teyvat-writer

[teyvat-writer]

Rough infection concepts that I might tweak in the future, I just wanted to draw him a bit fucked up and that's all

[teyvat-writer]

[teyvat-writer]

[teyvat-writer]

just got to water seven and fell in love with this wet cat

[teyvat-writer]

Uk peeps!! Let’s get this going! 🏳️‍⚧️🇬🇧

[teyvat-writer]

so I was in Japan for a month (I mean like just 29 days but still)

[teyvat-writer]

[teyvat-writer]

🌾🌾🌾

Harvesting my wheat

[teyvat-writer]

Naoya Zenin’s transformation

[teyvat-writer]

[teyvat-writer]

reblog to teleport your mutuals to a massive party when jkr dies

[teyvat-writer]

I try to stay off OP reddit, but I saw a post today that intrigued me and it pissed me off so bad I had to get my thoughts out. 😭 There was a conversation about Doflamingo and whether or not people feel bad for him (the question itself was vague so I think people didn't understand what exactly that meant) and then the discussion got into the whole "Doffy manipulated the audience to feel bad for him, and if you empathize with him that means he won," thing.

Now as someone who likes the character, I really disagree. I feel like it would be out of character for him to want people to pity him, at least for the traumatic stuff as a child and for being raised by a gang.

He definitely paints himself as a victim in some situations like his dad deciding to leave Marie Geoise and the whole Corazon fiasco, but in other ways, I think the things that make people sympathize with him would be things he thought were 'right'. The whole ordeal of Trebol offering him a gun, and then the gang treating him like a god instead of a child. Those are key aspects of his character that I always found disturbing, but he never acknowledges it as an injustice upon him when he traumadumps on Law and Luffy.

This is probably the only time it seems like he's trying to encourage sympathy for him, and it's in the silliest, most self-aggrandising monologue, where he tries trauma-scaling against a guy he knows survived a literal genocide. (like dude, you are losing this one.)

In fact, this particular flashback is given to the viewers by Trebol, not Doffy, as if it's not something he sees as important. Instead, it seems more like he thinks those were 'good' for him. I don't think he saw what Trebol did as grooming or the way he was treated as unhealthy. This is someone who canonically has PTSD induced nightmares and chugs a whole bottle of wine as soon as he wakes up. He saw himself in Law and thought he was making him better by grooming him to be his second in command. Thanks to Corazon, Law genuinely got help and started to heal, but in Doflamingo's eyes this made Law worse. I don't think he needs to be deliberately misleading the audience if his perception of the world is already warped. He's a messed-up guy, and manipulating people is one of his skills, but he's not as self-aware as people seem to think he is.

And one comment that really had me raise my eyebrow was the implication that when he was being strung up on the wall with his brother and father, he deliberately cried out to pretend that he'd been hit by an arrow so his dad would say 'train your arrows on me, not my sons!' Now we're getting into 'Law made up his backstory so people would feel bad for him,' levels of child slander. He's literally blindfolded, I'm pretty sure the implication was that he didn't know when or where the arrow would hit and got scared?

I think its totally valid to think he's a terrible person in the story and not feel a lick of sympathy, there are other characters who have arguably sadder backstories and don't let that influence how they treat people. But the way people talk about him specifically when he was a child feels like we're missing the point of Dressrosa. This is an arc where we see the effects of dehumanizing children, with Cora and Doffy, with Law, with Rebecca. Saying that Doflamingo was just one outlier who was always born evil because his brother didn't turn out that way just doesn't make sense given the structure and goes against the themes of freedom that are so prevalent in One Piece. He was a little brat, but he was still a child. Treating him like some devil incarnate that was a super evil genius is giving way too much agency to a ten year old.

And Doflamingo and Rocinante have always been established to be very different, why would they react the same way to a traumatic event? There's a reason why the term fight or flight exists (and freeze and fawn). Doffy's claim that he would kill them is just as extreme as Rocinante saying he wants to die, its just easier to sympathise with someone when that pain is internalised rather than externalised.

Again, i'm not saying you shouldn't hate Doflamingo or that he isn't a villain, but I think seeing him as just 'pure evil' flattens the nuances that make him interesting.

The debate over whether or not he loved his family also always ends up being "yes he did," or "no he was just using them," without considering that it's not as black and white. He definitely is using them and the way he treats them is abusive, the Donquixote family is much more of a cult than a healthy functional family, but that doesn't mean he doesn't care about them at all. It's not like the people he finds are under the impression they aren't expendable for his sake, Monet was already planning on sacrificing herself before he asked and Giolla told him to let Law kill her so he could go after the Straw Hats. He isn't rubbing his hands together at the thought of killing off his family, he is just selfish enough to be able to go through with it even if he does like them.

In some ways, I understand the desire to not want to conflate that kind of abuse with love, but I think seeing those relationships as purely good or bad lacks any kind of self-reflection. Anyone can be abusive, it's a set of patterns and actions that you foster in a relationship. You can love a person and still mistreat them, especially if you never unpack your perception of your world and the people around you (like seeing yourself as a god and them as lesser). But the concept that you can care about someone and be abusive seems too scary for some people, because then they have to reckon with the fact that they can be an abuser even if they aren't the evil boogy man character of a person with low empathy (usually NPD or ASPD). The things that happen in Dressrosa are cyclical - the celestial dragons enact violence upon the citizens which is what caused them to enact violence upon Homing and his family. Whether or not Homing had that coming as part of an oppressive system, his two kids were clearly caught in the crossfire despite not doing anything. And then he is enabled by Trebol and his gang, where they recruit more people who have been abandoned by the world and try and encourage them to also become violent back. Law broke that cycle because Corazon showed him compassion rather than hatred, letting him process the emotions rather than using them as a justification for hurting others. That doesn't mean Law and Corazon were magically born good and saved the day by being themselves, they were able to break a cycle of violence that existed (and still does in the OP world) before Doffy existed.

[teyvat-writer]

[teyvat-writer]

sexyback is a good song but the idea of justin timberlake being sexual disgusts me I don't even register him as a human being let alone a person or a man he's more akin to an old blind dog who pisses everywhere

[teyvat-writer]

are we even trying to make posts anymore