#which i don’t want people listening in

[ikkan]

might try to look for a therapist again…it’s just…the co-pays are just a lot if it’s weekly.

[evermorepeyton]

maybe you would think so but no, they actually like each other that much

[sockdooe]

I don’t know if maybe it’s just me, but is anyone else seeing a rise of people claiming that they could do a better rewrite of Voltron and then immediately say they’d make K/L cannon or Adash/ canon?

I don’t know about anyone else but I genuinely don’t think making ships canon would make the show better.

In fact I think It’d make it worse.

And considering shiro isn’t even mentioned in these and if he is it’s just to be Keith dad…. Is telling.

[macklesufficient]

today i’m thinking about how happy i am to no longer be twelve. remember how u were constantly living the most humiliating moment of your life? why was that?

[sea-jello]

hong kong miku,,,

[a-small-writer-in-a-big-world]

Found out that you actually don’t have to do things that make you uncomfortable sounds fake but will report on this as I set more boundaries

[ryukisgod]

I’m begging men who pay “dating coaches” to realise women are not the fish, women are the bait, YOU are the fish, and the “dating coaches” are the fishermen.

“Dating gurus” survive on the desperate men who pay them, the way a fisherman survives off the fish he catches. Women are the lures these podcasters/YouTubers etc dangle in front of lonely men in order to get them to sign up for a course and hand over their credit card details

[trislosherfan25]

So sick and tired of other peoples notions about what constitutes a platonic or romantic relationship dictating the level of closeness I can have with other people. Not even talking about physical closeness… like even just the degree to which I hang out with someone, or how I behave around them has been enough for people around me to insist I’m “acting like a couple” with someone and just push that narrative on me absolutely constantly despite me being in a pretty long term relationship with someone else. It’s absolutely infuriating because having that narrative projected onto me and thus having to avoid it and reject it constantly puts up so many barriers to my ability to form close connections with people and strong friendships. I just want to be able to connect with people in the way that feels natural and comfortable for me without being constantly questioned about my intentions or having to question my own intentions because of what other people are projecting onto me. I know what is platonic and what is romantic to me, even when to other people that line looks blurry. I wish people would just listen to me and let me be.

[toddtakefive]

btw todd’s reluctance to join the dps because he doesn’t want to read (which is then accommodated for) and is scared to put himself out there (which is also worked through) being read as todd not wanting to go AT ALL, and thus neil making the proper accommodations (“todd anderson, who prefers not to read, will keep the minutes of the meetings”) and encouraging him to step out of the box that stifles him being seen as ‘forceful’ or like he can’t take no for an answer makes me insane with rage

[shorthaltsjester]

begging twitter to stop showing me tweets of people with no reading comprehension misrepresenting things I said but since i was going to make this more in-depth post Anyway .

when i say imogen is better read as a metaphor for generational trauma than she is a metaphor for queerness or chronic pain, i’m not talking about legitimate traits she has as a character. obviously she is queer. obviously she experiences some form of chronic pain (though i would argue her magic better suits chronic illness not pain because she states that it’s Not always painful, but it does always influence how she lives her life).

when i talk about how well she’s understood as a metaphor, i’m talking about when i’m looking at her as a part of a story, as an arc that i am witnessing rather than in the more typical fandom way of this is a fictional person who interacts with exandria as real people do. and that is a fun way to interact with characters, i enjoy it a lot! but when i say imogen (to me, as i for some reason have to clarify on my own blog which implies that these are my own opinions and not absolute fact that needs to be accepted by people on the internet with different experience and opinions than me) is best read as a metaphor for generational trauma, it isn’t a dismissal of her queerness or her illness, it’s just me thinking looking at her from that angle is more compelling.

imogen has been one of my favourite characters and least favourite characters in campaign 3 because i tend to analyse her through a lens of generational trauma and she ends up looking extremely familiar to me as someone with a family that carries their’s heavily which is as comforting as it is frustrating.

for me the main thing that looking at imogen through a queer lens of literary analysis fails to account for is harm. on the one hand - the harm that imogen experiences, not because of how people treat her for who she is, but that exists simply as a factor of her being ruidusborn. on the other hand a the harm that imogen causes. not to say that she is some malicious villain waiting for her chance to harm others, but that there are things about being ruidusborn that very much do incline her towards violence in a way that she might not otherwise be - i think about the conversation after she went nuclear and chet brought up people being scared of her connecting that to her father keeping distance. the only harm that queerness provides comes from society, and that isn’t the case in exandria. even metaphorically, the thing that society fears in ruidusborn people (while it has certainly been exacerbated by centuries of superstition and practices like we saw in zephrah) is a tangible threat. imogen’s magic when not controlled can wipe out a city block, but queerness poses no threat.

that’s why i’m not compelled by imogen’s backstory as a queer metaphor. not because i’m some imodna anti (i very emphatically am not but this fandom kinda makes me wish i was sometimes) or because i think exandria’s lack of homophobia/transphobia means that characters can’t be viewed through a queer lens or that critical role doesn’t contain some of the most compelling queer metaphor i’ve encountered. imogen just isn’t one of those characters, not because she isn’t queer, or because i think her story shouldn’t resonate with queer people, just because i find the generational trauma angle more consistent.

