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nikethestatue · 3 months

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TW: sexual assault

I just need to vent. I saw a post today (and it’s been the case almost everyday this last week) of a certain Gwynriel posting about Gwyn’s SA and how she can have a sexual relationship. I know when Elriels even bridge this conversation we get destroyed and told we’re disgusting. I think there are obviously problematic takes on both sides of this and a lot of nuance. However, even when very informed people share their thoughts about this topic, that side goes into attack mode. Even when it’s sensitively handled, people get attacked. Even when it’s clearly stated nobody is saying Gwyn or survivors cannot have a healthy sexual relationship. Even when it’s stated this is just the opinion based on how Gwyn’s character is written and how challenging that book would be to write (and read) with power dynamics, etc.

Well today, I saw a post of a bigger Gwynriel saying that Gwyn is not a virgin and I am just…at a total loss. I sincerely do not know how this is not incredibly offensive, but people on the other side who say Gwyn is very traumatized and has severe concerns associated with her trauma, to the extent that this would be a highly triggering and complex book to write, are evil and offensive. How is it not extremely offensive for somebody to associate a violent sexual assault with a character not being a virgin!? R*pe is not consensual. It is not sex.

If this person is so upset and opposed to this dialogue, why discuss it all the time? Why bring this up every single day this week?

I’m sorry but it’s frustrating for us to be told we’re these evil and terrible people for saying that a character who is a survivor of sexual assault, who lives in a court-funded shelter for vulnerable women and can barely leave said shelter without 1. Permission and 2. High levels of anxiety and struggles to be around men, would have a more powerful story healing outside of sex and a man. It’s so frustrating that this is such an offensive take to them, but it’s fully acceptable to use this character’s sexual assault as a rationale for why she isn’t a virgin and can have a sexual relationship?? It’s fully acceptable to say that Gwyn is going to jump into a sexual relationship with bdsm involved when she hasn’t even expressed sexual interest in anybody? That’s acceptable?? But we’re the bad guys for pointing out Gwyn is uncomfortable around men and this would be a highly triggering book for so many actual, real-life women bc the book would have to deeply explore themes of intimacy after sexual trauma and have an on page first sexual experience after this?

Just because some people heal via sex and bdsm does not mean it would be and is healing to all people who have been through a similar experience.

There would have to be major disclaimers and trigger warnings to that book. And that’s something a lot of people just do not want to read. And that’s valid. I don’t want to read that, personally, either. And I want better for Gwyn’s character than for this to be the mechanism of her healing. For sex and a man, who witnessed this happen to her, and is in a position of authority and has power over her, to be that vessel of her healing.

Idk - it just seems like there is ownership of this topic on that side. I’ve seen posts accusing us of not being survivors when statistically we know this isn’t true and is again, insensitive. There is just so much nuance that is missed. People respond to trauma differently and some characters are written with more symptoms than others. If it’s somehow acceptable to say Gwyn isn’t a virgin (when as far as we know the only experience she has had was non-consensual), but it’s unacceptable to say her character, who is written as highly traumatized, may need more time and her healing in this regard not happen on page after the last book where we left her struggling to leave the library to go to Nesta’s mating ceremony, idk what to even say.

It really feels like some people in this fandom are absolved of accountability and can say horribly offensive things but it’s ok bc they’re gwynriels. How is that compassionate towards a character you claim to care about?

And using Rhys and Lucien as a rationale for why this is possible is just…not even a justifiable comparison. There is so much nuance to this and again, everyone recovers and responds differently. Rhys and Lucien can be around women comfortably. Rhys and Lucien can be in public spaces. Gwyn will get there, but not bc of a man. But bc of her own strength and fortitude in her recovery.

All of this nuance is why I think it would be difficult to write this story sensitively. I guess in summary, of course Gwyn can have a sexual relationship. I don’t think anybody has said otherwise, as far as I have seen. It’s the timing and nature of these spinoffs that make it difficult to give this story the justice it deserves. And I argue that there is nothing offensive about believing that. But there is something highly offensive about saying Gwyn isn’t a virgin when we know her only sexual experience to have been non-consensual.

Sorry. I needed to get that out.

I agree with everything you said, Anon. I think, overall, Gwynriels are so consumed by this ship, the overwhelming NEED for the ship to happen that they fail to see the optics of the ship.

In general, Gwyn wasn't written to be in any ship, at least as it was written in ACOSF, Gwyn wasn't written to be a LI to any many, let alone Azriel. Her whole history was made up for SJM for one purpose, to put her in the Library and make her a friend to Nesta.

This utter misunderstanding and misappropriation of her character by GAs leads to all these very charged and uncomfortable conversations. The issue isnt that she is ready or not ready, or that people in RL ready or arent ready for sexual relations -- it's that she wasn't WRITTEN as a character who was meant to be having any sex with anyone. She isn't going to be tying Azriel up with the ribbon in the Library, or having BDSM sex with him, because again, she was written as a Valkyrie and a friend to Nesta.

That's why the infamous bonus was so sexually charged in the beginning, and then completely lacking in any sexuality in the second part. The sexual potential, the attraction,the desire were firmly set up with elriel. NOT Gwynriel. That's why Azriel wouldn't touch her, that's why there is an underlining theme of him being her teacher, being an 'opponent' to overcome (aka cut the ribbon), and her not being interested in him.

It's not 'oh evil Eriels don't want Gwyn to have sex!!! because they hate women with SA!' (we've all heard this nonsense). We don't give a fuck, frankly, if Gwyn has sex. What we DO understand is how characters and interactions are written. If Elain is extremely uncomfortable with Lucien, we are not going to twist and write 50K metas about how she is secretly pining for him. Sometimes, things are stated with specific intention. Same with Gwyn and Azriel and Gwyn and men--SJM isn't going there, because it's not a place she needs to be as a writer and that's not where her story is going. The setup is Elriel. That's it. It's not us. It's the author, who didn't write Gwyn as a LI. That's it.

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aura-acolyte · 1 year

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Hello, hello. The name's Mare Birch (call me Marie at your own peril) and I'm 18. You may know me as the Hero of Hoenn who saved the world from Groudon and Kyogre and Deoxys' Meteor. Or maybe you don't know me at all because nobody ever seems to recognize me even though I've saved the entire world at least twice maybe more.

Anyways, I'm the Chosen of Rayquaza which basically meant Rayquaza looked at me and said "yeah, I wanna give her superpowers. That seems like a good idea." And it was cause now I can save so many people!

I am also a powerful user of Aura. Like, really powerful. I like to consider myself a Human/Lucario hybrid which isn't technically true cause genetically I'm 100% human but my Aura is mostly Lucario. As a friend of mine put it, I'm human with a Lucario flavor packet.

If you're ever in trouble or need the world to be saved, just call my name and I'll be there! Uh, actually, that doesn't really work cause super hearing is one of the few powers I don't have so instead, like, send me an ask or something. My askbox is always open which is probably a mistake but hey, what're you gonna do.

List of Pokemon because they won't all fit on my trainer card:

Kaen the Blaziken: My starter and one of my most powerful Pokemon, he is a master of speed and is capable of Mega Evolving into an even faster Mega Blaziken.

Kyoshi the Lucario: My mentor and other strongest Pokemon, she taught me everything I know about Aura. He uses any pronouns.

Okami the Mightyena: The only Pokemon I've ever caught in a traditional manner. She once attacked my Uncle but now she's my loyal friend.

Kusanagi no Tsuru the Doublade: Kusanagi for short, Kusanagi is a powerful Doublade who taught me swordplay. I often weild her like a pair of swords. She uses any pronouns.

Henka the Sylveon: A Sylveon who hatched from an Egg I was given. She evolved during a battle with Drake.

Shiruto the Swampert: My other starter. Yeah, that's right I got two. Nobody else was taking him.

Ataque the Tinkaton: A Tinkaton I picked up on my trip to Paldea. I'm pretty sure she's secretly evil. Warning: She will Bonk.

Other facts about me:

I'm a Champion Class trainer meaning I've beaten the Hoenn E4 and Champ but I am not the Champ because I don't wanna be.

Latias is my bestest friend ever.

I have a girlfriend named Zinnia. Go bother her at @last-lorekeeper.

I'm 4 foot 6. It's the worst.

(OOC: Hey, hey! It's me, BackSet. It's been a while so I thought I'd revamp my pinned. Now it explains Mare a lot better and is a lot more characer for her. Anyways, there's not much I need to explain here but some general disclaimers: Mare kinda sort of breaks the Power Ceiling for Pokemon. Most of the time I make sure to only put her up against threats on the same power level because of that. Legendaries, freak science experiments, natural disasters, etc. She also participates in a lot of High Stakes Events by virtue of her having a Savior Complex and being super powerful. She's got a whole Spider-Man "Great power, great responsibility" thing going on. That said, I have two rules about High Stakes Events: 1. I will not plot with minors. and 2. I will not plot with anybody I am not already friends with. You wanna plot, you're gonna have to gain my trust. Kapiche? Kapiche.)

(Icon by @plasmaapologist)

(Also, here's art from @awn-moo)

And some art from my friend Jupiter (she's tagged in the post and I don't want to bother her by tagging her a second time so just go to the post to find her blog)

#irl pkmn #pkmn irl #pokemon irl #pokeblogging #introduction

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gaysullengirl · 2 months

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𝐭𝐫𝐮𝐞 𝐛𝐥𝐮𝐞, 𝐜𝐚𝐬𝐭

❝ But it feels good to be known so well

I can't hide from you like I hide from myself

I remember who I am when I'm with you

Your love is tough, your love is tried and true blue ❞

cast ೃ⁀➷

ೃ⁀➷ alexa demie as isabelle cruz

(𝙏𝙃𝙀 𝙃𝙀𝘼𝙍𝙏 𝘽𝙍𝙀𝘼𝙆𝙀𝙍)

❝ filled with poison, but blessed with beauty and rage. ❞

ೃ⁀➷ matthew gray gubler as spencer reid

(𝙏𝙃𝙀 𝙃𝙀𝘼𝙍𝙏 𝘽𝙍𝙊𝙆𝙀𝙉)

❝ for once in my life, let me get what i want. ❞

ೃ⁀➷ ariana greenblatt as juliana cruz

(𝙏𝙃𝙀 𝙈𝙄𝙎𝙎𝙄𝙉𝙂)

❝ give me back my girlhood, it was mine first. ❞

spence & isa

thomas gibson as aaron hotchner

joe mantegna as david rossi

shemar moore as derek morgan

paget brewster as emily prentiss

aj cook as jennifer jareau

kirsten vangsness as penelope garcia

mixtape ೃ⁀➷

— isabelle, side a

➷ things i wish you said, sabrina carpenter

❝ baby, sorry, i left you in the dark, i always

reach for your leg over there on your side

of the car, baby, everything reminds me of you .❞

➷ a house in nebraska, ethel cain

❝ and it hurts to miss you, but it's

worse to know, that i'm the reason

you won't come home. ❞

➷ cinnamon girl, lana del rey

❝ if you hold me without hurting me,

you'll be the first whoever did. ❞

➷ a&w, lana del rey

❝ do you really think that anybody

would think i didn't ask for it? i didn't

ask for it i won't testify, i already fucked

up my story on top of this, so many other

things you can't believe. ❞

➷ waiting room, phoebe bridgers

❝ she'll be the best you've

ever had if you let her. ❞

spencer, side b —

➷ boys don't cry, the cure

❝ i would tell you that i loved you,

if i thought that you would stay. ❞

➷ unsteady, gracie abrams

❝ but it's so hard, when it feels like

my fault when i keep 'em so far, happens

when I go dark i'm so unsteady. ❞

➷ frank ocean, self control

❝ wish i was there, wish we'd grown up on

the same advice and our time was right ❞

➷ daddy issues, the neighborhood

❝ i know that you got daddy issues, and i do too. ❞

➷ snow angel, reneé rapp

❝ the seasons change,

addiction's strange

i loved back then

what i hate today. ❞

DISCLAIMERS!

isabelle's nickname 'isa' is pronounced 'e-suh'

takes place in 2008, the timeline is a little out of order, it takes place after mayhem (4x01) (the episode where hotch gets blown up lol.)

formatted for wattpad, i apologize if the formatting is confusing.

this book will have mentions of murder, assault, sexual assault, physical abuse, self harm, addiction, drug addiction, panic attacks, depression, anxiety, alcohol use, foul language.

please get help if you are struggling with any of these things! if you ever need to talk to someone my dms are always open <3

#jade’s works ⋆·˚ ༘ *#spencer reid #criminal minds #fbi #fbi agent #alexa demie #fanfic #spencer reid fanfiction #criminal minds fanfiction #mgg

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gayelectro · 1 year

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Thirst: A Ten Year Retrospective

On June 7th, 2013, at 7:30 PM, The Hub Network aired Transformers Prime’s 60th episode. Title: Thirst. Just five episodes before the conclusion of the series (and a post-series “movie”), the last few episodes of any serialized show can have a lot weighing on them, as you need to wrap up story threads in a satisfying fashion.

For me though, Thirst missed the mark. Pretty hard.

When this episode aired, I hated it. And when posting my grievances on Tumblr, I was met with a lot of backlash. This naturally compounded the hatred I ended up brewing for this episode, as I felt as though couldn’t even talk about it with people without hearing some seriously stupid counterpoints or outright attacks to my character over not liking an episode of a children’s cartoon to sell toys.

Well, a lot of time has passed since then. It’s been a decade and I want to lay this whole thing to rest. I was 16 and still in high school when it aired, and now I’m a whole ass married 26 year old adult with a job. So I feel that getting all of my thoughts and feelings out, while also reflecting on how the Transformers fandom (and myself) have changed, might finally quell this beast for good. Aiming for the spark, as it were.

Skip the readmore if you don’t want to encounter a genuinely and insanely long post full of rambling and Transformers media consumption.

Naturally, disclaimers, because this is the internet.

Don’t go and read this and give any guff to anyone who worked on this episode or in Transformers Prime in general. I shouldn’t have to say this. Even as I speculate over what writer’s intentions or unconscious biases were back in 2013, it still gives nobody any reason to find these people and bother them. I’m allowed to criticize a show but I see no need for anybody to send shit to people who were likely just trying to get their paycheck from Hasbro.

