues.

(Interestingly too, while it's not in the episode, in the 1.08 script it shows that Roman's there when Kendall realises their dad's sent Greg to keep an eye on him, and I think there's this interesting emphasis there in Roman realising Kendall needs a babysitter twice - himself in the last ep and Greg in this one - which for him reinforces Kendall as the 'weak' one.)

He weaponises a long past memory that he treats as an immovable truth to not just play victim, but I think as a yardstick to show how far he's come, and how far Kendall's fallen.

As for why Roman's treated as the more reliable narrator, I think there are a few reasons for it. In particular, I do think Kendall is the Known Liar of the show, haha. All the kids lie to varying degrees of course, but Kendall really lies in a way that I tend to think can feel more insidious, particularly as he lies in such a wildly broad spectrum - sometimes it's aching self-flagellation, sometimes it's mortifying self-aggrandisement, sometimes it's just straight up pathetic, and sometimes it's just the awkward vulnerability of trying to save face (particularly when he's relapsing).

We don't see Roman explicitly lie all that much on the show, at least not in the way many of the other characters do. In some ways he's actually the opposite to Kendall because Kendall tends to use lies as a means of defense or a way to hide while Roman absolutely and often weaponises a truth. Orrr at least I'd say that's what he would like to think of himself? I actually think Roman lies all the time, it's just less through actual lying like Kendall does, and more through undermining the truth or playing around in the grey of it. He likes to lean on a question and see what it does to the truth, like he knows that it's malleable and wants to see the shape it could take, and that's overall something I find super interesting about his character, and I think feeds into a distortion of truth / memory.

But back to your question about why people see Roman as the more reliable narrator of their shared past, yes, I think it's viewed through the prism of Kendall being the one more likely to lie, but I also think it's due to Roman's abuse being easier to understand and more textual than Kendall and Shiv's. We see him get hit, both Shiv and Kendall talk about Roman being hit, Roman jokes about it and diminishes it, and even in 3.09 blames Kendall and Shiv for it (I actually think there's such an interesting parallel there to Roman being abandoned with the waterpistols and the story of Shiv being abandoned with the chocolate milk in the car, but that's a whole other story, haha).

We get childhood stories from Roman more than any of his siblings, so he feels like the one who thinks about it the most. Is that true? I don't know, but I get why that would make people put more stock in his role as the narrator of it.

As for the contradictory childhood memories, I do think the show is interested in the subjectiveness of memory overall, and the way people influence the past and make history malleable, and I think that exploring that through the very specific context of a family like the Roy's, who have a loose relationship with the truth at the best of times, is a pretty remarkable way to do it.

[kuroo-hitsuji]

Bro i really played myself with my trans Solomon hc huh

No visual evidence to subtly include in my art. No top surgery scars no nothin. No one will know but me orz

Fool. Imbecile.

Unfortunately though i will change Nothing bc it makes sense To Me but I will still be sad about it xgmxgmxxfj

[clementinesmustyhat]

I wanna share my TWDG head canons, but I’m scared I’ll just mischaracterize the character on accident or people will think I’m mischaracterizing them. 😭

[dimiclaudeblaigan]

I really hate the inconsistencies that exist just to make SB (and CF technically) work, but also how hard Petra basically simps for Edelgard to the point it deconstructs aspects of her character.

In Houses she mentions her siblings being in danger if she died, but in SB she just doesn't even make any mention of them in this situation. She's just willing to possibly die all of a sudden for someone who never actually treated Brigid like its people were independent (which she could've done at literally any time from the moment she became emperor). She was relatively vocally I guess you could say "good" to Petra, but the way the writing handles Petra's response to all of it feels like Petra's just been brainwashed.

Petra says she would always choose survival and makes a point to emphasis that, but in SB she's completely and carelessly willing to risk her life and possibly throw it away... for Edelgard? Who still has not actually officially freed Brigid? And if Petra were to stop being Edelgard's ally?

"Reconsideration". Because Brigid was never freed and now they're not going to be as long as Edelgard is in charge, because their queen is no longer bending to her will and fighting for her. If she was ever truly planning to free Brigid, Petra's decision alone not to fight for her shouldn't have changed that fact (especially since she supposedly gives her the choice in Houses to fight for her or not, and on non CF routes she does this by sending a letter, to which Petra refuses).

It should, of course, be obvious with this that everything is very not hunky dory between Adrestia and Brigid, but then...

...eh wot hooligans???

I mean sure, if you considered forced vassalage to be "peace" and not being a free people "peace" then sure. But like... it's not a peace her people want and she should know that, but the game tends to do this back and forth with this topic. I hate it though because it makes it come across as being forced into submission and not having the means to fight back is "peace".

I know this game has lots of issues with uh, if you're attacked or if you were defeated by another military force you should submit and be happy about being taken over, and when you can't fight back anymore that's "peace" because nobody's fighting... but uhh... why is that only an issue with the Empire? I mean, we know why - the devs wanted to walk with her and they admitted it! But like... they should still know when they're writing something reeeeally icky.

Duscur doesn't have this problem and they're not under Edelgard's foot. Anything under Edelgard's foot though is treated like they should be thankful for her control and/or invasion(s). That just overall sends a really nasty message. I don't know that the devs meant to do that as far as an Empire, but I do think it's because they went a little hard with the Edelgard bias and somehow forgot what it would look like to an audience playing the game.

It's like they know it's not a good thing but they keep pushing the "Brigid isn't actually free but it's still peace because nobody is fighting" narrative.

Like... I don't care how much you love a character you're writing. You can't tell me that oppressed nations would just call oppressions "peace" or that their leaders would be more than happy to fight and die for the leader of the nation oppressing them. It gets even worse when you get into the racial territory of it, but that's a topic I've already covered so I'm not gonna go over it again here.