it’s similar with the chronic illness angle, which i will refer to as illness but you’re welcome to emphasise pain, we all have different vocabularies for the experiences we face. but just to give context i’m running off laura’s comparison of imogen’s powers to her own sensory issues and anxiety which while often Lead to pain, fall more into chronic illness in imogen’s context to me. and i do think there’s substantial comparison for imogen’s story as a metaphor for chronic illness, but i think that was much more true earlier in the campaign than it is looking at her from the current context. her beginning motivation being her search for knowledge about her powers really resonated with me as similar to someone experiencing symptoms of chronic illness but who could neither figure out how to treat them or what they were caused by.

but then imogen got more information, specifically about her mother, and her priority became not understanding her powers but understanding her current state as a person - how had she become the person she is, inclusive of her powers but very much emphasising her lack of a mother who became more and more present in the unweaving web of ruidusborn lore. that’s when i was less compelled by the chronic illness reading and more compelled by viewing her as a metaphor for generational trauma. had that not been enough on its own, imogen’s visit to relvin and her recent thoughts on her mother would be enough to convince me.

the part that makes me hesitant about this post is that generational trauma is so intensely linked to the contexts under which it is created and perpetuated. so i can’t really point to specific scenes as evidence of specific things that prove generational trauma is the most compelling and i don’t really want to unload that much of my own experience to clarify my thoughts on a character. but vaguely, i will say that imogen’s relationship with her parents is obviously the clearest source for my reading her as a metaphor for generational trauma. the fact that relvin, the only person in her family without the thing that draws society’s ire, is also the person that she has the most willing anger at is also indicative of this to me. in general, imogen’s rage that so easily transitions into sadness and vice versa comes out a lot in conversations about parents. most recently, i think about ashton’s lovely speech about found family and his distrust about parents and how as they were speaking, laura seemed to be playing imogen as sadly in thought versus months ago when fearnes parents showed up with striking similarities to liliana and imogen’s words of wisdom were let’s hurt them all.

and like. to me that angersadnessvengeancegrief is particularly evocative of the feelings that arise when you are in a family with generational trauma, especially when you are aware of it. because imogen can and has followed the logical steps that have led her and her family to where they are. early on when recounting her relationship with her dad she seemed wistful but understanding of the distance between them. in nearly every encountered with a parental figure imogen seems to be some level of distrusting for the most part, but she’s still holding out hope that her mother will see the good side. and further, there’s the complication of how dire her losing her powers seems to be, and how inextricable her powers are from every aspect of her life. she’s also southern and from a blue collar family. this means nothing except it also means a whole lot.

this is messy and not well organised but if you want a good essay you’re gonna have to pay me money for it but tldr: i say things i believe on my This Is My Opinion Blog and i don’t think i need to explain my thoughts to strangers on the internet but this was already half written in my drafts and if people are gonna shit on my opinions please at least do it in good faith and shit on my actual opinions not the ones you’ve decided i have.

[darlinimamess]

i feel like it’s saying something that this is the 3rd time in 4 years that i’ve needed to take a step back from the intense taylor love bc of her silence around a huge issue

[wifegideonnav]

tbh when mitski said “you’re my best friend/now i’ve no one to tell/how i lost my best friend”

[skyward-floored]

My mom: yeah don’t worry you can put stuff in the amazon cart there’s nothing there you can’t see (for Christmas)

*Lo and behold there was at least one thing in there that I probably should not have seen*

[dear-ao3]

Ur Ukrainian!!! Omg, are u making perogis for Christmas too?? If so, which ones are u making?

no i don’t celebrate orthodox christmas. my moms side of the family is very ukrainian (my great aunt and grandpa immigrated to the us after ww2 and my other grandma was born here at the beginning of ww2 to a ukrainian ambassador) and my great aunt does the whole traditional christmas eve dinner so that’s what we celebrate.

tho it’s not like all the dishes, she’s scaled it down over the years so we do the borscht with ushka, fried flounder, baked salmon with dill sauce, holupchi (sorry for the spelling) with mushroom sauce, regular potato pierogis and sauerkraut pierogis and a fuck ton of dessert. but there used to be i think like 2 more fish dishes.

my earliest memory is actually spitting out an ushka when i was 2 on christmas eve and my uncle making the most outraged face at me from across the table. baby saph didn’t like mushrooms aparently.

but merry christmas!! i’ll eat some of my pierogis on orthodox christmas in honor of all my fellow ukrainians out there :) if i can fucking make dough that cooperates

[cephalon-celaeno]

im not at all joking when i say that if they don’t make an option to disable pregnancy visuals somehow, i will never be able to play jade. i wish i was exaggerating how much it bothers me but best case scenario I manage to rank & subsume her. more likely scenario is i never equip her again and pretend she doesn’t exist forever

[countess-of-edessa]

the thing about taking advice from anyone on tiktok or instagram including catholic and christian type influencers, parenting advice, relationship advice, etc, or internalizing any stories of horrible relationships and betrayal people tell on those platforms, or reading about all the ways interpersonal relationships can end horribly and be cycled through extremely quickly on those platforms is that you are necessarily then consuming the thoughts and experiences of someone who is willing to put their face and name on a public social media platform to talk at you. and like 1% of those people have a good reason for doing so and the other 99% are completely unhinged. so everything you’re consuming has first gone through the filter of "is this person weird and insane enough to make Instagram reels of themselves crying?" and if the answer is yes maybe their advice doesn’t apply to your life because you’re a normal person who would not do that.