Another disclaimer: I don’t have any problem with people who like or love this episode. I have friends who do. And I can see what positive points about it shine out for them. But I’m still allowed to have differing feelings about it and express them. At the crux of it, I think it’s just that simple. Everybody should be able to coexist within a fandom and deal with someone not liking your favorite episode or someone loving an episode you hate.

And I think one last disclaimer: the fact is that a lot of my anger towards this episode is partially baked in due to immediate fandom reactions at the time of release and my own disappointment in the episode not being what I hoped it to be. I’m going to dissect that where possible in this post. But fundamentally, I just don’t understand people who are like “you can’t hold it against a piece of media for not being what you wanted it to be” in regards to being misled. There’s a vast difference between letting fan theories get in the way of the author’s intent and being misled due to the way something is advertised. And while yes, the show isn’t to blame for how the fandom reacted to the episode, it still leaves a bitter taste in my mouth. How could it not? Human brains are wired for pattern recognition. How am I supposed to forget the way I was treated for not liking this episode? How am I supposed to be objective about this short of amnesia to experience the episode for the first time all over again?

Anyways, now that that’s out of the way, let’s dive in!

Now let it be known that I was thrilled for this episode. I was an avid Transformers Prime watcher. I made a whole event around every new episode airing. And I watched the promos like a hawk. I was obsessed with Transformers Prime when it was airing and convinced that it was a masterpiece. Truly, the apex of Transformers media.

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So, the promotions really emphasized the zombie aspect of this episode, with a sneak peak at what they would look like. I don’t consider myself a horror fan by any means, I’ve always been squeamish and jumpy, but I think there’s an aspect of horror that lends itself to the curious mind. I wanted this episode to be scary. Knowing the Y-7 rating, I knew that this was going to be horror that likely fell within my comfort zone while also possibly pushing the envelope a bit. After all, Samurai Jack creator Genndy Tartakovsky had spoken at length about how much violence he could get under the radar in kid’s TV by having all of the “gore” be robots and aliens. I assumed that this episode was going to do much of the same.

Let me get it out of the way right now, one good thing about Thirst is the “zombicon” designs. I think they’re great. Personally would not change a thing about them, they’re pretty darn perfect.

But, being a weenie, I did try my hardest to steel myself against what the episode might throw at me. I was expecting the absolute worst they could get away with in regards to robot gore and violence and jumpscares. I wanted this episode to be scary. Sure, Y-7 scary, but still scary. I probably expected too much, given that I didn’t understand why shows stuck so hard to just 22 minute time slots at the time. But I was an easily startled kid, I figured they could still deliver... And, well... I just didn’t get that at all.

More or less, the episode rips itself into pieces. If one is being generous, about 1/3rd of the episode is veering on horror. But 2/3rds of the runtime are easily just comedic slapstick and banter between Knock Out and Starscream. While this is fine, it certainly wasn’t to my taste and was a let down. This episode obviously really really wanted to be funny and Decepticon focused. And while it was the only episode of Prime to not have a single Autobot in it, I still found its humor to be. Well.

Now, a tangent:

The writers and this series relationship with its queer-coded characters is complex and strange, to say the least. While I do love and appreciate a gay villain, it’s still very telling that the most flamboyant and clearly gay acting characters are Decepticons. Starscream in his literal stiletto heels and effeminate shrieks, Knock Out with his foppish behavior and just about everything said behind the scenes about him... It’s undeniable that they’re intended to be read as gay and it feels as though it varies from episode to episode whether them being gay is supposed to be humorous, relatable, or dastardly.

Thirst definitely feels like... The worst of this to me.

I’m going to focus more on Knock Out, just because he’s realistically more near and dear to my heart. But the fact is, I saw myself in these characters growing up. I was a young queer with no representation in the media I enjoyed. So of course I would cling to the gay, sexy robot. Regardless of if writers wanted him to be someone the audience saw themselves in, I did.

Of course, I believe at this point that everyone is familiar with “The Botcon Incident”.

[ALT TEXT : When asked at BotCon 2011, the Prime writers said that there is no designation for gay, or straight, for that matter, on Cybertron, where Transformers are created by the AllSpark, not through sexual reproductions. They also said that Knock Out is a knock out, and that the Nemesis is a very "don't ask, don't tell" place. And then they jokingly deflected the matter, claiming that Knock Out's mannerisms are not caused by any particular orientation, but are simply eccentricities caused by "a glitch in the AllSpark" the day he was created... which is unintentionally so insulting to gay people that it could create an awkward silence in the Void. ]

On one hand, Knock Out acting gay is seen as a defect. A mistake or some sort of source of humor. At the same time, there was still a lot of love given to him by the writers. In panels, they’ve expressed that they refused to let Knock Out be killed off (regardless of if any other character lived or died). Part of this was because he was really the big “original” character for the show, but part of it also definitely has to be some sort of genuine love for the character, I think.

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So, it’s a weird act to juggle as a queer fan, right? The writers loved Knock Out but it feels like they still wanted to poke and jeer about how gay he was (without even really confirming him to be gay, but we can all admit he acts gay and that’s WEIRD, am I right guys).

To wrap around to Thirst: I feel like this is part of why I don’t find as much humor in the slapstick Knock Out/Starscream moments in the episode as other fans do. This feels like the most brazen and obvious part of it: the humor in the episode feels like it comes from a place of “how funny would it be to make the fags run around the ship screaming their heads off”.

By season three, the animation in this show became so beautiful and utterly expressive. And that’s a great thing. But the level to which they pushed Knock Out and Starscream’s run cycles was just... Like I get it, it’s funny when scared gay person does a silly effeminate run. Not to mention how these characters have established run cycles, we’ve seen them run before, no, in this episode they flail about helplessly because it’s sooooooo funny.

I do feel like there were undercurrents of homophobia in this show. It released in 2013 and thus was probably written back in 2012. To act like the writers room was completely devoid of the influences of homophobia would be absurd. I’m not saying that the episode is explicitly homophobic, nor that it’s homophobic to put gay characters in horror scenarios, nor that everyone who worked on Transformers Prime is a homophobe. But I am saying that this show was a product of its time, and 2012 was a very homophobic time, and that I think we can talk about that without assuming the worst in those bringing it up or the worst in everybody who worked on the media in question. Multiple things can be true at once. I just want to talk about how the vibes are off, man, it feels a little gay bash-y.

Part of what I’m trying to describe here is, to put it another way, would this episode have worked the way it did with any other characters being at the forefront? Thirst, but with say, Shockwave and Soundwave? Airachnid and Megatron? Or Arcee and Bulkhead? Or Ratchet and Wheeljack? However you switch this episode around, I’m almost positive the characters’ mere presence would not be treated as inherently comedic into itself. It feels very telling that this was a Knock Out and Starscream episode, because Knock Out and Starscream are the most obviously queer-coded characters.

Getting off of that tangent which I’m sure has already turned the few readers of this away, let me get back more into the meat of this retrospective.

Another thing that infuriated me about fan reception to this episode is that a lot of fans reduced everything to shipping wars. If there’s something that’s really changed with time in the Transformers fandom, thank fuck it’s the shipping culture. A decade ago, any and all issues I had with this episode got reduced to “You’re a KO/BD shipper and you’re angry because this episode had KO/SS moments”. To this day, I cannot express how such a dismissive and us vs. them attitude makes me see fucking red! If anything, the fan’s combative nature is what made me come to dislike KO/SS as a ship-- not the other way around.

The fact is, the banter between Knock Out and Starscream is entertaining. I do like that aspect of the episode. When they open up to one another in the bunker, it’s a really sweet moment! We have two Decepticons being vulnerable and open with each other, which is a rarity, given how cold living on the Nemesis is! It was a genuinely touching moment that gave us insight into both Knock Out and Starscream as individuals, which I really did enjoy.

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The way they speak to each other throughout the episode is actually one of the things that makes me wish I could come back to this episode more (and hopefully now I can). It’s telling how they can open up to one another only to immediately throw each other under the bus the very next moment. It speaks to the Decepticon’s culture.

But anywho, there was also just the... Blatant ignoring of what actually was said in the episode to fit an agenda. Ardent “only-one-ship-may-rule” KO/SS fans insisted that Knock Out’s behavior in this episode ““proved”“ that he didn’t care about Breakdown. This thankfully has died off overtime in the fandom, now that more people can accept multiple ships coexisting in peace instead of making conflict where there doesn’t need to be any.

But even if we take shipping out of the equation entirely, you have to be either not listening or willingly deluding yourself if you think that any of Knock Out’s actions in this episode are showing that he did not care about Breakdown, regardless of if you think that relationship was lovers, friends, or just close coworkers.

“Despite your justifiable lack of regard for his human side, it doesn’t trouble you to watch what remains of your former partner endure your scientific endeavors?” “Not really. Besides, Silas once had poor Breakdown pinned to his lab table. I think my former partner would be pleased to be a part.”

This was the big exchange that really got under people’s skin. Watching it live, I loved this reaction from Knock Out. It spoke to what a sadist that he was and how he went about extracting revenge. He saw the perfect bookending of stories; Silas experimented on Breakdown, so it was only fit for Knock Out to experiment on Silas. Just as Silas had used Breakdown’s corpse as a suit to trounce around in, Knock Out would treat his body just as such. Just a shell, not any remnant of the soul that was once inside.

But certain people just heard the deadpan “not really” and just stopped listening. Like, I’m sorry, but these guys are alien robots. They probably already don’t have exactly the same feelings around corpse desecration as we do, and even if they did, Knock Out is kind of a freak anyways.

And once again, when I saw this episode, I was single. Now I’m married. I can see even more now how love can push you to weird, freakish, even ghoulish extremes. I personally could think of hardly anything more romantic than my wife torturing and experimenting on someone who wronged me. And I certainly wouldn’t be kind to someone for wearing her face in the event of her passing.

And the line “You’re no Breakdown” got wildly misinterpreted too. Somehow people thought that meant that Breakdown was “lesser” than Starscream, which... What? How? Like it’s obvious that Knock Out is contrasting his former relationship to Breakdown to the relationship he has to Starscream here. Starscream and Breakdown are vastly different people, that’s not to say anything about shipping. Once again, even if you only see Breakdown as Knock Out’s assistant, his relationship to Starscream is still vastly different to his relationship with Breakdown. Starscream is his superior officer whereas Breakdown is either on the same rung as him or a step lower. This is not a value judgement on either ship! It’s just basic chemistry and writing! One of them is a quiet brute while the other is a commanding fruit. I’m not understanding how this could lift up or put down either ship, so to see people do that (admittedly on both sides of this stupid fucking ship war) was just aggravating.

Once again, I can’t stress enough how by and large, the fandom’s attitude has shifted away from that bullshit. I see people gleefully talk about shipping all three of them together or just shipping their own favorite thing without needing to bring the other ship into it at all in an adversarial way. It’s great. Wish that could’ve been here all along. I could only imagine the kind of blood that would have been shed if someone had conducted the Transformers Husband Poll or Canon Ship Poll back in 2013, but now people can just have a good time with things the way we’re supposed to.

And then we get to the part where I actually take issue with the writing of the episode itself, regardless to fandom reaction.

Airachnid.

Okay, so can we finally talk about this part? Because when I took issue with this when the episode aired, I got a lot of “wait and see, they still have time to do something with this”. Which. No they fucking didn’t. They opened up like five new plot points, for no reason, right at the end of the series, and then did not follow up on them at all.

I can’t wrap my head around this, even now. Why did they even take this character out of stasis? They fridged her before only to let her out for five minutes to fridge her again. This is so absurdly stupid, like I still cannot even find a silver lining to this part.

Airachnid having a hoard of zombie Insecticons on one of Cybertron’s moons did not even get a mention for the rest of the series.

What was the point of this? Legitimately, was there some sort of reason they needed to write out the Insecticons so badly? They hadn’t really been important in any regard for a long time. At that point in the show, they were barely a step above Vehicons when it came to being Decepticon cannon fodder. Was there any reason to make Airachnid extra dead with more steps? Because this doesn’t provide more closure than her already piss poor exit from the show with her being in stasis, frozen in a pod, as a trophy for Megatron.

Nothing, and I mean nothing, would have changed for the rest of Prime if Airachnid had stayed frozen in her pod and the Insecticons stayed aboard the Nemesis. I can’t think up a defense for this, I can’t conjure up an explanation, just... Why? I’m still left feeling like this was fucking strange. Maybe someone’s femdom hypnosis vampire queen fetish, I can’t fucking tell.

Now that the series is over, I’m hoping at least people can acknowledge that this was pointless, stupid, and just unnecessary. Or at least give me any reason why this isn’t the dumbest thing ever. Because this was the big thing in the actual canon of the episode that made me go “wow, that was an awful episode”.

And while I’m still left scratching my head over that, I do feel... Relieved. The more I think it over, the more I can see how the fandom has changed for the better in a lot of respects. And upon rewatching this episode, I can better see the parts that I actually like. Sure, some shit still bothers me, but I do feel better about it now.

And of course, watching Prime as it airs at 16 is a very different experience than trying to rewatch it... Basically any time once you hit your 20s. I still love Prime, but I’m older now and can see its flaws, especially since we’ve got the whole story to work with. I still recommend Prime as a starting point to people with certain tastes who wanna get into Transformers. But doing a full rewatch of the series for me is a chore now due to some of the glaring writing issues and pacing. It’s a good show, but not the pinnacle of Transformers media I used to think of it as. And that’s okay! Tempered expectations help a lot with disappointment.

With something like ten years, a lot has changed in the Transformers franchise. We now have a plethora of canon queer characters and relationships, all treated with respect. We have a nonbinary Autobot in a children’s cartoon, and I know that would have changed my world as a kid if I had grown up with that. And while it sucks that my favorite character in Transformers Prime, Breakdown, got killed off so unceremoniously, so many continuities after that have tried to make up for it by having him survive and thrive.

Another positive note is the way my feelings for this episode have impacted my real life.

Back when my wife was still just my girlfriend, I ranted and raved to her about how much I hated this episode. How stupid it was. How it was the worst episode of the whole show. Back then, she had no interest in any media pertaining to robots, let alone Transformers. But something about how passionate that got me made her curious. She checked out Thirst, and concluded that if that was the worst the Transformers Prime had to offer, then it might be a pretty good show overall. She ended up watching Prime, and with that gateway, I was able to get her to watch and enjoy more Transformers media. Which lead to more robot media as a whole. Now we have so many more fandoms and shows that we enjoy together, all because my hate boner for this episode piqued her interest! Sharing my love of robots with my wife has been a wonderful facet of our relationship and I simply don’t know how we would have gotten there without this entry way!

All of this to say... I think after ten years, maybe this isn’t the worst episode of the series. I can’t be bothered with a whole rewatch to find out, as the episodes that bore me aren’t ones that I’d bother to watch again just to rate. The shit with Airachnid was mind-achingly stupid and maybe some of the slapstick hasn’t aged the best, but otherwise it just is what it is. I liked Silas dying, I liked the character interactions we got between Starscream and Knock Out, I always adore Darren Norris’ performance as Knock Out and this episode does wonders to show off his skill (“Precisely my-- WHAT”), and the zombie designs were pretty baller.

I thank this episode for what it’s given to me, I’m going to let go of the ghosts of fandom’s past, and now I set it all free.

Here’s the whole episode on Youtube, TFwiki just links these if they’re available, apparently.

youtube

#long post //#Transformers Prime #Thirst #TFP #Transformers Prime Thirst #TFP Thirst #Breakdown #Airachnid #Knock Out #Starscream #Silas #CYLAS #mentions of homophobia #f slur warning #I cannot stress enough how long and rambling this is so don't say I didn't warn you

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morguevampire · 1 year

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(Un) Fortunate Encounters -Chapter 2

Chapter One

Masterlist for this fic

summary: After being questioned by the FBI about an accidental interaction with a wanted criminal you thought your life would go back to being as mundane as it has always been. How wrong you were to think you could just go back to normal when come the next day you would find yourself being bound to a chair in a fucking warehouse.

warnings/tags: fluff, smut, angst, mentions of kidnapping, mentions of torture, drinking, mild alcoholism, dark themes, slow build romance, not really Stockholm syndrome but that’s up for interpretation

chapter: 2/?

word count: 2.938k

pairings: Helmut Zemo x fem!Reader

author’s note: Right folks - time for chapter two!

Note that this will be a very slow build at the beginning, meaning actual interaction with Helmut Zemo will probably only start in chapter four. (I do hope you will find it worth it) Currently already working on chapter three as well - so please be patient.

My personal disclaimer as always is that I am not an englisch native and will therefore most likely make some mistakes. Please don't hesitate to contact me should I have messed up.

Anyhow, I hope you enjoy and please let me know what you think so far! Kudos and comments are always appreciated.

Muchos besos, mis amores <3

You can also find this work on https://archiveofourown.org/works/43158162/chapters/108466263

The second time you wake up that morning (or is it midday..., perhaps even afternoon?) you’re not in your apartment anymore. Instead you find yourself tied to a chair in a dark room in some kind of warehouse. It’s quiet, aside from the pounding inside your head. An eerie feeling is settling over you, becoming more intense as your mind tries to grasp what happened, how you ended up here. Your first instinct is to scream but there’s duct tape covering your mouth. You shut your eyes again, wishing for this to be a terrible nightmare. You try to wiggle out of your bounds, unsuccessfully. Whoever dragged you here knows stuff about bondage and you’re too much of a weakling to get them off anyways. Panic starts settling in and it all only becomes worse once you hear footsteps echoing from afar. It must be him. Zemo probably discovered the FBI were onto him and now needs to get rid of the woman who made the mistake of running into him. But why not just kill you immediately? Why drag you to a dodgy warehouse? He seems to not care about the loss of innocent lives anyways, considering the attack on the UN building. Your thoughts are interrupted by two man coming out of the shadows. Both of them most definitely not being Zemo but perhaps associates? They look quite scary – that’s for sure. Tall, bulky and extremely angry looking. You begin to squirm in your chair once again. Not quite sure what to hope for, even if you ran, there would be no guaranty that you could get out alive.

“So, the bitch finally woke up.” One of the men, the slightly shorter one with the dirty blond hair huffed.

The other man steps up towards you, his finger already on the left end of the duct tape covering your mouth.

“Listen now, it’s of no use to anybody if you scream once I remove this. We’re in the middle of nowhere. Nobody’s going to hear you and we simply want to ask you a few questions. Understood?”

You can’t bear looking into his eyes, your whole body is shaking while you slightly nod. Tears already burning in your eyes. You wanted to throw up, or pee your pants or whatever the fuck people do when they are scared shitless.

Ripping off the duct tape is painful but if only you knew how much more painful this whole “questioning” would become.

“Alright. If you want this to be over quickly, be a good girl and answer me this simple question:” The taller one inquires while scooting another chair in front of you. The other man is off somewhere out of the corner of your eye, the only thing you can make out is water running into a bucket and the air becoming even more humid than before.

“Where is Helmut Zemo?”

Your eyes widen. Not understanding this situation at all. Were they not here in duty of the Baron? Were they FBI as well? The bad cops? The really bad, desperate ruthless ones? You shake your head no. Frantically trying to explain that you had no idea where he was. That you were just a normal, boring person who had a 9 to 5 and never did anything illegal in her life, besides maybe underage drinking in high school. You simply ran into Helmut Zemo without even knowing and you already got questioned by the FBI. You knew about the man as much as the media would report on him and you had zero ties to the avengers or anybody associated with him.

You could tell the man opposite of you was annoyed. Shaking his head and shushing you.

“See, we know the FBI already questioned you and we don’t work like the FBI. We don’t need those rules. And you won’t be able to pull off your I-know-nothing bullshit with us. You either tell us his whereabouts or this is going to be a looooong night, darling.”

That’s when the other man appeared again. Carrying a huge bucket with water. You gulped as he untied your legs from the chair, forcing you to your knees, which sent a wave of pain through your body as they made contact with the cold, hard concrete floor. You’ve read about water torture and all you wanted to do - in prospect of what you feared was about to happen - was scream and cry for your mum.

“I swear. Please I swear that I do not have any connection to Zemo. I don’t know him, I haven’t even talked to him. I bumped into him on accident. Plea...”

You begged but to no avail as suddenly a sharp pain shot through your already aching head as you were pulled by your hair and forcefully dipped underwater. You didn’t have any time to get air into your lungs, so water got into every available opening in your face, burning up your nose and your windpipes. At least the desperation to breath distracted you from how cold the water was. After too long but probably about only half a minute your head was pulled out again and immediately the questions shot out of the man again, while you were desperately trying to breath and at the same time not suffocate on the water you swallowed. Water in your ears made everything sound dull but you could still clearly tell the questions were still about Helmut Zemo. Only this time you didn’t even manage to properly reply in the negative before your head was underwater again.

This continued on for quite a while. Everything hurt and burnt and every time your head was out of the water you could feel hot tears on your face while sobs and violent coughs were wrecking through your body. This was worse than anything you had ever experienced in your life. You didn’t know what to do. You didn’t have any information. If you did you would give it away immediately. You just wanted the pain and suffering to go away. You wanted it to stop. To go home and hide forever and never set a foot out of your apartment again.

You could tell the two men were becoming more and more frustrated with you as well. Throwing around vile curse words and yanking you even more forcefully in and out of the bucket. You stopped counting how many times you got dunked but at one point the taller man must have had enough of your lack of knowledge about Zemo, so that he decided punching you right in the face might help bring your memories back. You felt blood running down your cheek and dripping into the bucket, giving the water a light pink taint.

If your head hadn’t exploded just yet, you figured now might just be a good time. You honestly just wanted to die. What did it matter anyways? You didn’t know shit about Zemo and you certainly wouldn’t recover from the trauma, if you ever made it out alive from this shithole.

At least after the forceful punch to your left eye the water torture stopped and the hand pulling up your head dropped. Like a sack of potatoes, you slumped on your side, silently wailing in a fetus position while the two men whispered to each other.

Some time passed until a kick in your rips forced you out of your pain induced delusion.

“Right darling. We’ll give you one more chance. You tell us where the fuck Helmut Zemo is hiding and we’ll let you go.”

He knelt down in front of you, snarling into your face while forcefully holding your chin in his hands, twisting your head into an uncomfortable position. “But…, if you don’t speak up now, we really do have no other option but to use other, more painful measures.” The hand grabbing your chin was replaced by the barrel of a gun.

You completely froze. You knew this was it. Perhaps making something up would work but they’d find you anyways, knowing you bullshitted them and death seemed like a sweet release at this point. You wondered when the phenomena of “the light at the end of the tunnel / your life flashing behind your eyes in seconds” would set in but just as you were about to mumble that you really did not know anything and maybe plead one last time to let you go, a gunshot rang through the building.

It seemed like everything stopped for a milli-second until there was a scream from the shorter man and suddenly another gunshot.

It got unpleasantly quiet. You shut your eyes, no thoughts ran through your head except that death didn’t feel any different. The pain was still there, you still felt the cold floor under your body and you could smell the blood dripping from your face. In a way you were disappointed, you thought dying would relieve you of everything. You were never a religious person, but you did believe that death felt like floating. A numb floating, no negative feelings, yet also no positive ones. Just aimless floating.

When you once again heard steps coming towards you, you realized that perhaps you weren’t even dead. You opened your eyes just to come face to face with your kidnapper, his lifeless eyes staring right at you. He must have been shot and has fallen right in front of you. Blood was still oozing out of his body and you could slowly feel it running towards your lying form, soaking the thin cloth of your pajamas.

The footsteps were definitely descending from somewhere now, getting closer. You decided to shut your eyes again, too afraid to see who else decided to have their way with you. You’ve already kind of made peace with the fact that you were going to die and you made the decision to simply not look into your murderer’s eyes once it happens.

The louder the footsteps became the more panic rushed through your body. It surprised you that only then an anxiety attack would overtake you. It suddenly felt hard to breath and a wave of ugly sobs rushed through your aching ribcage. You felt almost pathetic, silently stuttering “please, please, please…” over and over again. Your ears were ringing, still abused from all the water but you picked up the sound of the new intruder dragging the dead man’s body away from you, most likely to get a better shot at you.

Your shaking from barely registered the gentle touch of a hand running over your shoulder. “Shhh, hey…”

You opened your eyes abruptly, recognizing the deep, raspy voice with the accent even though you’ve only heard it once in your life. It was him. Definitely. In a long grey trench coat with a fur collar framing his masked face. He took off the purple disguise before continuing.

“It’s alright. You’re ok. You’re safe now.”

Helmut Zemo was kneeling in front of you, a golden gun right next to his knee. Looking down with furrowed, worried brows on your miserable, hurt form.

Your mind was still trying to make sense of it all but you came to no conclusion as you slowly drifted out of consciousness once again.

#Helmut Zemo #Zemo #Helmut Zemo x Reader #Helmut Zemo & Reader #Helmut Zemo fanction #Zemo fanfiction #MCU #Helmut Zemo x you #Helmut Zemo/Reader #Baron Zemo x reader #TFAWS

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fallynleaf · 8 months

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I'm trying to get my wrestling journal caught up, and am succeeding with mixed results. I wrote over 10k words on stuff from July alone, 4k of which were just about AEW Blood & Guts on July 19 (the Golden Lovers' first match back together since 2018). I've been toying with the thought of publishing that piece somewhere where people might actually read it, so I thought why not post it here?

(The usual disclaimer on my journal applies: please don't reprint any of these translations, as they're pretty rough and I haven't gotten them looked over by anyone.)

Kenny Omega & Kota Ibushi & “Hangman” Adam Page & Matt Jackson & Nick Jackson vs Konosuke Takeshita & Jon Moxley & Claudio Castagnoli & Wheeler Yuta & Pac

July 19

I’m at a loss of words to describe this match. Unfortunately, I’m at a loss of images, too. There is nothing I can put in this space that’ll do proper justice to the emotions I felt watching this. But I’ll try.

I don’t think Blood & Guts was the right match format for this story. There are simply too many moving pieces, too many distractions, too much for the cameras to keep up with. But pro wrestling teaches us to see things not as they are, but as they feel, so I will talk about how this match felt.

The feud between The Elite and the Blackpool Combat Club started a long time ago. So long ago that I can’t even pin down an exact start date in my memory. I suppose in some way, it started in the closing moments of the very first AEW show, when Mox made his surprise debut and breathed in his first taste of freedom, stained with Kenny’s blood.

Kenny vs Mox is such old history for AEW, it’s practically primordial. It’s in the company’s DNA.

Like many great wrestling feuds, there’s an ideological disagreement at the heart of this one, a disagreement concerning the fundamental nature of professional wrestling. More than anything, though, it’s about love.

Bryan Danielson said as much in the promo he cut on April 5 after the Blackpool Combat Club attacked Hangman on Dynamite. Interestingly, in this promo, Bryan seems to draw an equivalence between love and true professional wrestling. He treats them as one and the same. He talks about loving Mox, Claudio, and Yuta, whom he goes on to describe as “professionals” in contrast to the Elite, who are “amateurs”, and who don’t have love, or even understand the concept of it.

To Hangman, he says: “And I love these men! I love these men! Do you know what? You don’t have anybody who loves you. Is anybody coming out from the back? No! Not a damn person! ‘Cause nobody loves this man! In fact, they don’t even know what love is! But I know what love is. In fact, when I’ve been at home, I’ve been teaching my kids a few things. A few things about how to fix up your house. And I think the house that is AEW needs to be fixed up. From all these amateurs.”

The house metaphor immediately caught my attention. It reminded me of an extended metaphor that Hangman employed in his monologue from episode 204 of Being The Elite, which was released on May 18, 2020, and which to this day remains one of the few pieces of art about the pandemic that I can actually tolerate. In his metaphor, he compares AEW to a house, and The Elite are both in the house and they are the house.

In Hangman’s own words: “I nearly won the prestigious ‘Man of the House’ award in May. I’d teamed up with our broom to clean the house better than anyone had ever swept it before. And I feel like I might have been starting to… patch up the holes of the walls of the house. The walls that made the house what it was in the first place.”

The Man of the House award is his failed attempt to become AEW World Champion in May 2019. Teaming up with the broom refers to his tag team with Kenny and their 6-star tag title match with the Young Bucks, which was considered by many people to be the best tag match in history. And the Elite are the walls. He’s talking about the slow, tentative process of repairing his relationship with the faction that quite literally made AEW.

I suppose in a very literal sense, The Elite are in AEW and also are AEW, in the sense that they’re the “Elite” in “All Elite Wrestling”. Hangman’s mixed metaphor is only as messy as reality.

The “AEW as a house” metaphor came up again two years later, on May 25, 2022, in a now infamous promo segment building up to Hangman vs CM Punk at Double or Nothing, where, with just two words, Hangman unknowingly set off a chain of events that would end up almost tearing the entire company apart, though no one realized it at the time.

He tells Punk: “You talk a big game about workers rights, yeah? Well, you’ve shown the exact opposite since you’ve gotten here. I love this place! I care about this place! This is my home! And this Sunday at Double or Nothing, I will not, I will not be defending this championship against you. No, for the first time in my life, I will be defending All Elite Wrestling from you.”

And Punk tells him: “Win, lose, or draw, I respect you, Hangman. But remember, those roads you traveled to get here? They were paved by me. This house that you built? It was constructed with lumber from trees that I chopped down. The world you traveled to get here, to create All Elite Wrestling, happened because I gave you the blueprint.”

Hangman fails to defend the championship against Punk. And in the months that follow, he fails to defend All Elite Wrestling from Punk, too. The philosophical divide was so true to reality and so exquisitely foreshadowed that it caused me to initially assume that the rumored backstage altercation between Punk and The Elite was part of an intricate work that connected back to this very promo. I was more right than I knew, but I didn’t know that the reason for the connection was not because it was a well-planned story, but because the conflict at the center of the story was real.

AEW is the house that Hangman built, and Punk says that it was made with lumber from trees that he chopped down. In saying so, he takes credit for The Elite’s work and implies that without them, he could simply fill the space left by their absence on his own.

But can he? Can anyone? Can there be an All Elite Wrestling without The Elite, or would the whole building crumble without its walls? For a few months in late 2022, we got to experience AEW without The Elite. It was not a particularly encouraging time for the company.

Which brings us here, to 2023. Bryan Danielson says that the house that is AEW needs to be fixed up. He doesn’t think the Elite can compare to the Blackpool Combat Club, not in terms of love or in terms of pro wrestling.

I’ll admit, when Bryan said that The Elite don’t even know what love is, I laughed. Kenny Omega has centered his entire wrestling career around love, to the point where “A Wrestling Love Story” is in the title of his documentary. I once heard someone sum him up by saying “in pro wrestling, you can choose to be whatever you want to be, and Kenny Omega chose to be in love.”

Before he beat Kazuchika Okada to win the IWGP Heavyweight Championship in 2018 in what is widely considered to be the best match of his career, Kenny said: “I’m not saying that I’m arriving to this arena with a bunch of new moves, but I am saying that this version of Kenny Omega might be the most prepared. And a big part of that is because I’ve let someone back into my life that I cared about, that I loved, and that together with that power, we can’t lose.”

He says basically the same thing outside of kayfabe as well. In his documentary, he credits Kota’s support as being essential for preparing him physically and emotionally so that he’d be ready to pour his heart out in a match that he knew was going to last over an hour. Many of the hard lessons that his character had to learn about the pain of isolation and loneliness, and the redemptive power of love, are things that Kenny himself had struggled with.

In 2018, Kenny once gestured to Chuck Taylor and Trent Beretta, the Best Friends, and said “This is what friendship looks like.” Then he put his arm around Kota and said, “And this is what love looks like.” This is a man who knows what love is. He knows the pain of love as keenly as he knows the triumph and the sweetness of it.

In a way, I think of Kota not coming with Kenny to AEW as sort of the original heartbreak. It’s there in the background subtext of the entire major arc of AEW’s first chapter. It’s an unhealed wound that only leads to more hurt as time goes on.

Which brings us to Blood & Guts. The Blackpool Combat Club and The Elite are both lacking a 5th member for the match. The BCC has Jon Moxley, Claudio Castagnoli, and Wheeler Yuta, but not Bryan Danielson (who is out with an injury). Their fourth member is Konosuke Takeshita, who is fighting with a single-minded purpose, which is to surpass Kenny Omega. Their fifth member later turns out to be Pac, who has no real immediate story reason to be there, besides past grudges. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, and all that.

The Elite has Kenny Omega, Hangman Adam Page, and Matt and Nick Jackson. I can’t recall the precise moment I knew that Kota Ibushi would be their fifth member, but it was before the Blood & Guts match was even announced.

The moment I knew for sure, though, was when I saw this clip, which was filmed after Dynamite on July 5. Speaking to the crowd, Kenny says that during the week when his whereabouts were unknown, he didn’t stay home, and he didn’t go to Canada. “But where I went was for a good old friend, someone who is very near and dear to my heart.” He smiles when he says that last part, and his smile alone is a dead giveaway.

If there was any remaining doubt, this article by Michael Nakazawa on the DDT site cleared it up for me. The article sums up Konosuke Takeshita’s AEW story, which of course I know very well, but I wanted to see Nak’s take on it. This part was another giveaway that Kota Ibushi was going to be the 5th person on The Elite’s side: "そして竹下が抜け一人欠けたジ・エリート側には誰が入るのか？DDTファンにとっては竹下とケニーという顔合わせは見逃せないものになるだろう。(ここで多く触れるつもりはないがジ・エリート側の伏せられたメンバーとの顔合わせも見逃せないものになるだろう。) " (“And with Takeshita out, The Elite are down a member. Who will fill in on their side? DDT fans won’t want to miss the face-off between Takeshita and Kenny. (I’m not going to touch on it too much, but I’m sure that the confrontation with the unknown member of The Elite is also something not to be missed.”)

On July 12, the week before Blood & Guts, they reveal the 5th member of the Elite’s team. The Blackpool Combat Club has Kenny at their mercy, a chair around his neck. Mox offers him the microphone so that he can say his last words. Kenny says, “We still have a fifth member, too.” He’s laughing, even though he struggles to breathe. “Check the screen. Check the screen, you bitch.” The look on his face is absolutely serene.

The arena goes dark. Kota’s new music plays, though the crowd doesn’t recognize it. But everyone cheers when he shows up onscreen. I’d been wondering if a Canadian crowd would be more familiar with Kota Ibushi than an American one, since I’ve heard that the TV station that AEW airs on frequently plays Kenny’s documentary, so many regular AEW watchers in Canada likely have seen it. This crowd certainly knows who he is.

At the end of the video, The Elite is now listed as the Golden Elite instead.

The lights turn back on. The Young Bucks and Hangman are here now, ready to save Kenny. As the Blackpool Combat Club clears out of the ring, Kenny picks up the mic. He says, “We might be one man down, but we’re never out. Next week, Blood & Guts, we’re gonna show you guys it’s more than about fighting, it’s more than about your kill-jitsu; this is about more than that. Heart, passion, soul, friendship, love.” He smiles as he says love, his voice almost breaking.

He knows they’ve already won. Kota Ibushi is coming, and it’s all going to be okay.

After the reveal, Kota tweeted about it (he also posted it in English). That “AEW見ていたよ、ずっとね” (“I’ve been watching AEW, this whole time”) line in particular, I am overcome. I don’t even know how to put into words what it felt like to read that. Golden Lovers fans have been waiting four long years for Kota Ibushi to make an AEW appearance.

I don’t think any of us expected it would be anything like this.

Kota arrived in the US a few days before the match. He tweeted a photo of him and Kenny and Nak at Kenny’s house, which still feels utterly surreal to me.

And here at last we’ve reached the match.

I’m going to preface this by saying that AEW did a spectacularly bad job with the production on this match, which isn’t exactly unusual for them, but I’m less forgiving with this one. I think every single time the Golden Lovers started interacting, the camera basically immediately cut away. It’s hard to interpret it as intentional malice, considering how bad their usual production is, but it was jarring how little the production team seemed to understand what people actually wanted to see here.

The photos on the official website are also an incredibly poor selection (Kota and Takeshita aren’t in a single one of them), which seems to be a theme with every Blood & Guts show. And because AEW bans fan photography, if Scott Lesh isn’t there, and the official photographers drop the ball, we’re basically entirely out of luck. I got desperate enough, I actually attempted the bold and unprecedented strategy of just asking AEW for access to more photos. I couldn’t get them retroactively, unfortunately, but I should have more photos for shows going forward.

The whole thing made me extra appreciative of the work of Japanese fan photographers, who are so good at not only capturing vivid and dynamic photographs of moves, but who also capture the quieter moments, like exchanges between wrestlers at the corner. A lot of pro wrestling lives in those quiet moments, not in the bloody violence or flashy athleticism.

I think fundamentally that’s where me and this match were at odds. I was watching for the quiet moments, and what AEW thought they were delivering to viewers was the blood and violence.

In the end, the Golden Lovers were only one of like a dozen things that were going on in this match. So ultimately, it wasn’t really about them. I’m more at peace with that fact now at the time of writing, over a month after the match, than I was when I watched the match live. I think when you’ve waited so long for something that means so much to you, it’s almost impossible not to be disappointed when you finally get that thing, because it’s competing with all of the versions of it that played out in your head.

Kenny entered first for their team, and Kota entered last. The two of them were the bookends for the Golden Elite, the beginning and the end, containing the entirety of the faction between them. Kenny wore fully Kota Ibushi themed gear, so the two of them matched. The Young Bucks and Hangman had their own set of matching gear, which was white and purple in contrast to the Golden Lovers’ white and blue (I’m sure this divide won’t become important later).

Leading up to this match, the Blackpool Combat Club had repeatedly had The Elite’s number. They’d beaten them up more times than I can count, had mutilated them with screwdrivers, and had dragged Kenny through the hell of Don Callis’s and Takeshita’s betrayal.

But now The Elite had their secret weapon. They were finally whole again.

From the second act onward, as soon as Kota Ibushi, the final member, made his entrance, the story of the match was that the Golden Elite needed him to save them. Whenever things started going too badly for them, he’d come in and change the course of the match so that it was in their favor. Every time.

I think my favorite spot in the match involved this horrific bed of nails which turned out to actually be a bed of screwdrivers. Very thematically apt. Mox was laid out on it, and Kota approached him, and I knew immediately what he was about to do, yet still gasped when he actually did it. He did his trademark standing moonsault, his knees impacting directly with Mox’s chest, driving Mox’s body deeper into the screwdriver heads.

The Golden Lovers reunited over Mox’s prone body. They reached for each other in relief, and I looked to see their expressions, my heart pounding, and the camera had already cut away from them.

Some other things I remember: Matt Jackson poured a sack of thumbtacks down from the roof of the cage into the ring, and Pac stomped Nick Jackson through a table in a dramatic spot that looked far better in the replays than it had in the original shot. Mox brought the wild violence probably more than anyone else in the match.

I wish we’d gotten a little more with Takeshita and Kota, as it was their first time sharing a ring together in many years. But this match wasn’t really about that, either.

In the final minutes of the match, Pac and Claudio get into an argument, then Pac cuts his losses and bails. Don Callis pulls Takeshita out shortly after, realizing that their side is almost definitely losing. The match has now become a 5-on-3.

The Golden Elite unleash everything they have left onto poor Wheeler Yuta. Then they hoist him up with the chain around his neck, and he starts to pass out. The referee calls for the bell. I didn’t realize exactly what had happened at first, because the production failed to show it, but it was actually Mox who had ended the match. He surrendered to save Yuta.

Someone summed up the story very succinctly in a discord screenshot from somewhere. A person with the display name “V….” said: “So in the end the story is that despite how much conflict the Elite have had over the years when the time came, they were the ultimate cohesive unit and the BCC, despite how much they crow about being professionals and loving each other, had to rely on mercenaries that coincidentally had grudges against the Elite that bailed because they didn’t have as much skin in the game and in the end Moxley, a man who tries to portray himself as nothing but violent and merciless, had to surrender to save his protege in practically a perfect mirror of him submitting to Hangman at Revolution.”

For once, I actually found myself in near perfect agreement with what seems to be the IWC’s general consensus of the story of that match. I really liked how my friend described it: “mox literally had to surrender to love in more ways than one”.

The end of the match ran up against the end of their TV timeslot, the enemy of televised wrestling in America, though we did get one final shot of the Golden Lovers together right as the show went off the air. The post-match stuff didn’t quite make it onto the show, but some fans captured video of it. Kenny spoke on the mic for a bit, and one of the things he said is that we’ll probably be seeing Kota in AEW again.

Kota was unfortunately at a pretty severe disadvantage this whole match for several reasons. This was only his third match since coming back from his 2021 injury, for one thing, and it was much more demanding than either of his GCW matches in March. It was also a match style he was not at all accustomed to, and it was his first time wrestling in AEW.

We found out in a tweet he made later that he hadn’t realized that his normal wrestling shoes wouldn’t be well-suited for the match, so the thumbtacks and glass pierced through his shoes and hurt him throughout the match. Reminds me a bit of the original Little Mermaid story, where every step the mermaid takes on land hurts…

He didn’t actually come in contact much with the thumbtacks during the match itself, besides the ones that made it through his shoes. The thumbtacks in the photo in the above tweet came into play after the match. When they went off the air, Kota intentionally threw himself onto the thumbtacks, just for fun. Kenny had a pretty funny reaction, haha. He looked at him like he knew he’d be the person picking every single one of those tacks out of Kota’s back later.

And sure enough, Being The Elite featured a clip of Kenny doing exactly that. They talk briefly in Japanese while Kenny’s taking the tacks out of Kota’s back. Here’s a transcription of the Japanese. I love how Kenny takes care of Kota before getting his own wounds tended to, despite his own back being in far worse shape.

Kota explained the reason why he jumped into the tacks in a reply to El Desperado (English translation) (Despy also recently took a totally unnecessary tack bump himself). Since it was Kota’s first time in AEW, he decided to take a bump onto the tacks in lieu of a greeting. I think he knew that he really had to do something memorable to leave a strong impression in the minds of all of the American fans who’d never seen him before, so this is what he chose to do. It did make me smile seeing the reactions from Japanese fans. As soon as that moment happened, a lot of Japanese fans on twitter were like, “yep, that’s him; Kota Ibushi is back”.

After the match, apparently all ten of the guys in it were visibly emotional that they’d gotten that chance to wrestle each other, and Matt Jackson had them all sign one of his shoes so that he had a memento to remember the occasion by.

In Kenny’s unaired post-match promo, he says, “I'm a lover, not a fighter. You guys don't know by now, I'm a lover, not a fighter. There's one thing I learned throughout this rivalry of ours. When push comes to shove, you guys are as tough as they come. You taught us what it means to not only be a professional wrestler, but to be a wrestler.” He says, “I'm willing to stick my hand out and shake yours if you guys wanna let bygones be bygones, because love you or freaking hate you, Moxley, love you or hate you, Claudio, love you or hate your ugly ass [to Wheeler Yuta], I respect each and every one of you.”

And that’s that. The end of the feud.

In an interview, Claudio said what they wanted to come across was that: “We lost that battle, but we won the war. Thanks to the Blackpool Combat Club, now The Elite is better than ever. We brought them to a place they’ve never been.”

In a way, the BCC did end up fixing up the house that is AEW. They patched up the walls by bringing the Golden Elite back together, thus repairing the original heartbreak that was what caused the cracks to form initially. The Golden Elite is the best version of The Elite. It is their truest form, shining with love.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CvC9uVHOHJZ/

https://twitter.com/JJWilliamsWON/status/1682966137187778560

#see my wrestling journal for most of my wrestling writing this year that is not my TJPW translations! (some of those are in there too)#hoping to get it caught up by the beginning of october but i'm not optimistic jkfdghdfg #i also want to be back on tumblr properly but i've been so busy lately... rip #golden lovers #wrassling #love and genuine feeling

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lolamarlowe65 · 1 year

Text

𝓘𝓷 𝓶𝔂 𝓯𝓮𝓮𝓵𝓲𝓷𝓰𝓼 //James Hetfield

"The house next door was just sold, i hope the new neighbour will be nice."

part three of ? part two

disclaimers : smut, age gap (modern day james), slow burn shit, sex dream, smoking, probably drinking, whatever must know human reproduction to interact, kids dni

Wattpad link

࿓ 𓋪・𖧹 𖤐

Chapter 3 - 1967 Camaro

After I got home I put myself to sleep. Maybe I'll get some sleep. I haven't slept well since my mom's gone. It's always nice to sleep normally sometimes. My eyelids are heavy and I fall quicker than I did the last few weeks.

*I'm lying on my side in my bed above the covers. I don't have the time to know what I am doing when a hand falls gently on my waist.

This tattoo.

It's him.

He gently puts his hand under my shirt and pulls me to him by the waist.

"-My girl." i hear him whisper in my ear, his breath slowly attacking my neck.

I bite my lip. God, I'm so wet. I clench my thighs together and I can't help but start to rub against his growing erection. Fuck he seems so big.

"- Already so horny for me huh?" he says laughing against my neck.

"- Don't worry, I'll take care of you." he adds.

He climbs over me and starts attacking my neck. I want to whimper his name but I don't even know it. I put my hands in his hair. I hold him like he is my oxygen. I can't let go.

"-Mmhh..." i moan.

He lifts his head and smiles at me.

"- I -*

I suddenly wake up to the sound of an engine outside. I don't know what to think about this. I don't even know his name! Plus he's way older than me.

Well, a little dream never hurts anybody, right?

I slide my hand in my panties just to check. Jesus, I'm so wet. I'm down so bad.

It's not like you will ever see him again Ann, it's okay.

I got up and looked out the window. The sound of the engine came from a moving van. The new owner of the house next door was moving in.

Today I don't have work. I have to get some groceries, that's all. I decided to stay in my pyjamas and stay chill for the day. Well I sleep in my underwear and no shirt, so I put on some shorts and a Doors shirt.

That's my shit, I'm into 60s rock. The Doors is my favourite band. Apart from the 60s and very early 70s i don't know shit about music. 70s, 80s, 90s and after : no idea. My mom used to listen to Guns n'Roses sometimes and she loved Motörhead so I know who Lemmy Killmister and Axl Rose are (mom told me he was an asshole by the way) but that's it. I've always been stuck with the 60s. I know the classics, you know GnR, Queen, Nirvana, Metallica, etc... even though i could never recognise one of their members if they were put in front of my face.

I go down to the living room and put on some music. There is my grandmother, reading softly. I go kiss her on the cheek.

"- What did you put on my dear?" my grandma asked sweetly.

"- Jefferson Airplane, i know you love them." i tell her.

"- Oh yeah, it reminds me of my teenage years."

I know my grandmother saw so many things going on around L.A in the 60s/70s, she said she wrote them down in her notebooks and she'll give them to me one day. I know I'll probably have them when she's gone and I don't want that. So I'd rather not know until a long time. I sit down next to her and put my head on her shoulder. She puts her hand on my hair and begins to caress them slowly.

"- It seems you have slept well sweetheart. Had sweet dreams?" my grandma asks.

I cough a little bit.

"- Well... it was an okay night, I slept better than the last few days." i answer, trying not to be embarrassed by the remembrance of my wet dream.

"- I'm glad you did darling."

She kisses my forehead.

"- Hey grandma guess what?" i asked.

"- What sweetheart?" she questioned.

"- There's gonna be new neighbours next door. Maybe they'll be a nice couple." i say enjoyed.

I secretly hope this is a nice couple. That would make it more secure for my grandmother. Not that Stacy isn't good but for emergencies purposes when i'm not there it would be practical.

"- Don't worry for me sweetheart. Whether they are a gang member or a nice couple, I'm sure it'll be nice." she says laughing sweetly.

I laugh too. My grandmother is a badass that's for sure. I get up to get something to eat.

I hear a knock on the door and look at the clock. It must be Stacy.

"- Hey Stacy! Good morning!" we greet each other.

"- Hey girl! Did you notice the moving van?" questioned Stacy.

I walk outside the front door with Stacy and look over the porch to catch a glimpse.

"- Yeah it woke me up. Too bad I was having a nice dream for once." i answer, bothered.

I saw the questioning look of Stacy. She probably wanted to ask about my dream but she must have assumed I was saying that for once I was not having a nightmare about my mom's death. So she let go. Well it's true. I did not have a nightmare. But I did go from one extreme to the other.

"- You know who is the new owner?" Stacy asked.

"- No, not yet. I hope they are a nice couple. You know with my grandma and all."

"- Oooh maybe it's a nice and sexy dude just for your eyes to eat." says Stacy jokingly.

"- Stacy, come on."

"- What?! It would be nice!" she states.

No guy could beat the man I saw yesterday anyway. So her joke doesn't even work. Maybe I should tell her.

I get up and close the front door so my grandma doesn't hear.

"- Hey Stacy." i said to her with a shy face.

"- Oh my god tell me! You look like it's something nice!" Stacy asked excitedly.

We were sitting on the stairs of the front porch. Watching the workers move in the stuff into the newly sold house.

"- I saw the sexiest man alive yesterday at the pharmacy." i say, embarrassed.

"- Ann tell me you took his number?!" Stacy said, shaking my shoulders.

"- No way! Plus he looked so much older than me."

"- Well, I don't see the problem." she says dubiously.

I rolled my eyes and Stacy saw it.

"- Think about it. Life's too short for you to give a shit and your mom would say the exact same thing. You're an adult. He's an adult. You want him. And if he wants you, why would you not go for it. It being consensual is all that matters." she says excitedly.

"- I don't know. You're probably right. Anyway it's not like I'm gonna see him again."

"- I know I'm right! I always am. Next time something like that happens you go for it!"

I put my head in my hands for a second and sigh.

"- That's not the worst Stace."

"- What?" asked Stacy.

"- I had a sex dream about him last night." i say almost whispering.

"- WHAT?!" she coughed "I mean... What? No way! I didn't know you were that perverted girl!" she says laughing.

"- Fuck you."

"- I mean it's not a big deal, happens to the best of us. You saw a hot dilf, your brain made a sex dream about him. That's normal. Whatever. But i'm glad you dreamt about something else tho."

"- So it doesn't mean anything?"

"- No, maybe that you need a good fuck. But that's all. Look. The dreams you have about your mom are only a reaction to her death. It doesn't mean much more right? Same thing."

"- The dreams of my mom means that I miss her."

"- Yeah and this dream means you need to relax. Now i'm not telling you to fuck an older man, i'm telling you you just need to let go."

"- Argh" i exhale. "You're right, I do need to relax."

"- Yeah, do some of those artsy pictures you are so talented for or something. Try and live your passion. France is in good hands, plus it's not like you taking a step forward will forbid you from taking care of your grandma."

France is the name of my grandmother. It's a beautiful name. When Stacy uses her first name I know she's being serious.

"- Maybe. I don't know if I'm ready."

"- It's been years since you stopped living for yourself. It's time for you to start again." said Stacy concerned.

"- Years?! I'm not that old!"

"- Two years is already too much when you forget about yourself."

My mom was diagnosed two years ago. That's when I stopped everything to take care of her. I completely forgot it's already been that long.

"- This whole thing is so torturous."

"- It could be simple Ann, but I get why you don't see it. I know you will. You're a girlboss." she winked at me.

Stacy then gave me a warm hug.

The workers outside were taking out some big black boxes, they looked like engineering stuff. As well as cases. That looked like music stuff. It's cool, maybe it's a couple of artists. It's hard to see well anyway. This house is still big and there's a big path between the portal and the house.

"- And what about you, Stace? How is it going in your love life?" i asked, trying to make her stop talking about my life.

"- Wait look!" Stacy exclaimed.

Out of nowhere a loud engine roamed from the left side of the street. A black 1967 Chevrolet Camaro approaches. I thought that it was a nice car but that's the type to be owned by a douchebag. I hope they don't pull to this house.

Next thing I know, it does pull up to the newly sold house. It pissed me off. What is it? A douchebag musician who thinks they're rich and famous after one hit? I hope they're not gonna act like the neighbours in the highly modern houses around the block. They despise you because they got more money. Money they got by doing nothing but stealing it from their parents in general. They're lucky my grandmother is nice because I know a lot of old ladies who would have kicked their ass just for having such a loud car.

"- Oh fuck no." i frowned.

"- You've got your answer girl, douchebag bought the house. Love the car tho." she said with a doubting look on her face.

"- Give me a cigarette, I'm begging you Stace!"

I don't smoke. Normally. Well I do a little, when I feel too stressed I do. I've chained smoke the whole week after my mom died. I haven't smoked in a week. But now I need one. So many confusing things are going on around me. Stacy looks through her bag and gives me a cigarette and a lighter. I light it like a starved man.

"- Thanks Stace." i say giving her the lighter back.

"- That's not gonna solve our problem."

"- Problem?" i ask, raising a brow.

"- Who the hell is douchebag dude. I mean he may be a douchebag but I still wanna see his face."

"- Yup, me too."

He stopped in the street, not in his driveway, probably not to bother the people moving in his stuff. The car windows were tinted a little, so we couldn't see much. The car door opened and there he was.

Oh my god.

He was there.

The man from the pharmacy. The hottest man I ever crossed paths with. The man whose hand gave me a wet dream. The man I never thought I would see again. He looked over at us and smiled slightly before quickly looking away.

*"- My girl."*

Him calling me like this in my dream came back to me suddenly. I coughed due to the cigarette smoke that got tangled in my lungs because of the shock.

"- Fuck..." i said between breaths.

I couldn't keep my eyes off of him. I should. But i can't.

I forgot all about what I said earlier. He walked toward the house, shaking hands with the workers moving in his stuff. He was wearing a black leather jacket and black jeans. I couldn't look away from his attitude. The way he walked. The way he looked so smooth talking to other people. That I already knew with the way he talked to Pam. But it was a better sight.

"- Hey guys, how's it going?" he asked the workers with the beautifulest smile i have ever seen.

"Whatever" I say to myself breathing in smoke. It's not like him being my new neighbour is gonna change something.

"- OH. MY. GOD." said Stacy.

Stacy had her mouth wide open. She looked like she saw God herself.

"- What?"

"- No way you didn't recognise him!" said Stacy.

"- FUCK what is wrong? Pam yesterday and now you. What? Who's this guy?" i say obviously pissed off.

"- Pam?" she raised a brow.

"- Him. This dude. He's the one i saw at the pharmacy yesterday."

"- No way you've had a wet dream with James Hetfield?!" she exclaims.

"- James Hetfield?!"

"- James Hetfield. The singer of Metallica." she says like it's obvious.

"- What the fuck?"

"- That's so cool girl! Ann, your new neighbour is James Hetfield! And you've got a thing for him. I heard he got divorced not long ago. If it's any of use for you." she goes on with a malicious smile.

"- Stacy."

"- What?" she laughs.

I light off my cigarette and get up. I get some stuff in the entryway and get out again.

"- I'M GOING TO GET GROCERIES GRANDMA, I'LL BE BACK SOON. LOVE YOU." i shout to my grandma who's on the other side of the first floor.

I turn around to face Stacy.

"- Whatever. I need to do some groceries. One word of this to my grandmother and I'll beat your ass. I'll tell her about the metalhead neighbour when the time is right!"

Stacy laughed.

"- Okay okay. You're the boss."

I give her the finger while getting in my car. I need to change air.

I'm parking in front of the grocery store. Before coming out my mind wanders.

James Hetfield. Him. He is the guy I have a crush on. Well only a little crush but still.

I look up "James Hetfield" on my phone.

It truly is him. Even in pictures he gives me this weird effect. He was so cute young. He was so hot in the 90s. But nothing compares to him now. He truly is ethereal. I want to know more, to know him more. Not because of his fame, just because he attracts me. I'm so confused.

"- James." i sigh, throwing my head back on the headrest.

࿓ 𓋪・𖧹 𖤐

A/N : slow burn shit is killing me i have to write sex dreams. Chapter 4 is ready btw. XOXO <33

#james hetfield #james hetfield smut #james hetfield fanfiction #metallica #metallica smut #metallica fanfiction

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judasrpc · 2 years

Text

TIPS FOR WRITING TRANS* / GENDER DIVERSE CHARACTERS

This has been a topic that’s been on my mind for a while now, and I finally think I can share it in the way I want to!

This post can be reblogged by anybody, but cis muns should refrain from giving commentary. Please respect and boost trans* voices.

Disclaimer: While I am trans*, I am white. My perception of gender non-conformity and gender as a construct are not reflective of the beliefs / experiences of trans* BIPOC.

Similarly, my opinions are my own. Some trans* folk may disagree with points in this post.

BASIC REFERENCES

Trans* is an adjective and does not get hyphenated (re: trans man, trans boy, trans, woman, trans girl, etc.).

However, trans-masculine and trans-feminine are combined or hyphenated, as they are specific adjectives.

When someone is transitions in a binary manner (female to male, male to female), they are not transitioning to 'the opposite gender'.

Male and female are not the only genders, even though they are two binary genders.

NAMES / DEADNAMES

While it's common for trans* folk to change their name as they explore their gender identity and expression, it's not mandatory. Trans* folk with androgynous and gendered names may keep their name for a variety of reasons, including:

Simply liking the name

Respect for tradition / family

Being unsure of coming out / unsure of what name fits them

Generally, it isn't a great idea to include the deadnames of trans* characters in media.

Deadnaming is incredibly harmful to many trans* individuals, and regardless of intention, deadnaming someone is actively disrespecting them as a person.

A great example of how to address the past of a character through the lens of transition is Tell Me Why, an episodic adventure game developed by Dontnod Entertainment (yes, the same folks who made Life is Strange)!

Throughout the narrative flashbacks, Tyler (the trans* protagonist) is never referred to by his deadname. Subtitles refer to him as 'Young Tyler'. The townsfolk, even when actively attacking him / his character, refer to him as Tyler (though use other methods to demoralize him, such as insinuating that he isn't / won't be 'man enough').

That being said, I have seen other opinions on the matter, and some have detailed why using a character's deadname could be beneficial to the plot.

Ask yourself the following questions if you are considering using a character's deadname:

Does it need to be used? Can the story be written without it and stay the same?

Do you, the mun, need to know it? Why would you need to know it? Are there other irrelevant birth details you're making note of?

Can you 'use' the deadname without using the deadname? Are there ways (e.g., dashes and static noises) that could convey its use without actively showing it?

PRONOUNS

Pronouns, especially neo-pronouns, are not a "modern" or trans-exclusive concept!

There are many examples of cis individuals using pronouns not typically associated with their gender identity (re: he/him lesbians and she/her gays). Cis people are allowed to use 'nonconventional' and / or neo-pronouns! Make it a habit to list your characters' pronouns, even if they're cis.

Neopronouns have been used as early as the late 1700s-early 1800s, with examples such as 'a' and 'thon'. Examples of more popular neo-pronouns include:

ey/em/eir/eirs/emself

xe/xem/xyr/xyrs/xemself

ze/hir/hir/hirs/hirself

ze/zir/zir/zirs/zirself

co/co/cos/cos/coself

ve/ver/vis/vers/verself

On a similar note, some trans* people don't use 'conventional' pronouns! Some people's experiences with gender mean they may only use neo-pronouns.

Similarly, not every trans-masculine person will use he/him, not every trans-feminine person will use she/her, and not every nonbinary person will use they/them.

Some people will use multiple pronoun sets! These can be in a preferential order (e.g., he/they with 'he' listed first to show order of preference) or in any order.

Try to interchangeably use these pronouns within your work (e.g., 'He went to the store because he needed new work pants. I wonder if they found a good pair, or if I need to take them out after my shift.').

Similarly, some people will use any, 'mirror', or no pronouns (yes, no pronouns is an actual thing!).

Where no pronouns are used, refer to the character by name (e.g., 'Ace went to the store because Ace needed new work pants. I wonder if Ace found a good pair, or if I need to take Ace out after my shift.').

Where mirror pronouns are used, refer to the character with the pronouns of the person(s) they are talking to (e.g., 'Ace was telling Kelly that she needed to go to the story because she needed new work pants. I wonder if she could give her a ride after her shift.')

In short: gender =/= expression =/= pronouns.

TRANSITION

There are various ways an individual transitions, and not everybody has the same transition goals!

Some trans* folk may have medical goals (e.g., hormone replacement therapy and gender-affirming surgeries), and some may not!

Trans-masculine individuals (binary or nonbinary) are not required to take testosterone, have top surgery, or have bottom surgery.

Trans-feminine individuals (binary or nonbinary) are not required to take estrogen, have top surgery, or have bottom surgery.

Medical transition is not a requirement to be trans*.

Some trans* folk may socially transition by changing their way of dress, behaviors, etc., and some may not! Some trans* folk may come out, and some may not!

Some trans* folk may feel dysphoria, and some may not! Gender dysphoria is not a requirement to be trans*.

Suffering is not a requirement to be trans*.

Everybody's transition is incredibly personal, and it depends on a variety of factors such as personal relationship with gender and available resources (e.g., accessible healthcare, finances, etc.).

#rph #rpc #character help #trans #trans representation #guide #judasrpc

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jomteaaa · 9 months

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BSD S5E2 thoughts

i am so late for this i apologise. but the episode was so not a letdown, it really meets my expectations. the reason why i'm starting on e2 and not e1 because e1 was more of setting the scene and picking up where they had left off. e2 is where the plot thickens and intensifies. plus, ranpo had a lot of screen time in this, and alas, i'm a simp for him.

DISCLAIMERS: this is not spoiler free, so if you haven't watched it yet, continue at your own discretion. also, don't attack me if we don't share the same opinions and views. this is just my thoughts. lower case intended.

"TURNS OUT YOU'RE QUITE THE IDIOT TOO."

one of the scenes that strikes me most is the car ride scene where minoura, the officer who ranpo interacts often during cases over the years, drives him to a safer location after freeing him from captivity. during this, minoura seems to be in a bit of a frenzy, while ranpo relaxes with a smile on his face that has been there since minoura arrived. (he's so adorable jdfhiasu) we all know that ranpo is incredibly intelligent, and could deduce people's motives and future actions. however, when minoura asks him whether he knew that some of the officers would trust his righteousness and intellect, and would therefore risk their lives to save him, ranpo admits that he did not know whether they believe him. during the whole time, he was not expecting to be saved, yet he was and realises how many people actually trusts him to the point of sticking their own heads out for him. imagine the amount of love and gratefulness he must have felt from this. i'm really glad that ranpo is reminded how precious he is to everyone, like he has that reassurance that he is reliable. this is also probably the reason why he could not stop smiling when he was rescued. AND HIS GIGGLE IN THE END I'M TEARING UP.

"ALL I'LL DO IS TRUST, BECAUSE THE PRESIDENT SAID QUITE SIMPLY 'I TRUST FUKUCHI'."

y'all i'm not gonna lie, this scene made me love him so much more, and it's saying a lot because i love him tons already. the whole scene where he tries to persuade fukuchi to help ADA capture the page from kamui really shows the kind of role fukuzawa plays in ranpo's life. i think we can all agree that fukuzawa is a dad to ranpo, right? he took care of ranpo since his teen years, introduce to him the idea of his unusual intelligence being his special ability, gave him a job, and created a family for him aka ADA. as i said before, we know ranpo is smart enough to guess what fukuchi would do and manipulate his decisions, and he himself admitted that. but he didn't. all because he respected, looked up to, and ultimately TRUST fukuzawa. he knows how much fukuchi means to his 'dad' as a friend, and wants to respect that, at the cost of ADA. ranpo even gets down on one knee and say that he trusts him too. (don't mind me, but that shot of ranpo that i attached under the quote is so fine. is it just me?) that's why i was pissed as hell when ranpo found out that fukuchi is kamui. my boy was devoted to his father and THIS is what he gets.

"SOMEBODY, ANYBODY, PLEASE, FIGHT ALONGSIDE ME."

this is great content for atsushi x akutagawa shippers. the way i was chanting akutagawa's name, waiting for him to appear, and then scream when he did. was choosing akutagawa to help atsushi at his lowest moment a mere coincidence? i think not. asagiri knows what he's doing. context is, if you don't know, ranpo deduced that kamui is fukuchi, and of course was right. luckily, ranpo managed to escape, but unfortunately for atsushi, he couldn't, knowing fukuchi can easily catch up to him, and leaving him with no choice but to fight him. but atsushi knows that fukuchi is a much greater fighter than he is, and starts to get scared. scared because he was alone in this battle. and we know that he has ptsd from his orphanage days. so he begs to the universe to give him an ally, and boy, did the universe choose well. akutagawa being there is like a knight in shining armour moment. this is quite straightforward so i don't have to explain so much. let's lose our minds together over this.

HIGHLIGHTS

ranpo pushing kunikida to atsushi when he was about to be hugged like BOY JUST ACCEPT SOME AFFECTION

kyouka saying that she was trying to hold herself back from hugging ranpo, kunikida and yosano. SOMEONE HUG HER FOR GOODNESS' SAKE

when yosano asks ranpo what he will do, he replies, "what do you think? i'm doing the funnest part of the job." cut to him showing up again in front of the fukuchi with a "heya, i'm that terrorist everyone's talking about." he's so chaotic, i love it.

fukuchi and ranpo interacting like uncle and nephew respectively for a while. that was cute. AND RANPO CASUALLY EXPOSING FUKUCHI'S BEHAVIOUR AT ADA'S OPENING CEREMONY

the fact that ranpo has a novel written by poe to use as an escape route is something i'll never get over. ranpo and poe >>>>

#bungo stray dogs #bsd #atsushi nakajima #akutagawa ryuunosuke #ranpo edogawa #fukuzawa yukichi #bsd spoilers #bsd season 5

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moontheoretist · 2 years

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Final Rant About She-Hulk

[Disclaimer: This is very reactionary, written while watching]

- *opens and closes her mouth* *gesticulates* *lost all ability to speak* ............................................................ I have no words. Wait no.

- Ok so... Jennifer got a little bit angry, destroyed a TV and a wall. She scared people, but ultimately she didn't attack anyone and surrendered the moment the law enforcers arrived... AND SHE IS PUT IN THE SAME FUCKING PRISON AS THE FUCKING EMIL BLONSKY WHO WENT ON A FUCKING RAMPAGE THROUGH HARLEM AND PROBABLY KILLED A LOT OF INNOCENT PEOPLE PLUS SOME POLICE OFFICERS AND MILITARY MEN!? WHAT IS THIS? Like seriously, what is this, because she seems to be unproportionately punished for a minor and justified anger episode. Yeah, she is a Hulk, but she surrendered, which Hulk and Abomination WOULD NOT DO. Abomination would just fight, while Hulk would run away, because he is that type of person. WHY SHE ENDED IN PRISON? WHERE IS HER SCENE WITH SOME LAWYER SWOOPING IN AND KEEPING HER FROM GETTING INTO PRISON IN THE FIRST PLACE? WHY IS THE LAWYER APPEARING ONLY AFTER SHE WAS ARRESTED? WHY?! WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK!?

- I agree with Mallory that what people saw was a monster when Jennifer got angry, but do people really have such a goldfish kind of memory? Don't they see that Jennifer surrendered immediately and didn't even injure anybody? Speaking of which, Jennifer is also right. Anybody in her situation would react the same, AND I disagree with Mallory here. Jennifer is a Hulk, yes, but looking at how she behaved, she was not out of control. If she was out of control completely she would have fought the people who came to apprehend her, she would not fucking surrender herself willingly to them. If she was the monster people see her as, she would go on a rampage through half of the city. But well, I guess she is a woman, so nobody would treat her as if she was a man. If she was a man, her anger would be seen as part of who she is, instead of something that makes her into a crazy monster. Hell, people loved the Hulk for that exact reason. That he went on out of control on rampages. Geez! Give me a fucking break.

- Did Jen got similar terms to Emil Fucking Blonsky? I am so mad.

- Also, really? Are we going to ignore the band of incels targeting super women now? (Yep, they went and ignored ALL OF THEM).

- AND SHE LOST HER FUCKING JOB! SHE LOST HER PRIVACY, DIGNITY, HUMANITY AND JOB. HOW MANY THINGS WILL BE TAKEN FROM HER? ... SHE LOST HER APARTMENT TOO!?

- Interesting thing though is that she lost her right to turn into She-Hulk, which you could count as losing powers, even if she didn't lose them at all, so technically Jen got what she wanted, but also she didn't get what she wanted. She didn't get normal life again when She-Hulk is finally gone. She got broken pieces of the life that she may never recover enough to live normally. She wanted to be a successful lawyer, and what happened is that she no longer is that. She cannot even go outside without reporters asking about what happened. I bet there will also be people that will treat her like a monster now, even when she cannot turn into She-Hulk anymore. HELL, she is even more vulnerable as a woman now, because she is in the position when any attack at her person can end fatally in more ways than one. She could be fridged literally here. Which is SCARY.

- The only nice thing so far: Jennifer loves Legally Blonde. Me too, Jen. Me too. Also did you know that Elle is coded as autistic? What an icon. I love her. Jennifer and I share love for Elle.

- Me right about now: *inserts Tony Stark to hack all of those incels and destroy them, because they dared to attack one of his favourite Hulks* They would be so destroyed that they would not want to see the light of day anymore. (Yes, I know it would be not feminist to make a man deal with Jen's problem, but let the girl dream that Tony would be so furious we would be ready to fuck all of those incels lives to Kingdom Come). His reputation would NEVER recover.

- *takes her chair and throws it at Dennis Bukowski* SHUT YOUR TRAP! YOU DATED SHIT! How can this guy even say such things. Like ugh, what is his problem!? Ah, wait. DELUSION. If I take him and drown him in the nearby lake, that will still be not enough to erase the taint from the world from anything he ever said or do. That man is literally the worst. Fuck him. Or more like NOT fuck him, because he doesn't deserve it and his genome may be too much for humanity. We will seriously all go into extinction if guys like him continue to procreate. I am starting to fantasize about castrating this guy.

- No! We don't want you to get screwed over, Jen! But thank you for finally saying out loud that we were saying for weeks. WHY this story is treating you like this? WHYYY!? You don’t deserve this!

- I can accept that it is a mental health break. You definitely deserve one after this bullshit! I feel like we all need it.

- How did we know she will use Pug as her incel stand in for the secret incel party? xD Elven old lady foreshadowed that lol.

- OMG that gross rich guy, seriously?!

- WAIT, DID JUST THOSE INCEL DUDEBROS SAID THAT THEY WOULD SMASH PUG? Should I be angry, or should I laugh that some of those incels are closeted bigoted homosexual men?

- Lol, it makes sense. Rich guy who lives for collecting superhero stuff. He has enough money to create several shell companies that run the website. OMG, seriously, if Tony was alive, this guy would be so dead. It would be a billionaire against billionaire fight. But Tony is not here, and we all want Jen to destroy this guy, because only then will Jen get justice. Nobody should do it for her, she should do it for herself, so it would have meaning! Smash them, Jen! Smash!

- WAIT, WAIT, WAIT, WAIT! "He is in the lodge, some private event"... THAT ROOM LOOKS FAMILIAR, WHAT THE FUCK!? EMIL, WHAT THE FUCK!? YOU WERE BETTER! I BELIEVED IN YOU. HOW FUCKING DARE YOU!? But welp, what did I expect from this guy, seriously? ... Ok, never mind. Apparently he didn't check for who he was fucking speaking, and now he is protecting Jen? Like, seriously, Emil. CHECK YOUR FUCKING CONTRACTORS, DUDE! I mean, they are a secret organization, but they said their fucking name JUST THERE. Ok, well... yeah, Emil has no access to internet. I forgot. My bad. He had no ability to do the research. But he did have ability to get money and get hired, like, what the fuck Emil? Seriously, what the fuck. So do you have internet access, or you are just I dunno neutral in everything?! EXPALIN YOURSELF TO ME, EMIL!

- Lol, she just left her TV show and went into another xD Just to roast the team working on her show's storyline. ROAST THEM, JEN! ROAST THEM HARD! SERIOUSLY, YOU CANNOT IMAGINE HOW MUCH I WANT TO HAVE AN ABILITY TO JUST DROP INTO MCU CREATION ROOMS TO JUST POINT ALL THE STUPID IN THEIR STORIES EVER! I have so much to tell them.

- Also, Jennifer is completely right. Last time we saw Bruce, he was in space. It would be AWFULLY convenient if he dropped on Earth into the Emil's cabin, no less to fight. It is impossible. Same for Titania. It almost looked like Bruce and Titania had Jen bugged to hell and back, so they could stalk her location even in places that have no internet, lol. So yeah, Jen is completely justified to call it all bullshit and go speak to the manager. Kick his ass, Jen.

- "There are certain things that are supposed to happen in a superhero story". Yes, there are, but you do not have to be so BORING ABOUT IT. SCHEMES EXIST TO PLAY WITH THEM, TO EXPAND ON THEM, NOT TO CONTINUOUSLY REPEAT THE SAME THING WITHOUT DOING ANYTHING INTERESTING! Schemes are not inherently limited in the ideas you can use! Just try to pick good ideas, instead of rehashed old superhero ideas. Treat it like ART! Who cares about what Kevin wants? Kevin barely understands the universe he helped to create! That man and Russos are a menace.

- Yes, let's talk to Kevin. Feige. We are coming at you.

- Did she just break that guy's arm?

- KEVIN... K.E.V.I.N XDDDDD Should have seen that coming.

- "You are very expensive". Jen... Jen... why do you care? Fuck it.

- Ok... so... she changed the ending... so they would not show it in the end? What was the point, then? I want a rewind and I want to see the whole thing unfold again. And also where did Matt drop out off? In the middle of the lawn? SPACESHIP? Like, seriously, Jen. Where is the fixing here? I am like, so not seeing any fixing. I see skipping and indulging. I need logical for the story explanation. Not THIS.

- Didn't Jen violate her plea deal when she changed into She-Hulk? She came back from breaking the fourth wall as She-Hulk, so... I suspect someone should arrest her too? Like, hello? What happened?

- Scaar... what. where. when. what. what the fuck? SO HULK WAS 2 YEARS IN SPACE AND HE FUCKED? WHO?! WHOSE KID IS THAT!? WHAT YEAR IS IT ANYWAY!? *counts from Age of Ultron that was in 2015 to Endgame that was in 2023* SHOULDN'T HE BE LIKE 8!? Or more?! HOW MUCH TIME HAD PASSED SINCE ENDGAME?! WHAT IS HAPPENING!? This literally makes no fucking sense. (Will they try to bullshit that time works different on Sakaar so it makes sense?)

- Ah, so she was cleared upon arresting Intelligentia. Still doesn't explain lack of arrest for her taking off her ancle device.

- Tell me that I am not alone in thinking that the ending was stupid. I liked some elements of it, but the execution of it? Horrible. Ugh, where is the fixing Jen promised? I don't see it. Josh was not held accountable for the "rape by fraud" that he did (I am not American, but I learned since last week that the state of California considers consent given to someone who engaged in sex under false pretenses to be rape). The only one punished was the HulkKing. What happened to all those other incels? Because they deserve some ass whoppin’ in court of law as well. We got the whole plot of the blood sample erased completely, so now this is a big hanging plothole. Matt is cute in the ending scene, but seriously, he appeared out of nowhere with no explanation. How is this better than Bruce dropping from the sky in the middle of the battle? It is literally the same. And Scaar? WHEN exactly Bruce had Scaar?! Or he is like adopted? Some Sakarran kid got blasted with gamma and Bruce went all Tony on him, because kid needs family? I dunno. Nobody explained. I hate those introductions that tease and make no sense at all. And Emil still didn't hold himself accountable, because he skedaddled to Kamar-Taj to avoid the law at first opportunity. Where is accountability here?

- What is this mess? I literally have no more fucks to give. MCU is a mess. *hugs Ms Marvel, the only very good show MCU ever birthed*

- Y’know what? I cannot shake the feeling that if the show ended last week on a cliffhanger it would be infinitely better. It would use cliffhanger as licencia poetica and exploit the fact that stories that didn’t close all its points are valid too, and then it would have whole season 2 to actually crack on Intelligentia, to show Jennifer’s case in court, make Matt come back to help Jen and showing Jen nagivating the world in which she is now seen as a monster etc. Infinitely better.

#she-hulk #mcu critical #she-hulk critical #jennifer walters #bruce banner #emil blonsky #josh the traitor #lol #todd phelps #scaar #titania #she-hulk episode 9 #she-hulk episode 9 spoilers #she-hulk spoilers

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ofonikabutobeetlesandmen · 1 year

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Building Dendro: My Nahida Build + Team Comps

Disclaimer: This isn’t me telling anyone how to build their Nahida or how her multipliers are gonna work and blah blah blah. I suck at math and I don’t like telling people what to do. I just like Dendro, its characters, and wanna share my build ideas. None of this is based on meta, just what I wanna do with the character.

The Princess of Dendro, the God of Wisdom herself, Lesser Lord Kusanali everybody!

While I admittedly cringed at the thought of the Dendro Archon being a child when the first leaks came out and was disappointed that the gender of Sumeru’s Archon got updated to be female (because prior to 2.0/2.1, Kusanali was stated to be male)ー all that is water under the bridge now because I adore Nahida so much.

The Archon Quest made Dendro my favorite element because of the lore surrounding it and her story was just so gripping. She is definitely my favorite Archon by far and I’m not sure how any upcoming Archon will dethrone her from her spot as my fav. So I’m definitely getting a kick out of using her and recommend her for anybody for her attack animations alone. They are, by far, the cutest attack animations in the whole game.

Artifacts

Like my Collei, Nahida uses the 4pc Deepwood set. To be honest, I got lazy with the grind when Nahida was coming out so all of her artifacts that she uses are Collei’s and they work pretty well on her!

Constellations

My Nahida’s at C0 for right now but I plan on getting her to C2 when her rerun comes around. There were more Dendro characters I wanted to pull for after and I wasn’t sure I’d have that many primos for them if I went all in for her constellation and weapon.

I don’t C6 my limited 5 star characters anyway, the only 5* you will intentionally see me C6 is the Traveler. My C6 Qiqi is pure happenstance lol. But Nahida is my precious daughter, she deserves a couple constellations in the future so I’ll make sure to have enough fates saved up for her. And Venti, he is the only Archon I don’t have and I am bringing that gremlin home once and for all.

Weapon

For right now, Nahida uses the Solar Pearl. I wanted to get A Thousand Floating Dreams for her but like I said in the Constellations section, I was saving for other characters. For right now, this weapon is decent on her and I have no complaints.

But I do plan on getting her signature weapon on when it comes back around during her rerun. It looks best on her and I love the lore behind it as well. I’m a lore fiend as you guys can probably guess by now if you’ve looked at even a small handful of my posts. Lore comes before all.

Team Comps

nahida (main dps)

amber (babygirl)

kokomi (healer)

yae miko (sub-dps)

The team I use to trigger all the effects of Nahida’s burst. Like I said before, my Nahida is built for Spread so everyone else isn’t that important in the grand scheme of things in the party. Bloom is my least favorite of all the Dendro reactions and Amber isn’t fast enough trigger Burgeon, admittedly.

I prefer Miko for Spread since her Dendro application is slow enough that it won’t trigger Aggravate constantly.

nahida (main dps)

cyno (sub-dps, occasional main dps)

yaoyao (healer)

yae miko (sub-dps)

The team I use for Friendship. Y’all understand the relationship between Nahida and Miko at this point, Yaoyao is a pretty good healer as well so I have fun tossing her radishes all over the place. Her build is still a work-in-progress though so her post won’t be coming out for a while.

Cyno is there to look pretty but I enjoy using him from time to time as a main DPS to shake things up in the party. His burst is really cool and I enjoy his character. That’s enough reason to put him in the party for me.

#genshin #genshin impact #character build #team build #dendro #nahida #lesser lord kusanali #dendro archon

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friendlystarfruit · 2 years

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Can we request any Harry Potter character?

yea I will have to add a *read only warning* as I don't want to upset anyone. The creator came out as a terf , a lot of people still love the characters and the fandom including trans people but just choose not to support the fandom financially but some people may get emotional because the show is a kind of a trigger to associating with the creator so I want to accommodate . (panic attacks are shitty af) I also understand exactly why people are so hurt by the comments of hps creator =( I think though JK R later books are more intrinsically harmful toward trans people so I wouldnt even bother with them at all I am ok with characters that are only harmful by association not by themselves . (I might refuse hp requests that themselves are problematic such as the goblins are often considered visually antisemitic, but Wizard kids are fine ^.^ )

I try to keep my blog inclusive and reasonable so I think proper tags and read only warnings should be fair enough (=

I cant go out of my way to be a perfect safe space for everyone but I think taking Hp requests is fine with disclaimers and warning. As long as people aren't using hp requests to hurt anybody I don't mind (=

I would say that fictional media is not always black and white , its societal and social impacts are intersubjective and many times fictional worlds can be reclaimed by the audience and divorced from the author but there are cases it can be weaponized this is usually more the case with fiction that has deliberate propaganda vices. Its always good to be on guard and open minded I am only human though (=

#hp #ask #anon #anon ask #harry potter request #happy potter anon #ask anon

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somehowmags · 2 years

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a long talk about the “hybrid racism” trope

and why i think it sucks.

i’ve been seeing an uptick in the amount of works with this trope, so i decided to write out this post to explain my feelings on it. it’s a long one so buckle up folks! also, thank you to my friends who looked over and gave their commentary on this when it was a draft <3

NECESSARY DISCLAIMERS

i am not saying “nobody can write fantasy/hybrid racism”. i am not asking you to cancel anyone who has written this trope. i am asking you to think critically about this trope in the context of the mcyt fanbase. additionally, i am one person with one opinion. other people may be able to present more compelling cases than this. please keep all replies in good faith. furthermore, i am pakistani-american, but other commentators of color may have different opinions than i. poc are not a monolith. please do your own research and come to your own conclusions.

this post assumes that most, if not all, writers of this trope are white; however, that may not be the case. i believe that this trope is still harmful because of the characters it is applied to and the fandom who will be reading it, however, i understand that creators of color also write these works, and it can be cathartic.

this post is not an attack on anybody, and i ask that you do not send hate to anybody as a result of this post. again, be mature, and keep replies in good faith.

THESIS

hybrid racism, in the context of mcyt fanworks, is a harmful and racist trope. the trope as it is currently used takes the pain and trauma of racism and applies it to white characters for the purpose of hurt/comfort, angst, and whump. in doing so it fetishizes and commodifies the pain of racism and turns it into a marketable narrative for a primarily white audience. additionally, works of this nature also vilify poc who are not (in the context of the fanwork) hybrids, specifically quackity, and turn them into raging bigots with no canonical justification. this is done with no regard to readers, characters, or creators of color. this post aims to discuss this trope and its harmful effects.

WHAT IS HYBRID RACISM?

hybrid racism is a subset of the “fantastic racism” trope. fantastic racism is when a work will have a non human race that experiences in universe discrimination. for example, the taugel in fire emblem awakening, who are a species of wererabbit who are victims of a genocide by humans, with the character panne and later her son yarne being the last remaining taugel that we know of, or the elves in dragon age, who are forced to live in ghettos and whose culture was forcefully stamped out by humans. as with any trope, there can be good and bad examples of this- however, this post argues that this trope as displayed in mcyt fanworks is inherently harmful.

this trope in mcyt fanworks is based in racism, as many of them draw parallels to real life incidents such as slavery and human trafficking, specifically chattel slavery. this is evidently based in racism, and not other forms of oppression such as ableism and religious discrimination, althrough they may intersect. creators are drawing on the experience of specifically people of color.

WHY IS THIS HARMFUL IN MCYT FANWORKS?

the mcyt community is majority white, both fans and creators. of the 36 members of the dream smp, 6 are people of color, seven if you count corpse husband as an active member. on the other popular smps, such as empires, hermitcraft, or last/third life, there are similarly few nonwhite creators. of an ao3 census taken in 2013, based on 10,005 responses, 78% of respondents selected white as their ethnicity. while this census was taken nearly a decade ago, it is safe to assume that fandom remains overwhelmingly white.

the problem here is that white creators are taking the pain and trauma felt by communities of color and applying it to white characters in order to farm likes and tears off of white readers. in each ao3 tag that specified that a character was a hybrid, over half of the works each time were dedicated to hurt/comfort and angst. the nature of whump is that it is self contained- very rarely does it explore beyond the pain and comfort the characters feel. very rarely is it willing to confront its own worldbuilding- worldbuilding that recreates a bigoted system that white writers tend to know little about and yet still profit from. and while it’s true that whump fic can be important for catharsis, racism is not white creator’s pain to feel. you will never be affected by racism. neither will the white creators who play these characters. this is an act of commodification. for those who do not know, commodification is the action or process of treating something as nothing more than something to be exploited and profited off of. by creating these works, white creators use an experience that is not their own for their own benefit.

furthermore, these fanworks absolve white readers of the responsibility of confronting their own racism. you can read these fics and come away feeling fine. of course if you existed in this fictional universe, you’d never treat anyone like that! these fics let you project onto a savior character who you will cheer for when they destroy an illegal fighting ring or burn down a front for hybrid trafficking. but the question asked of you is not “will you save this inhuman character from slavery or trafficking or slurs or a microaggression”. the question is “will you treat people of color with humanity and respect”, and the mcyt fanbase fails consistently. see: people saying “i don’t speak taco bell” in quackity’s chat when he speaks spanish, or calling ponk’s lore “semi-lore” and refusing to acknowledge the fact that they use all pronouns, whitewashing skeppy in fanart, only ever drawing or talking about eryn when his lore involves tommy, and ignoring tina completely.

these fics also tend to misunderstand racism and how it works entirely. first, they try to make it so that there is a reason for oppression- hybrids are stronger physically or have special powers, and that’s why humans oppress them. that’s not how racism works. oppressed groups never have an advantage over their oppressors. there is never a valid reason for oppression, but these works try to give one. secondly, these fics forgo long term change in their worlds for short catharsis. they act like systems of oppression can be changed by burning down a slave market or busting a fighting ring. in reality, solutions are never this clear cut. but that would not make for a satisfyingly angsty story, so instead creators focus on what is more marketable, and miss the point entirely.

and then there’s also the quackity problem. in fanworks, if quackity is not a hybrid himself, he is often an aggressor towards hybrids, specifically ranboo and techno. quackity is a person of color. ranboo and techno are white. these works characterize quackity as an angry bigot, when there is no canonical basis for it. while quackity and the butcher’s army created propaganda that referred to techno as a pig, techno is not canonically a hybrid, and this is closer to political dehumanization than racism. furthermore, he has never been racist towards ranboo, who is canonically half enderman (he has mocked ranboo’s water allergy, but this is closer to ableism than racism). i do not have to explain why showing a man of color being racist towards two white men is wrong. people of color are already perceived as inherently more violent than white people, and this only adds to that stereotype. this is a misinterpretation of his character, and a racist one at that.

finally, it is at best inappropriate and in poor taste and at worse an act of bigotry to take the legacy of racism, of slavery, of human trafficking, of the hurt and the trauma that is unique to people of color, and use it for angst for your favorite white boy. these are real events that have hurt and continue to hurt real people. please note again: i am not saying nobody should write about these themes. but the way that these fics use the, again, very real and hurtful legacy of slavery and human trafficking is more trauma porn rather than actual meaningful exploration. there is a time and a place to explore these themes, and mcyt whump fic isn’t one of them.

now, to be clear- i am not saying that nobody should write fantasy racism or that nobody should explore racism in fanworks. but firstly- not every space is appropriate to explore that. the mcyt community, which is again majority white, is not the place to do that. secondly, to write about racism as a white creator, you should be willing to do the research and unlearn your own racism. and from what i’ve seen of most of these works, i do not think most white creators are willing to put in that work.

CONCLUSION

when you create and consume these fanworks, you exploit trauma. you fetishize and commodify racism, in an easy-to-consume package for the white reader to read and never feel guilt about how they treat actual people of color. by white writers, about white characters, for white fans. i am asking you to think critically about this trope. i am asking you to unlearn your own racism, and to consider the feelings and trauma of fans and creators of color before your fanwork. please support creators of color. thank you.

#discourse #mcyt fandom critical #fandom critical #dream smp #dsmp #mcyt #ranboo #technoblade #philza #fundy #quackity #tommyinnit #wilbur soot #long post #fandom racism

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mettywiththenotes · 3 years

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Bakugou is so cool and cute! (Disclaimer: I do not condone his acts of violence as a future Hero and I do not condone his suicide baiting and bullying) But also I like Tomura because he’s cool and cute too! (Disclaimer: I do not condone his acts of violence or murder and I do not think he is justified in killing people. Nevertheless I am aware he has serious mental issues and needs therapy. I also do not approve of how he started a terrorist organization, nor do I approve of his invasion in the War Arc or USJ or Deika). They are my favorites in the series!

Then again, All Might is nice too (Disclaimer: I do not condone his acts of withholding information from Izuku or his encouragement of toxic Hero Propaganda in Hero Society) as well as Aizawa (Disclaimer: I do not condone the way Aizawa expelled his first 1A class just to experience death and that is in fact a bad way to teach kids how to be Heroes. I realize that he haz mental health issues and possible PTSD as well as trauma but that course of action was unfair towards 2A)

On the subject of UA staff, Principal Nedzu is pretty funny (Disclaimer: I do not condone the fact that he seriously tried to hurt Mina and Kaminari, his students, in the Final Exam and I do not approve of the way he agreed to let Aizawa expel his 1A class) and Midnight has her moments too! (Disclaimer: I do not condone Horikoshi’s fanservice)

But I also think Overhaul was a little cute too even though he was a very bad person (Disclaimer: I do not condone the fact that he abused a child and put his caretaker in a coma to sell drugs, nor do I condone him fusing with somebody without their consent), as well as Chrono (Disclaimer: I do not condone the fact that he stabbed Aizawa and willingly went along with Overhaul). Rappa is really funny and I hope to see him again! (Disclaimer: I do not condone his acts of violence or the fact that he joined the mafia)

But that’s just the Yakuza. Onto the League Of Villains, Twice is really funny (Disclaimer: I do not condone his actions of taking part in a terrorist organization and killing people), Toga is super cute and actually really cool as well! (Disclaimer: I do not condone her actions of killing people and sucking people’s blood without their consent) Dabi is pretty cool, I like his fire and his depression aesthetic haha its quite relatable (Disclaimer: I do not condone his 30 murders, how he tried to attack Shouto when he was a kid - just because they were both minors does not make that excusable or okay - and how he outed his families abuse without their consent). On top of that, Compress (Disclaimer: I do not condone the kidnapping of any minors or anybody for that matter) and Giran (Disclaimer: I do not condone any acts of selling illegal items or black market weapons) are such a riot! Spinner is cool and relatable too (Disclaimer: I do not condone any killings of village people just because of acts of discrimination and I do not approve of Spinner’s admiration of Stain who also wanted to kill people for justice). Kurogiri is mysterious and Tomura’s caretaker and thats what I like about him, his elusive and mysterious past is what interests me (Disclaimer: I do not condone his willingness to follow a terrorist organization or its creator). In fact, all of the LOV are relatable! (Disclaimer: I do not approve of their willingness to kill people)

While I don’t like All For One, I am interested about him and his bond with Yoichi or lack thereof haha (Disclaimer: I do not condone manipulation, grooming, kidnapping, abuse, torture, forced starvation, stealing, murder etc) and, related to that, I am not incredibly happy about Hawks either but I also think he is interesting and I want to see more of him (Disclaimer: I do not condone his act of murder, and just because I put him in the same paragraph as All For One doesn’t mean that I think they are equal or the same, rather that they are similar in that I am only interested in their character arcs)

Real Actual Disclaimer: This post is to show that expecting this kind of format in every post is ridiculous, as I have shown above. People really take things out of context as if, if we don’t say these disclaimers, then we approve of the horrible acts these characters and many more have committed. Just because we do not say them doesn’t mean we like these acts or approve of them. While you can ask a person about what they think of a character if you are curious and respectful about it, do not expect your hand to be held throughout every post someone makes.

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elysian-phoenix-05 · 3 years

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FANFICTIONS THAT ARE ACTUALLY GOOD![BTS EDITION] {PT 4}

Missed me?

Well, it's been so damn long since I've posted something related to fanfictions and I thought that needed a change as I'm kinda going on a fanfiction reading spree at the moment.

You might have noticed that the title is a bit different, and that's because I've recently gotten myself an ao3 account [Yea, I know I'm late-] and I wanted to add some fanfictions from there as well!

And there will be a slight change in format as well!

And, let's get into the recommendations! Cue the warnings!

Somewhat of a disclaimer:- expect an array of ships in the books I'm recommending, as I don't mind any ships as long as the story is great. And, of course, all the books are a work of fiction, and I hope you treat the story as such. Of course, some of these would handle mature topics, from occasional smut to depression, suicidal tendencies, etc.

16. HOUSE OF CARDS

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By the author @sugamins (orphan_account)

SUMMARY

Jungkook is the heir to a mob empire, the most notorious in the whole of Seoul. Taehyung is a rookie sent in to infiltrate by his select team and bring the empire crumbling down.

"You knew the game and played it, it kills to know that you have been defeated."

RATINGS

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ [Easily one of the best ffs I've read and an absolute classic]

PAIRINGS

Vminkook

17. SONGBIRD AND THE SEA

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By the author @maia_archives

NOTE

This fanfiction has been now made into an actual book which is now accessible only to the author's Patreon account. You can read the first book of the series, i.e, the original fanfiction from AO3. The rest are paid content.

SUMMARY

In a world where the dominance of the sea is an endless battle between pirates and mariners, Park Jimin is content living in his little village on a small, uninteresting island by the eastern mainland. He wants nothing to do with the bloodshed of good and evil, the heartless killing of both innocents and condemned, the constant establishment and disruption of order. What he wants is peace, to live his life in the same town he was born in, to spend his days in the beautiful forest, and to use the powers of his Blessed Rune to nurture the home he loves so dearly.

But when his island is attacked by pirates, Jimin will have no other choice than to do as they command and leave all thoughts of peace behind in favor of boarding the Agust, a pirate ship captained by the infamous Min Yoongi, Black Fox of the East.

RATINGS

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ [Let me tell ya, I cried when I knew that I can't read the rest of the story, cause the circumstances won't allow me to have an account and pay for it. The story was beautiful, it had a wonderful storyline and writing style. 100% recommend]

PAIRINGS

Yoonmin

Taekook

Namjin

18. BLACKJACK

[This one doesn't have a trailer or picture so-]

by author @nicowememoney

SUMMARY

[Group052] Jung_HS: Is anybody there [Group052] Jung_HS: help im alone in this weird small room and its so dark and theres no door no nothing only this weird touchscreen device thing on the wall [Group052] Jung_HS: anyone? [Group052] Min_YG: I’m here, same situation [Group052] Min_YG: Damn if we’re group 052 does it mean that there are at least 51 other groups like this what kind of mass kidnapping is this [Group052] Kim_NJ: I think there’s more. [Group052] Kim_NJ: Why else would there be a 0 in front of the 52 unless they need the third digit? There can be hundreds of groups. [Group052] Min_YG: Wow you’re a smart one aren’t you, now find a way to get us out of here [Group052] Kim_NJ: I’m at a loss. If we can get to talk to whoever abducted us we might figure something out. Pied Piper: Hello. I am your kidnapper. Do you want to play a game? [Group052] Min_YG: Holy shit

In which seven strangers are abducted to secluded rooms and forced to play a game of life and death in which they have to communicate with each other through a chatroom. Can they work together to survive and figure out how they’re connected in time to escape the impending doom?

RATINGS

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

PAIRINGS

Well, kinda figure it out yourself lool

19. OUR FAKE OMEGA

[Once again, no trailer or pictures so-]

by author @Sialucky

NOTE

The story does have some grammar and spelling errors here and there but the story has been enjoyable so far [by so far, I'm implying that it's an on-going book]

SUMMARY

That means Jungkook had just eavesdropped and now fallen and hurt the Prince of the Kingdom. This was bad. Very bad. He ignored Yugyeom’s frantic voice asking him what had happened.

“Oh my God! Your highness, I am so sorry.” Jungkook said scrambling to get up and kneeing the prince in the ribs. A hand gripped his wrist tightly to stop his fumbling. He barely noticed Yugyeom going silent on the other side of his comm.

“I am so sorry.”

“It’s okay” Kim Namjoon said but his voice was pained. Oh god Jungkook just gave the Prince a serious injury. This was a disaster.

“Seriously I am fine.” Kim Namjoon said freeing Jungkook who this time carefully got off the man.

Namjoon made to sit up and Jungkook hurriedly offered his assistance, “Believe me, I have had worse.” He smiled a dimple smile at Jungkook and Jungkook was like…wow!

“I am sorry.” Jungkook said staring around and relaxing when he found no bodyguard with guns drawn at Jungkook’s head.

“It’s fine. But why were you jumping down the balcony?” Namjoon asked tilting his head and again…wow!

“Umm…running from an alpha? Yep… running from a perverted alpha.” Jungkook said and mentally face palmed at himself.

RATINGS

⭐⭐⭐⭐

PAIRINGS

OT7 [Jungkook focused]

20. MURMURATION

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[Random note:- This trailer was the sole reason, I started reading this book, and I just finished binge-reading this a few minutes ago]

by @fringecity (indiachick)

SUMMARY

Park Jimin is a rookie detective at the flashiest department in Seoul Metropolitan. When he's tasked to work with Min Yoongi - an apathetic, disgraced cop handling the ineffective cold case division - he doesn't expect the murder case they're working on to turn intensely personal.

For both of them.

RATINGS

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ [Trust me, it'll blow your mind]

PAIRINGS

Taegimin

This post was a continuation from my previous posts. You can check them out here!

PART 1/PART 2/PART 3/PART 4/PART 5

That's it for today guys! Have a wonderful day! Take care!

[sends lots of love, hugs, and support!]

Purple you!!!

💜💜💜

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